The care and feeding of the wooden plow plane

[Zach Dillinger]

Gents,

A long, long while back, I was asked how I go about finding, tuning and using a vintage wooden plow plane. Its taken me the better part of a year, but I've finally finished the mini article. It isn't short, but I hope it has some good information for users.

http://eatoncountywoodworker.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-care-and-feeding-of-wooden-plow.html

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[Jim Koepke]

Nice article Zach.

I am not sure what the photo caption meant by "Ghost planing a groove."

I have one of these with wedged arms. It has worked a few times, but it hasn't been used since my knowledge of planes has been built up. My Stanley 45s have mostly left it on the shelf.

jtk

[David Weaver]

No shavings maybe?

[Zach Dillinger]

Thanks Jim. The 'ghost planing a groove' caption just means that I'm not there "driving" the plane (I'm taking the photo), so it looks like a g-g-g-g-ghost is planing that groove. No big deal.

The 45 is a nice plane. I just prefer the wooden plow, for aesthetic and practical reasons.

[Zach Dillinger]

No shavings maybe?

The shavings are on the shop floor. I cleared 'em out for a better photo. This was originally intended for a magazine article but I decided to go this route instead.

[Jeff Heath]

Good stuff, Zach. Thanks for your efforts.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

Thanks.

I'm confused about the bit about parallelism of the fence to the skate:


but if yours is out of parallel, you will have to shim the arms where they attach to the fence. This is touchy, sensitive work that isn't possible on some types of plows, so finding another plow is usually a better alternative.

couldn't you just plane the face of the fence to be parallel to the skate again? I assume I'm missing something obvious.

[Zach Dillinger]

You certainly can do it that way. But I prefer not to remove wood from the plane if I can avoid it. I'm a fan of "patina" so I try to leave it where I can. Shimming fixes the problem and leaves the old look of the plane.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

Of course. Makes sense. One of those things that doesn't occur to me thinking about the problem off hand, but would be an immediate thought holding the thing in my hand and mulling it over.

[Nathan Wertman]

Looks like great info Zach. I’ve book marked it for later reading.

I’ve got a wooden plow plane that I picked up about 2 months ago. The thing is great, but it only has 1 iron which makes its usefulness limited. Do you have any suggestions for finding/buying/making new irons for an existing wooden plow plane?

Nate

[Zach Dillinger]

Nathan, you can find new irons in a lot of places. eBay, Jim Bode, Lee Richmond and Patrick Leach will have sets for you. Josh Clark probably will too. Expect to pay around $100 for a set of eight, maybe a little more for certain makers (Sandusky for example). You can make just about any iron fit in just about any plow if you make a new wedge to suit them. It's not hard. The only thing you can't really adjust for is the width of the mortise in the body of the plow. It should be a little larger than 5/8" to suit the wide part of the iron, but on some early plows they aren't quite 5/8". And you can't really fix that.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

Adding to this thread rather than starting a new one, since it comes up quickly in Google - if answeres to my questions end up providing any good information, hopefully it being tacked on here will be helpful to anyone doing a search for questions in the future. . .

I recently picked up a plow and set of irons from Lee Richmond at The Best Things - the someday hope is to build my own toted plow around the irons like Derek has done, as I've mentioned wanting to do here before. (http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?197632-How-much-to-pay-for-wooden-plow-plane-irons-Plow-plane-stock-thickness)

But Lee made the point to me that the matched set of irons are really the expensive part of the the proposition; and building my own isn't the best use of my time. I obviously knew that building my own tools would be a good way to go broke in an attempt to save money, but the prospect appeals to me. But Lee was able to sell me both the irons (what looks like will be a great set of Thos. Ibbotson and Co. after honing) and the plow within what I had budgeted for just the irons. This is great because it gives me a working tool (my Mujingfang is half-broken and half fixed) while I pretend that I'm building my own, and if I continue to make a muck of building my own, I still have something worthwhile.

The plow is an A. Mathieson & Son No. 5B. It needs a little bit of work to be spot on, although I probably could press it to service as is. Zach's excellent write-up covers most of my plow-specific questions, the rest of the job being standard wooden plane stuff, but I've a couple more questions.

