Since beginning woodworking some 20-odd years ago I’ve used metal hand planes. A brief try with Mujingfang wooden planes soon saw a return to the metal Wester style. I couldn’t get on with the lack of knob & tote or the necessity to adjust the blade with a hammer, in Chinese planes.
I hadn’t got a jointer, though. The metal ones are rather unwieldy, as I know having tried a Veritas then sold it on ebay because it didn’t suit me. But having recently made a wooden plane from a kit, for a woodworking “pupil”, and found it very pleasing to use, I decided I’d acquire a wooden jointer.
Gary Blum makes wooden planes with a very unusual adjustment method. In fact, the whole blade and frog gubbins is very unusual. I felt the curiosity to try one so eventually acquired one …. although it did spend some time getting from the USA to Wales …. via Japan! (No, I don’t know why it went that way).
http://blumtool.com/
I’m very impressed with the Blum jointer. Light to use and remarkably effective with the difficult grain timbers. But it prompted the thought: could I make my own jointer in a more conventional Western style? By now I’d made two wooden planes, with the second even more impressive in it’s abilities than the first – and I am no expert tool maker. No. But it’s not that difficult to make a wooden plane.
So I’ve begun. A core made from a 24 inch long blank of old-growth and very dense sapele, with a hard maple sole and afromosia cheeks. The blade will be a Veritas bevel-up blade mounted bevel-down, at 50 degrees. They’re thick and not chatter prone, so no chip breaker needed. The adjustment will use a Veritas Norris adjuster with the very fine thread, directly located in the sapele core of the plane.
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Is anyone interested in wooden plane making of the less usual kind (those Krenov wedgie ones with no adjuster and a cap iron)? I’ll post some pics and blurb to see.
Lataxe
Replies
The first wooden plane I made employed a Veritas kit comprising a Norris adjuster in a metal cup that's screwed into the wooden plane bed and kept attached with a magnet. Also included in the kit is a block plane blade, a brass bar under which to put a lever cap and a brass knob to tighten the lever cap down on the blade. The suggested design is for a Krenov style body with a blade bed of 45 degrees.
Although the resulting plane works well in making either super thin or quite thick shavings, the Norris adjuster seems to have too much backlash due to being perched in a shallow metal holder, as well as being difficult to adjust exactly because of its fairly coarse thread.
I decided I'd make another wooden plane using the same method except that I used a Veritas Norris adjuster with a very fine thread, directly mounted in the wooden bed of the plane rather than in a metal cup screwed into the bed. This made a big difference in eliminating all but a few degrees-of-turn backlash in the adjuster, as well as enabling very precise and fine adjustments to the cutting depth.
I also made the plane bed 50 instead of 45 degrees; and gave the bevel-down block plane blade a 5 degree back bevel, to make a cutting angle of 55 degrees. The mouth is also very narrow; As a result, this plane can cut fine shavings from very difficult grain timbers with no tear out. It's as good as the high end metal planes I have that have a high angle of cut in their design.
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I'm hoping the jointer I'm making will be as good, using the same sort of fine-thread Norris adjuster mounted directly in the wood of the plane bed. It'll use a wider Veritas blade (two and a quarter inches wide) also on a 50 degree bed with a 5 degree back bevel.
Previous planes I made have used bought-in wooden totes and/or knobs. For the jointer I'll be trying to make a saw-handle style tote myself.
The attached pics are of plane number two: sapele core, beech sole and London Plane (lacewood) cheeks).
Lataxe
I wonder if you have any advice. I recently got just the wooden part of an old jointer plane for cheap in a junk shop. I'd prefer to restore it w/o a chipbreaker. Is bevel down mandatory then?
If I want to use a bevel up blade, what are they options for a chipbreaker? The plane itself has a recess for a chipbreaker screw, but no fittings for any adjustment, so I guess I'm restricted to hammer adjustment. I think it was originally intended to have just a wooden wedge, not the Krenov-style pin. Any thoughts on that? Thanks
An old jointer plane is going to have a bed angle of 45 degrees, maybe up to 50. You can't use a bevel up blade. The cutting angle would be almost 90 degrees.
