Thread: Jewellers' saw blades

Originally Posted by Simplicity

Not wanting to Hi Jack the thread.


Just found this:

144/Pk Pike Jeweler's Saw Blades #6 Jewelry Making Cutting Sawblades Amazon.com


Looks like number 6 blades an not 0.6 blades, I was for warned by Ian that number 6 an 0.6 are a big difference in size.
I ordered some 0.6, only to find out they would be great for cutting Tin foil, not the thick stuff those weird Infill plane makers use.
Lesson learned stick to whole numbers 4 an above.

Cheers Matt.

Comparing the specs they are #6 with 33tpi at least.

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Just did some more research,the listing i linked too was a Company in the states supplying Casting supplies PMC supplies.

So as normal postage is the killer,just under $100 delivered, tho it is for a pack of 144 blades,so that’s approximately 69 cents a blade!!!.

But Ian, you have given me doubt,especially when the Packaging says “Best Quality” Immmmmmm.

Cheers Matt.

Orright, I was hoping the brass rod I ordered last week would arrive before the weekend so I could finish the thumb plane, but it didn't, so I had to find something else to amuse myself in the meantime...

Something I've wanted to do was use a bit of the Chinese-made H62 brass alongside the 380 brass that's the most readily available from dealers here. The thumb plane is 380 brass & as I happened to have a small sheet (100 x 100) of 2.5mm H62 just the right size for a miniature smoother, I thought I'd use that straight after peining up the thumb plane as a comparison of how each cold-works. I thought I'd use a bit of the 5mm SS for the sole & since it is a small plane, hope my dying files hold in there long enough to finish it.

First, a demo of the difference in malleability between 380 & H62. I took a sliver of each & belted the ends flat:
1 H62 cf 380.jpg

That's 380 on the left, all fractured & split, while the H62 (right) peined to a foil-thin wafer without any drama.

I started out preparing the sole piece from the SS. I cut out the shape & was drilling a couple of holes to cut the mouth out but the drill snapped off in the second hole - damn! I decided it was a message from the gods and switched to more cold-rolled mild for a sole - I'll deal with the SS another day (maybe; but certainly not before I get some new files!)
2 SS sole.jpg

It didn't take long to get the sides & a new sole ready. Something else I wanted to do with this little plane is to fit a cap-iron. It will be the smallest plane I've attempted to make with a cap-iron.
3 bits.jpg

The Super Pikes made a good showing - one blade easily cut out the brass sides including the D/Ts. It would have done the mouth too if I hadn't broken it through carelessness (I was shifting my seat with one hand while still holding the saw with the other). Anyway, a new blade finished the mouth & cut out all of the sockets.
4 Sole prepared.jpg

That's a pretty acceptable effort in my book.

I'm getting pretty practised at curved sides now, so even a dinky body like this one didn't present me with too many problems. But as I said, the soft brass is easy to mark & I put some deep pits in one side when I held the body over a corner of the anvil at an angle whilst belting one of the front pins. I think the marks will sand out ok, and otherwise I'm pleased with the result - curved sides are difficult to keep perpendicular to the sole when peining, but these came out pretty well.
6 Body peined b.jpg5 body peined.jpg

I chose some nice dark & dense black wattle for the stuffing.
7 preparing stufing.jpg

Fitting over-stuffing on these little planes has always stretched me, so I took extreme care in making a set of cardboard templates and after spending most of the afternoon carefully cutting, paring & trying about a million test-fits, it was sitting in nicely, so I trimmed most of the excess wood off the sides ready to glue it in place.
8 stufing fitted.jpg

Then I mixed up a batch of Araldite, clamped the stuffing in, & left it to cure overnight:
9 glueing stuffing.jpg

Tomorrow I will add some through-rivets of 2.5mm brass rods while the glue is still a bit plastic, then make a start on the lever-cap. The hump of the cap-iron more than doubles the blade thickness so it gets a bit tight in the throat, but I spent a good bit of time on the plan, so hopefully everything will fit nicely.

