I made some handy bench hooks based upon the teachings of Sloyd (which I don't know much about, but discovered is quite an interesting thing). Actually, learning about Sloyd may be the most interesting thing about this project. Anyways, these bench hooks are really useful to hold wood of different lengths on the bench for, say, cutting dadoes, or to hold up long pieces level when crosscutting on the hook I use for sawing, or for holding wood for paring.
I started out with a scrap of hard maple. Bad choice. This made a quick project into a several day project, because the wood was like granite. I cut out 12" blocks and surfaced all the edges with a hand plane. Then measured 2" from each end, marking the center points, then drew a line from that point to the far corner as seen here. Once I had the layout, I sawed in a bunch of relief cuts with a carcass saw.Here's a shot of the two hooks, with the surfaces ready to be chiseled out.Here is one finished surface. To get to this point, I chopped out the sawed parts with a bevel-down chisel, then pared down to my line with chisel and block plane. You can see the unfinished bottom surface here. This is a rinse, repeat operation for the other surfaces.To finish off the hooks, I rounded the corners with rasps, so it's easy to hold with the hand. I also used a card scraper to get the show surfaces as flat and smooth as possible.The hooks seemed a bit slippery, so I lined the bottoms with cork (secured with hide glue). Now they're ready for use.
