Journeyman's Journal

In the last video I showed that one of the two keepers used to hold the blade in the brackets snapped. These are the same keepers Chris from Blackburn Tools describes and supplies. After looking closely at the failure it became clear why it happened. The hole in the saw that the keepers pass through was biting into the steel. I do not know exactly what type of steel was used but we can see from the damage that it does not hold up very well over time. The idea with a part like this is not for it to last for a short while but to last indefinitely.

Another factor that likely contributed to the failure is how I was using the saw. I was leaving the saw under constant tension so it was always ready to use. This is not a good idea with frame saws or bow saws. When a saw is left under tension the hardware is under continuous stress. Steel under constant load can slowly deform or fatigue even if it looks fine on the surface. Wood also moves with changes in humidity and temperature and that movement can increase stress on the metal parts. Over time this combination weakens small components like keepers and clips and makes failure far more likely. Releasing tension after use greatly extends the life of both the saw frame and the hardware.

To solve the issue I went to visit Gerald at Complete Engineering. He is a fellow woodworker who has moved into metal work and he is extremely pedantic about what he does. After looking at the problem he suggested using stainless steel, explaining that it is much harder and more durable than the steel being used in the original keepers. After walking through both of his factories he managed to find a single stainless clip left in stock and gave it to me free of charge.

What really struck me was the time he gave me. Gerald spent a good half hour helping me work through the problem. Considering the size of his operation and how much work he clearly has on, I was genuinely lost for words at the kindness he showed.

Gerald then suggested I head over to Build It Fasteners in Molendinar. As luck would have it, just as I pulled into the driveway the owner was starting to close the roller doors. I showed him the clip I needed and without hesitation he knew exactly where it was. He also had only one clip left and he gave it to me free of charge. I tried to pay him but he flat out refused.

Two men I had never met before showed me an incredible amount of kindness. It was honestly a heartfelt moment of absolute gratitude. The irony that both of them only had one clip left was not lost on me either.

When I got back to the shop I hammered both stainless clips into a shape that matched the original keepers supplied by Blackburn. I then cut them to length with a hacksaw. The whole job took only a few minutes. Gerald was absolutely right. These stainless keepers are far better than the originals. There are no bite marks from the saw plate and they feel solid and reliable.

Sometimes a small failure turns into a good lesson. In this case it was about material choice, tool care, and the reminder that generosity still exists in abundance if you are paying attention.

To show my gratitude I would like to give these businesses a smal promo. Please take the time to visit their links.

Complete Engineering provides machining and fabrication services for industrial and building work. They handle custom jobs and ongoing work and have been operating in this space for many years.https://comeng.au/

Build It Fasteners supplies fasteners, tools, and related hardware for trade and construction use. They carry a wide range of standard and specialty items and provide practical advice when selecting the right products. https://www.builditfasteners.com.au/

Used together, these businesses cover both fabrication and supply requirements, making it easier to move projects from planning through to completion.

The sofra is now complete, and to my eye, the table looks good. I am very happy with how it turned out. The carving in particular stands out to me. I like it a lot and would like to repeat this style of carving in future projects.

Years ago, I used to follow a woodworker in Russia on YouTube who carved the most beautiful work I have ever seen. When my account was hacked, I lost everything and with it, I lost track of his channel. I do not know his name, and no matter how much I search, I only seem to get results from western countries. That is disappointing. I would really like to see how people in other parts of the world work wood and approach their craft.

The finish I used on this table is food safe. My preference for food safe finishes is tung oil thinned with a citrus solvent. You cannot use mineral spirits or turpentine to thin tung oil. They are petroleum based and not suitable for a surface that will be used with food. It is also important to use one hundred percent tung oil, not a blend. Many products sold as tung oil are mixed with other oils or varnishes. If you want to buy it, I highly recommend this company. You purchase directly from the source instead of through shops, which are middlemen, so the price is much lower. https://www.sceneys.com.au/product/tung-oil/

The citrus solvent is ridiculously expensive. A 4-litre (1-gallon) can costs $176. That’s why I only use it for food-safe projects and never for everyday work.

I prefer tung oil over mineral oil because tung oil actually cures. Once cured, it hardens within the wood and provides real protection. Mineral oil never cures. It stays liquid, continues to weep out over time, and needs constant reapplication. Tung oil, once cured, is stable, durable, and better suited for a table that may see regular use.

Tung oil takes about four weeks to fully cure. The table should not be used before that time. It may be possible to serve food on it with a tablecloth under the plates, but I am not fully confident recommending that before the cure is complete.

