David Conley
Well-known member
Society of American Period Furniture Makers
Ohio River Valley Chapter
2024 Fall Meeting
Columbus Ohio
(As reported by Dale Ausherman)
Ohio River Valley Chapter
2024 Fall Meeting
Columbus Ohio
(As reported by Dale Ausherman)
The Ohio River Valley (ORV) Chapter held their fall 2024 meeting 26-27 October at Woodcraft of Columbus in Ohio. The meeting was planned and coordinated by Chapter lead David Conley. There were about 21 members or guests in attendance at the meeting. We owe special thanks to Woodcraft owner Bob Smith for hosting the meeting in his large and well stocked store. The store workshop was equipped with good benches and a large screen computer display which made it a great place for holding the meeting. Any member travelling through Columbus should plan to stop by and check out this exceptional store.
The Saturday program began with Show-and-Tell, while the remainder of the 1 ½ day meeting was focused on sand shading, sharpening of gouges and V-tools, re-handling of socket chisels and carving gouges, and hands-on carving of a gooseneck molding rosette.
Charles Murray started the show-and-tell by showing a video copy of a 1965 film of bench plane maker Albert Bock at work on creating a plane. Albert, who retired in 1966, was the last wooden bench plane maker at William Marples. The film is one of many such films for various tools from the early 1960s showing the era’s tool makers from Sheffield England plying their trade. These films are part of the Ken Hawley Collection Trust. ((35) Hawley Original Film Series - YouTube) The films were made in the early to mid -1960s and inspired by collector Ken Hawley who was acutely aware that he was witnessing the disappearance of a wide range of tool craft skills on which Sheffield's reputation had been built over the two previous centuries. The Hawley Collection (www.hawleytoolcollection.com) is an internationally important material record of tool making, cutlery manufacture and silversmithing from Sheffield, together with complementary material from Britain and the rest of the world. The film clip showed the tremendous skill of the maker in quickly crafting a wooden bench plane with hand tools.
Next Dave Upperman passed around a pair of shop-made scratch stocks made with White Oak blocks with inserted shaped blades. One was for a cabinet bead, the other for a rabbet. Dave reported that the white oak held the blades very firmly in thin Japanese saw kerfs.
Charles Murray then returned to show-and-tell to show the making of a replacement handle for a large tanged chisel, similar to one shown in the book The Tool Chest of Benjamin Seaton, 2nd Edition. He had made a video showing all the tools and steps used in making and fitting the new handle, including using a series of gimlet bits in a bit brace to set the handle. He also showed a wooden block tool he made to remove the old tang handles from chisels without damaging them.
On his return from this year’s annual (Midyear) meeting, Doug Moulder stopped at the Chester County Historical Center and found inspiration for his next project, a 1770-1790 mahogany Medicine Chest (Accession No. FBX10). Doug showed his reverse engineering paperwork and the portions he has built so far, using cherry for his version. The chest is structurally quite complex, a cubical mahogany chest with an arched lid, with the front half divided into 2 compartments which swing outward on hinges at the sides. His casework is connected by finger joints rather than the original’s dovetails. Under the lid are 18 square cubbyholes in the stationary back half, and a further 18 in the front swing-out sections. Under the cubbyholes are 10 small drawers, 5 shell-carved drawers over 5 block front drawers, 3 pairs in the stationary section, and 1 pair in each of the swing-out sections. The block fronts are necessary to make room for the drawer pulls within the completely closed cube. The base has 1 drawer with 2 blocked sections; this drawer underlying all 3 sections of the chest. Dave had not started the shell carving or the blocked drawer fronts. We can always count on Doug to pick a really challenging project, which will be unique and amazing when finished.
New member and attendee Roger Kritzer from WV wrapped up the show-and-tell with several wonderful boxes, made as Christmas presents to family members. Roger has made many forms of furniture, including period pieces, but instead showed us a different interest. Having attended a Mike Pekovich tea box class a while back he was enthused to make some tea boxes of his own design. This set were made primarily with mitered corners reinforced with contrasting wood species. One box had a secret drawer in the bottom, in this case containing a hotel room bar bottle of Jim Beam bourbon. Roger also brought a number of antique hand tools he recently acquired, and was seeking inputs as to their purpose and value in the present.
Following Roger, Dick Reese gave a demonstration of sand shading for veneer inlays, a process for imparting a 3-D appearance to the inlay. Veneer pieces are dipped into hot sand creating a spatially varying shading from light to dark across the piece. This involves a very simple process, used frequently in Federal period inlays. A light toned wood such as Holly is generally used. The sand is heated in a cast iron skillet, with about ¼ inch of sand, but one can pile up some of the sand for a deeper shading. As heat source Dick once used hot plates, but now finds that use of a Coleman camp stove allows quicker and more accurate setting of the heat level. One must use extremely fine sand, the best coming from the beaches of Siesta Key in FL. One attendee also suggested “wedding sand.” Aquarium sand is much too coarse. Attendees could shade a sample piece, of typical size for making a fan. The wood shades in few seconds, with practice required to get it to a desired shade and depth.
Several members of the ORV chapter have adopted Bert Bleckwenn’s Carver’s Sharpening Apprentice (CSA) as an aid to sharpening carving gouges. A comprehensive description of the CSA solution, construction instructions, construction templates, labels, usage instructions, and component sourcing information is available for purchase from Bert via the online SAPFM Forum. (Carvers Sharpening Apprentice | Society of American Period Furniture Makers - Forums (sapfm.org)
The basic CSA system requires augmentation for sharpening of V-Tools. Bert has developed an add-on fixture to enable V-Tool use. Dale Ausherman next gave a presentation on Bleckwenn’s augmentation which adds an Adjustable Restraint Block below the support arm that the Tormek Short Tool Jig can ride on, restricting the tool rotation on both sides to precisely align the two V-Tool flat bevels with the stone. This Block must be custom set for each V-tool using the sharpie marker method on each side of the two bevels to set each side height. This also requires improving Tormek’s Short Tool Jig mounting bolt interface with the V-Tool shaft, a requirement for which Bert suggests a couple of solutions. An issue with this solution is that the various jig settings required to get the V-Tool bevels sufficiently flat on the stones at the correct angle requires great precision. These settings are driven by the actual tool geometry (thickness of the wings, asymmetry between opposing wings, shape of the underside of the shaft, etc.). Dale’s experience is that variability in manufacturing tolerances drives having to sharpen each side of V-Tool separately, which for efficiency requires working through all the grits on one side, before proceeding to the second side. This approach gives good results, but re-setting of the restraint bar is inefficient and agonizingly cumbersome. He concludes there may be a need for an alternative to the Tormek Short Tool Jig for V-Tool sharpening. Also needed is a designed means of quickly resetting and adjusting the restraint bar to previous settings. More research is required as to why V-Tool shapes and tolerances don’t support a simpler jig.
As an aside, with all the investment and work in making a jig for sharpening gouges, Dick Reese reported the availability of a high-quality gouge and chisel sharpening service in Troy, Ohio: Belcher Carving Supply, LLC ( Belcher Carving Supply, LLC - Belcher Carving Supply, LLC) For $2 per tool plus return shipping, Dick Belcher will sharpen your gouges (and knives) and return them to you quickly. I probably could have sharpened ALL of my gouges and chisels via this alternative with less time and money than I have spent on my jig. But what fun is that?
