Paul Sellers Router Plane

[jcassidy]

Indeed!
And I'm Irish!
(And he can't spell "pompous" either!)

Sorry I was reading something about the future President Mike Pompeo...LOL

 

[IWW]

I think this tool looks good, but the wood will have to be very well seasoned or it'll move, laminating on some rosewood or ebony to the sole wouldn't be a bad idea

The wood Derek used (& I used a very close relative) is a good deal harder than any ebony, so I don't think you need worry about that aspect! It's also very stable, once dry. Mine has been in service for quite a while now & is as true as the day it was made.

In any case, a router plane is an exceedingly simple tool, the accuracy of which depends as much on the operator as the tool itself (& how well you can sharpen that darned awkward blade!)....
Cheers,
Ian

 

[kwigly]

I find it difficult to get these high angle straight blade routers to work well, and find the low cutting angle of the L shaped blades in Stanley/Veritas routers to be a vast improvement

 

[Cozzer]

I've got a little Stanley - thinks: thankfully they're not called a "dick" - #271.
Used it a lot in my marquetry days, for routing out a solid wood ground or a glued veneer, ready to insert a marquetry design.
As long as the outline of the shape was accurate - in my case, courtesy of a scalpel - the Stanley worked quite well.
That said, a rectangular piece of metal does fade in comparison to the beeeeeeeautiful wooden job pictured above....

 

[D_W]

The wood Derek used (& I used a very close relative) is a good deal harder than any ebony,

It looks to be similar in hardness to gabon ebony, but it definitely has less volumetric shrinkage (ebony is terrible for that). I have a bunch of ebony, but have been too stingy to do anything other than cut some into fingerboards (it's not that expensive, but it's uncommon that dense rosewood won't do just as well for anything I've made in tools and rosewood has much more directional conviction to manipulate - gabon ebony is a bit of a weird wood in that it's really dense and really hard, but it doesn't usually seem to have any stringiness at all and can be scraped to a polish with a simple blunt metal shaped scraper.

Not sure what's gotten in England, but in the US, there seems to be some overseas myth about the wood market here that not a lot of really hard stuff is available. There are woods close to 4k on the janka test and with 12% moisture, 1.2 specific gravity. They are so heavy that they cause me to have issues with chisel handles being heavy (and they feel like plastic because you have to have magnification to find pores). They sound odd when you strike them (a loud high pitched sharp crack). I'm going to make fingerboards out of some of the gombeira as the wood feels like its waxed.

There are some harder woods in australia, but it's difficult to find a use for the woods that are in the upper 3k here (and they're usually not too expensive unless they're really limited, like kingwood - kingwood costs the moon in anything sizable).

compared to gabon ebony, though, gabon ebony is a "makers" wood. It's not as hard or dent resistant (and probably only half as stiff as gombeira/ Coracao de *****) as any of the above, but you can scrape a chess piece out of a block without ever cutting anything and it will be bright.

 

[IWW]

Ok, I should have said "any ebony I've met".

I have used very little ebony, and most of what I have used came from Sri Lanka, plus a few lots of "Macassar" ebony. The latter comes from a broad area and can be one of a few different species, apparently, so I could not tell you exactly which species I've had. They were all hard, but easier to work than most casuarinas, mainly because the fine grain was much more predictable.

The casuarinas are rather unforgiving woods, they are siliceous and difficult to plane. Like hard Maple, they dull edges faster than you'd expect for their hardness (& ~3 times faster than rock maple!). Nearly all have large to very large medullary rays which can be a plus or a minus aesthetically depending on what you want to use them for, but the large rays will sometimes tear out when you least expect it & always in a most visible spot. Their worst fault is that they are difficult to dry in large pieces (as are most very dense woods). This is what happens in a couple of days if you leave it in the round in the middle of our summer:


I don't make them sound very attractive, do I? However, once you do get them dry they can be very stable, and very suited to toolmaking if you have the patience & peseverence to work with them. Despite the appearance of a northern hemisphere Quercus, most species of casuarinas I've tried scrape or sand to a very fine texture that makes very tactile (& tough!) tool handles.

The stocks of my "working" trysquares are "bull-oak" (Casuarina leuhmanii), often (erroneously) described as the hardest wood in the world. The tree this lot came from had unusually fine grain for a bull-oak & finished with a superb shimmering surface. They've served me well for 12 years or more now & should see another generation or two out:



And the prominent grain pattern can be used to good effect in small turned/carved items:




Cheers,
Ian