The slot under the bed was for the screw from the cap iron. So you can get a double iron to use, or try a single iron without a cap. Both are bevel down.
It would have used a wooden wedge. You can see the tapered abuttments on either side, where the wedge would have held the iron. You will have to fit a new wedge, after you find a new blade. The fitting of the wedge needs to be precise.
You will also need to work on the sole, as it is almost certainly not flat, and could be twisted as well. And after the blade and wedge are fitted, you'll probably need to work on the throat.
It will be a bunch of work. Trying to plug in a blade without tuning up everything else will only lead to frustration.
As John_C2 remarks, it's not easy to put right old wooden planes with the tapered abutments each side of the inner cheeks made to take the blade and it's wedge. They get worn with use and if the plane body is at all distorted, the abutments will also be distorted, making it difficult to fit even a well-made new wedge. Jointers, being long, are the most problematic as they're the most likely to suffer significant distortions in their body.
But people do restore them. I suspect it might take a lot of very careful paring with a sharp chisel or two to get those tapered abutments corrected if they're a bit wonky. And this after you've fixed the other likely problem that John mentions - a sole that is unlikely to be dead flat, perhaps also having some twist in it. The balde bed may also be "bumpy" and it needs to be dead flat or with the slightest of central hollows.
One of the Youtube WW fellows named "The English Woodworker" has a blog-spiel about this problem with older wooden planes and their renovation. His opinion is that the Krenov style architecture for a wooden plane - no tapered abutments but cross-pin instead, to jam the blade and its wedge in place - is a better design, less prone to resisting a correction if the plane body distorts over time and moisture changes.
Here's the link to the article:
https://www.theenglishwoodworker.com/second-hand-jointer-plane/
His wooden plane-making video is worth a look, if you can put up with his Manky gurns and accent. :-)
It's the later section of his blog article that discusses the difficulties with renovating older wooden planes, particularly jointers; and his preference for the cross-pin design rather than the tapered abutments, as illustrated by traditional German wooden planes; and Krenov style wooden planes.
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A wooden plane with a conventional blade & chipbreaker is a time-tested design but .... they are notoriously time-consuming to set up with the chipbreaker-to-blade interface just right to make the plane performant. There needs to be no gap between the two at the business end; the blade projection needs to be very small; the chip breaker "nose" needs the right profile to avoid shaving-jams. There is no automated alignment between the two so it relies on your hands and eyes to get it exactly right.
A single blade design can work very well, though, as I can attest from having made a couple. Even with a 1/8" thick blade, if it's lying on a dead-flat wooden bed and firmly held with whatever is used to do so, with a small mouth ..... it'll cut cleanly and without chatter. But the standard 45 degrees for the bed and no chipbreaker means there's a high likelihood of tear out on any of the "difficult" timbers - those with grain going all over the place.
You can use a thicker blade of something like 3/16" or more; and you can put on a back bevel of 5 - 10 degrees to make the cutting angle a higher 50 to 55 degrees on a 45 degree plane bed. This makes a big difference to the ability to cleanly shave difficult timbers.
In all events, if you can fix the body of yours, it's worth buying a high quality blade from the likes of Hock or Veritas. But a high quality blade can't compensate for a plane body that's "wrong".
Lataxe
The wooden jointer is progressing. The front and back core parts are cut, with the recess for the Norris adjuster let into the rear part at the top end of the blade bed. The front part has had the mouth opening cut out.
I decided to use a saw handle style tote but mounted high on the rear end of the plane and with a more acute angle, so the thrust of my palm would act through the edge of the blade. Thos razee style jointers with a low back end and tote feel wrong to me - not encouraging one's hand-weight to bear down at the back of the plane as it approaches the far end of an edge or face.
