Rifflers Handles & Case - #2 Finishing the Handles

With the ferrules done I could start working to mate them to the wood handles.  The first step is to mount one of the roughed-out handle blanks in the scroll chuck centered on the live tail center then turn the bottom half of the handle down fairly close.  With that done I marked the limit of the dado cut where the ferrule will go.

Next, using a parting tool cut the dado deep enough so the ferrule will fit snugly.  The difference between being too tight and too loose is measured in a few thousands of an inch.  I approach the depth very carefully.  You can always cut it a little deeper but if you go too deep you cannot go back.  The other thing is to make sure the cut into the blank is square or very slightly back-cut.  Otherwise, the ferrule will not fit tight up against the cut edge.  The top photo shows the finished cut and the bottom is of the parting tool.

Here you can see how the ferrule fits on the blank.  Each one is for a particular handle just in case there is any variation in the interior diameter of the ferrules.  Note the wood is a little proud of it.  That way once I have the piece epoxied in place I can come back and turn the wood down so there is a perfectly smooth transition between the two. 

Once all the ferrules are fitted I mixed up some two-part black epoxy spread it on, twist the ferrules around to make sure there are no gaps or voids in the epoxy bed then set them aside to cure overnight.

The next day the blanks are back in the lathe to finish the transition between the wood and the copper ferrule.  Here everything is ready for turning.

Using a gentle touch with the lathe tools I turn the wood down until it matched the ferrule.  In addition, I also turned the end flush with the ferrule.  Some finish sanding of the wood plus a little light work with a file rounding over of the sharp edge of the ferrule and the bottom half was pretty much done.

With that done I could work on the top half.  To mount the blanks so I could turn them I needed to use a simple fixture that is just a small cylinder with a hole centered and counter sunk.  This lets me run a screw into the hole drilled in the blank to pull it up tight against the fixture.  Here are all the pieces ready to be screwed together.  There is a reason I did not just mount the blank between centers and that will be obvious pretty soon.

Once the blank is screwed onto the fixture I can clamp the fixture into the scroll chuck and run the live center tail stock up to the piece.

Next, I mark the finished length of the handle and starting working the end down.  Here I am about half done.

Once I get pretty close to the finished shape I pencil mark two lines near the end for a set of grooves.  They are for decoration and to increase the handle’s grip.  Once marked I use an awl to make a shallow reference cut then using the parting tool cut deeper.  Last is to use hold some thin wire in the groove while the lathe is on using the heat generated by friction to actually burn the grooves.  After the grooves are burnt in I lightly sand with 400 grit paper to clean up any roughness generated by the wire when burning.  The pictures below show the progression.

I can now finish turning the end down to where there is only a small bit holding the waste next to the tail-stock on.  A fine-tooth Japanese pull saw cuts the waste off close to the end then I turn the remaining nub off, make the final shape adjustments and do final sanding.  Now you see why I could not mount the handle between centers. Here is first one done with five to go.  Because they are going to be in a “set” I will need to take careful measurements so they are matching.

After turning all of the handles, I finished them with three coats of Danish Oil Finish.  I used this rather than my usual lacquer finish because these will be working tools and I think that over time the handles will get a little beat up.  If that happens I can clean the handles and just give them another coat of oil.  If I used lacquer then re-finishing is a little more involved but still way less than polyurethane.  If they were a presentation set then I would have considered lacquer.  

I gave the oil on the handles about three days to cure then buffed them with a cloth wheel loaded with carnauba wax.

Last is to mount the rifflers into the handles.  The rifflers are manufactured in Italy so naturally they are metric.  The shafts are about 3mm in diameter.  My actual measurement was .121” or just under 1/8”.  When I drilled a 1/8” hole in a test piece the riffler would not go in.  The hole was too small.  I double checked and the bit was 1/8” so it should have fit or at least I should have been able to twist it in but no way.  I checked the hole with a digital caliper and found that even though the bit was 1/8” the hole was about .118”.  The only thing I could think of was there was some spring back from the wood fibers after the hole was drilled.  Going with this idea I ran drill in and out of the hole several times which helped a little but not enough.  Going up 1/64” made the hole too big.  I could have epoxied the rifflers in the handle but wanted to be able to remove them if the situation called for it.  What I needed to do was to ream the hole out or compress the fibers just a smidge.  To do that I took a 16-penny galvanized nail put it in the lathe and filed it down to .122”.  The photos below show the before and after of that process.

To use my custom “reamer” I started the lathe then by hand ran the handle in and out on the nail.  That helped.  I think it burnished the wood fibers but not quite enough.  What did work was to use the heat generated by the friction of the nail spinning in the hole to melt a little wax on the nail then run it in and out.  I don’t know if it was the wax that added a little lubrication or if it held the compressed wood fibers in place but it worked.  Here is the finished product, six rifflers mounted in matching cherry handles.

