Great Cheap Tools

[Reggie]

I ordered one of those axminster no.5s on Wednesday and it turned up today, it did indeed need some fettling but nothing too heavy, the first thing I did was to just check the overall finish of the item no pits or marks in the sole, no errors in the casting, the mouth is nice and straight, finish on the handle is functional, looks like whatever they used pooled on the side of the handle but it doesn't detract from the usefulness of the plane :-D

Next up was to check the yoke, I ran the adjuster from front to back and it had a tendency to try and ride out of the groove, this will lead to inconsistency when trying to adjust the blade or worse still, popping out of the groove and leaving the blade too proud or too far back in the plane mouth to be effective.

The only way to fix that was to make the 2 ends of the yoke closer together, I took the frog off, the screws came off nicely so no threading there, got my pliers and a cloth to stop them from marking and gently squeezed the ends of the yoke until the were sufficiently close, put it all back together and now the adjuster action is consistent from front to back.

next up was the blade, not sure if it's just me but the blade seems fairly thin and short too, I'll check it tomorrow against the record blade, it seemed like it was bit flexible. I gave it a quick 25deg touch up/hone and then put a small 2ndary 30 degree bevel, put the plane back together and tested, the chipbreaker immediately jammed up with bits, I checked it against the light and there was a clear gap between the end of the breaker and the back of the blade, it was only touching on the back edge of the end of the breaker, it needed a reasonable amount of work to get it back to touching at the front but once it was done, I tested again and got nice thin easy shavings on the first push

I am incredibly happy with my purchase, I checked the flatness of the sole of the plane and it looked much less than 0.5mm, although it's possible I need a better straight edge to check it with, either way it shouldn't take very much at all to lap the sole and get it completely flat.


I also purchase a pair of axminster scrollsaw blade clamps at £2 each, they're cheap cast iron but they don't need to be pretty, they just need to work, pretty simple to fit, they just replace what's there and use the existing bolt to fix them to the saw arms. I wanted blade clamps because the pinned blades aren't very good for intricate inside work, you need a 5-6mm hole to fit the pins through, with the clamps fitted i can use pinless blades and the size of the hole needed is the width of the blade (2mm or less I think), I only tested the scrollsaw for 10 seconds but the small cut I made was clean and vertical, I didn't need any compensation for left/right swerve on the blade, the blade stayed in and didn't snap, so for now it looks like another good cheap purchase from axminster

 

[G S Haydon]

Good stuff Reggie

 

[AndyT]

Coming back to an elderly thread but I've just been doing some marking out and realised how much I like my little Axminster engineer's square. It's the 50mm size which is the smallest but comes in handy quite often for smallish stuff and for jobs like marking the straight bits of dovetails. I recently got a proper Moore and Wright square which confirms that this one is spot on. Still only a fiver and great value.


http://www.axminster.co.uk/axminster-axminster-engineers-squares-prod23310/

 

[G S Haydon]

Excellent Andy, the kind of straight forward feedback this thread was looking for.

 

[Corneel]

That reminds me, I've picked up a set of 4 engineers squares from the famous Faithfull brand, for very little money on Ebay a few years ago. Similar sets are often for sale on that site. I use them all the time, especially the smaller sizes for example for marking tenon shoulders and such.

Edit: a set like this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Faithfull...UK_Measuring_Tools_Levels&hash=item2c71d586b7

 

[Sheffield Tony]

Of course second hand, gifted or homemade tools are the best value. But I presume we are talking tools available to buy new now. What about cheap, hardpoint saws ? They may not be worth trying to sharpen, but at least they do the job when new, and can become stock for scrapers / scratch stock blades / turning saw blades (if you're keen !).

But there are far more unuseable cheap tools. Wouldn't buy Silverline squares again - I sent back a mitre square that was over a degree out. And a set of steel rules from Screwfix - presumably guillotined off in strips form a sheet of steel, they were curved !

 

[AndyT]

That Faithful set look exactly the same as the Axi offering -
I expect they come from the same source.

 

[Reggie]

Hmmmn, the axminster own brand squares are actually made by SOBA, the same company that makes their planes, I would be much less inclined to want to buy a soba square, whilst you can fettle a soba plane to your liking, it's unlikely that you'll want to do the same to a square, I would definitely buy the faithful squares over the axi brand given that they are bs939 grade b so should be +/- 0.016mm/0.00064in on 50-100mm stock apparently.

 

[Corneel]

If I were building space shuttles in my garage, it would probably be worth to get somebetter squares. But for woodworking these are plenty good enough.

 

[AndyT]

The Axi ones are made to the same British Standard, and as Corneel says, entirely accurate enough for woodworking.

 

[Reggie]

eeek, my mistake, I didn't see it at the bottom of the axi list of features. Then again, I did spot 3 out of 5 cats, errm, reviewers, rated the axi ones at 2stars or less.