I’ve been playing around with new designs for my infill planes, along with new production methods, and thought it might be time to post some photos.

Counting from the left, the first and third of these planes are the size of a Stanley 4.5, more or less. The irons are 2 3/8 inches wide, pitched at 45 degrees. The infills respectively are Brazilian pepperwood – or so I was told by the acquaintance who gave me the billet from which I made the infill – and blue gum eucalyptus.

The infill in the second plane from the left is black walnut, as is the infill in the last plane on the left. The infill in the plane next to that last one is black acacia. I gave these three planes the dimensions of a Stanley No. 4.

I’m not sure how it came to mind to carve that fillip atop the totes on the Brazilian pepperwood and black walnut planes on the left, but I can offer you a story. One day, using rasps to shape the tote on the black walnut plane, I thought: Why not have fun and maybe leave matters up in the air here, as it were?

I liked the result – and also saw the risk in the design: Drop the plane and it’s a goner. But so what? The same risk is inherent in the bun on all my planes, which George Wilson, quoting someone who didn’t like them one bit, likened to the gasp of a fish drowning in air.

I take that in good stride and say: If there’s something of the sea in the bun, the same is true of the tote on these two planes as well. Follow the lines converging on the fillip and you see the head and bill of a shore bird – an avocet, maybe (if avocets had short bills, that is) or a lowly duck with an upturned, snooty bill. Donald Duck had such a bill, as I recall.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I had avocets or ducks or critters of any sort in mind as I worked on that tote. But when someone pointed out that the lines were those of a shorebird, the light bulb in my head lit up and I recalled the many, many Sunday afternoons I spend with my sweet wife Elise on the seashore a few miles north of where we live in California, watching shorebirds chase down their prey in the sands of the beach as the waves of the sea wash up on shore and then fall away again.

I’ve made three planes with this design so far and have commissions for two more, both with infills of blue-gum eucalyptus. I call them my shorebird planes.