Most designs in books and on the web that I looked at let the tote into the body of the plane with some form of mortise & tenon joint. This doesn't seem strong enough as it relies entirely on the glue to keep the tote attached to the plane body. M&Ts are notorious for being difficult to make with an exact and close fit at all surfaces between mortise and tenon. In fact, old wooden planes in the junk shops and elsewhere often have a loose tote for this reason.
So I decided to mount the tote with a sliding dovetail joint, to make a mechanical as well as a glued join. This necessitates leaving a dovetail socket at the rear of the tote, as going in to the rear of the plane body is the only practical way to form the dovetail keyway into which the tote "male" dovetail slides. So a section of dovetail plug was also made to glue into the empty end of the keyway.
The next step will be to glue on the cheeks to make the whole plane into one piece. The cheeks will have to have a shape of some kind. Perhaps they could have a bit of stringing in them too, just for decoration. .....
Anyone else out there making wooden planes?
Lataxe
I made this wooden foreplane many years ago. As you probably know Stanley made a series of "transitional" planes which mated a wooden bottom end with a traditional metal frog adjuster top end. That series was phased out in the 1940's.
My attempt at a transitional plane included an old Stanley frog, a Padauk body, and an East Indian Rosewood sole. I originally built a traditional pistol grip tote but didn't really like it. So I chopped it off and fashioned a more ergonomic shape to accommodate my hand. The plane works great and is very comfortable to use. I plan to pickup a Veritas replacement iron soon.
Lat_axe, et al. Great pics of some very nice work. Making a wooden, Krenov style is on my list behind a few other projects. My tool making of this nature so far is limited to a router plane, which functions well for me only because I know I didn’t get the cutter mounted perfectly at 90*. Your work, well, I’m just plane envious. I’ll be following this thread, you can count on that!
'Witzy,
That's a very handsome plane. It has some features I'm very interested in, if you have the time to discuss them.
I've thought about putting a rounded-edge square "bun" as the front knob, like yours, on the jointer I'm making, as it does appear on quite a few traditional designs and looks 'andsome. I did also consider a carved rear tote not unlike your own - to the point that I made a couple - but worried about not being able to pick the plane up easily to bring it back for the next stroke, as you're not gripping such a thing but rather palming it ......would you say?
It's all too easy to get in the bad habit of just dragging the plane back still lying on the work piece, which apparently wears the blade edge twice as quickly (or so I read). Do you find yourself plane-dragging or does that rear tote have enough grip to enable you to pick the plane up to bring it back for the next stroke?
I notice you also have a patch in front of the blade at the mouth, which is said to be the high-wear place with wooden planes, so that a patch of harder wood there helps. Your patch looks to be the same timber as the plane body, though. Have you made it to be easily replaceable in some way?
I did think of (brass) screwing one in so it could be quickly replaced if it did wear but worried about the screw holes (which would have to be countersunk to allow the screw heads to be well below the surface) interfering with the planing action as dust & shaving bits accumulated there. And I imagine that it really needs to be glued in, anyway, then made co-planar with the sole if it isn't to interfere with the ability to take very fine cuts.
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The Lee Valley and other replacement blades are generally thicker than the original Stanley blades, as are the cap irons (or so I read). Will you just file open the mouth of that plane to accommodate them? It's been taking me ages to file the mouth of the planes I've made so far - not because it's hard to file off a bit of wood but because it's all too easy to file off far too much wood! Three file strokes and a check; three file strokes and a check ...... ad infinitum, ad nauseum. :-)
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Mr 'Mudgeon,
I have found it very satisfying to make these planes (and a spokeshave) although it's distracted me from making the furniture on my list. The first attempt inevitably contains the mistakes you don't notice until you've finished it and used it. But these are the unavoidable learning lessons that make the next one much better.
The full-Krenov planes are fairly simple ..... apart from one or two things.
First - the cross bar. I have the David Finck book & video describing the making of a Krenov wooden plane and the process for making and putting in the cross-bar looks all too easy to get slightly wrong - which will scupper the plane in all likelihood.
