Thread: Dem bones. And a hand plane .

So, yesterday, I finally got back to my little mitre plane after a two-week hiatus.

To recapitulate, I'd got as far as peening up the body & doing a rough clean-up:
7a recapitulate.jpg

The next step was to prepare the infill. The front bun is a scrap of figured gidgee & the rear infill is beech from an old plane body. I've taken to using beech for this job because it seems to be kind to bare steel (some of our native species are acidic & can promote nasty rusting!). Note the use of its older sibling to prepare the infill - very handy thing for jobs like this!:
8 fitting wood.jpg

Now I need a lever-cap. I decided to cut down a lever cap that was sitting in my spare parts drawer - waste not, want not. It has been there for ages, and I'd forgotten why. Anyway, it looked like it would do nicely after a nip & tuck:
9 LC trim.jpg

Yeah, well, the best-laid plans & all that. When I went to fit the LC in the plane, I discovered why it had been rejected. The holes for the axle screws were not co-axial & one was skewed to boot:
11 skewed axle.jpg

I vaguely remember stuffing up a lever-cap like that, due partly to a drill bit wandering & partly to my failure to check my set-up. It was mishaps like that that taught me the value of starting critical holes with a centre-bit!

The LC fitted in the plane & clamped the blade alright, but was noticeably slewed with the thumbscrew markedly over to the left of the centre line. It's not noticeable in this pic, but it is if you hold the plane straight-on, it's very obvious: 10 LC in place.jpg

It will have to go, & fortunately, I found a scrap of brass that I could just squeeze a new one from, so I got as far as cutting it out & drilling & tapping the axle holes. That went well, & the new LC sits nice & straight, so I will finish shaping it tomorrow. In the meantime, I had to at least try my new plane, so I popped a blade in & lapped the sole a bit. Happily, it cleaned up very quickly, and the mouth looks very good:
14 mouth.jpg

It made some good shavings straight off:
13 first shavings.jpg

So with that bit of encouragement, I glued the woodwork in place & left it for the night:
15 wood glued in.jpg

Tomorrow, I will finish the new lever cap and do a final clean-up & polish, so hopefully, it will be done by close of business tomorrow....

Cheers,

Nice plane Ian. I like the style of the lever cap. A long neck like the early Spiers ones.
Do you saw and shape those lever caps all with hacksaw and file. No power tools?
What is the side thickness and height of body for this one ?

Ive had to put my plane to one side for the last week. I had a big table to do the final details to before the truck arrived yesterday for delivery. Then a trip to town. 80 K each way. And now a favorite chicken needs attention or its not going to survive . The Isa Browns attacked our Buff Cochin badly. So Im now converting a wood shed into the Buff Cochin coup. And its been a real hot day here clearing and splitting firewood from one shed to the other before I can put a door on it tomorrow hopefully.

its easy to get side tracked around here.

Originally Posted by auscab

... Do you saw and shape those lever caps all with hacksaw and file. No power tools?
What is the side thickness and height of body for this one ? ......

Morning Rob,
no power tools used to make my planes other than the drill press for drilling accurate holes (sometimes!). I wish I had some safe powered method to clean up after peening, that's getting to be hard yakka, not helped by the rubbish files we get these days!

To cut out the shape of the lever-cap I use a combination of hacksaw for straight cuts & a jewellers' saw with a #6 blade (or coarser when I can get them). The little LCs are cut from 1/4" thick bar, and that saws quite quickly with a #6 blade, but even the 1/2" thick stuff I use for larger planes cuts quickly enough. Sawing out LCs from 3/4 material like I did for my panel plane was a bit slow-going, but I got there:
LC 1.jpg

From the basic shape it's all files & sandpaper. A coarse file rips off the gross waste very smartly and coarse sandpaper like 120 wrapped around various sizes of dowel smooths the curves after rough filing. I usually sand to 1200, then polish with a felt wheel & jewellers' rouge. You can progress through the grits quite quickly, but watch the edges & corners where scratches will lurk & pop out when you begin polishing. This is the LC above ready to install (& it's for my skewed panel plane, in case you are wondering about the shape):
LC 4.jpg

It takes something less than a couple of hours to go from a piece of flat bar to a shapely LC (though probably took 3 times as long for my first attempt), but it's not as tedious as you might expect, and sculpting the brass is very satisfying. I "finger-gauge' some pencil lines on the neck to help keep things symmetrical.

Side thickness for the mitre plane is 2mm, and wall height is about 17.5mm, which added to the sole (4mm) brings the sides to 21.5mm, near enough.