Whatever, I reckon I've given the Super Pikes a fair run now & can pronounce them pretty good. I think the H62 brass is also a good choice for a beginning plane maker, it is a bit more susceptible to dings than the harder stuff, but it is far more malleable, so you don't have to worry about hammering the daylights out of it & have a much better chance of closing large gaps. Ideally, you strive for nice fits with the D/Ts which minimises the amount of peining required. I (usually) manage to get them fitting pretty closely now, but I certainly didn't get them all fitting as well when I started, so being able to fill larger gaps without worrying about your material splitting & flaking is comforting....

Cheers,

Still no 3mm brass rod in the post today, so I finished the little smoother instead.

The first job was to level the infill to the sides. It's very handy when working on small tools to have even smaller tools
a levelling infill.jpg

Withe sides levelled, I drilled the body for the rivets (2.5mm brass rod), peined & levelled them:
b levelled & riveted.jpg

Then I could get serious about shaping the woodwork:
c infill shaped.jpg

Some more filing, scraping & sanding & the body is complete:
d infill polished.jpg

Now for a lever cap. First I made a template being careful to ensure the toe end would bear right on the top of the cap-iron hump, & that the thumbscrew will be well clear of of the cap-iron screw:
e LC template.jpg

I had an odd-shaped scrap of 3/8" brass, & with a bit of juggling, it was just enough for the LC:
f LC cut out.jpg

Making a shapely LC from a chunk of flat brass is something I enjoy - it takes a bit of care to keep it symmetrical, but I use lots of guide-lines pencilled on the blank to help. It took about 45 minutes from the previous stage to a finished LC, polished & ready to go in the plane:
g LC shaped & polished.jpg

I thought I had a thumbscrew ready-made but it proved to be about 3mm too short, so I turned up a longer one. With the plane assembled, I discovered the front of the mouth needed sloping off a bit more to allow the cap-ion to fit. With that attended to, I honed up the blade & popped it in & was most gratified to get a lovely full-width shaving first try!
h first shavings.jpg

I think that's a record - it usually takes me a bit of fiddling to get things working at first, so I'll take it as a good omen. I do need to slope the mouth front just a wee bit more, if I set the cap-iron really close it closes the mouth too much so there's a bit more fettling required. I am particularly pleased with the mouth gap though - it's as fine as I've ever managed. Not that a fine mouth is everything, but it's a matter of pride to get it as fine as I can (it looks wider than it really is because of light diffraction):
i mouth.jpg

This "baby" is a bit wider than the others I've made to date, with a 31mm blade (the others are all 25mm). It's small, but quite manageable. In fact it's as wide as a Stanley #1, and 15mm shorter, but substantially smaller than a #4, of course:
j size cf No 4.jpg

OK, still waiting on my 3mm brass for the thumb plane. If it doesn't turn up tomorrow I'll be tempted to waste some thicker stuff & turn down to 3mm.....

Impatience is one of my many flawsl...
Cheers,

Magnificent!!!

Ian

Miniature magic, again. I know you have focused on the fine mouth and full width shaving, but that part that attracts me is that lever cap: I think I was a bower bird in a former life.

Regards
Paul

You like the shiny bits eh, Paul? They don't stay as shiny as that, of course, but mellow quite a bit after a month or two.

As I said, I reckon sculpting a lever-cap is one of the fun-est bits of plane making. My first attempt was a bit pathetic:
LC a.jpg

I later took it out & cut out the shoulders a bit more, which improved it quite a bit, I think:
LC b.jpg

But I got bolder after that & am much less tentative about putting some flowing lines into them:
LC 1.jpg

I think I was a bit nervous about making the neck too fine, at first, but I soon realised there is plenty of metal left & you would have to be Superman to bend or break it with the leverage a 16mm knob on a thumbscrew offers!

Cheers,

I was hoping my rod would arrive this morning (it didn't ), but while I was waiting & listening out for the postie's bike, I was looking at the bull-oak infill I'd started preparing a few days ago:
a bull oak.jpg

I decided to reject it, for a couple of reasons, one being it's a bit on the pale side & I reckon darker woods sit best against brass. But perhaps a better reason was because I noticed several of the rays were shedding their innards - sometimes the centres are quite soft & do this. This bull-oak came off very poor, sandy soil & I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but it has particularly thick rays compared with the Victorian bull-oak I have, which came off good loamy soil.