Second - the use of a cap iron as well as a wooden wedge to keep the blade in place ...... these certainly work but seem to introduce complexity and the need to become adept at adjusting things with a wee hammer. I've struggled to do this with the one wooden Mujingfang plane I've had for many years. It may be that I'm a cack-hand; or it may be that adjusting plane blades with hammers requires far more practice to do well than I'll ever have the time or inclination to give it.
So, I recommend a try with the Veritas kit or something like it. A blade, Norris adjuster, brass crosspin and brass wedge-screw are included (as well as a plan) for around $50-70 depending on the blade.
They're made Krenov style (two inner body parts glued between two cheeks) so are easy in that way. The cross pin requires only two easy-to-drill holes in the cheek, none of the full-Krenov wooden cross pin with a flat that also has to rotate freely (but not too freely) in the cheeks. The Norris adjuster makes it far easier to adjust the blade than with a hammer - for the unpracticed, at least.
https://www.leevalley.com/en-gb/shop/tools/hand-tools/planes/bench/74621-veritas-wooden-bench-plane-hardware
https://www.leevalley.com/en-gb/shop/tools/hand-tools/planes/maintenance-and-accessories/71379-veritas-wooden-plane-hardware-kit
Lataxe
I don't like to drag my planes back either, I also don't like to rest them on their soles but that's a whole other story. The plane is pretty light compared to it's metal equivalent so it's not a problem to get some lift and pull it back. But, if I were to redo my tote I'd make the thumb concavity deeper to get a better grip on the lift.
I added the sole patch (no beard reference intended) to make the mouth smaller. When I originally did the layout I miscalculated the mouth size and it ended up too large. Shortly after I built the foreplane I picked up two flea-market transitional planes that needed to be resoled. I went with a countersunk slot that allowed me to adjust the mouth as needed, it worked out great. I've never had a problem with debris in the slot. The plane on the left received an Ebony sole and the other got some left over East Indian Rosewood on it's bottom.
I can't wait to see how your plane turns out!
I like those mouth adjustment patches! There's a chunk of Macassar ebony in the woodstore .......
Yesterday was glue-up time: the body parts between the cheeks.
The body parts are made of old-growth sapele with a hard maple sole. The cheeks are 3/8" afromosia (part of old chemistry lab bench tops scavenged from the local university when they refurbished their labs).
Afromosia is oily - although it feels more like it's been pressure-treated with wax. In any event, it doesn't glue to itself or anything else very easily, as the oil/wax inhibits the glue bond. So the first task was to wipe the inner (to be glued) surfaces of the cheeks with alcohol, in an attempt to get as much oil/wax out of the glue surface as possible.
You can see how much comes out on those cotton swabs in the photo.
As a belt to the alcohol-wipe braces, I also located and attached the cheeks to the body parts with four brass screws per side (two to the front body part and two to the rear, each side). This also helps to align to parts - although the cheeks are left proud all 'round of the body parts, with only the sole planed flat (with another jointer plane) before glue up. (The sole will get another final planing after the glue is dry and the body as a whole is being shaped).
It's very important at this stage to make sure the mouth gap is just too small to let the blade through. This will leave capacity to exactly file the mouth to the required gap once the glue is dry. The blade is mounted in the body parts, which are then pushed together longitudinally until the blade can no longer go through the mouth-gap.
I put some glued-up things in the warm house if the weather's cold, to give the glue the best chance of solidifying rightly. I'm wary of leaving glue-ups in a cold place like the workshop, although Titebond III seems fairly forgiving of lowish temperatures.
Next stage will be body shaping, mouth shaping and front bun (knob) shaping/attachment.
Lataxe
Another few stages of the jointer-making were done yesterday. The first: sole-flattening; mouth-opening and wedge-fitting.
