Wizards Metal Renew Polish

Wizards Metal Renew Polish  is new to me, but I must confess to all the enthusiasm of a convert.  Browsing the web, I came across Mark Harrell's video, "Maintaining your Saws" on his site Bad Axe Tool Works.  Given the outstanding reputation of these saws, I figured that if Mark Harrell recommended Wizards Metal Renew Polish for cleaning saw blades I should try it out. Reader, I love it.

You may well ask, What is it? I had no idea where to shop for Wizards Metal Renew Polish, so I took the easy route and ordered it from Amazon. It turns out to be part of a product line focused on car car. It's also available through chains like NAPA. It removes discoloration from a variety of metals, including steel, pewter, and brass (be warned, though:  if the brass is lacquered, it will also remove the lacquer). You can apply it with a cloth and then wipe it off and polish the metal with a clean cloth. Unlike some other polishes, it has an agreeable smell.

I tried it first on the blade of a heavily oxidized back saw, a Jackson, a secondary line for Disston. As I wanted to save the saw's etch if possible, I applied it generously and gently used a sanding block with 320 grit wet-or-dry paper. You can tell immediately that it's working because the cream-colored liquid starts turning brown. I wiped the blade off and repeated the process. The etch was long gone, it appeared, but the blade once more looked like steel. What I like about the result is that it retains the look of use and age. The steel doesn't look overly polished, just well-cared for.

With "well-cared for" in mind, I looked around for what else might illustrate how Wizards Metal Renew Polish works if I took some "Before" and "After" shots. And I realized that the table of my Delta band saw provided a relevant example.  I bought this band saw in non-working condition at least twenty-five years ago. I got it working and cleaned it up then, but I haven't touched the band saw's table since.  So here's the Before shot:

And here is the outcome after two applications of Wizards Metal Renew Polish followed by buffing the table with a cloth:

The table now is clean enough to reflect some of the colors of the polish's container. I personally don't want it any shinier, but if you do you might go on to use Wizards Metal Polish.

The label of Wizards Metal Renew Polish says nothing about corrosion protection. To protect the newly cleaned steel, I wiped it down with Break Free CLP, waited a few minutes, and then wiped it dry.

Another French Comment on Brexit

Given that Brexit is a mess with negative economic implications for the United Kingdom, it's a momentary relief to learn that not everyone is filled with doom and gloom.  In The Independent, Jon Stone reports that France's Europe Minister Nathalie Loiseau has named her cat "Brexit."

Why?  Because "he meows loudly to be let out but just stands there when I open the door."

Dillinger's With Saw, Plane & Chisel: How to Build Historic American Furniture

As a collector of American Colonial furniture for over fifty years and a user of hand tools for over thirty, I read Zachary Dillinger’s With Saw, Plane & Chisel: How to Build Historic American Furniture (Popular Woodworking Books, 2016) with keen interest. Unfortunately, the book fails to deliver what its title promises.

Dillinger’s six projects span a good hundred years. With detailed instructions and excellent photographs, Dillinger shows how to build a Jacobean chest of drawers, a William and Mary side chair, a Queen Anne stool, a Queen Anne desk, a Chippendale bookcase, and a Hepplewhite hunt board. But how historically accurate are these reproductions? A critical look at these projects soon reveals that they are generic, based less on specific surviving examples than on stylistic features generally attributed to whatever so-called period is in question. The sources for these six projects remain vague: Dillinger says that the William and Mary side chair copies a chair he owns and that the Hepplewhite hunt board comes from Vermont, but he does not give sources for his other projects. 

Even worse, three of his six projects distort what historic examples looked like. Dillinger’s version of a “Queen Anne” stool, for example, is nothing less than grotesque.  Upholstered stools with cabriole legs were common in England with its more stratified society but rare in America. Squatty with bandy legs, Dillinger’s stool looks as if it had been whelped by an English bulldog. His “Queen Anne” desk also has faulty proportions:  Colonial slant-top desks with drawers were generally about as wide as they were high.  At 29 1/2” wide, Dillinger’s desk is unusually narrow for its height of 41”, so it looks top heavy. His “Chippendale” bookcase possibly could be considered an example of early 20th century Colonial Revival style, but it certainly isn’t representative of American bookcases from the second half of the eighteenth century. It’s a modern bookcase with some period details applied to the carcass the way icing is applied to a cake.

