Files certainly can be resharpened - it's an acid etch. One school of thought (currently fashionable in the USA) is that new files aren't sharp enough until they've been resharpened, so some people send their new ones off straight away.
Mostly though you just need to buy decent files, which means Swiss Grobert ones. US Nicholsons are OK, are are old-stock Sheffield files, if they're still fresh. Chinese and Brazilian are anything but.
It's also not what I recommended. You seem to have misread/misunderstood my recommendation. The handle is the thing that strikes the surface, not the file.
Nicholsons is where I'm at, although they do have a factory in Brazil...
I take it you don't rate Bahco or CK, then?
I've got a Bahco adjustable spanner. Quite a good tool, had it for years. Please don't tell me it is Chinese!
brainwave...
I suppose the *handles* wear whilst the file tang doesn't - so the only way to stop the handles loosening over time is to just rely on a friction fit which can be adjusted as the handle wears (any bolt/collar would fix the handle in relation to the tang, and it'd wobble all over the place as it wore)
Handles can be replaced cheaply, I suppose - but if the file's in heavy use then it would get annoying having to do that regularly.
Could that be it?
cheers
Jules
Hardly. They are Swedish.
That'll be because you didn't specify which way up you were holding the file.
Not if it's an old one.
It'll be because you made an assumption and didn't stop to think.
Check the manufacturing location on their recent products
Quinton?
Were you not taught this method of putting a wooden handle on a file when you were a lad, or at any other time?
I've been told lots of ways, and I've also seen people using several others.
The ones that involve banging anything where your hand is near the tang aren't an example that ought to be copied.
The practice of putting a file handle on a file and banging the handle onto some thing hard is common practice in engineering, so why do you say that it should not be coppied?
If you look at a file handle, you will see that it has a metal ferule at the file end of it. This is there to prevent the tang from coming out, through the handle, and biting your hand.
Dave
Many people. when prompted to "bang a file" will grab it by the handle
- the obvious thing to grab it by. This may lead to injury. It's also a poor way to seat the handle.
You know, I'd never noticed that.
A tang is perfectly capable of coming out of the back of the handle (more likely, I would suggest). If the handle splits, and the file has a long enough tang, there's little to stop it.
Appart from the ferule at the front of the handle.
Tangs are sized to prevent this, as are file handles.
In the 40 years I have spent on the tools and then mentoring others as a team leader in development, I have never seen a file tange come anywhere near a hand.
Dave
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Dave Osborne saying something like:
The tang is soft, so heating it as suggested would be ok.
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