Weekend Tool Use Observations
Jay Samuels
>I never did get geared up for the create-a-spoon contest, but I did want to try one under less onerous conditions. I had an old cherry Stanley level, bad vials and not useable for leveling, so I sawed the rough blank out of the level body. Beautiful tight grained cherry under the surface grunge, not a check after 80 or 90 years. I finally put a good edge on a Stanley 55 concave spokeshave I had bought a couple of years ago (another story - the sharpening - if anyone is interested) and used it on the handle. Very nice tool. If the new LNs or LVs have a different radius, they are certainly worth looking into. Since I can't post pictures, you'll have to take my word that the spoon is nice. I finished it with Behlen's salad bowl finish.
I am also doing some woodworking in the house, and managed to glue up a 3 sided mitered component about 1/8" too narrow on the inside, so I had to plane away the insides of each side to make it fit. I pulled out a Stanley 140 skewed block that I have likewise never used, and found I had done a really indifferent job of sharpening. After that was remedied, it worked very nicely on poplar, although you need to pay ALOT of attention to where your fingers fit when you rabbet flush to a side. If one were doing alot of fitting on a jobsite without a basement full of tools, or if time were money, I bet that a pair of LN right and left skewed blocks would be very nice.