Two Filing Horses

[Bob Smalser]

The first storm of the year with 4 inches of rain gave me an excuse to get under cover for a day and make a taller horse for saw filing. Either I’m getting taller or my eyes are getting worse, and the horse I copied from one of my uncle’s and have been using for almost 40 years now is a bit too short these days.

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I’ve always been interested in trying the Cornish “saw grip” from the UK on Alice Frampton’s Cornish Workshop web site. The Pennsylvania Dutch birdsmouth design is simple and lightweight for toting around, but once the saw is tapped home in the wedged vise jaws, it’s easier to pick the whole horse up and reverse it than it is to reverse the saw to change sides.

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The softwood birdsmouth is cut 7 degrees from vertical and reinforced with a carriage bolt to prevent it from splitting, and the hardwood jaws are beveled to 8 degrees so the mouth bites high on the jaw taper, forcing the jaw edges tight on the sawblade above. The saw requires a mallet to install and remove, which over time is hard on the jaws.

This horse has a 50” working height, with 6 X 30 X 3/4” jaws set in uprights of 1 3/8 X 3 3/8 X 48” jointed by mortise and tenon to two ¾” rails cut to provide an overall frame width of 20”. This one is on its third set of jaws and is spruce and cherry with holly jaws.

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The Cornish vise is more sophisticated with a hinged jaw bearing against a fixed jaw….

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….secured by a loose bar riding in slots in the uprights and bearing on two hardwood wedges screwed to the bottom of levers which are in turn screwed to the moving jaw. Sweet. Here for weight I used a 7/8” steel bar salvaged from an old wrench, instead of a lighter hardwood dowel that would have to be tapped home a bit harder.

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The specifics of the Cornish design allowed a carpenter to quickly fabricate one of these on a job site using the lumber and framing saws at hand. I used a bit more time and tools to reduce and refine the scantlings a bit, and will only mention the dimensions I changed from the original plan. The frame was got out of three VG Doug Fir 2 X 4’s I used last year for concrete forms, the uprights measuring 1 5/16 X 3 1/8 X 52 1/2” and tapered from the center rail to the feet, allowing an overall working height of 53 ½”.

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The two frame rails were planed down to 7/8” and cut to make the overall width of the frame 17”. I deepened the mortise for the lower rail to make two feet less likely to rock on a patch of wet shavings than if the entire length of the rail was in contact with the floor. The rails were positioned for the horse to mount cleanly in any bench vise or Workmate.

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I enlarged the vise jaws to 5 ½ X 30 X ¾”, and kerfed the frame to accommodate my largest saws. The jaws have to remain true, and the wider the board, the greater the chance for warp. My hardest wood for this application is Pacific Madrone, not the most stable wood, so I kept them narrow and kerfed the uprights to take a 7 ½”-wide saw. An alternative is to make wider jaws, each laid up from three narrow boards, flipping the end-grain cups to make a more stable jaw than one got out of one board.

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The inner faces of the vise jaws in both designs must be beveled or coved so only the top inch or so of the jaws bear on the saw. Such tapering leaves insufficient thread depth for the wood screws mounting the levers to the moveable jaw, so I used machine screws instead. I used flat-headed lags in oversize holes rather than wood screws to mount the fixed jaw, so as to provide some minor adjustment to align the two jaws.

Continued….

[Bob Smalser]

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When not on the road in a tool roll, I store my files and spares in a lead-weighted block to prevent confusion and keep them from touching each other, but I like a small bin on the horse for the jointer and saw sets. A few drain holes in the bin are useful to brush out file shavings or water, and the inside face is a handy spot for notes on file sizes that won’t get rubbed off. I also mounted the mahogany faces of the bin using large, round-headed box pins to provide some texture for wood or leather bench vise jaws to grip. All hardware was bedded in oil-based bedding compound for outdoor use and the horse given several coats of spar varnish.

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Finally, I like to scribe my usual fleam angle into the vise jaws to keep me straight. ;)

[Jim W. White]

Great post Bob! thanks, I always find your posts very informative!

[Ruston Hughes]

Very nice tutorial as always Bob. One question though. Instead of tapering or coving the inside of the jaws, could you simply glue a thin shim (wood, or leather) to the top 1" on the inside of one or both jaws?

[Don C Peterson]

Interesting post. How does that vise work for back saws? I recently acquired a few back saws off of eBay. All of them need sharpening so I decided to build my own saw vise. Since all of my hand saws to date are either back saws or Japanese saws I made the vise with them in mind.

It seems to work quite well (of course this is the opinion of someone who has sharpened a grand total of 1 1/2 saws...)

It does have the disadvantage that you mentioned that when I want to turn the thing around the saw isn't locked into place, but I just use a small bar clamp to keep things tight when I loosen the bench vise and turn the saw vise around.

[Don C Peterson]

I just noticed that I used the wrong pictures for that last post... These are better.

[Don Pierson]

Wonderful! This is one of the things I like about the internet...this forum provides a place for an expert to pass on knowledge that might otherwise be lost...Thanks Bob

[Bob Smalser]

Very nice tutorial as always Bob. One question though. Instead of tapering or coving the inside of the jaws, could you simply glue a thin shim (wood, or leather) to the top 1" on the inside of one or both jaws?

I keep a small, cast-iron vise for small backsaws, and generally use jaw-length, 1 X 30 X 1/4" shims to jam a long, miter box back saw into the wooden vises. Haven't tried that yet with the new one, however.

[Bill Brehme]

Bob quote: "Either I’m getting taller or my eyes are getting worse"

Bob, dont get any taller! You're already a GIANT around here.:eek: Thanks for the update to the original saw filing post. I've found the "plan" for the saw filing horse on the Cornish website and found it a bit 2 dimensional and difficult to read the text... real grainy. Thanks for the clarifying color pics. Now I believe I can actually take a whack at this!!!:cool: