Bringing rusted hand tools back into service, and building the things they live in.
A hand saw from the 1900s, bought rusted for the price of a sandwich, will out-cut most new ones once it has been cleaned and sharpened. The steel is good, the plates are properly tapered, and the only reason it is cheap is that almost nobody now knows how to put an edge back on it. That knowledge is not difficult. It is just unevenly distributed.
These pages are the method, written out properly: what each stage does, what it costs, and where it goes wrong. They are written for someone about to try it, not as a diary of having tried it.
Between cleaning and sharpening there are two optional stages, and both of them remove metal, which is why they come with a timer.
A warm soak at roughly 30–60 g per litre lifts the grey staining that electrolysis leaves behind. It works in minutes rather than hours and it does not stop when the rust is gone — leave a plate in overnight and it will come out uniformly etched and dull. Neutralise in a baking-soda solution, rinse, dry with heat, oil immediately. Bare steel flash-rusts in the time it takes to fetch a cloth.
By hand, on a flat block, with a little oil, working up through the grits — 220, 400, 600 — always along the length of the plate. Never across it: cross-scratches run perpendicular to the direction of cut and drag in the kerf. The target is a plate that slides cleanly out of a cut, which arrives long before a mirror does. Sand around a maker's etch rather than through it; an etch is only a few thousandths deep and it will not come back.
Saws stored flat get knocked, and saws leaned in a corner get their teeth damaged by everything else leaned in that corner. A till holds each saw by its handle with the plate hanging free and the teeth facing where no hand goes.
This one is two tiers, 1400 mm wide and 700 mm tall, which takes a full set of panel and back saws with the backs clear of each other. It is not fixed to the wall. It hangs on a French cleat.
A batten is ripped down its length at 45°, giving two pieces with matching bevels. One is screwed to the wall with the bevel facing up and in; the other is screwed to the back of the till with the bevel facing down and out. Dropping the till on engages the two slopes, and the weight of the thing is what locks it: the load pulls the till down the incline and therefore into the wall, so the harder it is loaded the tighter it sits.
Three consequences make it worth the extra batten. The till lifts straight off in one movement, so the wall behind it can be painted, or the whole workshop can move house without unscrewing anything. The load is spread along the full width of the cleat rather than concentrated at two or three fixings. And anything else built to the same cleat height is interchangeable with it.
Leave a couple of millimetres of gap at the bottom of the bevel so the two faces meet on the slope and not on their flat backs, and fix the wall cleat into something real — into the studs, or with proper anchors in masonry. The cleat is not the weak point. The wall is.
Traditional timber choices are not sentiment. Each one is a specific mechanical property being used deliberately, and knowing which property explains most of what a board does on the bench.
| Timber | Property | Traditional use |
|---|---|---|
| Ash | Tough and elastic — bends a long way before it breaks | Tool handles, ladder rungs, anything shock-loaded |
| Oak | Durable and strong, but high in tannin, which corrodes iron and stains blue-black around it | Frames and joinery — fixed with copper, brass or stainless, never plain steel |
| Beech | Dense, fine and even-textured, wears smooth rather than splintering | Plane bodies, mallets, bench tops |
| Elm | Interlocked grain — resists splitting almost completely | Chair seats, where legs are driven into a solid slab |
| Pine | Light, cheap, stable when dry, soft enough to bruise | Carcase work, shop fittings, anything that will be painted |
The oak entry is the one that catches people out in a workshop rather than in a book: tannic acid and ferrous metal react, so an ordinary steel screw in oak will corrode and leave a black halo through the surrounding timber, and a steel clamp left on a damp oak board overnight will print a stain that has to be sanded out.