So I had a fossick in the wood stash & pulled out a small stick of Solomon Island ebony I'd forgotten I had. So I cut out a wedge & front bun from that:
a changed plan.jpg

I was well advanced in shaping the wedge when I noticed a hairline crack all along the top of the thing:
b crack.jpg

I swear it wasn't so obvious when I first cut it out - it would probably be ok if I ran some superglue along it & heated the crack up with a hairdryer to get it to soak in, but it almost certainly wouldn't hide the crack completely & I hate the idea of starting out with a fault. Fortunately. there was just enough left on the piece to cut out a new wedge. I studied that bit with a magnifying glass & could see one small crack that was easily avoided, so I went ahead & finished it:
d ready to fix.jpg

SIE is interesting stuff. When you cut into a piece, it's dark brown & has a bit of grain pattern evident on the radial surface, but after a few months of exposure the wood turns almost jet black for several mm below the surface & it looks much more like true ebony. It's got very fine pores, even finer than some ebony I've used so it takes a superb polish and is a very tactile wood. The front bun is from a small scrap that has darkened all the way through, so that's what the wedge will look like eventually.

I had planned to spend my shed time fitting the screw adjuster, but the woodwork took up the time I had, so the screw adjuster has to wait til the nest shed session....

Cheers,

Ian

Looking at the last pic the wood appears completely brown, particularly compared to the front bun. Is that what you referred with colour change to and you are anticipating (hoping) it will go black in time?

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

...Looking at the last pic the wood appears completely brown, particularly compared to the front bun. Is that what you referred with colour change to and you are anticipating (hoping) it will go black in time? ...

Yes & yes (at least I hope so!), Paul. When I first got this lot of SIE I was quite pleased with how dark it looked, the outside was a uniform near-black. It was a large chunk which contained several deep splits end to end, so I sawed it carefully to get the pieces I needed at the time, then cut the rest into what I thought were sound pieces. I noticed that the dark colour extended in beside the deep cracks, any wood more than 10mm from the outside of the surface or a wide crack was brown, so I assumed it's an oxidation process that darkens the chemical(s) in the wood. I put the pieces I didn't use aside & forgot about them until a couple of days ago. It must be about 2-2.5 years since I cut them up & I was pleased to note they were pretty uniformly black wherever the air could get at the wood.

This pic was taken a few months after the plane was completed. It started out quite brown but is much darker in the pic & has continued to darken since Horn & grip mod b.jpg

I suspect the finish slows the process down, because the same wood left unfinished was quite a bit darker than the plane currently is, but I expect it will get there eventually.

I've only worked with a few bits of genuine ebony, & think from what I read somewhere, but don't know for sure, is that the colour of ebony isn't from the wood itself but is a pigment elaborated by fungi that is similar to melanin. A chunk I managed to get when I was attending a conference in Sri Lanka was jet black through & through, but another piece I got from a wood show had brown streaks that showed up on the fresh surface (but did go a bit darker on exposure). Here's a freshly-finished bit compared with ringed gidgee:
Ebony & ring gidgee minis.jpg

So I'll just have to wait for a year or two to see how the new plane ends up....

Cheers,

Hi IanW Thanks for your write ups and photos. Glad you got over that "this is my last plane" nonsense!

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Hi IanW Thanks for your write ups and photos. Glad you got over that "this is my last plane" nonsense!

Did anyone actually ever believe Ian when he said “This is my last plane build” that’s like believing politicians don’t tell lies.

Cheers Matt.

Originally Posted by Simplicity

.... when he said “This is my last plane build” that’s like believing politicians don’t tell lies.....

Are you equating me with politicians?!!

Well, I suppose I have broken a few promises to quit the habit.

But someday soon, it's going to be true when I say "This is the last one...". It could even be the one I'm working on now - I've actually used up just about every scrap of brass that could conceivably become part of a plane, so there will have to be a bit of re-stocking before anything else happens.

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

Are you equating me with politicians?!!

Well, I suppose I have broken a few promises to quit the habit.

But someday soon, it's going to be true when I say "This is the last one...". It could even be the one I'm working on now - I've actually used up just about every scrap of brass that could conceivably become part of a plane, so there will have to be a bit of re-stocking before anything else happens.

Cheers,

Well the difference between your lies and politician's lies is that we hope you'll break yours [emoji1]

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