I made this one because I ended up with a small piece of gauge plate left over from making a small rear-bun smoother. After wrestling with SS on this small smoother: Bull oak 170mm.jpg
... I decided to spoil myself and use gauge-plate for the next one (expensive, but sooo much nicer to work with than cold-rolled steel, and far, far easier than SS!). There was a short piece left over, which was the perfect size for another small mitre, which I was not intending to start for a while, but my road to hades is paved with good intentions.

I am becoming very fond of the first "midi", as I'm calling it, to differentiate it from the even smaller 'mini' I made 'just to see if I could'. The mini is a very handy little thing to be sure, but this size is just right in my hand & very comfy to use (how did I manage for so many years without it?). Both 'midis' have the finest mouths I've managed on a split sole plane so far. In fact, I don't think I could want the first one any finer. The one I'm working on atm is a tiny fraction of a hair bigger, which is probably a good thing, an ultra-fine mouth can be a 'choking hazard' on some woods. It copes easily with shavings up to several thou thick on most woods I've fed to it, including she-oak & gidgee, but there are some woods that are a bit gummy & like to jam in the mouth. The same woods give my smoothers grief as well. They have fairly fine mouths, but nowhere near as fine as the mitre, so it's more about the woods than the planes, I think.

Originally Posted by auscab

....its easy to get side tracked around here.....

There are so many side-tracks here I get lost in the maze almost every day...

Cheers,
Ian

This morning I shaped the new lever cap. Here it is beside the rejected one, not quite ready to fit, needs a final sand & polish:
16 new LC.jpg

Sorry, Rob, the scrap I had to make this one was about 5mm shorter than the reject, so the neck isn't as long, but I fined it down more & gave it a 6mm thread for the thumbscrew instead of 8mm. The other one was actually bordering on too long, the thumbscrew was bearing on the infill almost at the rear edge. I think the replacement looks ok, and the thumbscrew is bearing in a good spot, at about the level where the back curve begins (new plane on left):
19 twins.jpg

I did a bit more lapping and it's looking pretty good, flat where it needs to be, but there are a couple of low spots, one at the toe & one behind the mouth. (New plane on bottom):
17 mouths cf.jpg

I'll attend to that later when I need a small, boring job to do. The mouth of the new plane is just a teeny, tiny bit wider than the other - you may be able to see it if you squint hard, but there's very little to choose between them. And I've managed to get the blade edge slightly off-square so it has to be slewed as far to the right as it can go to get an even cut. I'll also deal with that another time.

It has a nice action and is a very comfy size to hold.
18 Shavings.jpg

I think of the three mitres I've made, this is going to become my favourite size, I've found the other one so handy for so many little jobs already. Here is the family now:
20 three sizes.jpg

The largest is 6 1/2", the 'midi' 4 1/2 and the baby is just over 3" (that's total length of the sole). And it's time to practice serious birth control on these fellas, the family has grown more than planned!

Cheers,
Ian

Originally Posted by IanW

20 three sizes.jpg

Great set of Mitre planes Ian. You need a mark or a stamp of some sort don't you? I haven't finished one plane yet and I'm thinking a stamp would be nice to finish off a plane. You have a such large number of hand made planes. Have you thought of a stamp? Such a body of work should be marked possibly?

You must have posted this before. The lapping process you do is just sand paper on Glass, or something else? Do you just get it flat on that or test it with the blue dye on something like the surfacing plate method as well?

I follow a guy on instagram who made a traditional stamp . Jordan Goodwin , axe_and _anvil is his insta name. He does great traditional work. His nail making is very cool.

IMG_5712aa.jpg
There is a demo mentioned below, online somewhere, of his explanation of the process. He made reverse male stamps first, to then hot stamp the female impressed stamp , the bottom one , that then made the impression in the copper one at top.
IMG_5712a.jpg

Rob.

Originally Posted by auscab

..... You need a mark or a stamp of some sort don't you? ...

Rob, I've thought about it a few times, but it seems a bit self-agrandising to stamp my planes. Years ago, when I read about the "mouse man", a Brit who carved a mouse somewhere on each piece he made, I was taken with the idea & started using a gum-leaf 'signature' somewhere on each piece of furniture I made - either as a shallow relief carving (leaves are good for that):
gum leaf knees.jpg

...or as an inlay: 14 desk detail.jpg 12 chest.jpg

I've thought about trying to engrave a similar design on brass lever-caps, but my engraving skills are not quite up to the job...

So the planes go unmarked. There is something approaching 50 of them out there now & my body tells me there won't be many more (& they'll be small or very small ones!) so it's a bit late to be thinking of branding them now. I guess there are sufficient breed characteristics to indicate a common source, so if someone 'discovers' them in the decades to come & wonders who dunnit, they'll probably find out who it was easily enough through the interweb & articles in AWR. So I'll probably not remain completely anonymous...

Originally Posted by auscab

....You must have posted this before. The lapping process you do is just sand paper on Glass, or something else? Do you just get it flat on that or test it with the blue dye on something like the surfacing plate method as well? .....

Yes, & it's in the 'manual'. I use a bit of laminated counter-top as the support for strips of paper, & have cobbled up a clamping system that stretches the paper really tight as one end pushes a dowel into a groove (got a pic of it somewhere but can't find it atm). For small soles, this works fine, but white paper soon wears with steel (especially stainless!), so I sometimes use a zircon belt stretched tightly across the tablesaw top. It's difficult to get the thick belts really tight (& they're expensive), but they cut fast & last a lot longer.

Lapping gets them flat enough for my purposes, not as flat as scraping (see yet more discussion on this topic in two threads running concurrently), but imo you can get them very close, with appropriate care. The nature of lapping means there will always be a bit of rounding at toe & heel caused by accumulating swarf & loose grit when they are forced under the metal as you go back & forth.

So while I can't detect it with a straightedge, I suspect there is a tiny bit of convexity in a lapped sole as an inevitable consequence of the lapping. A teeny amount of convexity is fine on a short sole, & in fact, I venture it may be a good thing (the emphasis is on tiny amount) because it counters the trend to cut deeper at the start & end of each stroke. It also allows a short smoother to get into those small areas on a wide surface. It's a very subtle thing & not appropriate for a longer bodied plane.

All of the planes I've lapped can produce 1 thou or better shavings end-to-end of a board, & that's my criterion of acceptable....

Cheers,
Ian

It was all shed-time yesterday & today, enough rain to curtail any outdoor activity, so I decided to finish off another little plane. This one is a mini, the same size as the smaller of the two I showed back in post #12: 1 second mini.jpg

Now there is a reason for showing this, Rob (it's not just an idle gloat ). When I started to lap the sole, I got a bit of a surprise. As I've said a couple of times elsewhere, after peening, there is nearly always a bit of a dip in the sole at the mouth where the two parts of the sole meet. I ascribe this to the long socket I make here to avoid heavy peening at the sides of the bed bevel, which allows a bit more squirming around as the metal is hammered. But when I began to lap this one, the dip was not just at the join, but extended fore & aft by a considerable amount. You can see almost half the sole is untouched after a couple of minutes of lapping: 2.jpg

I was a bit alarmed by this, but after a break for lunch & a bit more work, the dip started to diminish pretty quickly, it wasn't very deep, thank goodness: 3.jpg

I could see the dip diminishing quicker than I expected, and after a bit more work, I finally had it flat to the front of the mouth (the last bit to come into line): 5 nearly done.jpg

There are still two little dips each side of the join, where the depression was deepest, but I think I'll quit here. The mouth is still nice & tight and the plane makes nice shavings: 6 shavings.jpg

After your comment I gave this one a longer, slimmer neck on the lever cap than #1 & I think it looks better for it. The perspective is making the new one [on the right] look wider than the first, but they are actually identical: 7 minis.jpg

Now, the reason for showing this is to propose a theory as to why that dip was so pronounced. I did a lot of peening on this plane, the piece of SS I had for the sole was barely wide enough & so I had the bare minimum of steel extra for peening, which caused me some anxious moments during the job!, so I had to do a lot of coaxing to get the steel to cover the edges of the brass. But I don't think that was the culprit, I also worked very hard on the brass from the sole side to make sure the tails were thoroughly squashed into the steel sockets & I suspect that is what dunnit. The brass is only 2mm thick, and the walls are only 15mm high, and what's more, this brass (H62 from China) is softer than the stuff I've been used to, which makes it lovely to peen, but in future I will go a bit easier!

Unfortunately, I didn't know about the dip until I'd filed & flattened the top - it probably had a slight convexity from front to back, which would have supported my theory, but I just levelled it on my sanding board without putting a straightedge on it, so I'll never know for sure.

Your sides are even thinner at 1.6mm but deeper, & the brass may be a bit harder than this so you may not get a dip like I did, but I thought I should mention it so you can proceed with caution when you get to that step. Being your first you probably will go very cautiously anyway....


Cheers

Another beauty Ian. Thanks for the tips. Ill see what happens when I get to the sole and mouth. This plane making is an adventure. Once again I'm discovering how tricky building small is. I'm figuring out stuff as I go. BTW my brass sides are 2mm , same as yours.

