The Jasper Kade HDD-Blade-Jig™

[MichaelC]

Hi Guys,

Just thought I'd post about a simple blade-jig I made recently. It's just a little idea I had one day while trying to make my own to start restoring some blades I have. And so in the spirit of recycling / reusing, I present a quick quide to making your own blade jig.... I thought it's pretty unique and I know you guys will appreciate it.

I had 3 old IDE harddrives in a cupboard - the drives were pretty old and generally not working, so I hacked them open. (you need a few Torx screwdrivers to open these...) And then under the arm that extends to read/write to the platters, you'll find some healthy sized rare-earth magnets... so I took these out from all the drives and had about 5 flat magnets - now I just needed a suitable way to either embed the magnets in a block of wood, or fixed underneath a section of aluminium - basically some way to create a magnetized bed for the blade to sit on.. I then took a look at the actual aluminium housing of the hard drives and thought 'well why not use the rest of it..' So long story short, I cut the drive housing in half and then packed the magnets into the front half of the aluminium shell, bulked it up with some metal putty and then closed off the open back end with a small piece of plywood.
I then cut a piece of compressed engineers felt to glue across the jig which acts as a firm backing for the blades' spine to press against while sanding (and also to protect it from scratching..)
Finally the two existing screw holes in the hard drive shell worked perfectly for screwing the whole unit tightly down into a block of pine for support.
What i also do is just cut a strip of broad masking tape that I stick to the surface to both give the blade edge a very fine cushion, and also as a means to protect the surface from getting sanded to death - since you simply peel the used tape off once you're done with a session..

And so the end result is a pretty slick looking, highly effective blade jig, that only cost a bit of time to make. (I should have taken process photos, but didn't actually think of it at the time, still its a pretty basic project so I hope the end result pic is enough to understand what I did..)

Have fun