Finished a New Plane Today

[David Weaver]

Finished a plane today. Nearly broke it and did something really dumb when putting in the brass rods (pushed the pins/quasi-dovetails out a teeny bit on one side because my holes weren't aligned from each side for the brass rods, would've been catastrophic).

Anyway, regretfully can't take better pictures of it right now. The bench and garage are a mess, and it's raining outside.

It's a brese plane lever cap and iron and the sides and bottom are O1 steel joined with peined pins with secondary bevels. The only power tools I used were a cordless drill and a bench top belt sander for the metal and a bandsaw to rough out the cocobolo.

I made the lever cap on my first plane, but just didn't feel like it on this one, Ron's prices are reasonable enough it wasn't worth the trouble, and I needed an iron, anyway (Ron sells iron and chipbreaker sets, great quality).

Finish for now is one coat of blo and one coat of wax. I'll apply wax a couple more times, but I like planes that don't have so much finish on the wood, even though they don't look as smart as one with shiny shoes.

It's got a 4 thousandth inch mouth and a 55 degree bed. The iron is 2" wide. Kind of an oddball that steep, but I didn't want to make a plane that's something I already had.

Now that I've done it (this style, my first plane was simpler) once, I'll make another one at 50 degrees with a 2.25" iron and walnut infill.
Cocobolo is nice, but it took me forever to find this wood and I have a lot of acclimated walnut.

If you ever think you might want to build a plane, go ahead and do it. I made a lot of mistakes again on this (as I did on my first one), but as long as you can work with hand tools, you can fix them so long as you understand what makes a plane perform well.

[Orlando Gonzalez]

Awsome job Dave. Great looking lines and the cocobolo looks great. I think you are going to enjoy using this one as much as you do your other planes. http://www.forums.woodnet.net/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/yellowyes.gif (http://javascript%3cb%3e%3c/b%3E:void(0))

Hope the wife didn't mind you smoothing the top of the washing machine. http://www.forums.woodnet.net/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/yellowbiggrin.gif (javascript:void(0))

[David Weaver]

Thanks, Orlando - she always says "get your dirty tools away from my stuff!!!"

Today wasn't any different. :rolleyes:

[jerry nazard]

David,

All I can say is "WOW"! That is a beautiful baby!!

-Jerry

[Jim Koepke]

very nice plane indeed.

jim

[Dave Beauchesne]

David:

That is one fine piece of work - well done!

[David Gendron]

Realy like it. Nice work indeed and i like the mat finish also!

[Stanley Covington]

David:

Very impressive. How does she perform?

Stan

[Dale Sautter]

Nice job David, let us know how well it work on knarly grain, bet pretty well...

I wish that there was a tread here that served to only to showcase user made hand planes, no outside comments except from the builders' progression in building them. Your plane would fit nicely there...

[Leigh Betsch]

Looks good!

[David Weaver]

Thanks for the nice comments, guys.

I'll do that on the next one (put up a progression). I started to do it with this one on another forum, and then just before I was going to put up a glut of pictures, I got banned there :rolleyes:

I won't have any guesses in building the next one, so it'll be less confusing, anyway. I didn't have a good pattern for this one, so I had to guess at where to locate the mouth. The picture I had was the A13 picture from handplane dot com, and it was a little funky because I don't have an adjuster, and I couldn't decipher everything about that one, anyway - the details on the mouth weren't clear.

You learn really quickly making planes - really quickly. Fastest learning is by making mistakes, but in materials on this one, I have about $300. It's not nice to think about throwing stuff away at that price level. You get a good functional plane when you're done, even with the quirks, albeit not with the sparkling metalwork someone like Konrad Sauer or wayne anderson does by hand. On this one, I forgot to shine up the metal on the inside of the cheeks before assembling the sides, and then I had it upside down working on the mouth and didn't notice I was scuffing the sides all to pee with the side of a file. I had safe edge files on the bench, but i just wasn't thinking. Note for next time, I'll tape those sides before i start working on the mouth.

Then today, loosened some of the back pins a little (just a little, they're still snug, but they moved a couple of thousandths) running the brass rods through and not thinking to put the plane down on the vise anvil to support the sides. The very rear rod caught the sidewall a little and pushed it out. Just a consequence of not having a drill press to do a proper job, but one that can be easily avoided next time by relieving the outsides of those rods a little and then cutting them to length after they're in the plane.

The planes are the ultimate one or two hour at a time project, they are a combination of precise file work and really physical metalwork if you do it all manually. I had the near disaster with the pins because I was almost done and started to rush.

Anyway, in terms of performance, you've gotta build one and use it, or buy one if you can do so without getting in trouble - it's like a high angle frog lie nielsen on steroids. Plane with or against the grain on anything, no real tearout of any kind, and across knots like they're a minor speed bump. I just cleaned off my bench after posting earlier and got this one exactly where I want it, and shavings in hard maple and cherry slightly under 1/2 thousandth. Anything less than that, and they don't really stay together, about where I can get to on any plane, probably dependent on sharpening.

