[patron]

First you gotta do some thinking...and find iron

During the recent posting by Bertha on the hand planes of our dreams, the issue of wooden shoulder planes came up. I had some requests and PM's to blog on the making of a wooden shoulder plane so I will give it my best shot. Be warned, I work in the metric system so measurements are in millimeters. For those who use King George's thumb to measure, dividing by 25.4 will at least give decimal inches. I'll gladly answer any question but have patience: No computer will survive in my dusty workshop and I spend all my days there. It means that my computer habits are such that I only sit in front of this screen at night. Throw in the time difference and my response times get pretty slow, about once every 24 hours…..but respond I will. Promise.

Just so you know where we are going, this is what we want to end up with:

As you can see, this is not a very big plane, only around 115 mm (4,5") long. I've been into building smaller and smaller planes lately…

Some planning and scavenging for a plane iron.

The first thing to do is to decide on the width of the plane, or maybe the width of the plane iron will decide for us…. Since the width of the plane iron or blade will determine the width of the wooden plane body, we need to find ourselves an iron first. There are various ways to do this. If you live in the States, it can be as simple as buying the one that you want. If you don't have much money or you live in Africa like me, that option does not exist and you need to get creative. There are a few ways to skin the cat.

1. Find an old plane iron and cut out of it what you want. If you choose to go this route, use an angle grinder fitted with a slim cutting disc. Keep the iron as cool as possible whilst cutting; do it in steps and submerge the blade often in cold water to prevent it from heating up. Too much heat will alter the properties of the steel.

2. Use an old spade drill bit. Since the round shaft needs to be flat and the same thickness as the spade part, this method requires a lot of grinding. Again, keep the steel as cool as possible during the grinding process.

3. Use old HSS jointer or planer knifes. I've been going this route lately with much success. A big advantage with HSS is that it can be cut and ground without concern over altering the materials properties due to excessive heat. Even if it becomes red hot, no worries! Some will say that it is too hard for a plane blade and in a way they are right. You won't be able to hone an extremely fine edge like you can with good tool steel. But believe me, for what we want to do it is good enough. More benefits of the HSS are that it will stay sharp for much longer and the stuff is nice and thick, typically 3mm. Thick is good!
A disadvantage of using old jointer knifes is that they are never very wide; we are after all talking about worn out cutters. I've been making lots of small planes of late so it not a problem for me. If you don't have worn out knifes in your shop, ask at a sharpening service or a large commercial woodworking shop.

The plane body - what wood to use.
Although Beech was traditionally much used for planes, any good hardwood will do just fine. I've used Maple, Paduak, Wenge, Purpleheart and some of our indigenous woods like Ironwood, Pink Ivory and Candlewood. It is best, but not critical, to have the growth rings running vertical in your plane body. This makes for a better wearing plane. You can even get fancy and add a sole of different wood, or something exotic and hardwearing like ebony or ivory. Yes, I know there is a moral issue with ivory and it's impossible to find. Or not? Old pianos had real ivory on their keys. Keep your eyes open for a scrapped piano! I have some ivory pieces obtained that way.You can also use bone but that is a story for another time…

I leave you to go hunting for some metal and some timber….next we get down to building this thing!

thanks for the info
these are definitely rusty

so slow it is

thanks

 

[Bertha]

First you gotta do some thinking...and find iron

During the recent posting by Bertha on the hand planes of our dreams, the issue of wooden shoulder planes came up. I had some requests and PM's to blog on the making of a wooden shoulder plane so I will give it my best shot. Be warned, I work in the metric system so measurements are in millimeters. For those who use King George's thumb to measure, dividing by 25.4 will at least give decimal inches. I'll gladly answer any question but have patience: No computer will survive in my dusty workshop and I spend all my days there. It means that my computer habits are such that I only sit in front of this screen at night. Throw in the time difference and my response times get pretty slow, about once every 24 hours…..but respond I will. Promise.

Just so you know where we are going, this is what we want to end up with:

As you can see, this is not a very big plane, only around 115 mm (4,5") long. I've been into building smaller and smaller planes lately…

Some planning and scavenging for a plane iron.

