Two new cocobolo infills - my shorebird planes

[Juan Hovey]

Hey, everyone – Haven’t posted anything lately as I’ve been busy once again refining my designs and production methods, with results you see here.

The plane on the left is a No. 3 pitched at 50 degrees, the one on the right a No. 4 pitched at 45. The infill on both is cocobolo from a large chunk I bought on e-Bay years ago and kept around till I felt ready to do it justice. I’d been working on these planes for six weeks or so and took them to the Woodworking in America show in North Carolina earlier this month.

The irons are A-2 tool steel. For some time I’ve wanted to play around with size and length for my irons, so I made a few myself and had them professionally heat treated. The better idea, I now know, is not to fool with stuff you don't understand; I intend to ask Ron Hock to get a sneck onto my irons.

The board from which I got the shavings, incidentally, is the oldest, driest, toughest oak I've ever seen.

But, you ask, what's with the name, “shorebird planes”?

Well, I set out one fine morning some months back determined to spend the day playing with the shape of my totes. To free the mind, I spent 15 minutes or so studying a photo of one of Ron Brese’s infills with a crown – if that’s what you call it – that seemed to taper off into thin air behind the plane.

It was a lovely thing, to be sure, and I thought: Why not taper the crown upwards it so that it ends up not behind the plane but above it?

A friend smiled when he saw what I had done with this idea and said: You and your wife spend Sunday afternoons on the shore, right?

Right. Sundays on the shore at Dinosaur Park in Shell Beach, California, about 20 minutes north of Santa Maria. Lots of birds there – pelicans, cormorants, gulls of course, goslings, great egrets, you name it. Some days, if you don’t stay upwind of the big rocks where they nest, the stench will curl your nose hair.

Holding my new plane up for me to look at, my friend ran his finger upwards over the back of the tote and then forward across the top of the crown.

Do you recognize the shape? he asked. It’s the head and bill of a shorebird. You probably didn’t know it, but you had the shape in the back of your mind when you made this.

Indeed. A shorebird plane. If something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and flies like a duck, it's a duck - or maybe a gosling with a short beak, or something. Who knows? Whodathunkit, anyway?
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[Frederick Skelly]

Beautiful work, as always Juan! Thanks for posting it.
Fred

[David Weaver]

Nice, Juan. You are very productive!!

[george wilson]

Juan,the orientation of the wood grain on the front bun is much better on the one on the left. The one on the right has grain going right crossways to the thinnest section,and could easily snap off if bumped into or dropped.

[Joe Bailey]

Juan,the orientation of the wood grain on the front bun is much better on the one on the left. The one on the right has grain going right crossways to the thinnest section,and could easily snap off if bumped into or dropped.

George,
By the same reasoning, isn't the top-most part of the rear handle on the left plane equally susceptible to being broken off?

[george wilson]

Yes,the grain orientation of the handle on the RIGHT is done better. It would help Juan's work to keep grain orientation in mind on both the bun and the handle. At least,the handle is not as thin and fragile as the bun. I did not feel like being too critical of Juan's work. He is trying hard.

Juan,it would also help if your sneck was half of the thickness,and it tapered down to nearly nothing at the top of the blade. Old snecks were never that thick and blocky.One more suggestion I have made before: Get your screw maker to make the knobs half the height they are. They look way too blocky.

I don't see why you even need a sneck. Those rivets will fail and start getting loose when someone begins tapping on them. It will be another thing that will be coming back to you for repair,and there is no way to repair them. Old snecks were WELDED on.I would encourage you to at least silver solder them on if you must have them. I know it will take more work than riveting,but this is what you'll have to do if you want a strong,functional sneck that will not come loose. There is no way around it.

There,that's all the recommendations I have concerning STRENGTH. I won't get into design. I know that my friend Juan will take these suggestions in a positive manner as he always has.

[Juan Hovey]

George and Joe - Here's what the grain looks like up close and personal on the buns and crowns of these planes:

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Note that I've rounded the toe of the base, the idea being that if a user did drop the plane, the front, by protruding forward, might hit the floor first and absorb some of the damage, at the least, and maybe even protect the bun altogether.

Grain patterns aside, I recognize the risks in the designs of both crown and bun and think the benefits outweigh them - one being the grace that I, at any rate, see in the designs, and another being the fact that the shapes and positioning of the tote and bun make it more likely that the user will use the plane correctly.

To my eyes, the shape and positioning of the tote and bun on a Stanley-type plane tend to make the user bend over and get the body somewhat behind the plane with the elbow bent at 90 degrees, more or less, and with the front hand either directly on top of the knob or canted to one side. This gets the mass of the body into the game in working the plane - a plus. The bad news is that the angle of the elbow puts the forearm more or less parallel to the surface of the board - a minus, for two reasons.

The first is that it's unnatural to handle the tool this way. Think of the way you handle a dovetail or tenon saw. You don't lock the elbow when pushing and pulling the saw, right? You keep it loose, such that the angle is acute when you begin the stroke and obtuse when you finish the stroke and start pulling the saw back toward you, in a controlled, gentle rocking motion.

Kevin Drake of Glen-Drake Tools cants the handles of his dovetail and tenon saws downward with exactly this in mind. What's more, he teaches his clients to use his saws with a slight rocking motion as they begin the cut, leveling off only as they reach the bottom of the cut - again, the natural motion, and achievable only if the client keeps the elbow loose.

Kevin’s right about all this, and in designing my tote, I adapted the geometry in his idea - that is, the lines of force created by his design – to the special mechanics operating in an infill plane as it moves across a board.

Infill planes don’t work like other planes because they have more mass. I add to that mass with my planes in two ways: first, by fixing a steel frog, half an inch thick and about two inches long, to the base of the plane directly behind the mouth, and second, by fashioning my lever caps out of 5/8 inch thick 360 brass.

So my planes come to the party with plenty of mass; they don’t need more from the user. And I don’t want to see my client bend over and start pushing the plane like Sisyphus with one elbow more or less locked at 90 degrees and the other arm reaching awkwardly for the bun. I want to enable the user to control the stroke and produce either heavy or fine shavings merely by increasing or decreasing – and balancing – the forces with which he or she moves the plane across the board.

To that end I shape the bun so that the heel of the hand rests against the rear slope of the bun and the fingers curl naturally into the open mouth in front. And I shape the tote so that the hand rides not behind the plane but rather above and behind it, with the elbow loose and at a comfortable angle.

I do this because balance is everything in using my planes, and when rear hand rides up on the tote, grasping it with the web between thumb and first finger coming to rest comfortably under the crown, and the fingers of the front hand curl into the mouth, it’s easy to generate and balance the downward and forward forces necessary to get the plane to work right.

It takes a little doing to learn this, but when the user gets the balance right, the plane emits a vivid sound and feel – a vivid marker, as it were, to call to mind the next time the user picks up the plane.

[ken seale]

OK, I'll bite. What the heck's a sneck?

[george wilson]

A sneck is when you try to snack on your girlfriend's neck!

Actually,it's a rather German(I think) originated feature: The raised step on the top end of the iron that you can tap upwards with a hammer to retract the blade. Most English infills do not have a sneck. Some English miter plane type infills do.

[Juan Hovey]

An iron, on the other hand, is what you get hit upside the head with when she figures out what you're doing.

[Juan Hovey]

I amend my remarks: "An iron, on the other hand, is what you get hit upside the head with when she cottons on to what you're doing."