Half of the six projects, therefore, present distorted versions of Colonial American furniture. To that extent, they are not remotely “historic.” Dillinger’s With Saw, Plane & Chisel is a useful guide to hand tool techniques, but anyone who wants to understand period styles or reproduce furniture that looks right will be far better served by Jeffrey Greene’s American Furniture of the 18th Century: History, Technique and Structure (Taunton Press, 1996) or by Norman Vandal’s Queen Anne Furniture: History, Design and Construction (Taunton Press, 1990).

A Singles Ad

I just discovered this singles ad in my files:  you may have seen it a few years ago, but it bears rereading.  The ad appeared in the Atlanta Journal.

"Single black female seeks male companionship.  Ethnicity unimportant.  I've a very good looking girl that loves to play.  I love long walks in the woods, riding in your pickup truck, hunting, camping, fishing trips, and cozy winter nights lying by the fire.  Candlelight dinners will have me eating out of your hand.  I'll be at the front door when you get home from work, wearing only what nature gave me.

Call xxx-xxx-xxxx and ask for Daisy."

Over 15,000 men found themselves talking to the Atlanta Humane Society about Daisy, an eight-week-old Black Lab.

Just What Is A Leisenring Lift?

James ("Big Jim") E. Leisenring of Allentown, PA, was a tool maker by trade whose expertise at fly fishing led to him becoming known as the Wet-Fly Wizard of the Brodheads.  He published The Art of Tying the Wet Fly in 1941 and died ten years later. His name has endured among fly fishers because he invented the "Leisenring Lift," a technique of fishing a wet fly or nymph underwater.

I thought I understood this technique: you fished the fly in the typical manner, casting it upstream and letting it drift down as drag-free as possible.  At the end of the drift, you raised your rod tip so that the nymph rose in the water column, thereby imitating a nymph swimming to the surface to metamorphose into a dun.  I had tried this lift from time to time, but never had enjoyed success with it.

Earlier this spring, while reading William C. Black's engaging survey, Gentlemen Preferred Dry Flies:  The Dry Fly and the Nymph, Evolution and Conflict (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2010), I came across a quotation from Leisenring that stopped me in my tracks. What I thought I knew about the Leisenring Lift seemed to be altogether mistaken, so I decided to read what the Wizard himself had written.  Leisenring's book was reprinted by Crown with additional material by Vernon ("Pete") S. Hidy in 1971 as The Art of Tying the Wet Fly & Fishing the Flymph ("Flymph" is Hidy's coinage for a nymph near the surface or in the surface film that is about to become a dun).

Leisenring describes the lift in his last chapter, "Fishing a Wet Fly". His technique is based on first spotting a trout and then casting a fly upstream some fifteen feet or more above the trout. As the fly sinks to the bottom, the angler follows it with his rod, allowing no slack but being careful not to make the fly move unnaturally.

"Now watch the fly," Leisenring instructs the reader, invoking a dramatic scene: "It is almost to him, and would only have to travel about four more feet to pass right by his nose without his looking at it unless it can be made to appear alive and escaping.  At this point the progress of the rod following the fly is checked, and the pressure of the water against the stationary line and leader is slowly lifting the fly."

As the fly rises in the water current, Leisenring continues, its movement attracts the attention of the trout.  As Leisenring explains, "Now the fly becomes slightly efficient or animated and deadly, and the trout notices it.  The hackles or legs start to work, opening and closing, and our trout is backing downstream in order to watch the fly a little more, because he is not quite persuaded as yet.  Now you can see the fly become even more deadly.  As more water flows against the line, the fly rises higher off the bottom and the hackle is working in every fiber.  It will jump out of the water in a minute, now, and the trout is coming for it. Bang! He's got it" (p. 123).

The Leisenring Lift, then, is not caused by the angler raising the rod tip after the wet fly or nymph has come to the end of its drift.  Instead, the angler stops tracking the nymph's movement with his rod tip  partway through the drift, some four feet or so upstream from a specific trout's position.  Stopping the rod makes the current begin lifting the fly to the surface.  From the trout's point of view, it seems to be alive and to be escaping, and so the trout goes after it.

In the next to last paragraph, Leisenring repeats that elevating his rod tip is not what makes the fly seem alive and therefore desirable to the trout:  "I do not try to impart any fancy movements to my fly with my rod but simply allow the fly to advance naturally with the current over the stones and gravel until I check its progress gently by ceasing to follow it with my rod.  Then the slight tension from the water pressure flowing against my leader and line causes the fly to rise slowly, opening and shutting the hackles, giving a breathing effect such as a genuine insect would have when leaving the bottom of the stream to come to the surface.  The water will do all that is necessary to make a fly deadly if it is properly tied" (p. 124).

Twice, therefore, Leisenring states that checking his rod's movement causes the water current's pressure to move the fly upwards.  He does not elevate his rod tip to perform the Leisenring Lift.

That much seems clear.  One complicating factor is that apparently Leisenring practiced other techniques as well.  Dave Hughes knew Pete Hidy, commenting in Wet Flies (Stackpole Books, 1995) that Hidy had told him that Leisenring and he had meant to write another book on fishing the wet fly.  "'The Lift,' Pete said, 'was just one of many techniques that Jim used.  It's too bad that today everybody believes it was the only method he used'" (p. 29).

I believe we can see another method in an account by Ed Zern. Leisenring gave Zern a demonstration of nymphing one day on the Brodheads. As Zern tells the story in The Masters on the Nymph (ed. J. Michael Migel and Leonard M. Wright, Jr.; Nick Lyons Books, 1979), he was sitting on the bank, fishless, when Leisenring appeared (pp. 257-58).  Zern told him he had been reading The Art of Tying the Wet Fly and didn't understand how one could let the fly drift freely in the current and still maintain contact with it. "I'll show you," Leisenring said.

Leisenring then proceeded to stand quite close to a run and flipped the fly upstream, holding the rod tip high as the fly swept down beside him and then downstream. Zern comments that the fly traveled no more than fifteen feet. It was obvious to him that it drifted freely and Leisenring would have felt, and probably seen, any trout that touched the fly. The demonstration over, Leisenring went on downstream.  Zern stepped into the river, cast as Leisenring had, held the rod tip high, and proceeded to catch one brown trout after another!

Several points seem worth noting about this episode. First, Zern did not ask Leisenring to demonstrate the Lift (perhaps because the term was as yet unknown in the early '40's?). Instead, Zern asked him how he maintained contact with the fly as it came drifting down the bottom. We can't tell from Zern's description whether Leisenring let the water current raise the fly or not. I'd say perhaps not, as the fly continued to drift downstream. He wasn't trying for a specific trout but fishing the water.  So why was the rod tip high? I'd guess, and it's no more than a guess, that first Leisenring and then Zern had to hold the rod high to avoid drag from other currents, much indeed as one must when fishing a dry fly.

It's a shame Leisenring and Hidy never managed to write their book on fishing the wet fly. We have Leisenring's own words describing the Lift, and we can extrapolate from Ed Zern's account that Leisenring also fished a nymph on a short line with rod tip held high when he was fishing the water and not targeting a specific trout. What his other techniques for fishing a nymph or wet fly consisted of is a question that can't be answered.

But now I know that I was wrong about how to do the Leisenring Lift, I'm going to see what happens when I do it the right way. What worked once should work again.  I'd also like to hear from anyone who has used the Lift successfully.  Please comment.  Stay tuned, and tight lines!

Handplane Essentials by Christopher Schwarz

In a time when books often provide less than their titles promise, Christopher Schwarz's revised and expanded Handplane Essentials (Cincinnati, OH: P+W Media, 2017) does the reverse:  it is a compilation of his articles from the last fifteen years that goes well beyond what a beginning woodworker needs to know.

Sensibly, Schwarz doesn't go over the history of hand planes, already well described by books like Seth Burchard's translation of Josef Greber's The History of the Woodworking Plane (1991), John M. Whelan's The Wooden Plane:  Its History, Form, and Function (1993), and Garrett Hack's The Handplane Book (1999), which also deals with how to use planes.  Instead, he divides his book into five sections, dealing successively with Basics, Sharpening, Techniques, History & Philosophy, and Reviews of high-end planes.

Because the book is a compilation of articles, there is some repetition.  For example, we read a bit too often about the three essential bench planes, a jack, a jointer, and a smoother.  And there are a few minor inconsistencies in this repetition, as in mentioning the availability of differently angled plane beds for the Lee-Neilson smoothing plane in one place but not in another (cf. p. 41 and p. 178).