The first thing to do is to decide on the width of the plane, or maybe the width of the plane iron will decide for us…. Since the width of the plane iron or blade will determine the width of the wooden plane body, we need to find ourselves an iron first. There are various ways to do this. If you live in the States, it can be as simple as buying the one that you want. If you don't have much money or you live in Africa like me, that option does not exist and you need to get creative. There are a few ways to skin the cat.

1. Find an old plane iron and cut out of it what you want. If you choose to go this route, use an angle grinder fitted with a slim cutting disc. Keep the iron as cool as possible whilst cutting; do it in steps and submerge the blade often in cold water to prevent it from heating up. Too much heat will alter the properties of the steel.

2. Use an old spade drill bit. Since the round shaft needs to be flat and the same thickness as the spade part, this method requires a lot of grinding. Again, keep the steel as cool as possible during the grinding process.

3. Use old HSS jointer or planer knifes. I've been going this route lately with much success. A big advantage with HSS is that it can be cut and ground without concern over altering the materials properties due to excessive heat. Even if it becomes red hot, no worries! Some will say that it is too hard for a plane blade and in a way they are right. You won't be able to hone an extremely fine edge like you can with good tool steel. But believe me, for what we want to do it is good enough. More benefits of the HSS are that it will stay sharp for much longer and the stuff is nice and thick, typically 3mm. Thick is good!
A disadvantage of using old jointer knifes is that they are never very wide; we are after all talking about worn out cutters. I've been making lots of small planes of late so it not a problem for me. If you don't have worn out knifes in your shop, ask at a sharpening service or a large commercial woodworking shop.

The plane body - what wood to use.
Although Beech was traditionally much used for planes, any good hardwood will do just fine. I've used Maple, Paduak, Wenge, Purpleheart and some of our indigenous woods like Ironwood, Pink Ivory and Candlewood. It is best, but not critical, to have the growth rings running vertical in your plane body. This makes for a better wearing plane. You can even get fancy and add a sole of different wood, or something exotic and hardwearing like ebony or ivory. Yes, I know there is a moral issue with ivory and it's impossible to find. Or not? Old pianos had real ivory on their keys. Keep your eyes open for a scrapped piano! I have some ivory pieces obtained that way.You can also use bone but that is a story for another time…

I leave you to go hunting for some metal and some timber….next we get down to building this thing!

I've chosen an old Stanley blade.

I'm going with Stockmaker's maple (Swan drawknife eye candy for Mads, Dennis, and Div)

 

[woodspark]

First you gotta do some thinking...and find iron

During the recent posting by Bertha on the hand planes of our dreams, the issue of wooden shoulder planes came up. I had some requests and PM's to blog on the making of a wooden shoulder plane so I will give it my best shot. Be warned, I work in the metric system so measurements are in millimeters. For those who use King George's thumb to measure, dividing by 25.4 will at least give decimal inches. I'll gladly answer any question but have patience: No computer will survive in my dusty workshop and I spend all my days there. It means that my computer habits are such that I only sit in front of this screen at night. Throw in the time difference and my response times get pretty slow, about once every 24 hours…..but respond I will. Promise.

Just so you know where we are going, this is what we want to end up with:

As you can see, this is not a very big plane, only around 115 mm (4,5") long. I've been into building smaller and smaller planes lately…

Some planning and scavenging for a plane iron.

The first thing to do is to decide on the width of the plane, or maybe the width of the plane iron will decide for us…. Since the width of the plane iron or blade will determine the width of the wooden plane body, we need to find ourselves an iron first. There are various ways to do this. If you live in the States, it can be as simple as buying the one that you want. If you don't have much money or you live in Africa like me, that option does not exist and you need to get creative. There are a few ways to skin the cat.

1. Find an old plane iron and cut out of it what you want. If you choose to go this route, use an angle grinder fitted with a slim cutting disc. Keep the iron as cool as possible whilst cutting; do it in steps and submerge the blade often in cold water to prevent it from heating up. Too much heat will alter the properties of the steel.

2. Use an old spade drill bit. Since the round shaft needs to be flat and the same thickness as the spade part, this method requires a lot of grinding. Again, keep the steel as cool as possible during the grinding process.

