Don’t forget to file

Many metalworking professionals overlook filing as an important skill and pick up a grinder instead. And if you’re out of practice, filing is not something that’s easy to pick up on the fly. Bad filing can be seen from halfway across the shop.

Indeed, superb hand filing is a skill that is learned over a long period of time. One of its major advantages over power methods is extreme control. When you cannot afford to make a mistake removing material in a delicate area, use a file. A file is directly connected to the best computer—your brain. With a power tool, by the time the order to stop makes it to central command, it’s often too late.

All images courtesy of T. Lipton

Treat files professionally by putting handles on them and hanging them in a rack.

Keep the file in flat contact through the arc when filing a radius.

When I took metal shop in high school, one of the skills we had to learn was proper filing. The teacher was quite thrifty and would only replace a file if it made a better cake-frosting knife. Whenever a new file was put out in the general population, it was treated like the prom queen. And just like the prom queen, everybody wanted the file but only one guy got it. My trick: if I got the new one, I returned it to one of the extreme ends of the file rack. That way I could swoop in the next day and just grab the end file while everyone else was fingering the others to find the new one.

Our first project was to file and sand a hunk of cold-rolled steel into a perfectly square cube of specific dimensions. If you ever need to think of a devilish little project to keep an apprentice out of your hair for a month or so, this is the ticket. It sounds simple, but to get the sides to size and square is not trivial.

Follow these guidelines for filing: