Shave Horse

This style of building a shave horse is from the Weekend in the Woods (2010) course I did with Steve Tomlin.

: 1. Use a piece of wood long enough to reach between the arms of your shave horse- ours were 8″ between with 1″ tenons (longer for foot rests). Cleave and round each piece (with draw knife).

: 2. Pole lathe- make two small holes in either end of your wood and dab on a little bit of oil (i used vegetable oil). Then put into the lathe and use a roughing out gouge to get the piece cylindrical. Straighten out with a flat chizle.

: 3. For the top pin (and pin that holds the plank on the body)-use a skew chisel, at first drawing a line around the piece, then slowly tilting the angle of the chisel, creating a shallower cut on one side. (this photo is of Steve demonstrating)

: 3 (b)- To create a flat right angled edge on the other side, line up the bevel of the tool at the angle and apply pressure until the cut is the right depth. Then level out the excess and round the tip with a flat chisel. This means your pin has a knob to prevent it slipping right through the whole in the arms/body etc.

: 4. Making the foot rest and top pin- use the skew chisel as on the other pins to create 2 (inch long for the top and whatever, foot width size required for the foot rest.) tenons on either end. Drawing a mark first (with the long edge of the chisel) then tilting the angle more until the tenon is roughed out, flattening with a flat chisel. With these pins make sure the width of the centre piece is even to the width of the body of your shave horse (8inch on mine) so they can fit into the arms above and below the body without it being to tight (or simply not fitting).

: My pins. End of day1. (well morning of day 2 for me! took a bit to get used to the lathe…)

: 5. Cleave and tidy with a draw knife some arms. (these were Ash). Make sure that the inside edge is flat and the pieces lie together (to make sure they dont wobble when clamped together.) Mine here are a bit wieghty as I was trying to make up a little bit of time, i’ll be taking some substance off them after the weekend..

: 6. Drill the holes in the arms, the same width as your tenons. Top hole, fairly high up so it can clamp various sizes of wood. The middle hole not too high making sure the arms wont touch the floor. The bottom holes being at a good distance from the middle holes, to make for comfortable use. To make sure the holes went through both arms equally, we clamped them together while drilling.

: 7. 3 legs are then cleft (from Ash again). And tenons are made on the ends with a draw knife.

: 8. Drilling the body (here made of larch plank). To drill the holes for the back of the horse, angles are worked out (so that the legs lean outwards from the body – about 45 degrees) and sight lines are drawn onto the plank. We worked in pairs to sight the angle of the drilling. For the front hole, one angle is used and one sight line.

: 9. Drill the whole for the pin that holds on the arms (same width as pins). Using a partner to sight the angle and a set square clamped to the plank.