3. Use old HSS jointer or planer knifes. I've been going this route lately with much success. A big advantage with HSS is that it can be cut and ground without concern over altering the materials properties due to excessive heat. Even if it becomes red hot, no worries! Some will say that it is too hard for a plane blade and in a way they are right. You won't be able to hone an extremely fine edge like you can with good tool steel. But believe me, for what we want to do it is good enough. More benefits of the HSS are that it will stay sharp for much longer and the stuff is nice and thick, typically 3mm. Thick is good!
A disadvantage of using old jointer knifes is that they are never very wide; we are after all talking about worn out cutters. I've been making lots of small planes of late so it not a problem for me. If you don't have worn out knifes in your shop, ask at a sharpening service or a large commercial woodworking shop.

The plane body - what wood to use.
Although Beech was traditionally much used for planes, any good hardwood will do just fine. I've used Maple, Paduak, Wenge, Purpleheart and some of our indigenous woods like Ironwood, Pink Ivory and Candlewood. It is best, but not critical, to have the growth rings running vertical in your plane body. This makes for a better wearing plane. You can even get fancy and add a sole of different wood, or something exotic and hardwearing like ebony or ivory. Yes, I know there is a moral issue with ivory and it's impossible to find. Or not? Old pianos had real ivory on their keys. Keep your eyes open for a scrapped piano! I have some ivory pieces obtained that way.You can also use bone but that is a story for another time…

I leave you to go hunting for some metal and some timber….next we get down to building this thing!

That Stanley blade will do the trick Bertha. Just don't let it heat up when cutting!

Nice wood for the job! (besides tempting us with some fine tools…casually sneaked into the picture!)

 

[Cher]

First you gotta do some thinking...and find iron

During the recent posting by Bertha on the hand planes of our dreams, the issue of wooden shoulder planes came up. I had some requests and PM's to blog on the making of a wooden shoulder plane so I will give it my best shot. Be warned, I work in the metric system so measurements are in millimeters. For those who use King George's thumb to measure, dividing by 25.4 will at least give decimal inches. I'll gladly answer any question but have patience: No computer will survive in my dusty workshop and I spend all my days there. It means that my computer habits are such that I only sit in front of this screen at night. Throw in the time difference and my response times get pretty slow, about once every 24 hours…..but respond I will. Promise.

Just so you know where we are going, this is what we want to end up with:

As you can see, this is not a very big plane, only around 115 mm (4,5") long. I've been into building smaller and smaller planes lately…

Some planning and scavenging for a plane iron.

The first thing to do is to decide on the width of the plane, or maybe the width of the plane iron will decide for us…. Since the width of the plane iron or blade will determine the width of the wooden plane body, we need to find ourselves an iron first. There are various ways to do this. If you live in the States, it can be as simple as buying the one that you want. If you don't have much money or you live in Africa like me, that option does not exist and you need to get creative. There are a few ways to skin the cat.

1. Find an old plane iron and cut out of it what you want. If you choose to go this route, use an angle grinder fitted with a slim cutting disc. Keep the iron as cool as possible whilst cutting; do it in steps and submerge the blade often in cold water to prevent it from heating up. Too much heat will alter the properties of the steel.

2. Use an old spade drill bit. Since the round shaft needs to be flat and the same thickness as the spade part, this method requires a lot of grinding. Again, keep the steel as cool as possible during the grinding process.

3. Use old HSS jointer or planer knifes. I've been going this route lately with much success. A big advantage with HSS is that it can be cut and ground without concern over altering the materials properties due to excessive heat. Even if it becomes red hot, no worries! Some will say that it is too hard for a plane blade and in a way they are right. You won't be able to hone an extremely fine edge like you can with good tool steel. But believe me, for what we want to do it is good enough. More benefits of the HSS are that it will stay sharp for much longer and the stuff is nice and thick, typically 3mm. Thick is good!
A disadvantage of using old jointer knifes is that they are never very wide; we are after all talking about worn out cutters. I've been making lots of small planes of late so it not a problem for me. If you don't have worn out knifes in your shop, ask at a sharpening service or a large commercial woodworking shop.

