Octagon handle, another method
Matti Kuikka
>Last night I tried another method to Sir William's of making an octagon handle somewhat resembling Todd's inspiring find. I made first a rectangular stick out of a small piece of mahogany I had left from previous project. Then I made pencil lines in one end from corner to corner to find the center and drew bisecting lines through the center with a small square. Next I drew a circle with a radius of half the piece and had the corner points of octagon defined. As it was a short piece I was lazy and marked only one end sacrificing exactness as you can see.
Next step was to plane the piece octaconal according to the markings. Then I made one end round by rasp and file and a smaller radius circle at the end and tried to cut a cove in the end by a couge. This defined the taper.
Last came the interesting hand tool part. I have a small japanese from end to end radiused plane (from www.fine-tools.com , just a customer though my bench is featured there, too). I used that to cut each facet into a curve which resulted naturally in a taper. The other end I rounded with the same method but with a normal small plane. Finally I made the knob with saw,chisel,rasp,file and stain. The finish is after planing tung oil (no sanding, just rubbed with a bunch of shavings).
The handle will be used in a bow saw I'll make to hold the blade.
Lessons for me: arrange better lightning in my shop and use reading glasses, darker wood would be easier, practice, practice...
The measure in the pic is in centimetres as I made the pic with a scanner at work and inch rulers are not very common in Finland.
Thank you for your understanding my at best apprentice's level workmanship, but I thought the process simple and worth sharing.
Matti Kuikka, Porvoo.fi