Look after tools: rust, handles and files

Tools are the one category of household equipment that gets better with age if it is looked after and useless within a couple of years if it is not. The maintenance is genuinely trivial and almost nobody does it, which is why every shed in the country contains a rusted saw, a mushroomed chisel and an axe with a handle you would not trust.

Three failures cover nearly all of it: rust, loose handles and clogged teeth. One of the three can kill somebody.

Rust

Steel rusts where there is water and oxygen. Everything else is detail. Salt, acid, sweat and damp air all accelerate it, and a shed in a British winter provides all of them.

Prevention takes seconds and is the whole answer:

• Wipe dry after every use, especially after cutting anything green, wet, acidic or salty. Fruit, grass sap and soil are all corrosive.
• Then oil. A rag kept in a jar with a little oil, wiped over the steel, is the traditional and correct answer. Any oil is better than none.
• Camellia oil, mineral oil or 3-in-1 for tools that touch food or timber. Wax on tool faces that must slide, like a plane sole or a saw plate, because it does not attract dust the way oil does.
• Never put tools away wet, and never leave them out overnight.
• A block of camphor or a rust inhibitor sachet in a toolbox reduces corrosion in the whole box.

Sweat is more corrosive than rain. Handprints on a bare steel tool will etch within days in a damp shed, which is why the oily rag matters after handling rather than only after wetting.

Removing rust that has taken hold

After any acid soak, neutralise and dry immediately. Rinse, then a bicarbonate of soda solution, then rinse, then dry completely with heat or a cloth, then oil at once. Bare stripped steel flash rusts within minutes and will be worse than when you started if you leave it wet.

Do not acid soak anything with a temper you care about, a wooden handle, or a spring. Prolonged acid attacks the steel itself, not just the oxide.

Handles, and the one that can kill you

Check every time you pick it up, not every season. It takes as long as putting your gloves on.

Rehanging a head

The real repair, and it is an afternoon.

1. Get the old handle out. Saw it off close to the head, then drive or drill out the remaining wood and the old wedge from the eye.
2. Clean the eye of rust and debris. Wire brush.
3. Fit a new handle, matched to the tool. Shape the top of it with a rasp until the head drives on hard, testing repeatedly. Take small amounts off; this is the whole skill and it is patience rather than talent.
4. Seat the head by holding the handle vertically, head up, and striking the butt of the handle downwards on a solid surface. The head's inertia drives it on. Do not hit the head itself.
5. Cut the handle off flush with the top of the eye, or a couple of millimetres proud.
6. Drive a wooden wedge into the saw kerf, glued, until it stops. Cut off the excess.
7. Add steel wedges across the wooden one if the tool takes them.
8. Oil the handle. Boiled linseed oil, several coats over several days, and top it up annually.

Grain direction matters. The growth rings should run in line with the axe blade, so the handle flexes correctly and is strongest in the direction of the load.

Wooden handles generally

• Oil them. A dry handle shrinks, and a shrunk handle loosens. Linseed oil once a year on every wooden handle in the shed is a twenty minute job that prevents most of this page.
• Never varnish or paint a handle. It hides cracks, blisters your hands, and prevents the wood breathing.
• Sand out a rough patch rather than living with it. Splinters from a tool handle are a genuinely common minor injury and they get infected. See wound care.
• Replace a cracked handle. Do not tape it, whip it or glue it: a handle that fails under load takes your grip with it.
• Store out of direct sun and away from heat, both of which dry handles out.

Mushroomed heads on chisels and cold chisels, where the struck end has spread into a mushroom of thin steel, must be ground back. Those flakes come off at speed under a hammer blow and go into eyes.

Files

Files are the most abused tool in most sheds and among the most useful.

• They cut on the push stroke only. Lift on the return. Dragging back over the work rounds the teeth and halves the life of the file.
• Clean them. A file card, a wire brush or even a strip of soft brass drawn along the teeth clears the pinning that makes a file skate. A clogged file is not blunt; it is full.
• Chalk the teeth before filing soft metals like aluminium or brass to reduce clogging.
• Never use a file without a handle. The tang is a spike and it goes through a palm when the file catches.
• Store them apart, not loose in a drawer touching each other. Files sharpen files and both lose.
• A new file on hard steel is a wasted file. Use an old one for rough work.

Saws

• Wipe and oil the plate after use. A rusted saw binds in the cut.
• Never let the teeth touch anything hard. Store hanging, or with a plastic or split-hose guard over the teeth.
• Wax the plate to reduce friction, which is the difference between a saw that cuts and one that fights.
• Traditional saws can be sharpened and set with a triangular file and a saw set, which is a proper skill and worth learning if you own one.
• Hardpoint saws cannot be sharpened, because the teeth are induction hardened. Keep a spare rather than a sharpening plan. See sharpening.

Storage

• Off the floor, and off concrete. Concrete wicks moisture and a tool left on it rusts from the underside.
• Hanging on a wall or in a rack, so air circulates and nothing is touching an edge.
• A shadow board in the shed, with an outline drawn round each tool, means you notice a missing one the same day rather than the next season.
• Dry. An unheated shed swings through the dew point twice a day, which is why sheds eat tools. A cheap sealed box with a desiccant inside, or bringing the precious ones indoors, changes everything.
• Edges protected, always: sheaths, guards, or a slit length of hosepipe.