Riving Brake

A quick note, my web site now has the ability to process credit card orders for the Galbert Caliper. I will be revamping my entire site in the next week or two. What ever happened to the simple chairmaker life!?

I have tried throughout the writing of the blog to keep it relatively free of commerce, I believe that the woodworking world has plenty of that to go around.
I will be focusing on turning more in the near future, but for specific Caliper info, please look to my web site as I will be adding more specific content there, where commerce belongs.



Here is the brake that I use when riving green wood. Riving is merely the act of splitting the wood along the fibers and the brake simply holds the wood and allows you to use leverage to control the splits. I enjoy the crudeness of my brakes, which last about 5 years in the yard. As you can see, any piece of metal (or wood?) will serve as the crossbars.
The one change that I'll make on my next one is that the piece of wood along the bottom of the brake will extend further out each end to give less chance of it lifting off the ground when riving large pieces.



Here you can see that the placement of the rods allows me to rive different sized blanks but still have them rise at a comfortable working angle. Make yours junky like mine, I am pretty sure you'll discover necessary changes and build the next one differently to suit your needs. A brake is one of those tools that should be a slave to function, save the pretty stuff for later!