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  1. #1
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    Default How Files Are Made

    I came across this video on how hand files are made: Not the machine made versions, but what we call hand stitched.

    The Process of Making a File - YouTube

    The bonus part of this is that video is by the late Ken Hawley (1927-2014). Ken Hawley amassed one of the most significant collections of hand tools in the world. Interestingly, he alleged a brace and bit was what started off his interest in collecting tools.

    Regards
    Paul
    Bushmiller;

    "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely!"

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  3. #2
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    I forgot to mention that the students of heat treating may be interested to hear the quenching mediums used: They are different for heat treating and tempering.

    Regards
    Paul
    Bushmiller;

    "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely!"

  4. #3
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    Thanks Paul,

    I had actually seen that clip a while ago, actually probably years ago now.

    It was fascinating to watch, especially in the day of machines make everything.
    But personally I would end up in the loony bin if my 40 hour week was spent leaning over a tree stump going tap tap tap tap.

    But saying that,what is the business end of the teeth making chisel look like, does anyone know.

    Cheers Matt.

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    Hi Paul. I have lost a lot of time watching YouTube videos of Ken and his tools. Great stuff, he even has a few saws!!!

  6. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mountain Ash View Post
    Hi Paul. I have lost a lot of time watching YouTube videos of Ken and his tools. Great stuff, he even has a few saws!!!
    O Dear,
    Thanks MA, I didn’t realise there were more[emoji6].

    Guess we’re you can find me ?

    Cheers Matt.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Simplicity View Post
    Guess we’re you can find me ?
    Leaning over a tree stump, going: tap, tap, tap...
    Nothing succeeds like a budgie without a beak.

  8. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bushmiller View Post
    I forgot to mention that the students of heat treating may be interested to hear the quenching mediums used: They are different for heat treating and tempering.

    Regards
    Paul
    It's interesting as I can't tell if he means "not heated as much" if they're intentionally reheated far above tempering temperature and then quenched in oil, which would leave a different structure than what we do now (which is to try to convert as much to martensite as possible and then temper the martensite) .

    I have come up short hardening early on and ended up with suitable temper steel by not converting everything to martensite, and still have the iron that I did that with - it's untempered more or less because I didn't get the iron hot enough and it didn't convert, but it behaves like a tempered iron because it probably retains pearlite. the former is preferred because it's more stable over time than keeping pearlite.

    Interestingly, though (i heat in a forge and then temper in a toaster oven in a thermal sandwich to keep variation effects low), it became fairly common to heat water hardening steel in molten lead or molten salt and then quench in a thinner oil instead of brine (less warp and less crack, but still good hardness) and then temper in heated oil immediately afterwards. As far as I know, this is still done for razors. A fast heat, quench and temper is good to avoid grain growth, and it doesn't waste money with complicated cycles that improve toughness slightly when the toughness isn't needed. Files don't need to be tough - they'd be a disaster if the teeth held on and a foil formed rather than failing by microscopically giving way as they wear.

    Nicholson files that I've broken to look at the grain behave like they are hardly tempered at all (put one in a vise and strike the file and it will break right off with a ping).

    There's another step in here that's done with razors and is done industrially with files - after heating and quenching, they will warp, and modern files are probably straightened by a machine before they fully convert (you have a minute or so to work before real extreme glassy behavior occurs, as long as you don't intentionally drive a metal object to room temp or below by finishing it in water - I do that, though). I have fiddled with hammering tools after quench and before they fully convert, but you can't faff - tap tap tap and things are good until suddenly "ping!" and whatever you're making separates into two pieces. Someone working in a factory in the old days would've been able to do this in seconds and avoid getting close to trouble.

    These kinds of things aren't well discussed now because you will often hear that you can't even get good microstructure hardening by eye (this isn't true, but it is mostly true if a steel has more than a little bit of alloying in it and that other alloying needs to be dissolved into the matrix before quench.....)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Simplicity View Post
    Thanks Paul,

    I had actually seen that clip a while ago, actually probably years ago now.

    It was fascinating to watch, especially in the day of machines make everything.
    But personally I would end up in the loony bin if my 40 hour week was spent leaning over a tree stump going tap tap tap tap.

    But saying that,what is the business end of the teeth making chisel look like, does anyone know.

    Cheers Matt.
    Kind of like the unicorn edge on a chisel - the edge can't be blunt, but the apex on it isn't shapton 30k either. If the file blank is annealed (like left overnight in vermiculite) and very soft, the toothing chisel doesn't need to be extreme hardness to work well - it's probably slightly less hard than a woodworking chisel to avoid breaking the tip off.

    I'm going to try making files at some point and find out what works. metal stamps used to impress orange steel definitely work better if their tempering is a step off of hard chisel temper (especially if they have a checker-file-pattern border - the tips of that checkering will break off if the tempering isn't drawn back a little).

  10. #9
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    I sort of guessed that we would "progress" a little on this subject. I am sure many of you will have seen this video before, or at least one like it:

    The making of LIOGIER hand-stitched wood rasp - YouTube

    It is, of course, a file video from the Liogier factory in France. The hand stitching comes up at the two minute mark. Hours of fun there for the budding file makers among you and it will only take you two years to master the technique. No compo though, so be wary of RSI!

    The stitching device I would describe more as a punch than chisel. What do you folks think? Also note the shape of the hammer both in the handle and the head.

    Regards
    Paul
    Bushmiller;

    "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely!"

  11. #10
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    I remember that video. Now having a belt grinder, I"m kind of confused as to why they're shaping the blanks with a wheel grinder, but I'm sure they will charge a price to recover their costs. With a belt grinder, you could get three times as many done for a belt cost of about $6 an hour or so. Maybe less. Maybe two a day.

