Wood Plane Rehab - Nicker Iron

[Bill Berklich]

So I cleaned up a box of old moulding planes and came out with a great Ohio Tool No. 47 dado plane. It cleaned and sharpened very nicely but it is missing an iron. Hard to see in the picture but there is a secondary iron in front that leads the cutter. In the picture you can see the mouth just under the stop. I assume it’s a nicker??


Anyone know if where I can find one? Or have a picture? I’ve looked on eBay but because I don’t know what it looks like I can't really figure out if anything listed would actually work nor can I fabricate a new one.
Barring a pic, I’m going to get some steel and a file and fake it. Or maybe Hock makes one?

[Andrew Pitonyak]

Hey Bill, sorry I don't have an answer for you (ignorance on my part), but I expect that there are people here that will know off hand.

I just wanted to ask..... The missing blade would sit on the other side of the depth stop, right? So if you had a picture from the other side, that would show where this blade would go?

[Jim Koepke]

The hard part about finding a replacement slitting blade is each dado plane has one sized to the plane.

The tang usually comes off the center of cutting end. At the business end of the cutter the blade has a void in the center and an edge descending down either side to score the work ahead of the main blade. What would normally be thought of as the side edges of the blade are formed to be the cutters. There are two cutting edges on a single blade.

jtk

[Chuck Nickerson]

Lie-Nielsen has moulding irons (off-center tang) and dado/rabbet irons (centered tangs). I don't have a photo handy but if someone hasn't posted one by the end of the day I'll take a photo tonight.

[Patrick Chase]

Lie-Nielsen has moulding irons (off-center tang) and dado/rabbet irons (centered tangs). I don't have a photo handy but if someone hasn't posted one by the end of the day I'll take a photo tonight.

Those L-N irons (https://www.lie-nielsen.com/nodes/4142/tapered-molding-plane-iron-blanks) are annealed O1, so it would be pretty simple to file/grind one to shape. Of course it wouldn't hold an edge very well unless subsequently hardened.

With that said, nickers don't need to be as hard as cutting blades to last for a reasonable amount of time. I've had decent luck fabricating nickers out of blue-hard 1095 stock (https://www.mcmaster.com/#standard-steel-sheets/=18zuo3a), which can be filed.