Here's my latest restoration. Did it for a rabbit breeder friend/contact of mine in exchange for some Californians (a meat rabbit breed we raise.) He'll be using it for cutting forage as he likes to feed his rabbits without pelleted commercial feed whenever possible. It's late and I'm turning in for the evening but I'll edit the post with descriptions later.
(edit: descriptions now added)
The "raw" snath. Can't place a name on the manufacturer yet but it's a style I've seen before. It's a little longer than usual (possibly due to the low degree of curvature) and very dense and clean-grained wood with a nice taper.
Slight crack on the nib here but it's nothing serious. I glued this later in the restoration process to help stave off additional cracking. Oddly, the thread of the nibs is a standard right-handed thread!
Partial label remaining. I was able to carefully pare this off using a sharp chisel. Unfortunately there's hardly anything legible left on it.
Hafting collar and mounting plate hardware. Note the large nail jammed under the collar. This caused some problems later on.
The blades. The friend I did this for had around 5 old complete scythes he got super cheap from a local fellow and I selected the examples most likely to be successfully restored from amongst them. I wanted to set him up with a trio of bush/weed/grass blades so he could be ready for anything. Note the awful bend in the weed blade at center. The tang wasn't just bent--the whole heel was! Still, I was fairly confident I could fix it.
The nib bands. As mentioned prior, these were on a standard right handed thread rather than the usual left-handed. Always fun seeing how the band itself is connected to the threaded rod. Seems every maker had a different method. Some weld the band ends to the tip of the rod, some draw out the rod into the band itself then weld the tip back onto itself...these guys used a fairly standard method of welding the ends to the sides of the rod but went the extra length to flatten a section first.
The rotating mounting plate. As you can see, the "bow tie" has a serrature that mates with two ridges on a keyed plate that lies beneath it. Actually not a ton of adjustment rang--just left/center/right. I think the real advantage was being able to reverse the bow tie if you broke one of the mounting holes and use it in any of the three positions without having lost a position like on a fixed plate if you tore one out. I honestly don't know how folks managed to do that back in the day, but they seem to have with alarming frequency. This may have been due to farmhands or rail workers (who used scythes to keep track lanes maintained) being low in skill or just not caring because the tool wasn't theirs. Probably both.
The unusual screw used to affix the collar in place.
Now a slight diversion from the pictures for a story about the trouble I had with that nail. The original owner had apparently jammed that up under the collar to tighten it up. The problem is that in the process they split the wood that lay above the loop bolt. When I tapped the collar off with a small hammer the chunks came off in the top of the collar since there was no longer tension holding them in! What to do? Well I used wood glue to reattach the chunks, but then there was the problem of tapping the collar back on since it was such a snug fit, again thanks to that nail. I cut a thin piece of pine that had the grain running across the narrow face and sanded it carefully for a snug fit under the shelf of re-glued wood, forming a brace that would prevent the shelf from getting levered as the collar was reinstalled. After tapping the collar back on I still had to remove the spacer. To do so I drove the loop bolt through the top hole backwards so the threaded section acted as a pin to break out the bracing block. Came out nice and easy thanks to the grain orientation I selected for it! Then after running the hardware through the electrolysis bath and sanding the wooden components then giving them all a clear lacquer coat, they were assembled and given a second coating with the parts in place.
Now back to the eye candy. I'll talk about the blades when we get to them.
Ta-dah!
Now the blades. They were all given an electrolysis bath (the weed blade needed two goes because it was so rusty) and the edges dressed to remove dings and reshape the toes. The weed blade was carefully hammered back straight. The tangs were all bent to proper pitch, then the edges ground and refined before being sprayed down with alcohol and wiped to remove dust then given a clear coat. The grass and weed blades are NWT Co. and the bush blade is a D. Wadsworth. The "AUB[...]" gave me a little confusion when looking it up as I presumed it meant Auburn, Maine due to the makers that had been in that area. Turns out David Wadsworth was from Auburn, New York!
Beautifully crisp forging on it.
They all took razor-like edges. I think my buddy is going to have a blast with it. He had been using one of them in a painfully untuned and dull/rusted state and somehow managing to cut forage with it, so this ought to be night and day for him!
