In April 2021, I posted my initial work on rough sawing out the ash for the handles. From here, I spent a great deal of time getting the wood dimensioned/S4S'd. It had twist, etc and was quite a bit of work with the wood not cooperating the whole way.. Basically I made two 24" 2x4's. I used my table top mortiser to put in the mortises.
From there, I took the Blackburn Tools template and drew out the desired shapes on all four ends. Since I don't have a bandsaw, I used the stop cut method I learned from Paul Sellers and then chisseled out the waste. It's lots of fun to do this as you get all kinds of hunks of wood coming off and you rapidly get down to the approximate shape.
From there, it was a mixture of chisels, spoke shaves, gouges, rasps, files, card scraper, and sandpaper to get the wood to the line. Once I was satisfied that the curve bits were relatively square across, I started the round over process to make things comfortable. I used my drawknife to quickly remove the bulk of the wood, then back to the tools mentioned above to get the round over nice and smooth. This is where the sandpaper really came in handy. I don't use sand paper all that much. For this smoothing however, sandpaper is really handy and I used 80, 120, 220 grits.
Unfortunately, one end of the handles was a bit too spalted and verged on being punky (handle in the upper left of the picture below). I purposely placed this portion on the decorative handle side so it doesn't get used. The wood where the mortise resides is solid ash so the piece should be fine. Just to make sure all will be ok, I used thin cyanoacrylate glue and let it really soak into the near punky ash. After it set for a while, I sprayed some activator on it. I don't know if this helps or not but I figured it couldn't hurt.
After that was done, it was time to cut out the mortise that holds the metal place that is used to tension the blade. I just used my half inch mortise chisel for this followed by a router plane. It came out nice.
Now it's time to move onto cutting out the stretchers from the rough ash. I'm not at all looking forward to this but the wood isn't going to cut itself. Fortunately, most of the weekend is over so much of the rough cutting will occur during the work week. With Covid, I'm fortunate that I can work from home. This kind of woodwork is perfect. When I take lunch or a break, I can go out and cut for 15 minutes then stop. Over the course of the workweek it will be relatively painless to cut out the stretchers.
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