Good morning, folks - and Merry Christmas to you and yours.
It was all blood, sweat and tears making the bun and tote for this plane out of a cant of snakewood, not to mention the stress that came from knowing that if the wood exploded on me, I had no Plan B. As I noted in an earlier post, exactly that had happened in my first go-round with this ornery wood, and I didn't want to ask the client who commissioned the plane to send me more of the snakewood out of which he had asked me to make it.
But I got it done without hitch by keeping the wood for this No. 4 infill away from the machines in my shop and instead shaping the tote and bun mostly by hand - and by sitting down to breathe in, breathe out whenever my stress level rose above the level of my ears.
The pitch is 45 degrees. The iron is A-2 tool steel, two inches wide and a quarter inch thick. The base is 0-1 tool steel, the sides mild steel; they are dovetailed and pinned.
There's a steel frog half an inch high inside the plane, set back far enough from the mouth to permit me to continue the frog's bevel through the base, too, such that the bed for the iron goes all the way from there up to the point where the cyma curve in front of the tote ends.
No way is this iron gonna chatter.
I did all of that work on my mill, of course, and I also used the mill with Forstner bits to establish the big arc of the cyma curve on the tote, the top and bottom arcs of the hand hole, and the arc at the top of the tote around which to wrap thumb and forefinger. I roughed out the basic lines of the tote on my hand saw, but after that it was all hand work. What joy it is to go looking for beauty in wood with hand tools!
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