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Very good news. Best wishes to you.

Please can responders be asked to say whether they are right or left handed?

Make a rasp by rivetting pieces of bandsaw blade together:

I tried to sharpen some old files with acid but I noticed no improvement, much to my disappointment.

When you have cut your "thread" on a dowel you can put a ruler beside it and count the number of turns per inch, or test it against your thread gauge as Andy has suggested.

The method described by AndyT is a good one. You can get some additional information by using the shanks of twist drills as Go/No-Go gauges. finding out which ones can be inserted into the threaded hole. For a 1/4" x 20 TPI thread: 5.0 mm & 13/64" will be "Go"; 5.5 mm & 7/32" will be "No-Go"...

I would like to take part, please.

I can make a steel rod with a threaded end to suit the plane. It can then be glued into a wooden handle. I have made side handles for hand drills this way. There seems to be some uncertainty about whether the thread is 1/4" x 20 TPI or 7/32" x 20 TPI - this can be checked when the plane...

+ 1 for Tracy Tools as as tap supplier.

I use a small "barbeque" of charcoal briquettes, urged on with a hot air gun. With this arrangement I can easily raise plane irons to red heat. Easy to do and low cost. I'll provide more details if this of any interest.

Thanks Nigel and Droogs. I think it is very instructive to try these Roman planes on a lower bench than we commonly use and experience the feel of their handles. Those planes that have survived, at least in Northern Europe, have significant non-wooden components e.g. iron, bronze, bone, horn...

Thanks to all for your comments. This illustration is taken from: Detlef Bach (1999): Zwei römische Hobel aus Oberüttfeld, Trierer Zeitschrift 62, 1999, S.181 – 191. Herr Bach is a restoration archaeologist and this paper describes a detailed examination that he made of the planes. It shows...

I wasn't able to discover the details of the teeth on the original so I cut as many as I could using a junior hacksaw. Maybe I could have cut a few more using a piercing saw at the expense of a few blades. I'd be very interested to know how toothing was cut by the Romans (and by the Victorians).

Thanks Andy - I think I may have only scratched the surface of ancient planes in Germany. They seem to take such things very seriously there. I think Norway and Denmark may be promising too. Yes, concerning the long iron - a low bench is definitely indicated :)

This is my latest adventure in making reproductions of ancient planes. In 1991, two planes and a billhook were found during archaeological excavation of the remains of a Roman villa near Oberüttfeld, Germany. I found three academic papers in German containing information about these tools and...

Thanks Nigel - I'm now working on replicas of a pair of Roman planes that were found in Germany. They have features that I have not seen elsewhere.

Thanks John - the handles felt a bit odd at first, as you might imagine. However I quickly got used to them.

Thanks Andy and Droogs. The original plane, including its handles, was evidently made of a single piece of wood. As I didn't have a piece of ash thick enough I laminated several planks together and cut the plane from the big lump so formed. Insetting separate handles may be a later idea.

In the 4th edition of Goodman’s British Plane Makers there are some drawings of planes recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose, the warship that sank in the Solent in 1545 in the reign of King Henry VIII. This is my reproduction of one of them, No. MR 82 A980, which is described as a jack...

The fence rod of my Stanley 78 is threaded 1/4" UNF 28 TPI . The diameter of the rod is 7.05 mm. The overall length of the rod is 74 mm and the distance from the end of the threaded part to the shoulder is 10 mm.