What's a good thing to do on a wet Saturday morning? Drive to a gym, pay loads to share the air with dangerous strangers? Or get some healthy exercise in your own workshop... No question really - that's not the dilemma.
I have this useful-looking chunk of walnut, kindly given to me a few years ago.
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A while ago, I noticed it had some flight holes on the surface. Not being sunnybob, I didn't reach for a flamethrower. Instead, I circled all the holes, noted the date and put it back on the rack.
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About a month later, I looked again and saw that a few fresh holes had appeared. Time to do something about it.
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I thought it would be a good idea to split the piece into two thinner boards. This would allow me to see how deep the damage goes and maybe get some material suitable for making a Useful Box to Put Things In, or some such quick project that would use the wood effectively. So it was time to get ripping.
Now, I do have a bandsaw, but it only cuts 3" deep and this is over 4". I could call in a favour and get someone else to cut this down on a bigger saw, but I also have a choice of muesli powered ripsaws and frankly, I need a bit of exercise.
I am aware that there has been a lot of online chatter elsewhere about something called a "kerfing plane" as an aid when rip sawing. It seems to lead back to a guy on YouTube called Tom Fidgen, but as far as I can see the idea has a somewhat shaky historical basis. It's not a standard tool that appears in catalogues or instructional texts. However, a while back, Richard Arnold, whose work I really do respect, did an exercise where he set out to test a statement in Walter Rose's book "The Village Carpenter". Rose wrote that making a four panel door, starting from sawn timber and getting out the stiles and rails by hand, was a good day's work. He wrote an excellent article about it in Mortise and Tenon magazine, issue seven. Admittedly, he was only ripping to width in 1½" softwood, but he ploughed a groove on both sides of the wood first and says it makes a big difference to the time and effort required. He thinks this practice is probably one reason why so many old planes have the no 1 iron almost used up.
Because the grain was a bit wavy on this chunk of walnut, I started by marking a pair of lines all round.
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I then ploughed the groove, about an eighth wide. I failed to take any posed action shots of this step, but you can see the plane in the next photo, where I have not put it away.
Time for a digression/experiment. I've done some deep ripping by hand before and I know it needs a bit of effort, so it makes sense to be efficient. I'd only used ordinary western style rip saws, but a while back someone on another forum offered a good as new ECE framesaw with a coarse rip blade and I was tempted enough to buy it. This was my first proper go at using it.
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I know they are the normal choice of saw in much of Europe and have been since Joseph's day, but I didn't like it. It's firm, light and comfortable to hold, with a narrow kerf and the blade feels very sharp, but it just didn't remove much wood. I swapped to something more familiar - my G Harding 3½ tpi. (Simon Barley in BSSM says that this is probably a second quality line from about the 1880s, which fits with it having split nuts and a London pattern handle.) Here's a side by side comparison:
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This made much better progress. Some of the difference is probably down to my own lack of experience with the framesaw and some must be because of the coarser teeth, but I think most of it is about the weight of the saw naturally cutting down. There's no need to strain your wrist pushing down into the wood, you really can let the saw do the work while you just push it backwards and forwards.
Anyway, the cut was completed in about half an hour, I worked up a bit of a sweat and felt better for it.
Here's the result:
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The only visible damage is a few very small holes which it would be easy to fill.
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And here are the two boards side by side after a preliminary clean up with a jack plane. It's clear to me that the insect damage is in the sapwood, which is also a bit softer than the rest. After sawing, the grain was quite torn up on the sapwood - you can still see where in those ripply looking areas.
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So, what shall I do next?
My inclination is to slap some 5-star wood treatment over all the surfaces, wait a while for it to dry, then make a box with the bits I have. Should I do that?
Should I cut off all the sapwood, throw that away and make a much smaller box with what's left?
Or am I just wasting my time? Will it only be disappointing?
Shall I just take out a subscription to our nearest Bannatyne's and give up now?
And does anyone want to make me an offer for a nearly-new frame saw?