The legs of the table are turned and foldable. Unfortunately, the folding brackets are poorly made. I bought them from Amazon, and they took a month to arrive. On one leg, the rubber pad you press to activate the spring was torn in several places. After attaching the brackets to the legs, another bracket failed, and the leg now flops around.

None of the brackets properly secure the legs or lock them upright. You only press a lever to unfold the legs, but there is no solid locking system. Every bracket is flimsy, so the legs rattle instead of staying firm.

Lastly, the screws supplied with the brackets are very weak. You have to turn them slowly and gently, even when using a pilot hole. If you are not careful, the screw head can snap off, which is exactly what happened to mine.

If I were to make another table like this, I would spend more time searching for better quality folding brackets, assuming they exist. The table itself deserves better hardware than what was used here.

Been a while since I last posted. I made a small video of my current project rather than writing about it. There is an aweful lot that many lessons could be derived from it, but I just found it a little simpler to show it to you rather than go into any great detail on how I arrived making a smooth round table by hand.

Lightening the workshop has been long overdue and I decided it was time to sell off the tools I do not need. The clutter had slowly built up over the years and I reached the point where I only wanted the essentials. I also let go of a large amount of timber that looks impressive but is not friendly to hand tools. American ash, red oak and similar species look beautiful in finished work but planing them is another story. When you are young and strong you treat it as a good workout. That is no longer the case for me and with ongoing back issues I simply cannot fight timbers that feel like stone.

I am not a woodworker who keeps a jointer tucked in the corner or a thicknesser ready to roll out. I have always worked with hand tools only and I have stayed true to that. I hand plane boards to thickness and I take rough sawn timber all the way to a finished surface using nothing but planes and scrapers. All of that puts real strain on the lower back and over time it has caught up with me which is one of the reasons I had to rethink what timbers I work with and what tools I keep.

When the cost of living went up I underestimated how much harder it would be to sell things, but they are moving slowly. Something I did not expect was how little interest there was in a rosewood mahogany industrial stain I tried to sell for years. I still have five litres left which is just over one gallon for readers in the United States.

I had gallons of the industrial stain made specifically for me and it never went off despite what some people think. The industrial version is nothing like the common off the shelf stain. Industrial stain is mixed to a formula, has stronger pigments and deeper penetration and is made for commercial finishing shops that need consistent performance. Off the shelf stain is thinned out, weaker in colour strength and produced for mass retail where cost and ease of use matter more than quality.

Stain can last a very long time if it is solvent based and kept sealed. Solvent based stains do not spoil the way water based products do. The pigments settle, the solvents separate and it may look unusable, but once mixed properly it returns to its original state. As long as the lid seals well and the container has not rusted through it remains usable for many years. Water based stains have a shorter life because bacteria and mould can form in the liquid, but industrial solvent based stain is far more stable.

Last night I tried the stain on a sample piece for a project and I expected it to look ordinary. I was wrong. It looked better than I imagined and I am relieved I did not sell what I had left. It reminded me of how easily people overlook good materials simply because they have never used them.

Clearing the workshop has made me more aware of what I actually use and what I was holding onto out of habit. Letting things go has also shown me that knowledge plays a major role in what people choose to buy. Some know exactly what they are looking for. Others walk past quality without realising it.

Sorting through everything has also made me think about how my work has changed. I do not work the way I did twenty years ago and there is no point pretending otherwise. My back limits what I can push through and the timbers I choose now have to make sense for the way I work. Once I accepted that it became easier to decide what stays and what goes.

The workshop feels calmer with less in it. There is more room to move and more room to think. What is left are the tools and materials that fit the way I work today. It feels like a step towards working with a bit more clarity and a bit less noise, and there is nothing wrong with that.

You do not have to look far to see how ridiculous timber prices have become. What used to be an affordable hobby is now something you really have to think twice about. For hobby woodworkers like you and soon myself to be, the cost of a few decent boards can easily rival the price of a good hand plane. It makes you stop and plan every project carefully because waste just is not an option anymore.

A lot of people like to blame it on transport costs or limited supply, but let us be honest, that is not the real story. There is no shortage of trees in Australia and the mills are still running. The problem is corporate control. Big companies have taken over the supply chain from start to finish. They have bought up smaller mills or forced them out, and with fewer suppliers left they can charge whatever they like. And they do.

This sort of manipulation is not limited to timber either. It is happening across the board. The world has become greedy. Corporations are driving up the cost of living while pretending it is all about inflation or supply issues. Sure, wages have gone up, but only on paper. The reality is most people are barely scraping by. A one bedroom apartment can cost around seven hundred dollars a week, and once you have paid rent there is almost nothing left for food, electricity, or anything else, let alone a few nice slabs of timber.

