Thread: New addition, I’ve been a good boy

IMG_0173.jpgIMG_0176.jpgIMG_0175.jpgIMG_0174.jpg

Nice . I love Spiers planes . Years of rewarding planing in using them on the right work.
Ive treated myself for being good as well a few times over the years with Mr Spiers hand planes.
The wife told me I was a bad boy at the time though.

I’m not married… and I a got a Spiers… l’m a two times winner… and I now have a new long term relationship.

It's potentially a fabulous plane. Mine is a smoother that arrived like this (I think it cost me $40 at the time ... many years ago) ..



Stripped to bare bones ...



And went on to a new life (good enough for FWW magazine) ...



Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by Clinton1

IMG_0173.jpgIMG_0176.jpgIMG_0175.jpgIMG_0174.jpg

a nice looking plane. I had perhaps four of the smoothers (one mathieson, one spiers, one norris #2 and then an unmarked gunmetal sided plane). All were lighter in weight like that plane will be - more comparable to a stanley 4 than a lot of the overweight boat anchors made now as infill smoothers.

I've had some vintage panel planes that are boat anchors, though. And have made my own boat anchors. I could work all day with a smoother like that, but a 6 to 8 pound norris copy with enormous amounts of extra steel would be a no go.

Congrats! I have a mild yen for an infill, and, if so, definitely a Spiers (after all, they were built in Scotland, my favorite part of my ancestry). You found a good one.

Very nice

Nice little plane, Clinton. I don't know when Spiers changed from using screws to rivets to hold the stuffing and wedges for retaining the blade, but it was fairly early from the pics I've seen of dated planes. According to a book I have, wedges remained an option for a little while and were an option on mitre planes almost to the last, but were pretty much history on bench planes by the last quarter of the 1800s. (Norris kicked off 15 years or more after Spiers & never used wedges on bench planes as far as I know). So I reckon your dating would be on the mark.

Be interesting to get a weight on your plane when you have it back in working trim. Looking at the empty chassis of Derek's plane, it doesn't have very heavy gauge material in sides & sole (looks pretty similar to the gauges I favour for a smoother, which is 3.2mm for sides & 5mm for soles) & with blackwood stuffing, it should be a pretty comfy weight. However, my she-oak infilled smoother is is not much heavier than my Stanley #4, which is a type 11 (with a lighter casting than later models). Inf a.jpg Stanley 4.jpg

I certainly don't find weight an issue with it, and it's a bit more comfortable to hold than my Stanley, but it is narrower with a 1 3/4" blade.
4 & inf.jpg

I can vouch that weight goes up exponentially with size and heavier gauge materials - my 14" panel plane is nearly twice the weight of a 5 1/2. It's very nice to use in 5 minute bursts, but I would certainly not like to push it around all day!

Cheers,

Derek, Thankfully I don’t have to put in as much work as you did.
Nice job you did!

Originally Posted by D.W.

a nice looking plane. I had perhaps four of the smoothers (one mathieson, one spiers, one norris #2 and then an unmarked gunmetal sided plane). All were lighter in weight like that plane will be - more comparable to a stanley 4 than a lot of the overweight boat anchors made now as infill smoothers.

I've had some vintage panel planes that are boat anchors, though. And have made my own boat anchors. I could work all day with a smoother like that, but a 6 to 8 pound norris copy with enormous amounts of extra steel would be a no go.

this is only my second “good brand, old infill”, I have a home build one made from much thicker steel. Thicker steel is more forgiving for the amateur builder, I think.

Originally Posted by Bill Houghton

Congrats! I have a mild yen for an infill, and, if so, definitely a Spiers (after all, they were built in Scotland, my favorite part of my ancestry). You found a good one.

Yeah, I think I did. I’m of Scots/Gaelic descent so the history of this grabs my attention

Originally Posted by IanW

Nice little plane, Clinton. I don't know when Spiers changed from using screws to rivets to hold the stuffing and wedges for retaining the blade, but it was fairly early from the pics I've seen of dated planes. According to a book I have, wedges remained an option for a little while and were an option on mitre planes almost to the last, but were pretty much history on bench planes by the last quarter of the 1800s. (Norris kicked off 15 years or more after Spiers & never used wedges on bench planes as far as I know). So I reckon your dating would be on the mark.