(which is why I started rambling - I should learn to think before I start writing and these things wouldn't prattle on so . . . sorry . . . )


The plow itself . . .
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and the maker's stamps - I particularly appreciate the typography on the "No 5B" with the little flourish from the "N" to the "o" . . .

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First question :
Some of the brass "end caps" (for lack of a better term - is there a proper word?) are a little loose. Pictured below is one of the looser ones. None of these will actually come off the arms. Is the proper solution here to just leave them be, or is there a way to tighten them on that's worth doing? I'm not particularly bothered by them being loose, I just don't want them to fall off entirely. Snugging them up, if do-able, would be preferable, though.

As an aside - is the purpose of those end caps just to look nice, or do they serve some function I don't grasp?

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The only major issue I'm confounded on is the fence-arm attachment. It's probably parallel enough for work, although I may attempt to shim it in the way that Zach mentions to dial it spot-on it seems to become an issue. It's certainly very close if not perfect.

The thing that's making it hard to tell how close it is, and making me hesitant to use it as is, is that the arms aren't tight to the fence. That is, particularly as you attempt to adjust the fence, the arms rotate in relation to the fence. Which obviously makes keeping the fence uniformly distant from the skate difficult. It almost makes it difficult to tell if the arms are binding in the plow body or not.

The obvious solution would be to snug down these screws, under the fence, attached to the arms:
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I carefully cleaned out the heads of the screws with a fret-cleaning pick tool I've got kicking around, and grabbed one of my close-fitting Grace screwdrivers. The screw really only wants to turn maybe 15 degrees or so each way - not enough t really loosen or tighten the thing.

The screw goes through the arm and into the brass escutcheons on the top of the arm. Are these generally threaded into the brass, or into the wood? Both? Looking at the top of the brass, I can't quite tell if the steel from the screw is peened over, or just funny from filing where coarse threads intersect:

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I guess I'm slightly uncertain what the next step is - my thought is a bit of penetrating oil where the brass and steel intersect, and then to clamp the arm in a padded vise and carefully torque the screw so I can loosen/tighten it properly. My thought is that if it's just threading into the brass, perhaps there's not enough threads to tighten it fully, and I should loosen it just enough to get a shim in it, and then tighten again? If the threading actually takes place in the wood, I'm not quite sure how to proceed. I do know, (from my Chapin fillester) as Zach mentions, that entirely removing old screws threaded into wooden parts of wooden planes is probably a Bad Idea . . .

I'm not in a huge hurry to work on this, but I don't want to make it worse or make more work for myself.

[Kees Heiden]

My plow is a lot like yours with the same kind of problems. The loose brass end caps cured themselves. I think the wood was a bit dry and after some time in my shop they were tight again. You could try soaking the wood in a bit of linseed oil, which tends too swell the wood also.

My fence also turns on both posts. But I don't percieve that as a problem. I think it was on purpose, so you could set it one end at a time?

The biggest problem with mine is like yours, the fence isn't parallel with the body. I can't insert shims, because mine is attached with rivets to the beams. And I certainly won't remove the rivets. The only thing I could do is planing the fence back to square. The color would of course be way too light after planing, so I am contempating to glue a piece of dark colored wood to the fence. Hmmm, not quite sure yet what to do.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

I hadn't thought that the fence was supposed to turn - I suppose it would help for perfectly getting it square, but it seems to make it harder to set, as if one arm gets too far ahead of the other, it binds. Reading through Whelan's Making Traditional Wooden Planes I never saw mention of this fact, so I assumed a firm attachment was the way to go. Other plow planes I'd seen had a more fixed attachment, but they were all screw-arm models, so I don't know how that translates.

I agree with you, Kees, on not planing the surface if not needed - after Zach mentioned that, it of course made sense not to remove patina unnecessarily. "Do no harm" seems to be a good first step in working with something old. . . .

[Kees Heiden]

Well, yes, it binds easilly when not adjusting both beems together. I adjust by lightly tapping the ends of the beams on the workbench, then do the "micro" adjustemt one at a time. Anyway, I can't fix how the fence is attached to the beams, and you can't either so I read from your message. So I would just learn to live with it.

But I really would like to have a parallel fence. It works as it is now, but it is much harder to keep the groove vertical.