I want to build some homemade planes using the plans in FWW #1. I would like to make my own irons. My questions: Do I need to make chip breakers when I make the irons or will they work without them? The plans call for a blade with chip breaker, but I don’t remember seeing a chip breaker on any homemade wooden planes.
Do old leaf springs from a vehicle (hardened and tempered) make good irons?
Any advice or plans on building homemade wooden planes would be appreciated. My plan is to build a prototype that works and then to make a bunch of different sizes (ie jointer, jack, smoothing).
Thanks
Replies
We can talk about it...but I first recommend you log on here and ask the same question...where an experienced group of toolmakers reside:
http://host65.ipowerweb.com/~traditi2/forum/index.php
And Shepard Company...who's owner resides there...even has kits:
http://www.shepherdtool.com/
Edited 12/1/2003 8:10:20 PM ET by Bob
I have made a few homemade planes, and all of them had chip breakers. To be honest I see no advantage to the chip breaker, so I would leave them off on any future plane I make.
The irons for my planes were made using flat ground A-2 steel. Using this steel resulted in a superior iron at low cost and minimal time invested. Now days these same irons are available everywhere at an even lower cost than the ones I made. I made my from 3/16” stock and I believe only 1/8” are commercially available.
Rob Millard
Canadian EH,
The chip breaker is an essential part of the plane, especially if you want it to perform to its highest potential. And I assure you, it is easily possible to make your own planes that perform as well as the very best planes you can buy commercially. You have to try hard to make one that performs as poorly as low end (under $100) metal planes.
I don't think there is any other project that offers such a high rate of success to even someone with no previous tool-making experience. And where else can you find, at any price, a sycamore body, cocobolo sole smoother plane that fits your hands exactly? Or a tiny block plane with polished brass sides, a rosewood interior and an ebony wedge? All of which produce a continuous, cottony shaving, the width of the iron, that curls out of the plane's throat from the beginning of the cut to the end. Most every time. Even on problem woods.
It takes about 2-3 days to make your first decent plane. After a while, it's possible to make one in less than a day. You can make several at once in almost the time it takes to make one. They're addictive. It's impossible to make just a few. They work so well that you'll end up making a whole kit of specialty sizes and models. And the satisfaction you'll get out of them is wonderful.
One of the best books to get on the subject is "Making and Mastering Wood Planes," by David Finck, Sterling Publishing, New York. He is thorough to the point of driving you out of your mind with detail. He not only tells you how to build and use a superior wooden plane, he explains how to use (and make) every tool you'll need in the plane making. (Well, he doesn't tell how to make a drill press, or bandsaw, but he is no less anal about describing their use and function).
Don't try to design your own until you've made one of his design. No need to reinvent the wheel. Just modify it as necessary. I advise reading his book several times before starting, and following his steps. After a while you'll develop your own procedures and shortcuts.
Finck sells A2 blade/mild steel chipbreaker pairs on his website. Supplies are widely available from other sources as well.
(I have absolutely no association with Finck)
VL
I know what you mean about being addictive. I made a dozen 2 or 3 years ago and gave them away as Christmas presents. Small block planes with cocobolo centers and polished brass sides.
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)PlaneWood
Planewood,
They must have looked like little jewels. The only thing wrong such pretty tools is the reluctance to use them!
VL
Have you tried looking for a source of A2 or other types of tool steel?Scott C. Frankland
"This all could have been prevented if their parents had just used birth control"
Here's another book on the subject. Actually it's a "pamphlet," at 48 pages:
How to Make Wooden Planes, by David G. Perch, Published by Lee Valley Tools with an introduction and encouragement by Leonard G. Lee, President, Lee Valley Tools, Ltd, 1981
I had forgotten I had this little work in my library and I don't know if it's available anymore. Mine is copywrite 1994. I can't remember when I got it.
Nothing but the barest instructions on building a smoother solid body plane, a laminated model (called "sandwich method"), a clam-shell model and a "Japanese" plane.
The author assumes considerable skill on the part of the plane maker, especially in regard to removing the material from the throat and establishing the bed of the solid body model. There's discussion of using the thickest iron possible to dampen chatter PLUS a chip breaker. There's a table of various bed angles and their uses.
