Best wood for shop built in-fill plane?

[Mike Allen1010]

I've never actually seen or used an infill plane, but information I've seen here in the Creek and other places has motivated me to attempt to build one (thanks David Weaver!).

What are some woods I should consider "stuffing" my infill plane with?

Based on my very limited knowledge/experience, my understanding is that I want something dense, hard, but also dry. I believe it's important to try to minimize any potential wood movement on the blade bed that could lead to poor blade support/chattering etc.

I've built a number of tools out of Cocobolo, which is dense and hard but in my experience seems like it takes a long time to dry out.

Any thoughts or recommendations about what kinds of woods I should be thinking about for this application are most welcome!

Beyond the fundamental of selecting the wood, I would appreciate any other suggestions from those that have experience here. I'm using a kit that includes a rough cast plane body from the St. James Bay Tool company, and the instructions are kind of hard for me to make out.

Thanks, Mike

[Bill Moser]

Mike - you probably have the xeroxed copies of the articles from Home Shop Machinist. That did look complicated to me -- one of the reasons why I went to a dovetailed shoulder plane kit from Shepard tool for my first (and only, so far) infill plane kit. Funny, I've bought a couple of the SJBTC dovetail kits recently, and the instructions included are the same ones I just mentioned - completely useless for the non-cast kits. Luckily, the guys from Shepard tool included good instructions for their kit. But to your point - SJBTC mentions on their website that they carry cocobolo blanks for their infill kits, so you might want to give them a call. If anyone else knows of a good source for well-dried 3x3 blanks of dense hardwood, I'd love to know about it :)

[David Weaver]

I've never actually seen or used an infill plane, but information I've seen here in the Creek and other places has motivated me to attempt to build one (thanks David Weaver!).

What are some woods I should consider "stuffing" my infill plane with?

Based on my very limited knowledge/experience, my understanding is that I want something dense, hard, but also dry. I believe it's important to try to minimize any potential wood movement on the blade bed that could lead to poor blade support/chattering etc.

I've built a number of tools out of Cocobolo, which is dense and hard but in my experience seems like it takes a long time to dry out.

Any thoughts or recommendations about what kinds of woods I should be thinking about for this application are most welcome!

Beyond the fundamental of selecting the wood, I would appreciate any other suggestions from those that have experience here. I'm using a kit that includes a rough cast plane body from the St. James Bay Tool company, and the instructions are kind of hard for me to make out.

Thanks, Mike

I have done three, and a fourth is in the works (a kit). I've done one each of:
* all scratch except the screw and iron
* all scratch except the screw, iron and lever cap
* a full shepherd kit

And I've been very slowly working on a norris smoother kit from st james bay, somehow it got put aside, but it's ready to go together. I will do only scratch built after that, no matter how long it takes me to make the tools.

I kind of like building from scratch the most, you have completely control over what you use. The exception being the iron, because it's hard to get an iron that's hardened and tempered as well as you can get a commercial iron, and they're not that expensive.

I think the castings from st. james bay will require someone who can do some machining. The dovetail kits do not. The only thing I don't like about the st james bay kit so far is that the lever cap is really really rough and requires a lot of work to get right. It'd be nice if the casting was a little more symmetric and closer to final dimensions.

As far as woods go, Something rift or close to quartered, and it's nice to have one piece (probably 16/4 or 12/4) that you're working from so that when you take pieces of wood, they all come from the same chunk. If you laminate handles and rear infill, when you glue them back together, they look like one piece of wood if you keep them together.

Riftsawn, to me, makes the nicest looking handles (if you make a toted smoother, the rear tote is a lot of real estate and draws a lot of eye) and is pleasing when you stare down at at the plane and bed, it doesn't look like a butter knife flatsawn at the top (QS makes the top profile from the view down or across look pretty blah).

16/4 walnut or mahogany kiln dried or long air dried would probably be the lowest rent to get decent wood in the plane. I like cocobolo and other dense woods a lot because they make for a heavy plane, but finding large cocobolo dry in an orientation that doesn't include a bunch of pith (like a bowl blank often does), and where a rift or quarter orientation is consistent through the whole blank is hard. And then you have to let it dry, and it checks like crazy. I scrape part of the wax off of a blank and then follow it around the next couple of months gluing all of the checks to stop them.

So, I guess what I'd do in your shoes is find a nice piece of walnut that's as dense as you can get it, the right orientation, and dry, and then that gives you a fall back piece of wood. From there, you can then see if you can strike it lucky in the interim finding an old dry blank of rosewood or cocobolo or some other such thing.

It's just so tremendously difficult to find that textbook large dry blank of pretty and dense non-porous wood with the right orientation.

My next couple of planes will be walnut. I like the dalbergias and others more, but they are just so hard to find. Walnut is very well behaved with moisture changes, too, and easily found in big pieces. I think it's the ideal go-to in case you can'd find anything else.