Travel Tool Chest & Workbench Build Process
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Posted 18th February 2023
After a bit of pondering, I decided to go with a hybrid approach.
I'm trying to make the most out of the wood that I've got and hence don't want to cut much off the end beyond what's required to square the boards up and get them to equal lengths. As a result, there are different amounts to come off different bits of the boards:
One some sections of some of the boards, the amount being cut off is less than a millimetre; in other areas it's as much as 50 mm.
I didn't fancy trying to guide a handsaw along the cut when there would be almost nothing on the waste side of the blade, so I decided to cut one end of each plank off with the track saw and then do the other end with hand tools. That way I got the practice, but didn't make my life unnecessarily difficult. As power tools go, the track saw is quite pleasant to use anyway. This photo shows how little is coming off in some areas:
After making a knife wall...
...the first board got cut off with a 13 TPI cross-cut western tenon saw:
The result ....
... was a pretty good square cut across the board ...
... but rather less so when looking at it the other way round:
After doing that one, I switched to a Japanese saw to see how that compared:
I was surprised at how much faster the Japanese saw cut than the Western one. I don't know whether that's down to sharpness (I've never sharpened the Western one, but when I bought it second-hand in a junk shop, it was still in its box, so I don't think it had been used much from new), or whether its just that the Japanese saws suit me better.
On the first cross-cut with the Japanese saw, I wandered into the waste by about 0.5 mm for the last 50 mm or so of the cut (better that way than the other), but the other three were all pretty square. By the third board, the results were looking pretty good by my standards and quite square to the face:
After all that, I've got four boards with ends that are somewhere near square:
Page 22 of 144
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