Not so much an instruction manual for the novice as a quaint overview of the process that would be appreciated by someone who has already made several successful planes. It kind of reminds me of a cartoon parody I once saw in Mad Magazine (very long ago) of instructions on drawing/painting. There were nine panels to the cartoon, the first 8 taking the student through the most elementary steps of laying out a canvas for a portrait, with instructions for the student to go on and finish the lesson as shown in the ninth panel on his own, using the previous steps as a guide. The ninth panel contained a completed image of the Mona Lisa.
VL
I picked up a copy a few months ago. It has been released again along with several other classic reprints.Scott C. Frankland
Scott's WOODWORKING Website"This all could have been prevented if their parents had just used birth control"
I fully agree that it is possible to make a plane that performs perfectly, but the chip breaker has nothing to do with it. I have a Clark & Williams plane that does not have a chip breaker, and it will plane nearly any wood and leave a superior surface. The bed angle is the real key to making a plane that can handle difficult grain. In the case of the C&W and the planes I made, they have a bed angle of 55 degrees.
Rob Millard
There are at least two sources for irons designed for wooden planes that have chipbreakers; Ron Hock and David Finck. As for whether they actually do anything useful in a plane with a thick iron, you are getting into a religious discussion similar to "pins first or tails first," "what finish for cutting boards," and "what stain for cherry?" (tails, walnut oil, and none, btw...)
I have used Hock irons both with and without the breaker and can tell no difference in how they perform (both extremely well), and makers like Steve Knight, Clark & Williams, and Terry Gordon make phenomenal tools with no breakers. The ECE planes that I have seen all use breakers, but they have very thin irons compared to the above, and the breaker is probably at least partly compensating for that. C&W has a page with an explanation here. My two best final smoothing planes are a Gordon and a Knight, with a 55° side-abutment plane that I made a close second to those; all of these use single irons, 3/16" thick or better.
Finck's book goes into long detail on the creation of essentially one style of bench plane ("Krenov"/cross-pin); a much more wide-ranging book is John Whelan's Making Traditional Wooden Planes, which covers making cross-pin bench planes as well as several different variations of more traditional side-abutment bench planes, and also covers more than a dozen other types (molding, rabbet, dado, etc.) for when your bench set is complete.
There are knowledgeable people here, but agreed with the above--the Traditional Tools forum or Woodcentral's Hand Tool forums are more toolmaking focused, and might be a better place to ask about planemaking.
[no affiliation with any of the above, blah, blah....]
Good luck!
/jvs
JVS,
Yes, David Finck describes only one type of plane, but it's a plane of proven worth that can be modified in any way the worker wants. And Finck's single-focus attention to detail is good for someone who has never made a plane. I had seen Whelan's book but had forgotten about it. Thanks for mentioning it. I've just placed my order.
Like many other novices, my first wooden planes were made with irons I had on hand. And they were (are) inferior pieces of steel. They're too thin and their composition is probably suspect. That's why they need their chip breakers. And they work beautifully that way. I've since made planes with Hock irons, but continued to make them with chip breakers. I'll have to refit those planes and try them with no chip breaker. I keep the mouths very tight anyway and that probably makes the breaker superfluous.
It's all about the plane bed and the perfect support that it gives the blade that makes a plane. Anything less than perfect and the iron vibrates (chatters). The thicker the iron, the better (to a degree, I suppose. What's the point of diminishing returns? - 3/16?, 5/32?)
The other area of "religion" in plane making is the debate about a laminated design vs a solid body. A separate sect chooses to deal with the addition of a sole/sole insert with arguments about glue line failures, delaminating, burning in Hell, angels dancing on pin heads. All the planes I have made are laminated. Several have added soles, one has a sole insert, one has brass sides. I admit to making many out of different woods just for the appearance. Many different bed angles. I have no idea if the choice of woods is "wise." but they look great. (No, they look marvelous!). They all work well. None has failed in any mechanical way in my brief plane-making experience (less than 10 years) which is an insignificant span. Will my planes stand the test of time and be intact 300 years from now in some collector's vault. Nope. But they are easy to make this way, perform about as well as I believe such a tool can, and if the need arises, I can make a new one from scraps in an afternoon. Hard to beat.
Anyway, it is Canadian EH's enthusiasm about making a plane that I want to encourage without throwing a blizzard of information at him and the Finck book facilitates an immediate reward of experience.