The plane body - what wood to use.
Although Beech was traditionally much used for planes, any good hardwood will do just fine. I've used Maple, Paduak, Wenge, Purpleheart and some of our indigenous woods like Ironwood, Pink Ivory and Candlewood. It is best, but not critical, to have the growth rings running vertical in your plane body. This makes for a better wearing plane. You can even get fancy and add a sole of different wood, or something exotic and hardwearing like ebony or ivory. Yes, I know there is a moral issue with ivory and it's impossible to find. Or not? Old pianos had real ivory on their keys. Keep your eyes open for a scrapped piano! I have some ivory pieces obtained that way.You can also use bone but that is a story for another time…

I leave you to go hunting for some metal and some timber….next we get down to building this thing!

Hi Div, I will just observe for the moment. When I can actually master using a plane perhaps then I will attempt to make one.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge Div.

 

[woodspark]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

 

[degoose]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

Gonna go and do me one of these…ONE DAY….

 

[patron]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

time to check the wood pile
i just got some stuff
that is hard and heavy
will hold it and see how it feels

thanks for the time and teaching

have a good smoke/drink and rest

 

[BigTiny]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

Hi Div.

Nice, straight forward instruction method you use my friend. I like it. I also like the topic, as wooden planes hold a fascination for me and are something I want to do at least a couple of. I'm also in the process of making a marking guage too.

I like your choice of purpleheart, and I'm using it along with some maple for my guage project. I think it would improve the appearance if you'd used a light wood in the middle for contrast. Still, purpleheart looks so good on its own…

Next time I'm at the wrecker's, I'm gonna check out a broken spring or two.

 

[mafe]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

Smoke rings in the distance, I see you Div.

I'm still at the same stage, had two days of rough migrene, so nothing done.
I have ten of these block plane irons I got at at a sale for 5 dollar so I will cut one up, the wood is cut in three and I have the drawing on the body (not my own body do not worry).
Ohh yes I plan to try and make a low angel version app. 11 degrees where I turn the blade arround, that should give me 11 + a 25 degree bevel = 36 degree this should be cool for end grain yes? (I'm a bad student).
So I will catch up fast.
Thank you for taking the time.
Best thoughts,
it is wonderful to follow you here,
Mads

 

[woodspark]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

Degoose, it doesn't take long to build one of these. We mostly spend more energy thinking about things than we do actually making them!

Patron, hard and heavy is good! Are you playing along? Nice to see you here.

BigTiny, from far away Canada! Glad you are also interested. I remember you talking about spring steel a long time ago on another post. You said to look for much older models, so far no luck this side ,but then I don't go to scrap yards on a regular basis! It is in the back of my mind, still like to try it.

Mafe, I just saw your smoke rings rising above the Northen horizon! Take it easy brother, no rush. I like your low angle idea! No, not a bad student, an inquisitive, adventurous, experimental, intellegent one! I like that kind!!!

Really low angle might be problematic with wood, failure of the very small glue line near the thin end of that low landing. It happened to me once when I tried it. Maybe just had some bad luck, but I think a solid bodied version might just work better.
Smoke signals departing now…

 

[woodspark]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

Mads, why turn the blade bevel up? If you leave it bevel down and make the ramp/landing at 36 degrees, it will give the same and make for a stronger plane. Could then even steal down to 30 degrees!

 

[Brit]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

I'm definitely going to make some of these Div. In the words of Humphrey Bogart "Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon…"

You're an excellent teacher my friend.

 

[SPalm]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

Hey Div, this is so cool. I remember when you first posted your coach maker's rabbet plane. I was blown away. So I will attempt to follow along and someday do one of these. It looks like a lot of fun.

I have never used planes very much, as I was always a power tool guy. But I should learn, and building one seems like a good transition from power to hand.

Thanks,
Steve

 

[Bearpie]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

I have not been able to work in my workshop as it is a mess right now because I am in the middle of super sizing it. I am going from a 12' x 20' to a 24' x 20' doubling the size! I'm excited because it means I'll have more working space. It is supposed to be finished next week then I get all the fun of finishing the interior, insulating, wiring, putting down solid vinyl tiles, making shelves, painting…..you get the picture! Hopefully I will be able to do it within a month, at least that's my goal for now.

I will be making one when I get caught up and thanks Div for the excellent instructions!

Erwin, Jacksonville, FL

 

[Dennisgrosen]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

great blog Div
thank´s for taking the time to do it

take care
Dennis

 

[stefang]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

The construction looks very straight forward Div, however, I will probably be using a spade bit for mine. It seems to me that the mouth would have to be more narrow in the part where the shaft will be to prevent sideways movement. I sure would appreciate hearing your solution to this problem if you have one.

