Did you ever have an idea which makes perfect sense to you, but when you tell the rest of the world about it, they look at you like you have completely lost your mind? Well, I’ve got one of those today.
I’m designing a piece of furniture which includes a coopered panel. When a coopered panel comes out of glue-up, the faces aren’t smooth, they’re faceted. I’m used to smoothing the convex face with a standard handplane. It takes only a few minutes to fair it to a nice smooth curve. The issue in this piece of furniture is that both the convex and concave faces of the panel will be visible. No problem, I thought. I’ll just go get a different plane to clean up the convex side. I was expecting to find planes whose sole is curved. The curve would be such that if you put the plane down on a flat surface, it rocks side-to-side, but not front-to-back. This made sense to me, but when I starting looking around, I didn’t find anything like this in the usual plane catalogs. The closest I could find was a FWW article by a Krenov disciple who described how to build a wood-bodied one. I’ll build one if I must, but the dearth of information out there makes me suspect I’m barking up the wrong tree. Is there some better way to do what I want to do?