February 2026 – Covington & Sons Tools

Not all those who wander are lost.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Introduction

In previous articles in this frightfully sexually-charged series, Beloved Customer produced a design drawing for your gennou handle based on the parameters of your actual gennou head and your body. You should have also selected, or at least rolled out of bed onto the floor, opened one eye, and seriously considered, an appropriate stick of wood. Assuming you’ve procured said stick, let’s get to the layout.

Tools

There are as many ways to layout the shape of a hammer handle as Carter has pills. I won’t tell you how to do it or what tools to use, but after making dozens of gennou, hammer, and axe handles for myself and customers, I prefer to use the following tools. You will need to have a similar set of tools on hand for layout and fabrication.

Divider with sharp points;
Sharp pencil;
Small try square;
Marking gauges (Titemark and kama kebiki);
Marking knife;
Rip and crosscut handsaws for roughing out;
Handplanes for creating the flat sides and edges in preparation for layout;
Dozuki crosscut and/or rip saw for cutting the tenon;
Auriou cabinet rasp (Lie-Nielson);
Bogg-pattern flat-sole spokeshave (Lie-Nielson);
Bogg-pattern curved-sole spokeshave (Lie-Nielson);
Sandpaper;
Satin Polyurethane finish;
Mineral spirits.

Can you get by with fewer tools? Of course. A pencil, handsaw, hammer, marking gauge, dividers, and pocket knife are a minimum set. Will this minimalist set take more time, produce more blisters, prove frustrating, and produce an inferior handle? Absolutely yes. But it can get the job done.

Layout

Select a board or stick with dimensions a little greater than the length, height, width, and thickness of your handle design.

We need to create 6 flat, parallel, square sides on this board/stock.

You can prep this board or stick using electrical tools, but if you can’t do it with handtools alone, I strongly encourage you to work on your basic skills. In this age, surprisingly few have these skills.

Looking back on the old texts, one of the first tasks assigned trainees in cabinetmaking technical schools and apprenticeships was making a number of sticks or boards like this because this job combines many of the essential tools skill while developing an understanding of the material. I can attest to the bullet-proof validity of this concept.

Begin your layout by selecting and marking a flat and wind-free side of the selected board corresponding to a profile view on the drawing to be the “reference face.” Don’t forget to label this critical surface somehow so there will be no confusion moving forward.
Plane the surface of the board that will form the handle’s back edge (seen from above in plan view) flat and perpendicular to this reference face. All further layout will be indexed from these two faces.
Mark the maximum thickness of the handle on the surface opposite the reference face, as determined by the widest dimension of the butt, using a marking gauge against the reference face.
Plane all the surfaces flat, free of wind, and where appropriate, planar. This needs to be done pretty precisely.
Use a marking gauge to draw the appropriate centerlines on both sides, edges, ends of the board/stick.
Use dividers to measure and layout the width of the eye, centered on the centerline you just marked, and spin this around the eye, butt, back edge and front edge.
Make paper, cardboard, or wood patterns based on your design drawing of the handle’s elevation and profile views. Paying close attention to minimize grain runout, especially in the tenon and neck area, position the patterns and mark the board.
Using these cardboard patterns, carefully layout all the tenon’s dimensions on the board, measured from the reference face and back edge. Be sure to make the tenon a half-sheet of copy paper too large in width and thickness. This can be trimmed down later if the fit is too tight.
Adjust the lines of the handle design to meet your requirements for beauty.

In the next post in this series we will begin making sawdust. Oh joy!

YMHOS

Two Trolls by John Bauer, 1909. Not wanting to pay the construction costs of the bread oven with its artistic hinges your humble servant has just installed, exceedingly parsimonious Granny Troll is trying to convince me to climb inside and do a closeup inspection. Will I fit? More importantly, do you like my fetching new shoes?

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