VL
Yup--left off the laminated vs. solid body one (not that this means that I have any sense, since I will apparently argue the futility of mineral oil all day long), but I haven't had any problems in a ~year with mine, and don't expect to over the useful life. The stability-of-solid-wood part of the argument makes more sense to me, but my laminated ones have been fine over northern Virgina season changes so far.
Basically, I just find clearing shavings from a traditional plane easier, and find them a little easier to adjust finely withough being much harder to make. They would be even easier to make with the right tools, but I haven't gottn around to making floats yet. Finck's book is fine, espeically as a raw intro, but the Whelan will have a longer useful life, even if it is sparser on detail.
/jvs
You do not need a chip breaker. I am not sure if a leaf spring would be a good choice for the iron.Make your plane out of inexspensive wood until you get the method down, then use suitable hardwood. I made a 22" jointer plane out of scrap red oak, works perfect, this was supposed to be a prototype. Still use the plane today. I have made four other planes out of cherry. Made prototypes out of construction lumber and when I got it right, made them from cherry.If you can get hold of used power hacksaw blades they may excellent irons. I received one years ago that was 1/8" thick, 2" wide and about 16" long. This steel was better than the standard stanley irons I had.
Making Traditional Wooden Planes by John M.Whelan is an excellent paper backed book . You will get a wealth of information from it.
mike
Yeah - it's about time this whole notion of "chipbreaker" got another airing. It's a nonsense term invented by someone in North America. The cap-iron has nothing whatever to do with 'breaking' chips - it was put there to pretension the little slivers of metal that appeared as cutting irons along with the metal bodied planes. Without preload, the cutters will chatter on all but the softest woods. (It's no accident that the lever cap bears on the end of the cap-iron!)
With thick cutters sitting on a WOODEN bed, traditional wooden-bodied planes are much better damped, so that in all but a few cases, the cap iron is superfluous. (Larry, why haven't you bought into this???)
There must be a practical limit to the advantages of a thicker cutter in a Bailey design. Since the cutter is supported from the back, the closest point to the cutting edge that you can have any supporting bed, on any plane, is where the bevel begins. One could hypothesise that the ideal blade thickness would be such that the bevel begins a hair before the toe of the frog. You get maximum bed support this way. However, there are certain other variables to consider, such as how well the frog is seated on the sole at the toe. On some of the nasty cheap things the major manufacturers are producing lately, the front of the frog doesn't even touch the sole at the front, so you have to rely on the mass of the frog/cutter/cap iron/lever cap assembly to act as a damper. I can tell you from experience that that doesn't work very well! Someone with access to unlimited time and a few engineering instruments could probably work out all the variables and come up with some real objective parameters, here!
That ought to provoke things a bit.........
IW
Also, check out this link from, of all places, Lowes.com. I can't vouch for the quality of the instructions as I've not yet built a plane from them, but they look good :)
http://www.lowes.com/lkn?action=howTo&p=Build/BldHndPln
Clark
Here's a link to a page where the plane maker uses old leaf spring. Others use tool steel. Either way requires a bit of work as well as some blacksmithing skill. Good luck, and be sure to post a picture of your finished tool!
Another option may be to find an old wooden plane at a junk shop with a nice heavy iron.
http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu:8080/~cswingle/woodworking/jigs.phtml
Jeff
Thanks for all the info. I'm thinking that if I go with a heavy iron and narrow throat I can get by with no chipbreaker.
Anybody heard of "O" tool steel?
Thanks
O series steel is an oil hardening stock, hence the “O:”
I’m not a metallurgist by any stretch of the imagination, but O-1 steel is only a fair tool steel. O-2 is very good, but I understand it is not commonly available. When I worked in a machine shop, O-1 was kind of like poplar is to woodworking.
Rob Millard
There was a chisel comparison article in FWW years ago that tested a large number of North American, European, and Japanese chisels. Besides the usual hardness, sharpening, and durability tests, they also sent samples out to a lab for metallurgical testing. IIRC, the article said the North American and European chisels were all made of O-1 tool steel or some very, very similar alloy.
The point being that if O-1 is good for chisels, you probably can't go far wrong using it for plane irons.
Edited 12/3/2003 9:18:57 PM ET by Uncle Dunc
http://www.onlinemetals.com has O1, O2, and A2 in either flats or rods. I've ordered lots of A2 from them. http://www.wttool.com has some (Wholesale Tool).
I used the 1" wide by 1/16" thick A2 for my little block planes. I air cooled those to avoid getting them to brittle.
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)PlaneWood
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