monophoto
Member
Having made a few tools and handles recently, I've had a few random thoughts about tool ferrules.
There is a wide range of options for materials from which ferrules can be made. The simplest may be to tightly wrap the end of the handle with twine that is later saturated with epoxy. My father used to do something like this with the handles on his fishing rods and it seemed to work reasonably well.
Most of us, however, gravitate toward plumbing components. The elegant but expensive approach is to use brass fittings - a threaded brass fitting can be screwed onto the tenon on the end of the handle, and then the outside turned down to make a smooth ferrule.
A somewhat less expensive approach is to purchase copper pipe couplers. Depending on the size of the coupler and the desired ferrule length, one coupler could yield two or three ferrules. This option is not extremely expensive, but the challenge is cutting a fairly short coupler to make even shorter ferrules. A plumber's tubing cutter is the neatest tool, but it requires that there be a way to firmly grip the stock to rotate it in the cutter, and that's not easy to do with a short coupler. The solution I found was to grip the coupler using pin jaws in a scroll chuck (expansion mode), and then cut the spinning coupler using a cutoff wheel on a Dremel tool. Given the current price of copper fittings, the price per ferrule using this approach runs somewhere in the range of 35 to 50 cents per handle.
The other approach is to use copper tubing. Copper tubing is expensive, but you can make a lot of ferrules from a length of tubing, and one of the advantages is that you can easily use a tubing cutter to break down a long length of copper tubing into ferrules. The worst case is that you might end up with a couple of inches of tubing that you have to find some other way to cut. And the price per ferrule with this approach can be fairly cheap - I recently paid about $7 for a 24 inch length of tubing, which translates to about 15 cents per ferrule. Of course, that length of tubing is probably more than I will ever need.
There is a wide range of options for materials from which ferrules can be made. The simplest may be to tightly wrap the end of the handle with twine that is later saturated with epoxy. My father used to do something like this with the handles on his fishing rods and it seemed to work reasonably well.
Most of us, however, gravitate toward plumbing components. The elegant but expensive approach is to use brass fittings - a threaded brass fitting can be screwed onto the tenon on the end of the handle, and then the outside turned down to make a smooth ferrule.
A somewhat less expensive approach is to purchase copper pipe couplers. Depending on the size of the coupler and the desired ferrule length, one coupler could yield two or three ferrules. This option is not extremely expensive, but the challenge is cutting a fairly short coupler to make even shorter ferrules. A plumber's tubing cutter is the neatest tool, but it requires that there be a way to firmly grip the stock to rotate it in the cutter, and that's not easy to do with a short coupler. The solution I found was to grip the coupler using pin jaws in a scroll chuck (expansion mode), and then cut the spinning coupler using a cutoff wheel on a Dremel tool. Given the current price of copper fittings, the price per ferrule using this approach runs somewhere in the range of 35 to 50 cents per handle.
The other approach is to use copper tubing. Copper tubing is expensive, but you can make a lot of ferrules from a length of tubing, and one of the advantages is that you can easily use a tubing cutter to break down a long length of copper tubing into ferrules. The worst case is that you might end up with a couple of inches of tubing that you have to find some other way to cut. And the price per ferrule with this approach can be fairly cheap - I recently paid about $7 for a 24 inch length of tubing, which translates to about 15 cents per ferrule. Of course, that length of tubing is probably more than I will ever need.