The plane body & cheeks are glued up with the sole as planar as possible between the front body part and the rear. Happily, the first scraping of the glued-up item along 100 grit sandpaper glued to some float glass, with the sole marked with diagonal pencil lines, showed very little deviance from flat - just a slight dip at one side of the mouth that'll take very little sanding of the sole to remove.
The adjuster, wedge and blade need to be in place and tightened albeit with the blade retracted, when the flat-sole test is done, as the tension of the working parts has a slight effect on the sole flatness.
The adjuster is a Veritas Norris fine-thread item (a "slow" adjuster); the blade too is a Veritas - a spare bevel-up blade of A2 that came with a posh metal plane over a decade ago but hasn't been much used. It has a 26 degree main bevel with a 2 degree micro-bevel but is used bevel down and with a back bevel of 3 - 5 degrees (done Charlesworth style but with a blade-raiser thicker than a steel rule). On the 50 degree bed of the plane, that gives a cutting angle of 53 -55 degrees - good for naughty woods. The blade also has a very slight camber.
The wedge serves to tighten down on the blade on the plane's blade-bed at both ends. It pivots on the 1/4" brass bar above the throat. The bottom end of the wedge presses down on the blade near the cutting edge ... but not too near it.
The steel knurled screw presses down on the other end of the blade, through the wedge, over the centre of the Norris adjuster barrel. This knurled screw has a rounded end to stop the blade trying to skate away, as it would if the screw-end were flat. The wedge end near the blade edge is rounded and polished to help prevent the shavings from catching and jamming in the throat.
The mouth is the very smallest gap I could manage that lets the blade drop through. A feeler gauge (not too accurate on a slim wooden mouth edge, mind) says around 1/100th of an inch.
A first swipe or three with the as yet unfinished plane took nice thin shavings, with no throat-jam and leaving a polished surface on the planed wood (a piece of curly-grain black walnut).
On to the body-shaping and the adding of a front bun-knob, then. I'll also be putting a grub screw through the cheeks either side of the blade at the cutting edge end, a la Veritas planes, to help keep the blade central in the body.
Lataxe
I don't think I've ever seen a wooden wedge configured like that, sort of half wedge half chipbreaker. I have several Veritas planes and love the Norris adjusters. Did you purchase the stand alone adjuster from Lee Valley? I also really love the grub screw alignment feature.
You've got a quite a cool, hybrid, plane in the works!!!
Jkatz,
The arrangement of the wedge under a crossbar, tightened down on the blade with a screw, appears on all the metal planes I have, which are not the usual design but one used in some high quality plane designs of the past. The metal planes I have are Marcou planes, with much beefier but a similar arrangement to the wooden wedge et al of my jointer, rendered in brass and steel.
http://www.marcouplanes.com/index.php
The pic on the front page of Philip Marcou's website shows the arrangement. His wedges and screws are rather nicer than mine!
Personally I dislike the "double blade" design with a cap iron or chip breaker because they're so fiddly to set up and need to be arranged exactly if they're not to jam with shaving whilst also working to reduce tear out. You also have to re-arrange the projection of the blade from the cap iron if you want to optimise it for different thickness of shavings. Too much trouble!
The thick bevel-up blades of Veritas and Lie-Nielsen planes, with no cap iron / chip breaker, work very well without them. Tear out in difficult woods is avoided by steepening the cutting angle. In practice, I've found that the steeper cutting angles of a thick blade make far more difference to tear-out elimination than cap irons and/or tight mouths. The Marcous don't seem to care how wide the mouth is, even though they come with mouth-gap adjusters in most cases.
I also find the Veritas grub screws keeping the business end of the blade properly located to be a great help, especially with a Norris adjuster, which is not so easy to operate well to get the blade cutting evenly across it's width as is the Stanley lateral adjuster. Adding the grub screws makes it much easier to get the Norris adjuster to make those lateral adjustments precisely.
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I'm now prevaricating about how to shape the front and back ends of the jointer. Most seem to leave them square and utilitarian. Some add shaping of a vaguely mock-aerodynamic design seen in the tail fins of 50s American cars and steam trains.
