coopering plane

[Christian Thompson]

After a rocky start (screwed up the mortise layout: http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthre...-a-plane-build), I finally finished building my coopering plane. Here are some build pics:

Started with a 6' x 3" x 5" piece of hard maple:

blank.jpg 01 dimensionig.jpg

Here's where I screwed up - I started cutting the mortise the full width of the blade:
03 chopping too wide.jpg mortise.jpg

After some debate and discussion on how to fix, I decided to just scoot the mouth back a few inches:

05 chopping.jpg

Once I got the mouth all ready, I cleaned up the hole and patched it with another piece of maple. In hindsite, I should have spent more time color matching... Before I started planing it looked pretty close:

06 inlay.jpg 07 inlay2.jpg 08 inlay3.jpg

[Christian Thompson]

Next step was to build the stand. Didn't get many pictures of this process... Here's the only one - ripping the legs:
09 rip stand.jpg

Here's the finished jointer next to my #7 for comparison. Overall, I'm happy with how it looks, but I'm not wild about the huge eyes or the tiny wedge. I had to cut the eyes big to cover up one last bit of the original mistake. The wedge started small and kept getting smaller as I adjusted for fit. One of these days I'll replace it...

10 floor.jpg 11 floor2.jpg

The good news for all the mistakes is that the plane will spend most of its time upside down :-).
12 stand.jpg 13 stand2.jpg

I took a few swipes on a piece of oak and so far it works great. I had some shavings jamming on the right side so I'll need to fix that. Looks like I just need to pare down the point of the wedge on that side to get it out of the way.

This was an interesting project. It's probably the most mistakes I've made on any of the projects I've worked on so far. In addition to the ones I already mentioned, there was another time where I had it upside down with the toe on the bench and the heel on the floor. It wasn't braced and it slid off and crashed to the floor with the wedge and iron in. That could have been a huge disaster, but miraculously it only ended up taking a bit of a chunk out of the top of the abutment. Thankfully that was mostly fixable.

The other thing I hadn't really thought about was how unwieldy it is. That made for some clamping challenges and some interesting chiseling angles. The good news is that, even though it probably isn't going to win any beauty contests, it seems like it is going to be a good user.

So now to make some barrels .