Pretty sweet Dave! That sure must have been tough to do so cleanly in that wood. Way cool. Glad it's working pretty well.
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Pretty sweet Dave! That sure must have been tough to do so cleanly in that wood. Way cool. Glad it's working pretty well.
Woodworking is terrific for keeping in shape, but it's also a deadly serious killing system...
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I measured it just now, the final dimension is just a hair over 2.75" wide, so it's just a bit more narrow.Originally Posted by Mike Allen1010
For practical use, I think a laminated plane is probably just as good, as long as it's made properly. My objection to the laminated planes is two-fold, and it's just my opinion:
1) I think if someone is paying a lot of money, they deserve a plane that is cut from one piece, especially once it gets into multi-hundreds of dollars.
2) cutting a plane out of a single bit of wood is a good skill builder. You can't rely on power tools to cut a perfect bed, or to work in the mortise, etc. You get to rely on your eyes more to (try to) do tight work
Trust me, this plane is easier than any of the furniture you've posted (by miles). A couple of floats and a blunted chisel with a long handle makes the job easier, and you can see flat very well over a bed surface, so you just mortise close to your marks and then adjust. You can wing it more on something like this than you can on furniture.
(just be sure to check your iron thickness before you select a drill bit to open the mouth!)
Some part of this is having a decent plane to look at, too. When you do, you know if you stay fairly close to a good working plane that you'll get a good working plane. I got a rough idea of the curvature from a marples coffin smoother that I have, otherwise, without good pictures or something, how would you know where the plane is at its widest, and for instance, how much extra width you'd like a the wedge (this one has no room to spare, which looks nicer to me).
Well, I guess you might need a couple of gouges, too. I've always cut the eyes with a chisel before, but this plane wouldn't allow it - a false move into the grain raises a long thick splinter/crack, so they had to be cut cross grain with a gouge. It worked well enough that I'll do them all with a gouge, and clean them up by scraping with a marking knife.
For someone like steve, who will have patterns and templates for cutting abutments (because he's been making a fair number of planes), that part isn't bad either. I don't have any such things, I just mark them and cut them freehand and clean them up. If you're only going to make a few planes, that's fine.
FTR, it probably took about 7 or 8 hours to make this plane. To make a nice krenov plane (first one) and think about where the vitals will be (pin mouth, etc), shape it and finish the outside, would probably take a third of that or so. But 7 or 8 hours isn't that much for a plane that will last indefinitely. If one had patterns and was willing to make a few, I'm sure one could be made in half that.
Last edited by David Weaver; 04-27-2014 at 10:24 AM.
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Thanks, Derek. It is 8 3/8" long, 2.75" wide at its widest point, 2 7/8" tall and the iron is 2 1/8" wide, with a cap iron of course. It is 2 pounds and 15 ounces, exactly 1 pound heavier than the 2" wide beech marples smoother I made it to replace.
you'd love the cap iron on this one, too, it is the first one on these types (where there is really a lot of spring in these older design cap irons) where you place it in position and tighten the screw and the leading edge doesn't move. I guess the cap iron moves at the other end - toward the top of the iron. I did the usual, which is to leave it set loose before tightening it (figure it would creep up on the edge), but it stays exactly where it started every time. As it did that the first few times, I thought "derek would love this one!".
This iron is a Nurse iron, one of my favorite english companies. Being cheap, though I only have two nurse things. It's shaped like a more vintage iron, but I would guess that it's probably early 1900s because it's a solid piece of what sharpens and feels like oil hardening steel. It doesn't have the dry-ish feeling that water hardening steel has.
The difference in planes and focus probably has a lot to do with the woods we work.
Contributor
It's very well turned out David and if the board your smoothing is any proof, it does a fine job!
Bumbling forward into the unknown.
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Good eye on the chamfers. Every element on this plane was copied from something else - like the honky tonk man said about his gimmick (he said he stole it from someone else, just like everyone else does).
I have a couple of planes that have wedges sort of like that, but whoever chiseled the chamfers did it in a hurry and didn't make them even (an economic reality, I guess). These same chamfers are on the top of the cap iron that came with this set.
The worst thing about the last plane I made was the wedge - it was too short and the proportions were bad. I didn't want that to be the case on this one. It's always easier to make something nice after you make something that isn't and have a chance to think about why it isn't.
Making the mistake on the mouth sizing on this wasn't very nice, but it all but guarantees I won't do it again.
What's really lacking on this plane, though, is that the bevel on the sides isn't as crisp as I'd like. There's two reasons for that - the plane isn't wide enough for me to cut them in more (and the more they're cut in, the easier it is to get them even so that the sharp line made by the bevel stays straight), and 2, I cut them with a stanley #4 and a card scraper. I'd guess a spokeshave might've been a better tool to do it. Maybe next time.
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Nice looking plane.
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Thanks Brian.
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Courtesy of the postman, another iron showed up over the weekend (did I say that already?). I&H sorby, 2 1/4" wide, absolutely as wide as I'd go with a smoother. Well, it came with a cap iron, too, of course.
This plane works fine, but I think this is worth doing one more time. especially now that I have good proportions that i like, and we'll get the mouth done a little better. I've got plenty of wood left to do it, and I can do better than what I did - it was carelessness.
I'll do it a lot slower this time and take more pictures. I don't get the sense that lots of folks would really want to build a coffin smoother, as big of a pain in the butt as it is to find good wood, but nobody has made one like I like them to be made and shown the pictures along the way as well as an exact array of the tools they've used (though the tool array isn't really that important). There are a lot of plane builds online, but some of the critical things are missing, like the meeting of the wear and the abutments, etc, and the angle of the wear, exactly where the mouth is,....all of that junk.