I wondered if the rear end might have an additional body-tote rather like that you showed in your own plane, pictured up the thread a bit ..... something like the German wooden plane designs of ECE and similar. I'll certainly be adding a square-bun "knob" at the front, like yours.
Lataxe
PS This Marcou web page gives more details of the wedge and crossbar plane design.
http://www.marcouplanes.com/Marcou_Planes_31_Miscellaneous.php
BTW, I forgot to answer that, yes, the Norris adjuster in the wooden jointer and other planes I've just made comes from Lee Valley. They sell a small kit of parts for making a plane in this style
https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/hand-tools/planes/maintenance-and-accessories/71379-veritas-wooden-plane-hardware-kit
but I found the Norris adjuster in that - attached to the plane bed with a captive metal cup and a magnet - to be much less precise than one of their "slow" fine thread Norris adjusters let into a hole drilled in the plane bed.
https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/hand-tools/planes/maintenance-and-accessories/74068-slow-adjusters-for-veritas-bevel-up-planes
I have a forstner bit that's a very exact 3/4", with a very clean entry to the wood. The Veritas Norris adjuster fits very tightly in the hole drilled with this. In fact, I need to wax to hole the get the Norris adjuster barrel to turn easily enough to make the adjustments with it.
But once carefully located so the top of the Norris adjuster barrel is flush with the plane bed, and room made for its screw threads and blade-retaining pin ..... it works exceptionally well. There's only a very small amount of backlash and none of the slop that seems part of their plane kit adjuster with it's magnet and cup attachment to the wooden plane bed.
I should write to them and point out the difference. :-)
Lataxe
WOW, I have never heard of Marcou planes until I read your post and visited their website. Those planes are absolute works of art, but at those prices, it's art that I'll never own. I guess I'll just have to limp along with my cache of Stanleys and the occasional Veritas.
Thanks for the introduction Lataxe!
Jkatz,
The Marcou planes I have were bought when they cost a fraction of their prices now - some 12 0r 13 years ago. I couldn't afford even one now, as I yam a poor old pensioner, having to live on gruel and cabbage soup so I can afford my Veritas addiction. :-)
The ladywife threatens to sell a Marcou, or even all of them, to pay for my perch in the local gimmery, when I go doolally. (Any day now). Perhaps she will sell you one, cut-price? On the other hand, a grandson has put tickets on the inside of them all saying, "Property of Leo - Keep Orf".
*****
Today I have been rasping a plane nose and also it's bum, to a nice roundness for the hand to grasp. (It's not illegal - yet). Later, I'll make the square bun-knob for the front. What to finish it with? Perhaps simple is best - one coat of oil to bring out the colour and one coat of wax, when the oil is dry, to make it less dull-looking ....... ?
It's tempting to tart it up with stringing or even a fancy banding. But someone might nick it for an ornament if I do that.
******
One more plane after this - a shooting plane to go with the ginormous shooting board I made. I already bought one of these to go on it, as I'm too lazy to design one myself. Mind, I have a template now. :-)
https://www.leevalley.com/en-gb/shop/tools/hand-tools/planes/maintenance-and-accessories/77042-veritas-shooting-grip?item=06P2301
Lataxe
It's finished.
A traditional bun front knob and a saw-handle style tote. Higher at the back than the front, which I find gives greater stability and control, especially with the tote pointing the hand down more than is traditional. It's also heavier than most wooden planes of its size, which I prefer being used to very heavy metal planes. I like lots of momentum.
It's finished in USA-style - loadsa coats of this and that. :-) Spirit dyed to a darker brown all over; two coats of Liberon Finishing Oil; followed (when dry) with a coat of black patinating wax; then a coat of neutral wax to leach out the excess black pigment. It has a low sheen rather than that gleamy look, as a result.