    Interesting also that the finish work is done on a red old school alumina belt on the belt sander (same thing - ceramic belts would halve the time to do it).

    I remember George Wilson sort of hassling Noel about the wheel grinder vs. belt grinder almost a decade ago (but I didn't have experience with a belt grinder then). Now, I certainly get it!

    As to the graver that pushes up the tooth - I recall someone discussing or showing a picture of one at the time, but haven't gone to look for it. I think anyone here who can harden and temper steel could make one, and find out what temper and what corner profile would do the best at pushing up the metal.

    And you'd probably want to have vermiculite to anneal the steel as soft as possible.

    (that said, there are strange shape china or malaysia made rasps that are hand stitched that aren't auriou rasps and the blanks are thinner, but they work quite well. I would bet you could get good at stitching a rasp in about two weeks, but someone would have to give you a good idea on the profile starting out. It would take more than two weeks to learn to stitch everything, though, but like sharpening a file or sharpening a bandsaw blade with a dremel wheel, if you have a chance to do things freehand in rhythm a bunch in a short period of time, you get 90 percent of the way there by the end of it and then the development seems to stick long term - like riding a bike).

    Liogier's rasps cost about $140 here with tax, the bigger ones. It's too bad that they have to get to us through distribution systems like woodcraft as that suggests quite a lot of that doesn't get back to them.

  12. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by D.W. View Post
    ...... I would bet you could get good at stitching a rasp in about two weeks, but someone would have to give you a good idea on the profile starting out. It would take more than two weeks to learn to stitch everything, though, but like sharpening a file or sharpening a bandsaw blade with a dremel wheel, if you have a chance to do things freehand in rhythm a bunch in a short period of time, you get 90 percent of the way there by the end of it and then the development seems to stick long term - like riding a bike)......
    I wouldn't bet too much money on that one, DW. Some folks with exceptionally fine motor skills may be able to do so, but to develop the repetitive accuracy at the speed those fellas work at would take a while - that last 10% may take all of a year or two to acquuire.

    I assume you are talking about the Asian style of rasp like the one here, compared with a Liogier "copy" of the Nicholson #49 stitched as a 9-grain:
    L vs Ch a.jpg

    I bought it quite a while back, because it looked so crude, was ridiculously cheap & I was curious to see what it could do.

    Apart from the very fine taper compared with the "49" (the Liogier 'cabinet rasps' are more tapered, but not to this degree), the difference in the skill of the Liogier stitcher is pretty obvious - the teeth on the Liogier are amazingly consistent, & though the lines aren't absolutely perfect, they are regularly irregular, so to speak. The Liogier is also stitched in a spiral pattern, the Asian in rows (sort of) straight across, and the edge treatment is different - the Liogier has a fairly even & usable toothing on the edges, the other looks a bit like a broken-mouthed horse along its edges:
    L vs Ch b.jpg

    Of course, how they perform is what matters, and a comparison is quite surprising. Here are 6 swipes from each rasp on some moderately hard wood ("River oak" Allocasuarina cunninhamiana). The Liogier bite is on the left, Asian rasp right:
    L vs Ch c.jpg

    As you can see, they've removed roughly the same amount of wood, and despite the apparently finer teeth on the Asian rasp, it has left more visible tracks in the wood. These are not deep and it's a quite acceptable finish vs speed of stock removal in my view. What you can't tell from the picture is the vastly different feel of the rasps, the Liogier cut smoothly and evenly while the other bit a bit harder and cut with a less even feel through the stroke.

    For sheer quality & user comfort, & the fact you can have them in any grain you desire means the Liogier wins hand down, but if you analyse it from a bang for buck angle, the situation reverses very sharply & the Asian rasp wins by a country mile. IMO, it is better than any of the 'regular' style rasps from your average hardware store, and at least as good as the old Nicholson pattenmakers' #49, and at the time I bought it, I paid something well south of $20. It has had some heavy use in punishing woods and stood up very well (much to my surprise), so the metal & tempering are pretty good. My major complaint with it is the "unsmooth" action, but as it is wearing, that is improving. It's very handy where I need a long, very thin rasp, so I certainly don't regret having acquired it.

    And there is a story behind the Liogier. "Fence Furniture" persuaded Liogier to make a copy of the #49 when I whinged that the regular rasps of that size were too heavy for one-handed use and also the radius of the round side was too small, I wanted a much shallower arc for "planing" handle grips etc. "No problem a'tall" says Noel, and I have a set of hand-stitched 49s (6,9 & 12 grain), that have been my pride & joy for the last 10 years or so. They've done an awful lot of work on woods like Gidgee & our Casuarinas and are starting to show it, but I've had a very good run from them.

    So I would say that if you are going to use your rasps a lot & you can afford the outlay on the hand-stitched rasps, they are worth it & will repay the cost over the long haul unless you do something silly with them, but if you are an occasional rasp user, the Asian rasps, if you can get them at the "right" price, represent a much more economic way of acquiring quite good tools. It also demonstrates that even rough stitching can be effective, so Matt, get your stump ready & have at it....

    Cheers,
    IW

  13. #12
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    I don't mean two weeks an hour every other day, I mean two weeks of doing nothing but stitching rasps, one type. It seems to us like a matter of difficult things, but it's a matter of turning what's going on to feel rather than look so you can back off and observe what's going on rather than staring at the tree instead of the forest.

    At some point, I'll give this a try. Everything that I used to think took super fine motor skills really takes developing getting the trivial stuff into feel instead of look and analyze so that you can look and analyze separately from the small details.

    Doing it in rhythm is different than doing it in rhythm as fast as they do. Maybe half as fast, but you have to be able to do it fast enough so that it's reflexive or the feel thing doesn't work.

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