To celebrate our tenth anniversary, Catherine and I took a trip to Greece and few Greek islands. While we love our boys, we thought that a six and eight year old might cramp our style on this trip, so we arranged for them to stay with my mom. This left us with a rare full day in Santa Monica just the two of us, so we seized the opportunity and decided to go sailing with my friend.
We arrived at the boat before he did. I often help get the boat ready before he arrives, so this was totally fine from my perspective. But then I made my first mistake: I put Catherine’s sweater on the sloped side of the boat, and then her phone against the sweater. Catherine go in the boat, and first picked up the sweater. Immediately her phone slid down the side of the boat and straight into the water.
Remember: we were going to Greece the next morning. I really didn’t want her to be without a phone for the whole trip, and on top of that she had some pictures on the phone that hadn’t been copied to the cloud yet. I did the only thing I could think of: I took off most of my clothes and jumped into the water to try to recover the phone.
This was during the summer but the pacific is never warm. I suspect at warmest it was 70°F, but more likely in the 60s. Immediately on jumping in I’m gasping and cold and miserable, but I’m trying anyway. This is marina water so it’s dirty and black, certainly not clear. I’m trying to go down and look for a glowing screen but I can’t see anything, and it’s much deeper than I expected, probably 12 feet. My ears weren’t letting me comfortably go down. My hope had been that I could just grab the edge of the boat and find it with my feet but it’s too deep for that.
Anyway my friend shows up and sizes up the situation. “There’s no way that phone will still work. It’s time to give it up.” He gives me a dry wool shirt and we start to get the boat ready. A few minutes later a guy with a scuba setup approaches us and asks how much we’d pay him to recover the phone. I jump at the chance and offer $200 (later I learned that this guy would clean the entire bottom of a boat for like, $40, so I was way higher than I needed to be.)
While we are readying the boat he’s going down and looking, coming up gasping just as much as I was despite wearing a wet suit. After maybe ten or fifteen minutes of trying he comes up with the phone in hand. The screen is on. There are missed call notifications. He told us that he was only able to see it when it was just a few inches in front of his face.
When I made my first Saw Till one of the most frustrating parts of the project was using a coping saw a curve. Coping saws are fine, but they feel fragile and cheap. I wanted to build a frame saw for a while so finally I got around to doing it.
I ordered a kit from Gramercy Tools and roughed out a few pieces of cherry. The body came from scraps. The handle and the toe came my 8/4 stockpile. When I built this I was still only using pipe clamps for workholding, so I had to take the top off of my “bench” and clamp the work to the side of my sawhorses to rip out the smaller pieces.
After ripping the pieces out I sketched the pattern from Gramercy onto the work by just putting it against my laptop screen. I mostly used a chisel and rasp to shape the frame.
One of my favorite parts of woodworking is the actual joinery. While shaping and dimensioning wood is cathartic, it doesn’t have the clear success metric that joinery has which my engineer brain has learned to crave.
This project has tiny quarter inch mortise and tenons (which I comically initially chopped at 1/8”.) You can see I didn’t quite chop the mortises perfectly. If I do it again I will chop these mortises before shaping the wood, rather than after, as the shaping weakened the outsides of parts of the mortise.
After getting the tenons cut I did a test fit and everything fit well:
Next I shaped the handles, mostly with a block plane. For some reason I took zero pictures while doing that and instead opted for videos:
Finally I did a little bit more shaping and assembled the whole thing:
And immediately the string snapped:
Turns out you need way more than a single turn to get adequate tension. I had to use some other rope I had on hand after breaking the rope that the kit came with. Additionally I finished the whole thing with homemade paste wax:
There are a few big takeaways from this project. The biggest one is that I probably built this way too early. I was dragging my feet on my big project and stalling with this little one. It would have been better if I just waited to do this till later.
Worse, I failed to adequately center the hardware in one of the handles. While the tool works, my expectation is that because the blade has a slight curve introduced by the angled hole in the handle, the blade will be harder to saw with and more likely to break. If I were to do it again I would center the hole and then carve the rest of the handle, as I would be able to adjust the center of the overall object by removing material, rather than boring perfectly straight. James recommended this to me but I didn’t realize how important this detail was.
I was pretty proud of the outcome of this when I did it, but having done a much better job shaping handles now, I could have done better using a spokeshave, rasp, and file.
Right before we set sail Catherine took the phone to the car, turned it off, and set it on the dash to let it fully dry. As we were leaving the Marina we passed a guy hanging out on his million dollar boat. He told us that when he saw Catherine and me get on the boat that he knew “that shit was going in” so he called his scuba buddy to come help us.
The phone continued working until Catherine upgraded to a newer model. Turns out her Pro model iPhone was rated for being submerged 30 minutes at 12 foot depths.