I'll put into display what I said to pat - nobody told me how to make planes. I gleaned the ideas from other planes and some very brief (but important) discussions a long while ago with rob lee and ron brese about bedding to make a plane that not only works well when it's set, but one that also adjusts properly (i.e., when you tap it in the back, the iron retreats the same amount across its width).
Contributor
Looks great. Just when I thought I had control of the plane building itch. I've got a nice ironwood blank. SWMBO is gonna not like this........
The Plane Anarchist
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Nice work on the plane David. I wonder about the roundovers on the top. They look a little small but it may just be the picture. How does it feel for pushing?
Also - curious about you comment above. What do you do so that the tight mouth isn't all that important?
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Use the cap iron, then the size of the mouth matters only in respect to it not being so large that the plane can tip over things and try to take a big bite.
The mouth is somewhat of an inferior method of tearout control compared to the cap iron, though, so in the balance of things, you're much much better off with a working cap iron and a loose mouth, than a cap iron in bad shape and a tight mouth.
Use of the cap iron will quickly illuminate why a lot of the later made wooden planes had wide open mouths, even before they take on much wear. Same story with some of the infills that have large mouths.
The roundovers are fine, partly because the plane is a pound heavier and doesn't bash the hands as much, and partly because the only contact that you get on a coffin plane that's a little annoying is the tip of your thumb can work against the iron a little bit in heavy use, but it's not the kind of thing that would wear off skin or anything.
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It wasn't my boss who liked the steel toe planes. It was the old English cabinet maker who was the sole furniture conservator at Wmsbg. when I got there in 1970. I wanted one,but never found one,so I took a regular coffin smoother and made ione out of it. The steel toe is 1/4": thick. You have to have enough thickness to allow some decent threads in the hole. Note how the toe of the steel insert is fully rounded on the front edge. They were made this way.They used to sell these toes separately in catalogs,so you could convert your cheaper all wood plane. With this steel toe,you can easily adjust the mouth of the plane however you wanted it to be. As you can see,I used this plane a lot. I actually re shaped the sides to a more pleasing shape,and filled the plane with raw linseed oil. It has a Butcher iron. The brass inlet into the top is 1/4" thick,so it wouldn't bend under the tension of the adjustment screw.
I have included a BAD (these pics are ALL bad) picture of an English applewood plane. It has the most beautiful form of eyes I have yet seen. Notice how the eyes do not taper out to nothing at their front ends. They could be a bit more parallel to the sides,however. I did not alter them because it would mess up the old,dark brown patina of the applewood. They allow a bit easier access to clearing out chips,but could have been cut a bit larger,and closer to the sides of the plane,too. I just like the way the fronts of the eyes were done. Food for thought. If you cut your eyes at a steeper angle,you could make them like this plane.
That Cuban mahogany blank I sent you would make a pretty heavy smoother too. Especially if you filled it with oil.
Last edited by george wilson; 04-28-2014 at 10:20 PM.
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Put on a viking hat, get out a beer, and some chisels and a mallet!
Getting a decent piece of wood and a decent smoother in hand to look at and study are the two hardest parts. The rest is cake....apparently I couldn't handle the drill bit size, but it should be easy on the next round.
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I kind of like the eyes that come to a point at the front of the plane, though either way would be fine. The eyes on my plane look a little funny because the cheeks are still a bit fat and I cut them close to the sides. You can see on the right eye of mine, it's not perfectly even at the edge back to front (which I am aware of), I was just a little too lazy to fix it.
The eyes on the english plane I had in another thread are my favorites. They are perfectly made and very delicate, i can't remember where that went. I would love to build a long plane, but finding a beech blank has never happened and my beech guy has pretty much retired. I have QS 5/4 or larger (handle stock) hard maple and beech, but neither of those in a nice 4x4 blank.
I wouldn't, however, build a plane better than the english try plane or the mathiesen jack that I have, it's a simple fact - they are both perfectly done. Nor any better than the jt brown jointer, but it is single iron and a double iron plane would be more capable for me since I do dimension from rough and like to be able to work a board in an x from the same side of the bench.
I won't waste that cuban mahogany on one of these builds, I'd have to be better at what I'm doing before I go for that. I can find cocobolo to replace this blank at some point in the future if I get a burr up my rear that makes me want to make more planes, but cuban mahogany isn't something I find anywhere.
The trouble is when you start making your own tools, you get really particular about what you want. I want a double iron jointer about 8 pounds with a nicely made handle, a good attractive wedge, and an older english-looking body, and I wanted a heavier coffin smoother, .......like you said the other day..."i want, i want", but i'm willing to make them if I can get my fingers on the material!
(the eyes are something that'll be a little different on version #2 of this plane because the cheeks and abutments won't be quite as fat. I have to do all of this now, though, or I'll forget about it. The wear will be 85 degrees instead of 80, too, and I will probably not make it as far up the plane, though I do like the look better when it is a bit higher.
David, I've been wondering this - when I make a laminated plane with a separate sole, I first make the body, then glue the sole on in 1 over-thick piece.
then I chop a V into the sole from the inside, and then plane the bottom to expose the opening. from there it's all files and planing. why not do the same with a solid body plane? glue on a piece of 1\4 inch poplar or something to the bottom to prevent tearout at the mouth?
I just thought maybe the drilling is done to clear out waste (?) and so I don't get it because I haven't done it yet. but couldn't this be used to make that step more reliable?
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