But so much information is here, in fact, that a more accurate title would be Hand Planes: Essentials and Beyond.  I can imagine someone who just beginning to use hand tools becoming overwhelmed.  (That person might be better served by John Sainsbury's Planecraft:  A Woodworker's Handbook, 1989.)  Conversely, anyone with some experience is bound to learn some new things from Handplane Essentials.  Including an index would have been useful (and might have called attention to instances of repetition), but one can make notes on the blank end pages.

Handplane Essentials is a relatively large book, 8 1/2" by 12", weighing in at nearly 3 1/2 pounds.  Thankfully, Chris Schwarz's talents as a writer plus the excellent black and white photographs make Handplane Essentials a pleasure to read, if a bit heavy to hold while reclining.  I rarely finish a 350 page book and wish that it had been longer, but I did so here.  Highly recommended.

Knife, by Tim Hayward

Tim Hayward's Knife:  The Culture, Craft and Cult of the Cook's Knife (Quadrille Publishing, London, 2016) is an appealing book, with excellent photography by Chris Terry, first-rate illustrations of knives by Will Webb, and Shokunin Manga by Chie Kutsuwada.  But the more one reads of the text, the more one is put off by its over-the-top rhetoric.

Hayward is clear that he intends Knife not to be comprehensive but selective, reflecting his own personal views.  It's not surprising, therefore, that he never mentions the Inuit ulu, a wonderful chopping and cutting tool, nor the existence of ceramic knives, despite his avowed love of technology.  But he seems not to know how handy a small knife with a serrated edge is:  not only does it slice tomatoes easily, it saws through corrugated cardboard and plastic clamshell packaging.

His own views owe less to personal experience than to the desire to write vividly.  The result is pretentiously vacuous. Take the sentence from the last paragraph of his introduction:  "A knife has a beautiful purity of purpose, it's almost the perfect expression of form that precisely follows function, and yet it is at once a seething mess of elusive, impalpable qualities."  Some knives have a purity of purpose, agreed, but knives are too varied (as the book itself illustrates) to be lumped together and then abstracted as "a knife."  Form in a knife can indeed follow function, so what is the quality that calls for "almost" and hinders or prevents that "perfect expression of form"?  And if to some degree these claims are valid, how can "a knife" at once be "a seething mess of elusive, impalpable qualities"?  A seething mess?  In a knife?  Give us a break!

In like fashion, a horizontal cut is described by Hayward as "the utterly lethal and desperate 'last slice' cut, in which a piece of (usually) bread or meat is squashed flat to the board with the palm of the hand, the fingers stretched back and up in fervent but usually futile hope, and the blade sawn between hand and board" (p. 15).  Ever since I first read Marcella Hazan nearly forty years ago, I have been using that cut to slice a chicken breast horizontally in half so it cooks faster and stays tender.  I've never, ever cut myself.  So what are we to make of  "Utterly lethal"?  "Desperate"? "Fervent but usually futile hope"?  This is a seething mess of feverish rhetoric.

Let me just touch on other problems with Hayward's statements:

Steel is not "a metaphor for permanence, solidity and purity" (p. 18).

Slicing a lemon with a carbon blade will not turn the lemon black, as he asserts (p. 45). The citric acid of the lemon will discolor the blade, however, unless you clean it promptly.

Making a knife blade from steel involves two heat treatments, not one:  he ignores tempering the steel.

A newly purchased Chinese cleaver does not arrive "with a lifetime of patina and dripping with butch chic" (p. 78)--at  least none of mine ever has.  

His first rule of carving, "Rest the Meat," contains an amusing mistake:  let the meat rest until its core temperature has dropped to 50 degrees Centigrade or 32 degrees Fahrenheit (my italics, p. 174).

Leaving aside the empty rhetoric, Hayward's major shortcoming is ignorance about sharpening knives:  not only does he misunderstand wire edges, he doesn't realize what steeling and honing a blade accomplish.  As a consequence, he abrades his knives to get them sharp.  That is a waste of good steel.

Sharpening poses a problem for many people, but the solution is not to be found in Hayward.  Rather than spend the money for Hayward's Knife, buy a book or video on how to sharpen knives.  One book I can recommend is Ron Hock's The Perfect Edge (it's also available in video).  You'll learn about steel from a master blade smith as well as learn how to sharpen a knife properly.