Be interesting to get a weight on your plane when you have it back in working trim. Looking at the empty chassis of Derek's plane, it doesn't have very heavy gauge material in sides & sole (looks pretty similar to the gauges I favour for a smoother, which is 3.2mm for sides & 5mm for soles) & with blackwood stuffing, it should be a pretty comfy weight. However, my she-oak infilled smoother is is not much heavier than my Stanley #4, which is a type 11 (with a lighter casting than later models). Inf a.jpg Stanley 4.jpg

I certainly don't find weight an issue with it, and it's a bit more comfortable to hold than my Stanley, but it is narrower with a 1 3/4" blade.
4 & inf.jpg

I can vouch that weight goes up exponentially with size and heavier gauge materials - my 14" panel plane is nearly twice the weight of a 5 1/2. It's very nice to use in 5 minute bursts, but I would certainly not like to push it around all day!

Cheers,

I’ll stick it in a bag and get the butcher to weigh it.

Originally Posted by Clinton1

this is only my second “good brand, old infill”, I have a home build one made from much thicker steel. Thicker steel is more forgiving for the amateur builder, I think.

I've not made as many of these as Ian. At last count, it was four and then a bunch in process that I put aside. My first one was thicker, but I thought at the time there was something to having the weight and built something more like a brese plane with a tiny mount and heavy everything. It's a little under 6 pounds for a 2" wide plane. I thought I'd really nailed it - mouth of about 4 thousandths, 55 degree bed, and so on. I bought a lever cap and iron from Brese, as he sold those individually at the time and it certainly would be the two things someone without a mill might like to buy pre-made.

And then, after taking a bunch of luscious test shavings with it (wax it up and it's quite nice feeling), I added it to the end of the cycle for my first attempt at hand making (all single iron planes - I had no idea what I was doing and that was the sentiment at the time). It was pure torture!! The whole cycle was. I had a gorgeous early 1800s wooden jointer that had seen almost no use and had a small mouth, an infill panel plane with a double iron, but made in a way the cap iron couldn't be set close to where it would be useful, and my "foolproof smoother". Horrible in a way that's hard to get a feel for if not using a plane continuously. The smoother worked fine, but it was heavy and only took thin shavings.

When I later got over the kind of "I can't feel anything if a heavy plane goes over things with a thin shaving" (it's not such a good measure of the surface, it just feels smoother - the surface is the same either way), I bought a whole bunch of the earlier infills to extract "data" from them, and was a little surprised to find that most of those earlier types in smoothers are about as heavy as a stanley 4. I used a pair of them a good bit in actual work, but in the end, I like the stanley 4 more. There's a good bit to learn from what those older infills convey, though. how they achieve clearance for a cap iron without making the mouth wide, etc, their proportions, and then comparing the boat anchors vs norris #2s and the like in actual work smoothing wood that came from a try plane or machine planer with chatter marks.

Yes indeed, a heavy plane feels great ..... for about a minute!

I've probably made more planes than most folks reading the thread, which means I've also made more mistakes, one being "the heavier the better" - not so! However, it sure drives the lessons home when the result of all your efforts at sawing, filing, hammering & more filing, & laboriously fitting stuffing using a wood that is more akin to stone than wood turns out to be a bit of a dog! I managed to fettle my first effort into a decent plane eventually, but it was a bit of a scarring experience & partly why I wrote my "manual" in the hope of saving other would-be makers some disappointment.

I would never claim that my infill smoothers are superior to a well-fettled Bailey, the finished surface from either is indistinguishable, but I do find them a bit more comfy to use on a long session, and they have a bit more eye-appeal (to me) than the more 'industiial' Stanley, but the Stanley is slightly more convenient as the general-purpase bench plane so still gets lots of bench-time.

With care, and a common-sense approach, I'm sure most people could make a very good infill on their first attempt, but if you just want to enjoy that infill experience and learn a bit about them in the process, you are probably better off doing what Clinton is doing & restore a good old one. Mr. Spiers and his contemporaries had worked out things I'm still discovering, almost 200 years ago.....

Cheers,