First shopmade plane

[colinc]

Hi,

I thought that this might encourage other people to have a go at making a plane. The story is that a week ago I had a dose of some bug and was forced to rest for a couple of days. I decided to stay away from devices and pulled some books from the shelf, one of which was Krenov's that I had forgotten I owned. I was drawn to his description of his shop made planes and a bit of research on the inter-web resulted in me ordering a Hock blade, not cheap but I had a fever!

Amongst other jobs I this weekend, I managed to find time to glue up some offcuts to make a blank on Friday evening, cut the body parts and glued them together on Saturday afternoon, then this afternoon I made a wedge, honed and fitted the blade, then roughly shaped the body to something more comfortable than the angular block and decided to apply it to some wood.

I have to say it was suprisingly good from the first cut. Very comfortable to use and the surface finish of the timber was something I have never achieved before.

So, this may be the start of a rocky road searching for plane perfection. The idea of this knocked together prototype was simply to explore the process, and it does demand accuracy from the start, but the prototype is looking much more of a 'keeper' than I anticipated.

The lessons learned so far are that the angle of the mouth front section (15 deg from vertical) perhaps should be increased, and the base section needs to be harder than recycled mantlepiece. I need to find something harder but not brittle and would appreciate ideas. The main part is white ok, the wedge brown oak, but the sole I haven't identified.

Regards,

Colin

 

[AndyT]

Nice one!
I suggest beech for the sole - it was the best choice on millions of planes over the last five hundred years or so.

 

[CHJ]

and the base section needs to be harder than recycled mantlepiece. I need to find something harder but not brittle and would appreciate ideas. The main part is white ok, the wedge brown oak, but the sole I haven't identified.

You could do worse than follow the wood choices of Philly, (a one time regular contributor here and still visits regularly) whilst honing his skills before embarking on a Plane Making venture some eleven years ago

 

[colinc]

Nice one!
I suggest beech for the sole - it was the best choice on millions of planes over the last five hundred years or so.

Hi,

Yes, I did think that Beech would be good given that most wooden planes I have seen were made of it. My local timber supplier has some. I just used what I had for this one as I expected to make mistakes.

Colin

 

[colinc]

and the base section needs to be harder than recycled mantlepiece. I need to find something harder but not brittle and would appreciate ideas. The main part is white ok, the wedge brown oak, but the sole I haven't identified.

You could do worse than follow the wood choices of Philly, (a one time regular contributor here and still visits regularly) whilst honing his skills before embarking on a Plane Making venture some eleven years ago

I remember his posts from years ago. Thanks for the links.

Colin