Beech Jointer Build

[David Weaver]

The oil filling really works great with very old wood,like an old wooden plane.

Hopefully it will work well with fresh wood, too. The try plane stock I pictured above is going to be just over 6 pounds in finished form. It's a bit of a quibble, but the other try planes I have are 7 pounds, and I recall adding linseed oil to the one I've been using because it was a pound light.

[george wilson]

Be sure to use good window putty instead of paper towels this time. Caulking MIGHT also work,but it will be a mess if it doesn't. I'd prefer to stay with what I know will work. So,unsqueeze your Pa. Dutch fist and buy some putty!!

I'm pretty sure I successfully filled new made planes I made with raw oil,but it was a long time ago.

[Zach Dillinger]

Be sure to use good window putty instead of paper towels this time. Caulking MIGHT also work,but it will be a mess if it doesn't. I'd prefer to stay with what I know will work. So,unsqueeze your Pa. Dutch fist and buy some putty!!

Or, even better, buy some whiting and make your own. The whiting is probably even cheaper than the store-bought putty and you've already got the linseed oil...

[george wilson]

Is whiting as cheap as putty? Might depend upon the smallest can or tube you can find. I'd hope I would not have to buy a quart can for this one use.

[David Weaver]

Be sure to use good window putty instead of paper towels this time. Caulking MIGHT also work,but it will be a mess if it doesn't. I'd prefer to stay with what I know will work. So,unsqueeze your Pa. Dutch fist and buy some putty!!

I'm pretty sure I successfully filled new made planes I made with raw oil,but it was a long time ago.

I can't see why it wouldn't work well with them - they have a bunch of straws that have never been capped with other oil, etc.

[Zach Dillinger]

Is whiting as cheap as putty? Might depend upon the smallest can or tube you can find. I'd hope I would not have to buy a quart can for this one use.

I buy whiting chalk for about $5 a kilogram. The little tiny tub of store bought putty, at least in these parts, costs about the same. The whiting has myriad other uses as well.

[David Weaver]

Is whiting as cheap as putty? Might depend upon the smallest can or tube you can find. I'd hope I would not have to buy a quart can for this one use.

I'll probably just cut a piece of rubber and plug it. That will be free.

[Zach Dillinger]

I'll probably just cut a piece of rubber and plug it. That will be free.

Free is good

[george wilson]

I can practically guarantee that your rubber plug will leak all the oil out. You need the stickiness of the putty to really get into the grain of the wood to seal off the leaking. It will still leak some,even at that,but it remains the best way I have found to plug your plane up.

Here's an idea I just thought of: Get a piece of really soft but not porous rubber sheet. Cut a 2" x 3" piece of it and place it between the plane and a decently thick plank you are clamping it to. Securely clamp the plane down,squeezing the rubber tight. That MIGHT work. Place the clamps close to each end of the escapement so as to not warp the plane.

[David Weaver]

Been there before with the slow leak!

Maybe I'll just do the same setup I had last time. You'd be surprised how well the paper towels worked (the blue shop towel type). It took a long time for the oil to drain out and the plane itself had oil coming out of the sole.

Last time I did it, I wasn't thinking and waxed the plane first, so I don't think the oil had the chance to move unrestricted like it would've if I'd have not oiled it.

[george wilson]

Not sure if you can get a POUND of linseed oil into your plane. As linseed is lighter than water,that means more than a pint can to make your plane a pound heavier.

[David Weaver]

I've got a quart of oil, about 3/4ths of it is left. It'll be a couple of weeks before I finish the plane, though in terms of time, I'm going much faster this time (except I handsawed the black this time because I felt a bit cheated last time).

I hope I can get about a pound's worth through the grain in the try plane, because that's what I want the weight to increase by. The mortised blank is a little under 6 pounds, and 7 pounds is a nice weight for a try plane. I might not quite need a pound, but I have two old try planes where one was 6 and the other 7 and some change, and the one that's 7 pounds is nicer to work. Strange how a pound makes that much difference, but it makes quite a bit (makes a huge difference in coffin smoothers).

[David Weaver]

I learned something worth noting today, and that is that when mortising the plane initially, you can mortise a lot faster if the chisel has a steeper bevel. The reason for that being that at some point, the bevel on the chisel is steep enough that the moritised pieces of beech don't stick together, they shoot out of the mortise and don't stay around inside the plane, and if they do, you can turn the plane over and they fall out (vs. staying attached to something).

That and the mortise should be done progressively left to right rather than both outsides and the middle (it wouldn't take someone long to figure that out, though - you can mortise wood a lot more easily if it's not attached to other wood on one side).

Mortising is always done bevel down with the chisel so that it's climbing up the grain of the wood as it's working instead of going straight across. The cut is much easier (meaning you can take bigger bites) and the edge lasts multiples of what it would going perpendicular to the grain. Plus, both sides of the mortise are on an angle, so there's no need to go bevel up straight into the wood.

I could see being able to fairly easily make two of these planes a day if I made a dozen more, I could make this one in a long day at this point and have it bedded and tight (meaning made absolutely properly).

[David Weaver]

Finished (except for finish, and probably a little bit of oil).

Same issue again with the handle, kind of tubby at the top. I followed the picture of the JT brown handle like a slave this time, though, so I guess that's the pattern. I'll probably let in the top of the handle just a little bit go give the handle a little more forward and down. The side profile picture does make it look a little worse than it is, and the view from behind gives a better perspective of the curve cut on the top of the handle.

I was a lot less careful on this plane. Total time to this point, even hand sawing the original blank and preparing the iron, is less than 10 hours. It's probably more like 8.

I did all of the heavy work on the handle with a chisel this time, then light rasping with the gramercy rasp and a card scraper. Almost no sanding, which is left the handle just slightly less refined, but over time that'll get ignored.

One more to go ( a jack ) and then I'll have to decide if I care to make any more of them. I like making them, for sure.

Jim Matthews hooked me up with what looks like an unused butcher iron and cap iron 2 9/16 inches wide, no slot needed in the wedge because the screw doesn't come out the top like it does in an english set.

Mouth is probably a bit too tight for the cap iron, it's somewhere between 75 and 80 degrees, but I can open it up a little bit after the plane is oiled - it doesn't need to be that tight.P1040268.jpgP1040269.jpgP1040270.jpgP1040271.jpg

[Kees Heiden]

Great work David. I love to read these threads. Your last post about how you chisel the mortise is a bit cryptic, but I think I got it now.

It would be interesting to see how you get along with a tight mouth like that in a wooden double iron plane. So don't widen it too soon!

You are rather quick now, making these planes, for an amateur! Could you envision making 5 planes in a working day? That was the kind of reckless speed they made back in the days when this was still a 7 to 6, 6 days a week, job.