 

[woodspark]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

Brit, please do. It is not that hard, real fun and it works!

Bearpie, good luck with the upgrade. Let us know when you get down to it!

Dennis, no problem.

Stefang, the middle block of your plane needs to be just a bit wider than the shaft of your spade bit. Some sideways movement is good to allow for adjusting the blade. If the cutting edge of your blade is not exactly square, sideways movement will take care of that. It also allows for centering the blade exeactly.
Once the wedge is in tight, the blade won't go anywhere. Does that make sense to you? The photos in the next installment will clarify a lot!

 

[patron]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

got some katalox
almost like ebony
hard and heavy
think i'll use rosewood
got lot's of it
5/4" in the rough
and hard maple too

 

[woodspark]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

never heard of katalox? Rosewood will be beautiful, you know what kind? That stuff real expensive down here. We have African Rosewood but it is not a real rosewood.

 

[patron]

About body parts and even a mouth...

24 hours later and I'm back in my favorite chair! It sounds like some has already sourced plane irons in many different ways. Good! Bertha is ordering a brandnew blade, Derosa found some old plane blades at a local junk store and his Dremel with cutting disc is eager to go! Grittyroots has some old molding planes and wants to use an iron from on of those. Bearpie in Jacksonville has some old worn out metal cutting saw blades about 1/8" thick by 2" wide and 18" long. Good idea, Bearpie! Correct me if I'm wrong but I think those are also made from HSS. It will do the trick just fine in my opinion. I spent a few months in Jacksonville once during my sailing days. There was this one girl….Sorry, I'm getting off track here….

To remind us where we are going:

The plane body - making it.
The basic process involves first cutting the shape of your plane from some timber, then cutting the plane body lengthways into 3 pieces on the bandsaw. This allows us to work on the middle part where the tang of the blade will be before gluing the whole lot back together again. Bear with me, it will get clear soon! Doing it this way makes life easier. It can be done with a solid piece of wood but that involves cutting a rather small mortise at an angle through your block of wood. A tricky operation….I know because I did it on this Coach makers Rabbetplane:

Let's go the easy route first. We can get to the solid body type later if you want…

OK, I found a piece of HSS steel that will do the trick for me. My blade will be 15mm wide when done. That is a little under 5/8" if you speak American. Yes, it is narrow, but I want to make a tiny plane!

The finished width of the plane body needs to be a little less than the width of the blade. For now, let's say it needs to be the same, thus 15 mm. Because I will be cutting it into 3 pieces on my band saw, I add twice the bandsaw kerf width which is 1,5mm in my case. Therefore 2×1,5mm = 3mm. Let's make it 4mm to allow for sanding. Thus I thickness my timber to 15 + 4 = 19 mm. Whilst I'm at the machines, I also joint the edges square.

Draw the shape of your plane on that nice, freshly dimensioned piece of timber. Any shape that pleases you, fancy or simple, will work. You might want to think about ergonomics if you want this fellow to sit nicely in your hand. About the only important thing is that the length of the sole in front of the blade should be less than the length behind it. Take a look at any other Western style plane to get a sense of the proportion. Oh, and I guess you do want your blade to come out the top, so check your shape against the length of your planned plane iron!

Referring to the photo above, mark a 45 degree line to show where the bottom of the blade will sit. This is a good time to talk a little about that angle since it will determine the characteristics and use of your plane.

What are the advantages of the different set angles?
• 45º - Great for planing softwoods and North American hardwoods such as maple and walnut and such. It can handle figured maple well, but will have problems with figured cherry and walnut. This angle is the easiest to push/pull.
• 47° - A good compromise between good tear-out performance and effortless use.
• 50º - Great for North American hardwoods with some to lots of figure. It can handle pine, if needed, and can take on straight grained tropicals, too. This plane takes more effort than the 45 but is not hard to pull/push.
• 55º - For highly-figured American hardwoods and figured tropicals. This plane takes more effort to push/pull than the others, but easily gives good results on figured woods.
• 60º - For extremely hard-to-work woods and for use as a scraper plane. It takes the most effort to use this plane.
If you want to use your shoulder plane mostly for cross grain work, such as cleaning up tenons, you might even want to lower that angle some.

