Tools from Trash - Old Hacksaw blades

Howdy folks, Mark from Nomad Boatbuilding. Welcome to the workshop and we are back here with Tools from Trash. So the other day I was working on this particular boat. I needed to take a bevel off the stem and I wanted to copy that bevel onto a piece of paper to do some figurine. I needed to make my cut water here and so there are many ways we can take bevels off of things. A primary one is just using a bevel gauge and this is your typical sliding t-bevel gauge and I prefer ones, I prefer bevel gauges with a fixed blade but that's neither here nor there. So this works perfectly fine for taking a bevel off of something. The thing is if you want to copy this down onto a piece of paper it's not quite as ideal just because the body holds the blade proud of that piece of paper. It's a bit harder to transfer that line down accurately. So many years ago I made a similar tool specifically for this purpose and it's basically it's just a flat bevel gauge and I used a hacksaw blade. Bust it apart in the middle, connect it up at the factory ends with a nail through the end. I used a copper leather workers rivet with a rove on the end but you could use a common nail too and a washer and just smash that thing until it stays put. And so what's nice about this is because it's so nice and flat I can pick up a bevel, I can lay it onto a drawing. So what's nice about this is I can pick up a bevel and then I could lay it onto a drawing as I did in the case of this particular boat and then I can make use of that drawing. So a standard bevel gauge is really good at picking up an angle off the surface of something like say for instance we've got the end of this plank here we want to record the angle of it to the transom. So it does a great job of that. The bevel gauge sits nice and square to this surface or plumb to this surface and records this angle and then we could take that we could lay this on the table saw or the bandsaw and set the blade at that angle very easily. What it's not so good for is if say for instance we wanted to fit a thwart up against this transom and we want to know what this oddball angle is here it's a very compound angle. Well you can sort of do it but it's always hard to tell if you're getting it just right because the thickness of the body gets in the way of that accuracy. Our shop made bevel gauge here can record that very easily because there's no body thickness to it. So we could figure out what that angle is very easily and then this is a better tool for taking it over to a piece of stock and laying it on there and recording that that angle might be. Now we don't have the thickness of the body to reference one edge as easily but just the same we can pick up that angle more easily with this one. So that got me thinking about other times I've made good secondary use of an old hacksaw blade in the workshop and in the previous Tools from Trash we talked about transfer gauges. Here's one made out of a hacksaw right here and I'll be using that on this boat as well to transfer the shear marks from the mold on the inside of the boat to the outside of the shear plank. When I first got out of boatbuilding school I helped work on this big schooner project. It was the Pacific Grace. We were building a brand new schooner 130 feet, three inch thick planking and the foreman walked around and he gave all of us a feeler gauge in order to judge whether or not our plank fits were right and the feeler gauge he gave us was a chunk of hacksaw blade and he ground the teeth off of it so that was the level of precision he wanted in our fits. He wanted no more than one hacksaw blade's thickness of gap between those planks so we had to keep feeling our joint until this could not go through and then we were done. Pretty simple tool but you it is very effective and it rides with me in my apron all the time almost out of sentimentality more than use but you never know it does come in handy every now and then I pull it out and they do stuff with it I mean you can even use it for doing little tiny fillets if you want and another use for hacksaw blades is I think I made this little scraper here for doing canoe restoration years ago so you know bend over the other use a propane torch grind off the edge re-temper it and it actually holds a temper pretty darn good and this gives me a little scraper I can get into nooks and crannies and clean up stuff like alongside the stem get varnish out of there and stuff like that and I've been surprised how often I've pulled this out for all kinds of different little jobs so simple things to do with old hacksaw blades that's it for this one see what you can do to keep something out of the trash and put it in your toolbox instead okay ciao for now folks