Laying out the blank. The first thing I did was examine the ends and decide what I wanted to remove. One end of the stick has the tiniest little check, so with the spare inch on this billet, most will come off of that end.
I'm going to provide all of the measurements, and if anyone else wants to make a 28" jointer and is satisfied with the appearance of this, you can just do it.
Make sure before you do any of this, that your blank is straight and square. If it's not, you might have a couple of marking problems. I mark in this order.
* draw the back of the mouth 9.75" from the front
* draw the 45 degree bed line from the mouth at the bottom of the plane to the top of the plane. If you're not sure that you want to learn the cap iron but you have a double iron, better make this 50 - it'll still work well with the cap iron if you do.
* using the iron you will use with your plane, lay the iron on the bed line to get the minimum mouth and mark the front of the mouth with your iron's thickness. (You can mark an extra 16th if you want. I think it's important to get the mouth marked right, you'll work to it with chisels or a float, and if you work outside of your marks, you're sort of in no man's land. )
* from the front of the mouth mark, draw your wear on the side of the plane. Mine is 78 degrees. You can go closer to 90 degrees if you want a little more room for error. I wouldn't go much tighter on a double iron plane. My wear is 1" high. It's about that on all of the single iron planes I have.
* connect a 60 degree line from the top of the plane to the wear. I don't know what's typical. I have some less steep than 60 and some more.
* draw a center line on the top and bottom of the plane
* transfer the escapement and bed lines to the top of the plane and draw a box to be mortised around the center line 1/2" less than the width of your iron at the bottom (that gives you quarter inch abutments, which will look nice. ( I'm going to talk about the vintage irons in a separate post - it's important to the measurements. )
* find the width of the iron where it will sit at the top of the mortise. Add a fat 16th for lateral movement (you can do more if you want, but less looks better - it should only be a problem if your iron is ground way out of square). In this case, my top width at the bed is going to be 2.5" + a 16th, but I'm going to work just inside those pencil lines to give me a fat 16th of lateral movement.
* The distance between the back of the bed and the abutment at the top of the mortise will be 1 and 3/16 ths of an inch. Mark it on the top. If you are not using a double iron or vintage irons, you will need a different mark. please don't go to the trouble to make a plane like this and then insert a stanley iron and cap iron in the plane.
* turn the plane over to the bottom and mark the mouth width - it should be exactly the iron width. You don't want it to be any wider than just letting the iron through when you're done. If it's wide, you'll have lateral adjustment problems. I wrote myself a note to make sure I don't remove my lines completely, or I'll have lateral slop.
Pictures of what everything looks like - the side.
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The top of the plane
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The bottom / mouth area
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