Some new plane billet stock

[Jeff Heath]

I thought there might be some interest in seeing this from the group, as I know a lot of folks here like to make their own planes. As a woodie planemaker, I'm always looking for other good species that perform well as plane material. I bought this slab quite a while ago, and it's been sitting in my shop acclimating for about 18 months now. It was milled 9 or 10 years ago, and kiln dried at the time.

I've finally cut it into 3.5" square billets that are 28" long. I'm going to let it set this way and make sure it's quite stable before proceeding, but I can't get over how much this stuff looks like beech. It's a lot harder than any of the beech planes I have in my shop, too.

It's honey locust, and a particularly hard and tough version of it. I've worked with honey locust before building furniture, and it's about as hard as white oak. This particular slab is quite hard and dense.

Here's some pics.....I'm like to hear what others think of how it looks, and any experiences you may have had with the species.

http://i849.photobucket.com/albums/ab57/hawkfan9/Heath%20Toolworks%20planes/IMAG0342_zps332a2a58.jpg

[george wilson]

I'm sure the locust would be fine. Beech really isn't an extremely hard wood,and it gets "hairy" when turned on a lathe.

Locust lasts 10 years longer than stone when buried in the ground!!:)

[David Weaver]

Last week, I was looking for billets to make a jointer (something bigger than 3" wide table leg blanks). I couldn't find any, but I am also not looking for personal punishment, so I didn't look outside of maple and beech.

My local guy, Mike Digity, has cut a lot of beech, but he's retired or at least semi (mostly) retired and I don't see him listing much any longer, and he no longer drives over to the burbs here to make deliveries. He had QS beech.

I'd say if the wood is harder than cherry or walnut, it should make a durable plane (in my experirence at least) and the rest of the details are pretty much in how it works.

Like george says, a lot of our fence posts were locust (still are, I guess). The barbed wire might be rotted and tangled now that my parents' farm hasn't had animals for at least 30 years, but the posts are still there and standing. Once it gets really dry naturally, it's a really nasty wood...like case hardened or something.

[Matthew N. Masail]

sounds and looks great to me. I don't know the wood, don't think it exists around here. how does it look with a coat of shellac?

[Jeff Heath]

sounds and looks great to me. I don't know the wood, don't think it exists around here. how does it look with a coat of shellac?

Personally, I think it looks great. I made a table out of this same species several years ago, and it wears like granite. I'll post a picture of a plane when I'm finished.....BLO followed by blond shellac. I am pretty certain it's going to make great plane stock, and I have enough to make about 30 planes or so from it, and know where I can get more.....:).

[Robert McNaull]

My dad used to say one locust fence post could wear put two post holes and still be good enoug for a third. Makes great splitting firewood.

Bob

[Ron Kellison]

Honey locust is a wonderful, dense wood and has a great colour. I would point out that black locust is the wood used for fence posts.I buried more than a few posts when I was growing up on a farm in WVa! It's noticeably denser than honey locust and doesn't grow as big. I don't think I've ever seen black locust as lumber.

Ron

[David Weaver]

Honey locust is a wonderful, dense wood and has a great colour. I would point out that black locust is the wood used for fence posts.I buried more than a few posts when I was growing up on a farm in WVa! It's noticeably denser than honey locust and doesn't grow as big. I don't think I've ever seen black locust as lumber.

Ron

Black locust sounds more familiar. I have a log of it in my basement. My mother dropped it off and said a friend of hers had a husband who was a wood turner, and that the guy died and there were piles of it.

I don't know that I'd want to turn it. The short log that I have seems pretty much unfit for anything, case hardened feeling and ugly - not to mention cracked.

It was great firewood when I was a kid, though. Burned clean and hot.

If the chunk I have is indicative of what it all looks like nobody would want it for lumber, anyway.