For many woodworkers that means adapting. Some are turning to recycled wood or salvaging pieces from old furniture and building sites. Others are experimenting with new species or milling their own logs when they can. It takes more time but it is satisfying work. There is something special about bringing life back into an old piece of wood that most people would have thrown away.

Maybe that is what is keeping woodworking alive. In a world ruled by greed and profit, this craft still gives you something real. The feel of a sharp chisel, the smell of fresh shavings, the rhythm of a hand plane, these are things money cannot buy.

So yes, timber is getting dearer, and everything else with it, but true woodworkers will not stop. We will adapt, just like we always have. Because at the end of the day, woodworking is not about what you can afford. It is about what you can create.

When the early settlers came from Europe, they brought with them a mindset shaped by scarcity. Europe had already been stripped bare of much of its ancient forests. Centuries of shipbuilding, heating, and farming had cleared vast stretches of oak, elm, and yew. By the time they crossed the oceans, the old growth that once blanketed Europe was mostly gone.

Arriving in the Americas and Australia, they saw endless forests and thought they had found an inexhaustible resource. They felled the trees with the same habits that had already destroyed their homeland, cutting without thought for renewal, burning without a plan for regrowth. Tree farming was unheard of. The concept of managing forests for future generations simply did not exist in their worldview.

What followed was predictable. The great stands of cedar, oak, and mahogany in North America, and the towering red gums, blackwoods, and huon pines of Australia, were taken until there were no giants left. Many species that once grew thick and wide have vanished entirely, and those that survive no longer reach the same size because they are cut before maturity.

The tragedy is that it was not ignorance alone, it was greed and a short-term way of thinking. Forests that took hundreds of years to form were erased in decades. We inherited their mistakes, but we can still learn from them. True respect for timber starts with understanding what it took to grow and what was lost to bring it into our hands.

Modern day tool makers mainly concentrate on hobbyists with very little knowledge about the craft. That’s not an insult, it’s just the truth of where the market has gone. Most modern plane buyers are not tradesmen or full-time users. They’re enthusiasts who might use a plane once or twice a week, and that’s perfectly fine. But tool makers design around that group, not around those who spend hours at the bench every day.

I agree that metals have come a long way, but the real question is how has any of this actually improved our craft? What benefit have we really gained?

We’ve been told that thicker irons were made to reduce chatter, but that’s just marketing talk. In truth, chatter rarely comes from a thin iron. It’s usually the result of poor bedding, a loose cap iron, or sloppy setup. What thicker irons and A2 steel really did was make sharpening slower and rule out oil stones for anyone who prefers them.

Then there’s the matter of weight. For hobbyists, a heavier plane might seem fine, but when you use one all day, it quickly becomes exhausting. Old Stanley planes were light, nimble, and easy to control. The modern premium planes, on the other hand, often feel clumsy and tiring, especially when you’re planing something like a raised panel.

Manufacturers love to say that the extra heft helps the plane glide through timber. That’s nonsense. If you need the weight to do the cutting, your iron’s blunt.

Yes, today’s planes are machined to high tolerances, and that’s impressive, but in practice, a well-tuned Stanley does the job better. It’s lighter, faster to sharpen, and more comfortable to use, exactly what a plane should be.

Tool makers love to use terms like precision machining and modern performance steel because it sells. But in the hands of someone who knows how to sharpen properly and set a cap iron correctly, an old Stanley will run circles around most modern planes. It’s not nostalgia, it’s experience. Those lighter, simpler designs were made by people who actually used them for a living, not by engineers trying to appeal to collectors.

The first person to bring this topic to light and reveal its bitter truth was Paul Sellers. I was one of his first opposers, mainly because I had just replaced all my old tools with Lie Nielsen and Veritas planes. My pride got in the way, and I hadn’t used the modern planes long enough to form an informed opinion. Looking back, my biggest mistake was selling my old Stanleys and Record planes. They weren’t in the best condition, but they still performed beautifully.

The truth is, the craft hasn’t improved because the tool itself didn’t need improving. What’s changed is the audience. Toolmakers now cater to people who admire tools more than they use them. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s led to a generation of planes that look impressive on a bench but don’t necessarily work better in the wood.

So before anyone believes the hype about thicker irons and added weight, ask yourself: is it really an improvement or just another myth we’ve been sold?

