One of my upcoming projects is going to be an infill shoulder plane. I’m fairly confident about building it except for one problem, the mouth. in order for the plane to function well the mouth must be extremely tight, around .003″. now with a normal infill this wouldn’t be as much of a concern, because the bevel is faced down, and the opening would allow a file to fit through for fine tuning. however, my shoulder planes bevel will face up, and so the mouth opening can only be about .005″ wide (about the thickness of a sheet of paper). I am not sure how i am going to cut this though. I’m going to look into either having it cut by a CNC water jet, CNC laser or wire EDM, but all of those options could end up being very expensive. as a backup plan I’m wondering if there is a way to cut the mouth without one of those tools. have any of you guys made an infill shoulder plane and how did you manage to cut a nice tight mouth? thanks in advance
andrew
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Here's a picture of what it will look like when I'm done, I hope.
Good looking plane!
Make the initial cut with a jeweler's saw and then file the front of the mouth to fit. You can use fitter's blue on the bevel of a sharp blade to mark the high spots and file them off. Repeat until you're happy with the fit. The fitter's blue, also called high spot blue, is similar to artist's oil paint. Tedious and messy, but capable of giving a very close fit.
How are you going to fit the dovetails?
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