The blade sits on a 50 degree bed, bevel down but with a 5 degree back bevel. A cutting angle of 55 degrees, then. The bevel is 25 degrees with a 2 degree micro bevel, so easy to camber but still tough enough in the Veritas A2 to avoid rapid edge blunting. The camber is very small - about two thou difference in cutting depth, side to middle, on the 50 degree plane blade-bed.
The plane will be used for jointing mid-sized boards (its 21 inch length is enough) but mostly for flattening large area tops of glued-up planks. This has determined the amount of camber to the blade. It's a big smoother!
The test shaving shows that a first pass down a 2.5 inch wide board will take a one-to-two thou shaving of not-quite 2.25 inches wide (the blade width is 2.25 inches). No plane tracks. The second pass just gets a wafer-thin shaving. The third pass gets nothing, as the plane edges are riding on the now higher outside edges of the plank with it's two thou "grooved" central area just missed by the plane blade.
It deals well with nasty grain of the rising & roiling ilk. A high cutting angle with a very narrow mouth (barely perceivable with the human eye) and thin shavings are the keys.
Will it stay flat? Will it get a raggy bottom? Only time and use will tell.
Lataxe
Beautiful work, Sir! Congratulations, and enjoy.
I've made a lot of wooden planes. For the average western woodworker, most of what's offered out there now is substandard compared to either a continental pattern or an english pattern plane. The only place were anything modern falls behind these (aside from issues of wood movement on jobsites - we're not working in those conditions) is smoothing - a stanley 4 is better than any wooden plane ever made.
The krenov patterns or trick adjusters, etc, all solve problems that don't exist.
This is the style of plane that I make:
https://i.imgur.com/RnBIwC0.jpg
It's not historically correct in terms of elements matched together for aesthetics, but I don't care about that - I'm making a plane for me to use, or to be used by someone else.
As far as tearout goes, no modern shortcut matches a cap iron properly set, and for fine edge holding, there's probably also nothing more modern than water or oil hardening steel that does better there (for abusive or abrasive wear, there may be, but there's a trade off in sharpening and grinding that's not attractive - high carbide modern steels have to be coddled on clean wood if lack of edge damage is required - like final smoothing).
The reason this isn't more clear is most people aren't using their planes much or for much. All of the little proportional aspects of the older english planes (i don't prefer the continental proportions, but some do), are better than the newer planes and result in more efficient work and a less tired user, but the market isn't made of users. It's 90% people who read a Chris Schwarz book, ponder some things, buy a couple of tools and then decide it's not realistic to work much by hand for anything other than dovetail joints and sandpaper.
The old patterns rise to the top when they're learned - which isn't really a surprise. It's a little presumptuous of us to think we'll all come along and make something better and more productive than people did after centuries of professional feedback and use to make a living. Make a better plane 200 years ago? you get an economic advantage, and it soon becomes the standard. An economic advantage then becomes necessity for survival in business, and the cycle occurs with each material improvement. a certain handle type replaces the more primitive planes found on the mary rose, plane proportions change vs. those, the double iron is widely discovered and adopted and eliminates single iron planes because it's vastly superior economically in use ( the same worker planes far more wood to dimension and finish in the same time, and the plane type stays in the cut far further into the dullness cycle and needs less sharpening ). At some point, the machine planer becomes common and in the middle 1800s, planes go toward site work and the planes needed for dimensioning and sizing and truing wood start to get cheaper as the market disappears for them. The sweet spot for any kind of plane is just prior to that inflection point. Early/mid 1800s english wooden planes are probably the most practical type that ever existed for dimensioning dry wood. Stanley's smoothing planes are the most practical that ever existed for smoothing dry wood or working small areas to finish. The current crop of "improvements" by folks like krenov and other vendors are the most practical for selling to beginners.
Mr W,
That is first class tosh, which I will show to all and sundry as a fine example of the mode. :-)
Lataxe
PS Do you wear them pantaloons and a smock a la Cherubini? Or is it dungaree and a check shirt? Post pics!
