Help setting up wooden compass plane?

[Mike Cornwall]

Hi, new to this stuff so please forgive my ignorance. I try to be clever but I don’t always know what I’m looking at.

I got this compass plane and I really want to love it. The problem is it takes really thick shavings no matter what I do. After a couple discouraging rounds, I think it has problems that are compounded by my inexperience.

Often I rely on however the previous owner had a tool working, and try to make it like they had it. This plane had a pretty wild radius ground into it. I flattened and squared it up, just leaving enough at the corners to hopefully minimize tracks.

That didn’t solve the problem of the heavy shavings, .010” is the thinnest I could get from some pine after trying to sneak up on a setting with tiny taps.

Do compass planes make thin shavings or am I chasing my tail? I have a purpose for this if I can get it to cut pretty.

Any help is much appreciated, thanks in advance.

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[Nicholas Lawrence]

I don’t have any wooden compass planes, but I have several wooden planes I use and like.

I had trouble setting them for very fine shavings at first, because the iron is tapered (on my wooden planes anyway) so that a tap on the iron would loosen the wedge ever so slightly. Then when I tapped the wedge to firm it up it would advance the iron as well.

If you tap the rear of the plane you can get the iron to retract. With practice you should be able to get it where it needs to be so that the last tap on the wedge leaves the iron where you want it.

[Mike Cornwall]

Thanks! I’ll give that another wiggle.

If the cap iron isn’t staying put, knock some more convexity into it so it presses harder on the cutting iron? Or is there another trick?

[Nicholas Lawrence]

Is it slipping when you try to plane? Are there chips jammed between the iron and chipbreaker?

Or will it just not tighten at all?

[Mike Cornwall]

No jamming just not enough tension to stay put. I bent a little more arc into it and now it’s happy.

Man I gotta thank you for that insight about the tapered blade, within a few seconds I was getting .003” shavings off maple and walnut scraps.

Thanks a million!

[Mike Cornwall]

If you can picture the belly rout on a fender Stratocaster, this seems like it’ll be sweet for sneaking up on that shape.

[Bob Glenn]

I am not an expert on the compass plane, however, I use my Crown compass plane a lot when saddling chair seats. IMO and experience, (please correct me if I'm wrong), the compass plane is not intended to take thin shavings, but used to rough out the final shape as a scrub plane would on a flat surface. When I saddle a chair seat, I begin with a gutter adze, then go to a scorp, then the compass plane, travisher and curved card scraper if needed.

It seems to me that due to the radical radius of the blade, you are not going to get a thin shaving unless you are planing the exact same radius of the wood. If you want to match the radius to the plane and get thin finishing cut, I think you may have to back the blade off a bit. I can never get mine to cut unless I have a lot of blade showing from the sole.

Please school me up if I'm doing it wrong.

[Mike Cornwall]

I squared up the cutter except at the corners, there’s planes I’ve seen radiused in both directions like a violin makers plane, this one is flat across so I made the blade straight. Nicholas’s tip about the tapered iron made all the difference, highlighting my ignorance on setting a wooden plane but nobody on YouTube seems to know either.

So far it seems like this plane is a lot happier following a concave contour than creating one. I think I’ll hog out the shape with saw cuts and a chisel, then a draw knife, then this guy and so on like you describe up through the card scraper.

I’m not a woodworker so I’m just playing with things and puzzling it out.

[Bob Glenn]

Mike, sorry about my previous post. The compass plane I have is radiused in both directions with a radiused blade, a different animal. Sorry for the confusion.

[Nicholas Lawrence]

So far it seems like this plane is a lot happier following a concave contour than creating one. I think I’ll hog out the shape with saw cuts and a chisel, then a draw knife, then this guy and so on like you describe up through the card scraper.


Mike I don’t even own one, so definitely not an expert, but the Stanley compass planes I have seen being used (shaping rockers for a chair) were being used to refine a rough shape, not to create it from scratch. That sounds consistent with what you are finding.

You may want to look in the instrument maker’s forum for advice if you are making a guitar.

[Mike Cornwall]

Thanks Nicholas, your tip on the tapered iron made all the difference. I think there’s some twist in the bed of this plane but I’m having a lot of fun with it. Are these old laminated irons a lot better quality than the ones on my Stanley planes? They seem to be.

[Jim Koepke]

Thanks Nicholas, your tip on the tapered iron made all the difference. I think there’s some twist in the bed of this plane but I’m having a lot of fun with it. Are these old laminated irons a lot better quality than the ones on my Stanley planes? They seem to be.

The quality of old blades can vary among blades from the same maker. Two of my 2" Stanley blades have the same V trademark stamp but are very different in hardness.

An old laminated iron may have the benefit of being from a small batch made with care by someone with many years of experience. Then again, it could be made on Monday morning by a hungover worker back from a weekend bender.

Stanley made many laminated blades and even tapered blades.

jtk

[Mike Cornwall]

Thanks, I like this iron a lot and I have a William Ash that seems really promising too. I like the Stanley ones but the tapered laminated ones seem more special.