I don't think Raney Nelson reads this board any longer, but I've gotten a lot of advice from him, and a little from Ron Brese - that's been very helpful when I was trying to figure out what matters and what doesn't. Raney pushed me over the edge and gave me some metal bits for my first one. He has a nice blog about planemaking now and does really nice work - really really nice.

Karl Holtey even sent me a PM when I first started this, because this is very loosely based on a plane that he improved significantly a while ago, the Norris A13. I'd rather have Karl's version than mine, but I'd be divorced shortly after the credit card bill came in the mail - I already asked.

[Thomas Nye]

She is a Beauty, Awsome Job !!! Its gonna be hard to top that one.

[Steve Pirrelli]

That's a sweet looking plane. :)

[Derek Cohen]

Hi David

Wonderful plane and wonderful posting. I'm really impressed! Many thanks.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Mike Brady]

I'm in awe, Dave. I knew you were building one, but I didn't expect this. You must be fearless.

[James Taglienti]

Uh, wow. That's one of the classiest planes I've seen in a while. Thanks for not going all "Bridge City" on it with a ridiculous tote and tasteless lines.

Very very nice!!

[David Weaver]

Action shot - cherry stick. I don't have anything good (like figured maple) that's not in rough form, so this will have to do.

You can see a couple of mistakes from this side - you see the small gap that opened up in the rear along the infill when I dumbed it up pounding away on a brass pin. That's especially annoying when you go to the trouble to really make it a piston fit (it was super tight), and at some point I'm going to end up trying to close it even though you can't fit a sheet of paper in it. I'm asking for trouble given the infill is retained already by epoxied pins, it's still flush tight fit at the front, and it's epoxied in on the bottom, too.

And on the third pin back, there is what looks like a gap, but that's actually quick set epoxy that got trapped in there when I was peining the brass, so there is no gap, it just looks like one. And a couple of spots that need some hand sanding.

Avoiding all of these little things is what makes the planes made by the guys who do it for a living so impressive.

The shaving doesn't look that thin, but a quick view of it over an autosol tube without stretching it out or holding it down against the tube or anything shows how thin it is, it measured a bit under .0005" with no extra pressure on the caliper "helping" it look thinner on the dial.

I read something today that I read about once a month on these forums, that you can't lap planes accurately by hand and if you try it, you'll end up with a rough plane that can only take coarse shavings. This plane was far from being flat after I peined it, and it's O1 steel, which is MUCH harder to lap than cast iron, and it has seen nothing other than hand lapping to get the bottom flat post-peining.

New guys, please don't think you can't make your planes work well cheaply or that they need to be surface ground like an LN. I lap these on a $20 glass replacement shelf, and I've done probably 30 to 50 planes on it, all with loose belt stock from a $20 klingspor bargain box (there is enough in one of those boxes to do 75 or 100 planes) - not one has turned out poorly, and i've done everything from block planes to #8s. I don't get anal and tape it down, and I don't worry about the first couple millimeters of the nose of the plane that get dubbed a couple thousandth, because 95% of the sole length is darn close to dead flat. I just clamp it with a clamp at the back end and get after it. Just put one hand on the tote and one on the middle above the webbing at the mouth (not all the way forward on the knob) and do every stroke exactly the same like you're planing. No figure 8s or mashing the plane back and forth, just strokes, forward only, like you're planing with the pressure in the same place every time. That's all there is to it. Rare that it takes more than 20 minutes to lap anything 5 or smaller, and it's usually a lot more like 5 minutes on 80 grit and another 2 on 220 if I think it should look nice. 8s are another story, but 6s and smaller are all really easy to lap very well.

Mike, anything in the pictures look familiar? as far as being fearless, it's not really that tough to make one - there's no miters in it! What I did have was a real fear that I was going to spend $300 in materials and end up with a plane that didn't work as well as my LN smoother, so I took my time and "kept the work in front of me" if you know what I mean. I don't know how you could explain to a sane person that you're using a plane you spent a full work week's worth of hours on that costs as much as an LN to get the parts for and doesn't work as well.

I know some of you guys are pretty good at making tools yourselves, and if it weren't for "the internet" and the guys out here, I probably would still be using router jigs (and I hated routers from the beginning, just as much as I hate fitting miters on a piece that's out of square).

[Mike Brady]

That 605 in the background looks familiar. ;) You never forget one of your children.

[David Weaver]

That 605 in the background looks familiar. ;) You never forget one of your children.

I used it to do the initial thicknessing of the cocobolo pieces after I resawed them. I didn't have the stones to resaw them right up next to the marking line, just in case there was any drift. Lots easier to cut them an eighth away and run the jack over them and get them close to a marking line before final sizing them with a smoother.

It's a nice jack plane - a nice upgrade to have from what I was using before.