Lataxe- I don't read historical texts or get into the whole reenactment thing. That sounds like something for people who are looking for escapism or running away from the present. I'm interested only in mining older designs for performance so that I can work by hand for pleasure. I prefer whatever clothes are cheapest in the shop and none of the nonsense multihundred dollar schwarzian boutique shop clothes or aprons. What are we, chefs?
Another plane, based vaguely on the Veritas mitre plane but made of wood.
I've been using a ten-ton brass & steel jack plane on my newly-made shooting board, which works very well but is a huge thing to push and pull up and down the shooting board runway. So I thought I'd make a lightweight wooden item.
The body is cherry with a beech sole and oak cheeks. The front & back knobs are cherry drawer knobs; the side tote (to fit the web of thumb and forefinger) is a Lee Valley item meant to bolt on to various Veritas planes but quite at home on this woody. (I hope to use it as a template to make another tote without the metal bracket).
The plane bed is 40 degrees, with a Veritas block plane blade mounted on a Veritas block plane fine (or "slow") Norris adjuster let into the top end of the wooden plane bed.
The blade is kept on the plane bed with a wooden cap-wedge jammed under a 7mm diameter brass bar via use of a knurled screw pressing on the top of the blade above the centre of the Norris adjuster barrel.
The blade is adjusted not only with the Norris adjuster but also with four grub screws through the cheeks pressing on the blade edges, a la Veritas planes. Having four rather than just two grub screws allows the straight-edged blade to be positioned very accurately to make exact angles on the work pieces being shot.
The blade has a 27 degree main bevel with a 1 degree micro-bevel, no back bevel or camber. I also gave it the unicorn treatment as a last sharpening step (a few seconds on a buffing wheel). As it's bevel-down in the plane, the cutting angle is the same as the bed angle - 40 degrees.
It makes very thin and clean shavings, with a correspondingly glossy finish to the end grain of the work piece being shot. Careful measurements with a square and a mitre gauge show the shot ends to be .... perfek! Huzzah!!
Lataxe
Oh yeah, nicely done!!! I like the front and back handle configurations although I'm not quite sure how they come into play. I assume they become actionable when the plane isn't sitting on the shooting board runway waiting for take off.
I know you didn't make that side tote but it is a thing of beauty.
JK,
Thank you for the compliment.
As mentioned, I basically copied the look of the Veritas mitre plane albeit mine is rendered in wood (apart from the blade and adjuster, of course. A wooden plane blade? A step too far!)
https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/tools/hand-tools/planes/miter/73208-veritas-miter-plane
I believe the design is basically a large block plane, with the rear knob meant for pushing with the palm of the hand rather than gripping with the fingers. It certainly works well as a block plane, gripped in a similar fashion as one would grip such a smaller metal item.
Mine is longer with both a longer nose (sole in front of the blade) and rear (so the rear tote isn't over the adjuster but further back). Let's call it "a small jointer, block & shooting plane". :-)
That horn (to employ the proper nomenclature) mounted on the side is a very good arrangement for shooting the plane - it seems better to me than (an admittedly crude) hotdog shape I made for a large metal jack plane I've been using for shooting. I may make my own horn in time, for mounting on the plane without the metal sub-bracket - although that does allow adjustment of the horn position to the ideal for any user.
A lot of what one reads about shooting (as well as the current dedicated shooting planes from LN & LV) suggest that a great heavy plane is an advantage. Personally I found using an even heavier jack plane was a disadvantage, despite making the shooting board runway as slick as possible. You have to push and drag-back the heavy plane many times with one hand. It's much, much easier to use the lighter, smaller wooden plane to shoot one handed, I've found.
That horn makes it easy, also, to keep the plane sole pressed up one-handed against the ledge over which the work piece hangs awaiting the thin slices to be shaved away.
*******
That's it for self-made planes just now. I've made 4 of them and a wooden spokeshave since around the beginning of November. One more tool (that panel gauge) and then back to furniture! The ladywife insists.
Lataxe
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