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Thread: Beech Jointer Build

  1. #181
    Looking good! A great collection of users that will last a lifetime.

  2. #182
    My compliments too. Just put that Stanley #4 away for a while and you'll learn to appreciate your cocobolo smoother soon enough.

  3. #183
    Join Date
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    Thanks for the nice comments guys. I hope if anyone else is building an of these planes, they'll speak up. The discussions about them were interesting, but traffic for projects here seems to be tailing off.

    When I'm building planes, I fight my laziness a little bit. It's obviously work to sink a mortise as tightly as this handle is sunk, and I'm still not using any templates for anything other than a few sample measurements off of a plane and a printed picture of a handle (as in, I don't drill the handle or anything, just cut it close with a chisel and then finish it with a gouge).

    One thing I couldn't ever get control of before all of this was quick excavation of waste using something other than mortising (I had stray drill bit marks everywhere, and a drill press isn't a tool I use much). I guess it could be argued cutting the initial mortise in a half hour isn't particularly quick, but it's quick enough and risk free or close to it.

    The only thing sanded on this plane is a tiny bit around the eyes (which isn't really necessary) and I sanded the rear hump after paring facets off. The rest of it could be made sharper by sanding (like the handle - not the facet joints, of course), but I just scraped it with a card scraper and a shop knife for anywhere the card scraper doesn't fit. It occurs to me that I should make something a little more photogenic if I'm going to take pictures of it, but ..well, I'm too lazy.

    One final parting thought. I sharpen every float each time I do this, or every one I use, except for the edge float. The bed float doesn't do much unless it's near perfectly sharp - too much surface area otherwise. I didn't do this at first, but it takes about 2 minutes to sharpen a float if it's not in bad shape and I'm sure it saves way more than two minutes - it's the difference between fighting the bed float vs. springing it and being able to work a lot of wood off of it at a time.

  4. #184
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    Well I did acquire, very cheaply, a huge honking piece of hardwood 4inch square and 25inch long... problem is, it's Greenheart... I think It might be a "leave until you can do it perfectly" kind of wood

  5. #185
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    It'll be really heavy, but you can always make it a bit shorter to make up for that. Now you have to task yourself with finding a piece of quartered or rift to make a handle.

    Beech density is pretty much ideal to make a plane that's almost square in cross section (in terms of weight). Anything lighter feels whiffy, and anything heavier feels arduous.

    (I'd make another plane first, too. what are your prospects for inexpensive medium hardwoods? You can work with chippy woods as long as all of the cuts face in toward the middle of the plane, and still make something The only place I can think of where there's possible trouble is if you have to adjust the abutments - the wood will be chippy there)

  6. #186
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    I could probably get beech, there is a huge supplier of beech over here that has thick stock, steamed and not steamed and so forth. my biggest issue is finances, I cannot afford anything at current times. getting the beech would mean driving down there and buying a big board and knowing me I'd want to get some other stock for furniture and handles while I'm at it because I don't own a car.
    I'm also making more laminated planes, because I don't want to chop a mortice into a unproven desing. which is for me that hardest part by far.

  7. #187
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    Nothing is cheap, for sure. The average cost for irons for me (with cap irons) is about $40, because the only place I can seem to find unused irons in quantity is the UK (or near unused).

    It's funny that people see that as expensive, because wooden planes are usually cheap, but if you try to find a tapered iron out there that's new and slotted, well, good luck.

    The beech cost me somewhere around $30 a plane with shipping, and that was with some generosity from Prashun. That makes the price near my most expensive bought wooden planes, and I still have to make them. Are they better? Probably not better than the three planes I copied, but better than some of the old wooden planes that I've gotten. From a money proposition perspective, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense!!!

    It's easy to see why none of the current wooden plane makers want to make a traditional wooden plane in double iron format. First off, most of them probably don't know how to use one correctly, but second, neither do most of the buyers of planes, either.

    If you have to buy a large board of beech and it costs you several hundred dollars, I would allocate 25% of the board to make some smoothers or something, double iron, it's easier than it would seem to if you follow the stuff Steve and I put up, there's much less risk than it looks like there is if you have a spacer for the abutments and you cut accurately against it with something like a zero clearance saw or a modified saw like steve made, then you're good to go. Pretty much the rest of the stuff is cosmetic (like if you have some blowout on the abutments or the mouth), but the plane works well in spite of those issues. At any rate, it won't take many planes to tackle those issues. I guess it took me two coffin smoothers (a single iron and a double iron) and the rest have been fine - not cosmetically perfect, but fine in use. The blown double iron coffin smoother (ugly mouth area and funny aesthetics) could be made good by putting a steel sole on it on the front.

  8. #188
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    Yeah, there is no doubt I could have a bought at least 3 premium planes for what I've spent on irons and wood and other stuff for planemaking, and it all started to save money! honestly the best advice someone could have given me back them was to buy a LN4 and maybe 6, a low angle block and be done with it. my fanciest planes are Bailey 4's with nice iron, but I'd sure love to have a LN one day. lately I reach for my 9" krenovs more much more often than the Baileys, I guess for me that's to thing about making planes, you can keep making them until you have some that just feel right and you enjoy using them.


    I don't know how much the beech would cost, but 200$-300$ sounds like a good guess. that's a lot of money over here. I'm confused why I'd want to make coffin smoothers out of beech? the krenovs work well because they have a stout blade with a low center of gravity and the pushing point is low and far enough back to give good power, somehow I Imagine a coffin smoother being less than ideal unless it's quite heavy and correctly balanced. ?


    I have another Idea, quite stupid because it involves spending yet more money... but I'd like to know what you think. the Idea is basically to buy a U shaped steel profile square inside and out (might not be perfect), and file a mouth opening and fit infills (I Imagine beech looking quite handsome). I'd weld or peen steel ears to hold the wedge. I imagine I'd get "light wight" infills that might just hit the sweet-spot between mass and agility. of course, the challenge was and still is arriving at a perfectly balanced designs, but with the steel sole Stanley like designs would be possible as well as traditional (maybe only 2" high) models.

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