Another hour in the shop this morning. Trimmed the layer of granadillo after marking the rough diameter I plan to finish it to. Not perfect, but close enough, I hope.
1) make a stick that fits tightly in the mortise, and fine-tune the mortise. It’s really easy to have the mortise too small in the middle, and only discover that when everything has glue on it, which it too late to be fixing that problem.
2) scribe a circle roughly the diameter of the finished shaft. My dividers did a good enough job, but I came back and added a pencil line to reduce the chances of a mistake.
3) inspect the circle. Yup! Looks round enough.
4) use a dovetail saw to make angled cuts in the excess, then chisel away the excess to the cut lines. More cleanup to be done yet, but this is good enough that I can shape the handle without getting into trouble by removing too much of the granadillo.
And that’s it for this morning. Hoping to have a neighbor help me cut the shafts this afternoon.
Looking pretty good. Waiting for the next step. I had to look up that granadillo, never heard of that prior. "It's informally considered a type of rosewood, it's harder and denser though, and used for marimba bars because of its clear, chimey tone." Cool!
Thanks, guys! Yeah, granadillo - I’ve also seen it called macacauba. It’s a nice hard dense wood. I will sometimes snag a piece from savagewoods during a sale. Makes very nice spokeshaves and knife handles, too. I routinely will take 2 inch “turning blanks” and resaw them for box sides or things like this.
Neighbor stopped by and helped cut a 1¼ inch x 12/4 x 4’ strip off my ash slab, so I’ll be cutting that into cane shafts for the next update, probably tomorrow.
Micro-update. Shafts are cut. Marked the tenons on them, deciding grain direction and which end is up and such, and then called it an evening after just a half-hour. Will double check my math before cutting the tenons tomorrow morning.