Next Up – Case Plans & Roughing out Blanks

Rifflers Handles & Case - #1 Starting the Handles

What you ask is a Riffler?  Well, in this case it’s not a really good guitar player but small, quick cutting rasps used by woodworkers, sculptors and miniature builders for adding fine detail and intricate shaping to their work.  My son recently got me a nice set of straight 160mm (6 1/4”) Italian cut rifflers and an interchangeable wood handle.

In thinking about how I will use them and some experimentation I came to some conclusions.

• The handle needed to be a bit bigger for me to comfortably use. 
• Since I would be switching back and forth between the shapes having to change the handle all the time would be a pain.  
• I would like to have a nice case to keep them all together and protected.

There are a lot of options for a case that range from a simple canvas roll to a hard case of some type.  Since I am a woodworker I gravitated toward some type of wood case.  However, before I could design the case I needed to settle on the size and shape of the handles.  In the past I have made some handles for my other files and rasps that just fit my hands.  There was one in particular that felt right for the tool size and type of work I would be doing so decided to use it as a guide.

I chose cherry for the handles because I like the way it turns on the lathe and the nice rich reddish color it develops over time.  I started by cutting 7 blanks about 4” long and just over 1” square.  Using my center finder I marked the centers of the blanks.  Below are top and bottom photos of it.  In use the 90-degree corner on the bottom goes against the corner of the piece and the straight side of the opening lines up with the corner providing a 45-degree line as a diagonal.  If you mark all four corners and the piece is exactly square you get two lines with the center where they cross.  If it is out of square then there will be multiple lines like the right image below.

Once I have my guide lines I use an awl to make a dimple at the center.  In order to get as close as I could I used a set of magnifying glasses.  Maybe a bit of overkill but the final size of the handles are going to be pretty close to the size of the blanks and I wanted to get the center point as close as reasonably possible.

Below on the left are four of the blanks with punched centers.  With the centers marked I could use a mallet to set the drive and was ready to start turning.  The drive I used and what the blank end looks like is on the right.

With the blank mounted in the lathe and using a roughing gouge I turned each blank round.  Here is the typical progression through to a cylinder.  When done I had 6 nice round cylinders all the same diameter and length.

To prevent splitting the handle in use I will add a copper ferrule at the narrow end where the riffler goes in the handle.  The ferrule is made from a 3/8” hard copper tube union cut in half.  The inside of the fitting is ½”.  This begs the question, if the fitting is for a 3/8” tube how can the inside diameter of the coupling be ½”.  Short answer is the 3/8” refers to the inside diameter of the pipe having an outside diameter of ½” which the coupling has to fit over.  Anyway, my first attempt to cut the fitting was to put it on a ½” diameter dowel rod then used a tube cutter make the cut.  Unfortunately, the fitting just spun on the dowel rod as there was not enough friction between it and the fitting to hold it.

The second attempt worked a lot better.  I cut a lengthwise slot in the dowel slid the fitting on as before and jammed a small screwdriver in the slot to act as a wedge.  This worked just fine.  The left image below shows the setup and the right one is a close up of the coupling.  The tube cutter is not a saw, does not remove material and does not leave a kerf.  As the cutter is spun around the fitting its handle is tightened a fraction of a turn forcing the sharp wheel into the fitting.  The right image shows the cutter wheel about half way through the fitting.

Once cut I had two pieces I could use for the ferrules.  If you look close at the left piece you can see the sharp burr that rolls inside the piece left by the cutter.  The bigger problem is the manufactures name “NIBCO” stamped into it.  I really do not want that to show when I am done.

The burr is easily removed using a small round file and some emery cloth.  The “NIBCO” stamp requires a little more work.  I started by turning a slightly tapered mandrel then jammed the fitting on.  The top photo has the fitting on the mandrel mounted in the scroll chuck.  The bottom is just a closer look showing the “NIBCO” stamp I want to get rid of.

Since the stamp is only a about a hundredth of an inch deep and the fitting walls are about 6.5 hundredths thick I felt like it was OK to just file it down.  Running the lathe at a low speed I gently filed away the “NIBCO” stamp.  Really the most time-consuming part was cleaning the teeth in the file as they kept getting clogged up with the copper.  The top photo shows the stamp gone except for just a little bit of the “O”.  Since I wanted a more finished surface I worked it down with abrasives ending up wet sanding with 1,500 grit silicon carbide paper.  Last touch is to burnish using 0000 steel wool giving me the finish shown on the bottom photo.  I could have gone farther using polishing wheels and Tripoli then rouge to get a mirror surface but this is going to be a working tool not a decorative item.

The last bit of work on the ferrules is to flatten the edge that will butt up against the wood.  Here you can see the rough spots and burrs on the edge of the ferrule.

That gets fixed by making a few passes on a flat file clamped to the workbench checking after each couple of passed to make sure the edge is square to the sides.  Here is what the finished edge looks like setting on the file I used.

Next Up – Finishing the Handles