[Jeff Heath]

Honey locust and Black locust are, obviously, two different species. Honey locust is not used as fence post material. Black Locust has a natural decay resistance. Black locust is also a lot harder/denser. Black locust fence posts also need to be planted in the ground upside down, or else they are well known to start growing again, even after the log has been dead for quite a while. In my neck of the woods, out in the country, you'll occasionally see fence posts where the post sprouted again.

[Matthew N. Masail]

Personally, I think it looks great. I made a table out of this same species several years ago, and it wears like granite. I'll post a picture of a plane when I'm finished.....BLO followed by blond shellac. I am pretty certain it's going to make great plane stock, and I have enough to make about 30 planes or so from it, and know where I can get more.....:).

30?? :) lucky you


I've been playing around with plane making for about 2 years, and have
directed my designs to fit with regular 2" stock, similar to HNT planes. coffin smoothers need 2.5 inch height to start... still not sure what I'll about that.
as I said your a lucky guy, I love blond\golden planes, will be interesting to see if it looks like beech or goes (and glows) more golden like maple.

[Gary Kman]

If anybody cares:
Black locust has small thorns like a rose bush, hard to see and get you every time you pick up a branch.
Honey locust have clusters of enormous thorns up to a foot long but (get this) only on the lower twenty or so feet of the tree. They're smart.

[David Weaver]

Now that I know it's something much more pleasant than what I was thinking of (black locust) and have on hand, like a lot of other people, I'm sitting here wondering when you're going to put billets in the S&S

:)

That's about the perfect size for a woody jointer. Even the width and height are pretty close to where they'd need to be. The only thing missing is something appropriate to make a handle and a wedge.

[Dave Anderson NH]

Black Locust was always the material of choice here in NH for fence posts because of its rot resistance. A black locust fence post will outlast 5 post holes.

It is also used in boatbuilding and is occasionally available at lumberyards in NH and Maine which cater to the boatbuilding trade. A friend of mine built an 11 foot sailing dinghy as a black locust strip boat with a mahogany transom and centerboard trunk from a Gordon"Swifty" Swift design. The 1/8" thick strips were a bear to machine on the few occasions I helped him.

[David Weaver]

The 1/8" thick strips were a bear to machine on the few occasions I helped him.

I can imagine. Hard and thin, and splintery if it's dry. Is a boat like that put together with dry wood like we think of (8% moisture KD)?

My black locust log in my basement is my test log for hatchets and axes. I don't hit it full force, but it gives an idea about edge quality pretty quickly and doesn't take much damage while showing if the edge geometry is about right. It's a good piece of wood to hammer things on, too, if an anvil is a little too harsh.

[Dave Anderson NH]

David, it was pretty dry, but not 8%. The bent curves over the strongback were fairly gentle. Routing the convex and concave long edges on each piece was a royal pain. I'll see if I can dig up a picture of the Swallow when I get home tonight. 11ft long by 6ft beam and she carried 75 square feet of sail gaff rigged. The mainmast was a hollow of laminated up clear old growth white pine.

[ron david]

Black Locust was always the material of choice here in NH for fence posts because of its rot resistance. A black locust fence post will outlast 5 post holes.

It is also used in boatbuilding and is occasionally available at lumberyards in NH and Maine which cater to the boatbuilding trade. A friend of mine built an 11 foot sailing dinghy as a black locust strip boat with a mahogany transom and centerboard trunk from a Gordon"Swifty" Swift design. The 1/8" thick strips were a bear to machine on the few occasions I helped him.
but how long should the post hole last?. does this mean that you have to keep making new holes??
ron

[Jeff Heath]

Now that I know it's something much more pleasant than what I was thinking of (black locust) and have on hand, like a lot of other people, I'm sitting here wondering when you're going to put billets in the S&S

:)

That's about the perfect size for a woody jointer. Even the width and height are pretty close to where they'd need to be. The only thing missing is something appropriate to make a handle and a wedge.

