Beech Jointer Build

[Brian Holcombe]

I had to look it up to find out what that even is. I thought it might be something that you'd put on the outside of a suitcase, or that you'd make a hat out of!

Hah, that it does. My wife hates it, dubbed it 'old man smell'.

[george wilson]

I have mentioned that my wife likes the way I smell when I use linseed oil. Strange!! She said it reminded her of the smell of her grand mother's closet. When she was a little girl,she'd go in there and set it up to be her "office",and pretend she was in business.

I have never cared to smell of linseed oil !! Especially when it gets old smelling.

[David Weaver]

Laying out the blank. The first thing I did was examine the ends and decide what I wanted to remove. One end of the stick has the tiniest little check, so with the spare inch on this billet, most will come off of that end.

I'm going to provide all of the measurements, and if anyone else wants to make a 28" jointer and is satisfied with the appearance of this, you can just do it.

Make sure before you do any of this, that your blank is straight and square. If it's not, you might have a couple of marking problems. I mark in this order.

* draw the back of the mouth 9.75" from the front
* draw the 45 degree bed line from the mouth at the bottom of the plane to the top of the plane. If you're not sure that you want to learn the cap iron but you have a double iron, better make this 50 - it'll still work well with the cap iron if you do.
* using the iron you will use with your plane, lay the iron on the bed line to get the minimum mouth and mark the front of the mouth with your iron's thickness. (You can mark an extra 16th if you want. I think it's important to get the mouth marked right, you'll work to it with chisels or a float, and if you work outside of your marks, you're sort of in no man's land. )
* from the front of the mouth mark, draw your wear on the side of the plane. Mine is 78 degrees. You can go closer to 90 degrees if you want a little more room for error. I wouldn't go much tighter on a double iron plane. My wear is 1" high. It's about that on all of the single iron planes I have.
* connect a 60 degree line from the top of the plane to the wear. I don't know what's typical. I have some less steep than 60 and some more.
* draw a center line on the top and bottom of the plane
* transfer the escapement and bed lines to the top of the plane and draw a box to be mortised around the center line 1/2" less than the width of your iron at the bottom (that gives you quarter inch abutments, which will look nice. ( I'm going to talk about the vintage irons in a separate post - it's important to the measurements. )
* find the width of the iron where it will sit at the top of the mortise. Add a fat 16th for lateral movement (you can do more if you want, but less looks better - it should only be a problem if your iron is ground way out of square). In this case, my top width at the bed is going to be 2.5" + a 16th, but I'm going to work just inside those pencil lines to give me a fat 16th of lateral movement.
* The distance between the back of the bed and the abutment at the top of the mortise will be 1 and 3/16 ths of an inch. Mark it on the top. If you are not using a double iron or vintage irons, you will need a different mark. please don't go to the trouble to make a plane like this and then insert a stanley iron and cap iron in the plane.
* turn the plane over to the bottom and mark the mouth width - it should be exactly the iron width. You don't want it to be any wider than just letting the iron through when you're done. If it's wide, you'll have lateral adjustment problems. I wrote myself a note to make sure I don't remove my lines completely, or I'll have lateral slop.

Pictures of what everything looks like - the side.

P1040084.jpg

The top of the plane
P1040092.jpg

The bottom / mouth area
P1040093.jpg

[David Weaver]

About the vintage irons:

the vintage irons are tapered in their thickness and they're also tapered in their width. In my case, the iron is a 16th narrower where it comes out of the mortise than it is at the business end, where it's about exactly 2.5". When I insert the iron, it still has to pass through the top of the mortise, so the top has to be at least 2.5" plus a little. That's just about perfect for an attractive setup at the top of the plane, and it will give me enough for lateral adjustment.

Keep that taper on the irons in mind when you mark the top of your mortise (as in, don't mark with the cutting edge at the top of your mortise), or you'll end up with a lot of lateral slop which looks ugly. If your iron tapers like mine, then going just a tiny bit wider than the width of the iron at the business end should work well.

Most of us are pikers (I am), but we can at least try to get the proportions and the gaps, etc to be visually pleasing, and be mindful of how the irons, etc, were designed to be used in a plane.

[David Weaver]

This looks familar:

I do this on the bottom of the mouth so the drill bit doesn't wander when I come along to drill it. I hate that - you get long lines that look like those dynamite holes in rock if your drill bit goes off course. Careful with the drilling, do it slowly, keep it out of the wear and out of the abutments.

P1040098.jpg

I guess you could drill first if you like. I don't like to. Cutting the mortise for the plane is one of the best parts of all of this - it gives you a lot of time to watch the wood get worked and ponder how to speed up cutting mortises in general. It takes about a half hour to get this much of a mortise cut. I'd like to see a "real" planemaker back in the day cutting these mortises.

I used an iyoroi chisel this time (a bench chisel), sharpened only with the washita - I gave it a small rounded bevel and it handled this fine (iyoroi chisels are a bit soft among japanese chisels, some others won't sharpen on a washita very well).
P1040100.jpg

something interesting happens when you sharpen these on a washita. The jigane (soft part) sort of refreshes the stone a little bit. These are wrought instead of mild steel or harder non-wrought, which helps sharpenability on a washita. they get sharper on the washita than any western chisel I have.

[Matthew N. Masail]

I'm starting to think a laminated plane is just as much work... just more messing around and less woodworking

[Kees Heiden]

I've once seen a Japanese video from a guy bashing out dai mortices at high speed. If someone knows where to find that one?
The planemakers fom yesterday were expected to complete about 5 bench planes a day! A long day perhaps, buts still, that's fast.

[David Weaver]

Mark Hennebury put up a video if hisao working in context, and he was using a 6 pound hammer to cut mortises in planes. The speed that he cut macassar ebony was shocking, though it looked subtle when he was doing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Kae...ature=youtu.be (right at 1 hour - after he goes through his knuckle cracking routine)

There's a familiarity with what you can do when you have experience that I've never been able to...well...experience in woodworking.

[David Weaver]

I'm starting to think a laminated plane is just as much work... just more messing around and less woodworking

I think that's probably true to make one with decent aesthetics, though a beginner could make one without having to chisel anything.