Power Tools

Make Your Own Totes? An Interesting New Veritas Router Bit

Submitted by Leif on Thu, 05/21/2009 - 5:19am
 

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The Veritas Variable Round-over Bit
  

Do you make your own totes or tool handles?  It is one of the most time and labor intensive parts of toolmaking.  I find when making a saw, it probably took as much time to form the handle as it did to make the entire rest of the saw.

Today I see that Veritas, the manufacturing arm of Lee Valley, has come out with a new router bit the likes I haven't encountered before - a variable width round-over router bit.  Made specifically for handles, it promises to speed the process greatly...

Lee Valley has also come out with several templates of theirs and classic Stanley plane totes, free for download.

The instructions for the router bit are available here.

Kudos to Veritas.  This is the kind of forward thinking and customer oriented design we've come to expect from Lee Valley and Veritas.  They are constantly innovating and coming out with tools and products geared towards the hand tool user - and though this technically doesn't count as a hand tool itself, I think I can let that slide by this time.

Foley Retoother

Submitted by Leif on Wed, 01/14/2009 - 8:57pm

A hand-driven Foley retoother (model 332) in action...

 

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retoother.wmv

Some older iron... Stationary Tools

Submitted by Leif on Thu, 10/04/2007 - 6:56pm

I grew up in a shop - almost literally. I can't tell you how many hours of my childhood and adolescence were spent running any one of a variety of woodworking (and other) tools in pursuit of some grandiose plans of utterly blowing away all with my unquestionably masterful and artful talents. Most often, they were utter failures, but every once in a while I would surprise myself. Anyway, none of the tools were what you would call "high end" - though almost all were "sufficient". Dad never spent a great deal of money on tools - but who could, with seven kids?

I now have possession of a good many of those tools I learned on. They are in original, mostly untouched condition. There are three stationary power tools I have of his; first is an old Craftsman jointer, a model 103.23900 6" jointer manufactured by the King-Seeley Manufacturing company:

Jointer

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