The Roubo frame saw is one of those tools that reminds you how clever old designs really were. It’s a large hand-powered saw built for resawing timber, long before bandsaws and table saws were ever thought of. The name comes from André-Jacob Roubo, an 18th-century French cabinetmaker who wrote about it in his book L’Art du Menuisier.

The saw looks simple at first glance, a long, narrow blade stretched between two stout wooden arms with a crossbar joining them together. But when you use one, you realise how well balanced and efficient the design is. The frame keeps the blade under tension, so it runs straight and doesn’t buckle in the cut. You can tension it tighter than a normal hand saw, which makes a huge difference when ripping long boards down the middle.

The beauty of the Roubo saw is that it’s quiet, smooth, and surprisingly fast once you get into rhythm. It doesn’t fill the workshop with dust or noise, and you can actually feel what the wood is doing. The sawdust curls out gently instead of blasting everywhere. For anyone who enjoys hand tool woodworking, that sort of control is deeply satisfying.

Making one is a project in itself. The frame is usually hardwood, something strong and stable like beech, oak, or even spotted gum. The blade can be bought from a few tool suppliers overseas, or made from bandsaw stock if you’re handy with metalwork. The key is to file and set the teeth for ripping, not crosscutting, and to keep them evenly jointed. It’s worth the effort because once it’s tuned properly, it tracks beautifully and cuts true.

Using a Roubo saw teaches patience and accuracy. You can’t rush it. You learn to read the grain and keep your body lined up with the cut. It’s physical work, but in a good way, the kind that connects you to the material and makes you appreciate the craft. Many woodworkers build one not because they need to, but because they want to experience that connection.

For anyone who works mostly by hand, the Roubo frame saw fills an important gap between a panel saw and a bandsaw. It allows you to take thick boards and create thinner stock for box sides, drawer parts, or even veneer. It’s slow compared to a machine, but it’s also quiet, affordable, and completely under your control.

That’s what I like most about it. The Roubo frame saw isn’t just another tool, it’s a reminder that you don’t need electricity to do serious work. You just need sharp teeth, a steady hand, and a bit of patience.

When I mentioned sharp teeth I meant that’s what really gives this saw its speed. When I first bought the Roubo saw from Blackburn Tools I paid Chris to sharpen it for me. Since I had never owned a saw of that size before I had no idea what sharp should feel like. The teeth were massive and felt sharp to the touch but that might have just been because of their size.

I built a temporary frame out of pine which I am still using by the way and couldn’t wait to try it out. Truth be told I was disappointed. It took me nearly half an hour to resaw a board only about 20 inches long and by the end I was puffed out. Still none the wiser I figured I had fallen for it again, all the hype, and I was no better off than with a regular panel saw. I only reached for it when I absolutely had to.

Quite a bit of time went by and every now and then I would glance at that 400 dollars hanging on the wall collecting dust. Eventually I decided enough was enough and I would sharpen the teeth myself. I pulled it apart and clamped the blade in the saw vice.

I pulled out my file which had never been used and sharpened every tooth with a zero rake making it an aggressive saw.

The setup is really important. First, the blade needs to be centred in the frame and perfectly straight. To centre it, make sure the distance between the blade and both arms is equal. When the spacing is the same on both sides, the blade is properly centred.

Make sure the blade is perfectly straight like an arrow to ensure accurate sawing.

Next, when you tighten the blade, it should have a deflection of about 1/16 of an inch and no more.

Do a pluck test. The blade should give a low, clear ring, not shrill and not dead.

When sawing, it should track straight with no chatter, and the teeth should bite evenly. Over tensioning increases the risk of blade breakage or stressing the frame. On the other hand, if the blade is under tension and moves about 1/8 of an inch (3 mm), the cut will wander.

That’s all there is to it. Once everything was set up, I put it to the test and was very surprised at how fast it cut. I was taking an inch on every stroke, but it wasn’t easy until I got the hang of it. With the saw’s zero-degree rake, it is very aggressive.

That means the saw will catch if you’re not careful. I had to lift it slightly, kiss the surface, and ease into the cut. Before long, I got the hang of it and cut my resawing time from 30 minutes down to 5 minutes. It’s a total game changer and any desire to buy a bandsaw has completely vanished. Chances are Chris never actually sharpened those teeth. I don’t know if I’ll ever find out and, to be honest, I really don’t care anymore.

Using the Roubo frame saw has reminded me why hand tools still have a place in a modern workshop. There is a rhythm and satisfaction in working with a tool that responds directly to your hand, a connection you do not get with machines. It is not just about speed or efficiency it is about the joy of mastering the craft and taking pride in every cut. This saw has earned its spot in my workshop and I know it will be a companion for many projects to come.