Back to the photo above. The leftmost line represents the bottom of your blade. Using the actual blade as a marking/measuring tool, draw the next line showing the top of the blade. The distance between these two lines represents the thickness of the blade. Then, mark out for the wedge. The red line in the photo represents the top edge of the wedge.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Note that I start this line from the point where the upper blade line meets the sole. I'm not allowing anything for the mouth opening at this stage! That will come later.
The cross hatched area in the photo shows where the wedge will eventually be. Don't ask me what the angle for that wedge is, I just eyeball it! If you really want a number, I guess something like a 1 to 8 rise will do. Using a little tri-square, transfer the lines onto the sole and top of the body.

Next, drill the large diameter 19mm hole as in the picture. It is important to line the edge of the hole with the line representing the bottom of the blade. If you are clever, drill the hole first, then draw your lines! Easier that way! The distance between the bottom edge of the hole and the sole is around 10 mm in this case. If you are building a bigger plane, the hole and the bottom distance can be larger.

I use brass brazing rod to make pins to index and hold all the parts together. In my case the brazing rod's diameter was 2mm, so I drill the 4 small 2mm holes. 1/8" brazing rod will work well for bigger planes, even 3/16" if you want.

Right, to the band saw to cut the thing into 3 pieces. Wait, first a little thinking again! My tagline doesn't say for nothing: "A woodworker's sharpest tool should be his mind!" It is hard but I try… The middle section need to be the same width as the tang of the blade. If you buy a finished blade it means you have to dimension the thickness of the centre piece to the width of the tang on your blade. It actually needs to be a little more to allow for some lateral adjustment of your plane iron. Since I haven't made the blade yet, it can be whatever I like and I can cut the blade to suit. I decided to make the cheeks about 3mm thick in my case. So the middle piece will eventually be around 15 - (2×3) = 9mm. More or less! Set the fence 3mm away from the blade, add a little cause it just looks so narrow (!?) and clamp down.

Cut a cheek off each side. As you can see my blade was not too sharp. That frigging Purpleheart burns so easily!

My cuts were not too wonderful, so I decided to sand away the band saw marks on a flat sanding block. If you have a sharp and decent bandsaw blade this is probably not necessary. With the crappy blade I used, I got a little wander. I wish I could buy decent bandsaw blades in this joint. You guys are spoiled for choice! Oh, and a bad craftsman always blames his tools……

2 thin cheeks and one thicker middle piece ready to go! By picking up the marks on the sole and top, reestablish the blade and wedge lines on the centre piece.

Dry fitted my 3 pieces back together again just to check that my sanded surfaces fit well…

…Then cut that middle part into pieces! Carefully cut to the inside of the lines on the band saw or with handsaw if you want. If you look closely you will see that I left the lines just visible. I sand/plane the landing straight and square to the side. Save that middle piece! Later on this will give you the shape of the wedge to be made.

Testing the landing with the blade to be to check that it is nice and flat and square. You will notice that I didn't leave any gap between the body and the blade where the mouth opening will be. For now we want it tight, we can always open it up a little more later.

The 2 central body pieces and the 2 cheeks temporarily assembled with my brass pins which reference all the parts nicely. You can see the opening at the top where the tang of the blade will come out. The wedge will go in there to hold the blade tightly in place.

The view from the bottom. You also see the piece of jointing knife that will become my blade. Everything looks OK, so it's time to glue the parts together. Pull the four pins, give all the glue surfaces an even coating of your favorite sticky stuff and pin together again.

Clamped together with my motley collection of 1" and 2" clamps. Rather too many than too little…

Now we have to watch the glue dry! This could be a good time to clean up the shop a little…or …an even better time to enjoy something wet whilst contemplating matters of importance. Mads can light his pipe now and I will do the same. After all, glue drying is not a process to be rushed!

We have to be well rested for tomorrow ;^) Important work awaits. The mouth of our plane needs to be finely tuned then!

If anything is not clear, give a shout and I'll respond in due time. There is nothing I can do if your mind is not clear. That something wet we talked about…?!

this rosewood from indonesia
here is some