Infill brainstorm

[Mike Henderson]

Thanks, Derek, for the info and the diagrams. I, and I think everyone else also, appreciate it.

Mike

[Mike Henderson]

I'm told that St James Bey Tool Co. sells parts and kits for their planes and that a lever cap can be purchased a reasonable price. I haven't contacted them yet.

Michael

If I could get a sexy lever cap from them that would fit, it'd be fun to put it on a standard Stanley plane, just to replace the existing boring lever cap. It'd ruin the plane for collectors, but it'd be a real conversation piece.

Mike

[Derek Cohen]

Mike

Try LN - one of their bronze ones would fit a Stanley.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Ryan Cathey]

That would look spiffy on my infill. I might look into that.

-Ryan C.

[Chuck Hamman]

Hello Ryan,
I thought I would chime in and show you my efforts to make a mitre plane from a Stanley Handyman #4. I was looking for something to dedicate to my shooting board. It has a 20 Deg bed angle, bevel up blade configuration. If my attachments make it I included a sketch of my next creation. It is a stuffed #5 panel plane.

Check out this site for plans for a handle and cushion. Any plane I build I start with a full size plan. Tape a couple of sheets of graph paper together and in this case I traced off the profile of a #5 to start. Print out the plans for the infill, full size, cut them out and tape them to your profile.
http://www.xmission.com/~jry/ww/tool.../jy-panel.html

One drawback to using these bodies is that the sides aren't very high and getting rivets into the infill is difficult. The infill in my mitre plane sits in a bed of Gorilla glue. It remains to be seen if temperature changes in my shop give me any trouble.

Don't sell your idea short. There is no reason why you can't build a perfectly good plane with what you have.

Good luck,
-Chuck

[Ryan Cathey]

Thats ironic. I came this close to asking you about that low angle one over at knots. Sure is neat, I even thought about trying something like that with an adjuster set up kind of like the ones on the small Bailey transitionals. Thanks again everyone for the pictures, diagrams, and other helpful information. Once I get the funds built up I'll buy all the things I need and get it built. It may be a while. All I need is the rosewood though so it might not be that long.

-Ryan C.

[Chuck Hamman]

How do I mill out the insides of the bed?

Ryan,
It dawned on me that I never completly answered your question. I used a drill press and a large drill bit and drilled out much of the waste (for lack of a better word). Do this again with a smaller bit in the areas you couldn't reach with the big bit. Of course be carful not to drill through the sole I bought a small milling head from Sears and I chucked that into the drill press and took out most of what was left. I cleaned it up with a Dremel tool and hand files.

When your doing this, be sure to wear saftey glasses and a paper mask. If not, you'll be amazed at how much black crude you'll blow out your nose and pick out of your ears. And you'll have this metalic taste in your mouth for an hour. Don't ask me how I know this This is by far the worst part of the project.

The next time I think I'll check with a local machine shop to see how much they would want to clean out the plane body for me.

-Chuck

[Ryan Cathey]

I like that idea a little bit better than Derek's about using only a dremel. Thats the way I think I'll go. Thanks alot!!

-Ryan C.

[rick fulton]

Ryan, thanks for starting this thread. I've seen you have some posts looking for boxwood and rosewood. Any chance we will be seeing a post of your Stanley Infill plane progress pics soon?

Derek, thanks for adding your "cheats" and other nuggets of wisdom to this post. Your posts on SMC and WKFT are inspiring. You make it look easy, which means it might be doable by a newbie woodworker. Can't wait to find time to try building my own "Cohen Smoother".

Thanks for sharing.
rick
pre-newbie-blacksmith

[Dan Moening]

Ryan,

Bob Smalser posted quite a few how-tos on this forum (and others).

One he did was about creating a 50* smoothing plane. Part II shows how to "stuff" the plane with wood for extra weight:

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=8136

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=8491


HTH

[Ryan Cathey]

Not quite. That's for a different(read: smaller) project. Here is my plan I drew up, if your interested.

-Ryan C.

[Mike Weaver]

Thanks for the info & links to other [non-forum] sites and threads folks!

This is excellent stuff & definitely gets added to my 'personal archives'!

-Mike