Recommendation? Flat, and Parallel, and Wa Handles, Oh My...

[Josh Rider]

I haven’t had tear out, but it’s a new endmill.
I’ve found a mini mill to be invaluable, my most used tool.
I do follow up on a granite plate with sandpaper to make sure it’s dead flat, but a couple swipes and it’s done.
If you would like to see a video of it working, I could make one tomorrow.
Only thing I wish is that I had bought one that wouldn’t tilt.
I don’t use the tilt and it’s annoying to tram it every now and then.

 

[Josh Rider]

fly cut all of my blocks for WA and scale sets with my mini mill its dirty work that i dont do on the bridgeport. got to grind the cutter right and even then some woods chip out disc sander will flatten parts but not guarantee parallel. a little time care and practice surface plate and sand paper will geet you as good as you need and much cheaper use a set of calipers to check thickness on the 4 edged to help nail down parallelism

Butch, do you think you could email or show me what geometry you use on a fly cutter.
Doing a block in one pass would be awesome and I just couldn’t find much info on geometry for wood.

 

[butcher_block]

problem with wood router bits is the RPM the are ment to run. have not had much trouble with normal endmills but you could also get cutters made for plastic or Al that would cutt most woods cleaner then std. end mills

 

[HSC ///]

I’m kind of concerned about the length of your tang on that blade.... how long is the blade? I Don’t use very long tangs but that one looks kind of short

 

[Cushing H.]

I’m kind of concerned about the length of your tang on that blade.... how long is the blade? I Don’t use very long tangs but that one looks kind of short

Harbeer - you are correct. Long story .... I created the profile early last summer before I had experience making Wa style handles. The tang was originally longer, but as I learned more about how the various dimensions of the Wa (and its relationship to the blade) stack up, the tang had to get shortened, otherwise I would have compromised other dimensions of the blade. I could have trashed it, but I wanted to practice the multi-layer construction of the Wa handle, AND I really kinda needed a long, thin, slicer for Sushi .... so I decided to go ahead and assemble it. Here is the final result:

Kind of a Sujihiki (but not quite correct shape), blade stock is 0.06" (so does not put a lot of stress on the tang), and surprisingly, the thing balances right at the pinch point (blind luck). It ends up working very well for slicing Sushi (hmmm, that sounds good for dinner tonight...

(aside - the lengths of the various sections of the bolster and the and piece are defined by the "Golden Ratio" - another thing I wanted to try. I am pretty happy with the look

Nowadays, I target 3" for an embedded tang length. With the gentle use of this blade, it might well last. If not, I wont cry (I learned a lot from making the blade and the handle) .... and I have a Yanagiba in-process (but the blade is not as long :-( ).