Mike Allen1010
10-01-2015, 10:14 PM
I have a bad hand tool problem – especially saws and planes. Increasingly I enjoyed saws and planes I've built myself. IMHO, building shop built planes that I enjoy using and provide satisfactory work is waaay easier than building shop built back saws. I've screwed many of those up to the degree they are unusable, with countless hours wasted. My advice FWIW, is if you're in the market, buy a good back saw from a professional saw maker.
I like the feel of wooden body planes. Sometimes the mass of a metal plane is invaluable, but for final surfacing where hopefully I'm not removing too much wood, the light weight of wooden body planes is easier for me to use.
I don't have nearly enough talent to make solid body planes like our own Steve Voit and stick with laminated plane construction. I have followed Derek Cohen's excellent tutorial to build a number of wooden body planes with wedges held in abutment's. These are some of my favorite users, but in my old age I am getting fairly ham-handed about being able to use a hammer to adjust the iron for fine shavings.
Lee Valley sells a kit with a Norris style adjuster, however I believe the kit is limited to a 1 5/8" wide blade (don't quote me on that). While digging through the tool cabinet, I found a couple extra irons for the Veritas bevel up planes - 2" and 2 1/2" wide. These irons work with the Norris style adjuster Lee Valley sells in its kit. Typical of LV's truly excellent customer service; when I called to ask if I could buy the plane kits, without the blades, they said no problem.
I had some 12/4 Cherry left over from a recent project and used it to build a 14" jack and a 9" smoother. For the smoother I used the 2 1/2" wide blade LV sells as the "high angle" replacement iron for their BU planes. I'm not sure, but I think it's a little thicker than the 25° bevel angle irons.
322584
My knowledge of plane building is completely informed by Derek Cohen's excellent tutorial. The planews described here are little bit different because the kit uses a brass rod instead of abutments, and a wedge with a brass screw tension adjuster. Any screw ups are entirely mine.
Here's some pictures of the Jack plane. I like two iron planes, so bought some Hock chip breakers. I love Hock blades/chip breakers. I had to grind off quite a bit of the chip breaker so that it would fit the minimum length required by the LV irons between cutting-edge and adjuster indexing hole. Grinding the chip breakers was fairly brutal and there's a good chance I warped one because I was getting impatient (I'm sure this is horrifying for the people that make these CB's to high standards). I suck at metalworking – all I know is it took me a really long time to lap the chip breaker flat to mate with the iron, which I'm sure would not have been necessary if I would have used the chip breaker in it's provided length.
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I like the feel of wooden body planes. Sometimes the mass of a metal plane is invaluable, but for final surfacing where hopefully I'm not removing too much wood, the light weight of wooden body planes is easier for me to use.
I don't have nearly enough talent to make solid body planes like our own Steve Voit and stick with laminated plane construction. I have followed Derek Cohen's excellent tutorial to build a number of wooden body planes with wedges held in abutment's. These are some of my favorite users, but in my old age I am getting fairly ham-handed about being able to use a hammer to adjust the iron for fine shavings.
Lee Valley sells a kit with a Norris style adjuster, however I believe the kit is limited to a 1 5/8" wide blade (don't quote me on that). While digging through the tool cabinet, I found a couple extra irons for the Veritas bevel up planes - 2" and 2 1/2" wide. These irons work with the Norris style adjuster Lee Valley sells in its kit. Typical of LV's truly excellent customer service; when I called to ask if I could buy the plane kits, without the blades, they said no problem.
I had some 12/4 Cherry left over from a recent project and used it to build a 14" jack and a 9" smoother. For the smoother I used the 2 1/2" wide blade LV sells as the "high angle" replacement iron for their BU planes. I'm not sure, but I think it's a little thicker than the 25° bevel angle irons.
322584
My knowledge of plane building is completely informed by Derek Cohen's excellent tutorial. The planews described here are little bit different because the kit uses a brass rod instead of abutments, and a wedge with a brass screw tension adjuster. Any screw ups are entirely mine.
Here's some pictures of the Jack plane. I like two iron planes, so bought some Hock chip breakers. I love Hock blades/chip breakers. I had to grind off quite a bit of the chip breaker so that it would fit the minimum length required by the LV irons between cutting-edge and adjuster indexing hole. Grinding the chip breakers was fairly brutal and there's a good chance I warped one because I was getting impatient (I'm sure this is horrifying for the people that make these CB's to high standards). I suck at metalworking – all I know is it took me a really long time to lap the chip breaker flat to mate with the iron, which I'm sure would not have been necessary if I would have used the chip breaker in it's provided length.
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