Thread: Ever Wanted a Froe Away Line?

I have learnt a lot from this little venture. The main lesson is that I don't know nearly as much as I thought did.

I was going to show the replacement handle I made. I was going to tell you that the house we live in, which is on a slightly larger than normal house block, had been used to keep Arab horses. The previous owners ran, and still do run, an Arabian stud. They used to keep their favourite animals here and the rest of their animals on a property just out of town. In fact I recall one night, when we lived about 200m further up the road, saying I think I can hear a horse out in the front yard. Sure enough there was a horse in the front yard and it turned out to be the favourite stallion from the horse stud where we now live. We chased that damned horse around the town for about two hours before we caught it.

Anyhow the point of the story is that most of our backyard when we bought the house was stockyards for horses. I pulled them all down and salvaged some timber from the gates. These were ironbark and have been just sitting around for the last nine or so years. They had holes drilled in them but I salvaged the timber in between the holes and although it looked weathered I thought there would be some good strong stuff in the middle. They had been 100 x 50s and I only needed 50 x 50 for the handle (a little less than that really).

Froe handle Ironbark.jpg

It trimmed up as expected and of course had dramatic colour:

Froe handle Ironbark trimmed.jpg

but unfortunately it didn't work. It was an unmitigated disaster. I split off one Bull Oak billet (note: not firewood ) and then the b!@#$%^ &*()_+! broke

P1000850.jpg

Clearly the wood was not as good as I first thought. Some of you may recall that I am a big advocate of Spotted Gum for tool handles ( some might say "bespotted" ), although in this instance I was trying to shed that mantle. I was searching the handsaw container for something else and I noticed sticking up out of the drum for handle material a piece of spotty entirely the wrong shape for any sort of handle other than a Gents saw. It was just poking out saying "Take me, take me." So I did what any red blooded saw collector would do: I took it and this is the result.

Froe spotty wedge (2).jpg

and with some BLO applied

Froe spotty wedge (3).jpg

Sorry about the mood lighting. My primitive shed at night time is even more primitive. I rely heavily on the moon. AND I don't know why the pictures are on their side. I did not take them that way.

Just on the subject of wedges, and this is for those people who are the recipients of the other three froes, it seems better to make the wedge the width of the bottom section of pipe otherwise it floats around uncontrollably like this:

Froe Ironbar wedge.jpg

It means that in addition to the taper in the thickness a slight taper in the width will be needed also:

Froe spotty wedge (1).jpg

On a good note, which is how I would like to finish up after the initial tale of woe, the wedge on the Ironbark handle held really well and after cutting off the handle above the collar I had to drill out the stub to dislodge the wedge. So although it looked ordinary, it was doing it's job very well.

One last comment is that I very slightly bevelled the inside edge on the top of the collar. I did this with all of the froes. This enables the handle to be tapered at this point rather than meeting a solid piece of timber and "butting" against the collar. I believe this works better as there is a compressive action on the timber instead of pushing. I used a piece of off-cut pipe the same diameter as the lower part of the collar to forcibly hammer the collar onto the handle. Then the wedge was positioned in the usual way: With extreme force!

A little bit of a protracted talk just to keep you folks salivating until the experts post pix of their froes .

Regards
Paul