tool handle winter drying and shrinking and summer expansion

[David Wadstrup]

It's been a particularly, cold winter here in NY, which has subsequently made the climate of my workspace drier than it even usually is during these dry winter months. I've always had to tighten my plane and saw handles a bit, but nothing like this year. Which makes me nervous. How do you guys handle seasonal changes with your tools? I do only tighten just as much as is needed. But, I'm wondering if there will be any fallout(i.e cracking, splitting) when the air gets more and more humid and the wood expands. Do you ever loosen the screws and nuts on your tools to accommodate their expansion in the summer?

[Kees Heiden]

For example, take a sawhandle. In the winter the wood dries and the thickness of the handle shrinks. The bolts have a fixed length, so they become loose. At some point you decide to tighten the bolts. Then comes summer. The wood becomes wetter and the handle expands in thickness. The bolts remain the same length again. The results is that the wood under the boltheads gets compressed. Some of this compression is temporary, some of it is permanent. The result is that next winter the bolts loosen sooner and you have to tighten them a bit more. This is an unstoppable process. But the fact that we can find perfectly usable saws from 150 years ago is proof that it doesn't becomes too much of a problem too soon. But you will see how the heads of the bolts and nuts are deeper into the wood then when they were new. I wouldn't worry. There is allready so much to worry about in this world.

[Sean Hughto]

Mine crack and pop every year, so I had to get a lathe and a bandsaw, and a drill press, and a bunch of nice Aurio rasps, and spokeshaves, and expensive woods and everything else necessary to remake handles every Summer. Or at least that's what I tell my wife.

[Brian Holcombe]

If you have forced air heat, that is where most of the drying is coming from.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

For plane handles, I thought I remembered someone mentioning using wave washers or something of that ilk to take up slack without overly compressing wood.

A hygrometer is really cheap - if you're having major issues, just keeping an eye on relative humidity in the storage environments would give you a good idea when to loosen things up, unless you're experiencing really drastic humidity swings.

You can always take the approach I've taken inadvertently; the wife has a large turtle tank, lots of plants (many of them aquatic in nature) and a couple of fish tanks - this combined with non-drying heat sources means ever since we merged households, I get to battle the effects of high humidity year 'round . . .