Tool Kit Keeps Growing

Checking off a couple more items on the needed tools list.

First up is a Stanley No. 62 4-Fold rule. OK, to be perfectly honest, I’m not real clear how this will help with my woodworking. I always have my 12″ combination square handy, and have both a full size carpenter square and a tape measure close by. How will a 4-fold rule help?

Here’s what I do know for sure: these old rules are cool as hell. Even though I haven’t been sure how it will become essential to my woodworking, I had to have one.

Next up are some quality woodworking rasps, courtesy of fellow woodworking blogger Logan Cabinet Shoppe.

These are not the hand-cut french Aurora Borealis or whatever they’re called that go for $120 a rasp. But they are quality. I’ll quote LCS from his eBay posting:

This is a matched set of 10″ half round cabinet rasps and files. They are about 15 years old and were made in India but these are not the junk sold in the typical hardware store today. They are a set that used to be sold by Woodcraft for about $80 and were specifically designed for fine woodworking. Even though they were made in India, they are good quality tools. There are no handles included.
The set has been lightly used, but they are still as sharp as the day I bought them. There are three grades of 10″ half round rasps and one 10″ half round file. The rasps are bastard cut (coarse), 2nd cut (medium) and smooth cut (fine). The smooth cut rasp is not quite as fine as a #50 patternmaker’s rasp, but it still smooths pretty well. The file is a double cut bastard and works well to do the final smoothing after use of the smooth cut rasp.
These rasps remove material rapidly and work well for curved or sculpted work. By using all four and working from coarsest (bastard rasp) to finest (bastard file), this type of work can be shaped and smoothed efficiently. Just some final hand sanding after the file is all that’s required.

To date I’ve been using a medium cut off the rack file from Ace TrueValue, so I’m rather looking forward to trying these out.

This concludes a fairly successful run for me on eBay, which to-date I hadn’t ventured into. Managed to add several quality needed (or just really desired) tools to my kit for a fair price.

Doesn’t seem very long ago at all that I reviewed the list of tools Chris Schwarz considered essential in the Anarchist’s Tool Chest and thought it’d be decades before I came close to having them. Now when I review it, I feel like I’m getting fairly close.

While I haven’t totaled everything up, thanks to some gifts and some excellent deals I don’t think I’ve spent near as much as I was afraid it would cost, either.