I’ve been playing around with new designs for my infill planes, along with new production methods, and thought it might be time to post some photos.
Counting from the left, the first and third of these planes are the size of a Stanley 4.5, more or less - length about 10 inches, width 2 3/8 inches. The irons in these planes are 2 3/8 inches wide, pitched at 45 degrees. The infills respectively are Brazilian pepperwood – or so I was told by the acquaintance who gave me the billet from which I made the infill – and blue gum eucalyptus. The infill in the second plane from the left is black walnut, as is the infill in the last plane on the left. The infill in the plane next to that last one is black acacia. I gave these two planes the dimensions of a Stanley No. 4. Ditto the second plane from the left.
I'm not sure how it came to mind to carve that fillip atop the totes on the Brazilian pepperwood and black walnut planes on the left, but I can offer you a nice story. One day, using rasps to shape the tote on the black walnut plane, I thought: Why not have fun and maybe leave matters up in the air here, as it were?
I liked the result – and also saw the risk in the design: Drop the plane and it's a goner. But so what? The same risk is inherent in the bun on all my planes, which George Wilson, quoting someone who didn't like them one bit, likened to the gasp of a fish drowning in air.
That doesn't sound right. It wasn't George who compared the buns on my planes to a fish out of water. It was someone else; George passed the comment on to me in good faith, without endorsing it.
Even so, I took the comment without offense - mostly because that is in fact what the buns on my planes look like. But I also say: If there's something of the sea in the bun, the same is true of the tote on the two planes mentioned earlier as well, if you look closely at the shape of that fillip. Follow the lines converging on the fillip and you see the head and bill of a shore bird – an avocet, maybe (if avocets had short bills, that is) or a lowly duck with an upturned, snooty bill. Donald Duck had such a bill, as I recall.
It hadn't occurred to me that I might have had avocets or ducks or critters of any sort in mind when shaping that that particular fillip. But when someone pointed out that the lines were those of a shorebird, the light bulb in my head lit up and I recalled the many, many Sunday afternoons I spend with my sweet wife Elise on the seashore a few miles north of where we live in California, watching shorebirds chase down their prey in the sands of the beach as the waves of the ocean wash up on shore and then fall away again.
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I've made three planes with this design so far and have commissions for two more, both with infills of blue-gum eucalyptus. I call them my shorebird planes.
Here's another new infill, this one the size of a Stanley 5.25, more or less, with a 1 3/4 inch iron pitched at 45 degrees. The infill is ebonized black walnut via the vinegar-and-steel-wool method.
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