Sorry.....I won't be selling billets anytime soon. I'll be selling finished planes, but not in the classified section......it's just a guess, but I'm guessing they don't allow that here.

As far as handle and wedge stock are concerned, I've been thinking about that very topic myself for a few days. I'm going to try a few different combinations and see what looks good. I love cherry for handles, and have some great curly cherry stock on hand. I have all sorts of dense hardwood on hand for wedges, from exotic import stuff, to locally grown osage orange, hard maple, white oak, hickory, more honey locust, and a few other goodies.......the benefits of having owned a sawmill for years.

I cut these 28" long (plus a little) to accommodate a jointer plane, but I can also split that size into a combination of of two or more of any of the other plane sizes necessary. It's been soooooo cold here lately (below zero most of the time, and -14° this morning at 6:30 am when I fired up the shop heating system) that I actually cut these by hand with my two trusty Disston D8's. What a workout cutting across and ripping a 3.5" slab of this stuff. I was quite warm when finished.

[David Weaver]

Yeah, no commercial items in the classifieds. Welcome to the club on the crosscut. I don't really have any other way to do it comfortably (I do have a chop saw, but no good place to put it in my shop). You'd be shocked how fast those cheap 20 inch stanley saws will crosscut something. They're floppy, but you can lean into them with a little practice. They're hard on the back side of the cut, but I doubt you'd care much about that on a 3.5" square cut. I keep a 6 1/2 point saw (or something thereabouts) for crosscutting 8/4 stuff and other thick lumber.

[Jeff Heath]

It's a 10 pt. crosscut saw. I definitely need to buy another one that's more aggressive, and keep this one sharp for the purty cuts. It cuts pretty fast, and leaves a nice, clean line though.....I did use the same saw to crosscut my bench to length last year, which is a 24" wide roubo-style maple top that's 5" thick. That was fun.

My rip is set up proper for this job at either 5 1/2 or 6 tpi......I forget, and it's 40 below outside, so I'm not running up to the shop to check. :)

Cheers.

[Frank Drew]

I'm sure the locust would be fine. Beech really isn't an extremely hard wood,and it gets "hairy" when turned on a lathe.

Locust lasts 10 years longer than stone when buried in the ground!!:)

I agree with others that it's black locust that's everlasting in contact with the soil; I made some compost pile posts from honey locust and they rotted off at ground level within 4 or 5 years.

[george wilson]

I had forgotten about black locust. I remember the poor guys in the museum in the "Rural Trades" department, who had to fence in a large pasture with a historically correct hand made black locust fence. Posts with round end mortices cut into them for the split rails to fit into. That was not an easy job by any means. I think they made hundreds of those posts. The type of thing hardly anyone would notice was authentic,either.

Most of the time,fences were made by stacking up zig zagging split rails. A person who was drunk was said to be in "Virginia fences" in the 18th. C..

[Jeff Heath]

I finished bedding an iron and wedge in one of these plane blanks today. I can honestly say it's not much fun to work with. The stuff is hard as iron (it seems) and wreaked havoc on my chisels and plane floats. I've never had to sharpen my floats so many times for one plane mouth and bed before. By no means is this finished. I still have to make a tote, shape and finish the wedge, and shape and finish the plane. However, it cuts very well. Iron is bedded at 50°.

http://i849.photobucket.com/albums/ab57/hawkfan9/Heath%20Toolworks%20planes/IMAG0379_zpseca57c55.jpg

I'll post a pic of the finished plane when complete.

Jeff

[David Weaver]

That type of plane is territory for beech (if you're going to work that mortise by hand). It works easily and nicely and has plenty of density. I haven't had a whole lot of luck finding any beech billets, though, it's much cheaper to get a good tight vintage plane (most of the time) than it is to source a good blank (that still has to dry), a good double iron and a small piece to make a handle (actually, the last two are pretty easy to find, but add them all up and you have a plane that's not worth anything on the open market compared to an old stylish plane with a reputable maker's mark).