Thank goodness it isn't 1.6mm!!! After today's progress I'm convinced if it was 1.6mm I'd be making something to put on a shelf and look at. IF it survived the build.


I remade the bridge twice Yesterday. So it took three of them to get it right all up. And this morning started the making of the dummy plate to drill the sides so I could then mark the bridge for cutting and filing the pins.
They don't take long cutting with a steel cutting blade on the band saw.
My band saw is 14" Woodfast /Steelfast saw. It has a gearbox for slow or fast cutting. I keep it on the fast speed and have a metal blade in it. I reckon a steel blade in a wood band saw should be OK to use. A slow careful feed rate is what is needed. I also use my other wood bladed band saw for the brass.


IMG_5868.jpg IMG_5883.jpg


These pictures are the making of the dummy plate for drilling sides. I like the way filing up against a square piece of wood as a guide gives a square cut to the work.
IMG_5869.jpg IMG_5870.jpg IMG_5871.jpg

The machined piece was welded with a spot weld on the end first. Then I welded it better through a hole in the top plate. For each side of the body I clamped it to the work board and got the position right before drilling one side at a time with a 3mm bit in the cordless drill.
IMG_5872.jpg IMG_5873.jpg IMG_5875.jpg IMG_5877.jpg
The position was marked out on the sides and checked with a square to show marks on top of the body.
All went well with that.
IMG_5879.jpg IMG_5880.jpg

More later.

Rob

Rob, I'm impressed by your careful & thorough approach - you are certainly giving it every chance to succeed! My first plane build was the very opposite of yours, short bursts of frenzied activity, with long gaps while I was away on work trips & thinking how to recover from the latest blunder! As I've said before, I almost abandoned the whole thing at one point, but decided to carry on & finish it for the exercise, then make a 'proper' one using the gained experience.

However, when it was finished, it looked semi-decent (marvellous what a bit lot of file work does!) & I was pleasantly surprised when it actually made shavings. It had a few problems at first, like choking at the drop of a hat, which over time, I figured out were due to a combination of things. One of the main problems was due to the cast lever cap I'd bought for the job. It is very thick & had a very abrupt curve on the toe, so it almost filled the narrow escapement, which is particularly narrow because it's a high-angle [55*] & I didn't slope the front bun forward enough. Filing a much more gentle curve on the LC, and some experimentation to get the right angle on the cap-iron reduced the problem to tolerable proportions, but it still likes to choke more than the 45* infills I made since. I also remodelled the front bun a little, which was not so easy when it was rivetted in the body! All this took a couple of years, with my returning to it as I made more planes & learnt a bit more about what makes them tick.

I'm a walking example of the old maxim that what experience teaches you most is how to deal with your mistakes....!

Cheers,

PS. Of course, you did say very early on what thickness of brass you are using - I guess I was thinking of the original, which is only 1/16: iirc. I'd find that thickness a real challenge to work with for several reasons - harder to saw because the saw catches on the thin material unless you use very fine blades which cut slowly & break easily! , and harder to keep edges square. Filing edges square & straight is indeed a skill, which I haven't quite mastered and using a wood guide like you mention certainly helps a lot, especially when filing out the bottom edges of the socket, which need to be both square & co-planar for water-tight joins...

I took over 60 pictures doing this yesterday.
So its a picture feast of a post.

There is the bridge filed up before fitting. The little bone Preston 12" folding rule was a recent ebay purchase. Its 3" closed.
IMG_5886.jpg
The holes reamed with the end of a file as I saw Ian doing. This gave a slight taper towards the outside of each hole.
IMG_5887.jpg

The small Starret square I bought years ago finally came in very handy on this little plane job.
Fitting that bridge was tricky in that where the flat meets the pin, getting those corners clean is hard! One , I cant see whats not allowing a good fit to body. I didn't try my head magnifiers, I probably should have but I was already fiddling about with different sets of glasses. The crisp edge of the Starret hardened square easliy showed by feel where I didnt have a clean transition from flat to pin.
IMG_5888.jpg
Another tool I finally have a good use for. Peening the side together on the Peter Wright saw doctors anvil. Its now a plane making anvil Pete . 5 minutes before this picture I removed the thick green paint that covered the sides with my needle scaler . Then sanded the top clean and oiled the whole thing. Its been sitting to the side, rusty on top for a while.
IMG_5891.jpg

My first Peened pin.
It was moving like butter and was a delight to do. I was having so much fun and I knew I should have a buck or a piece of wood in between the sides to be safe, but I just kept gently going with the 4 pins and not paying attention to anything else. At some stage I had removed the front piece as I was working.
IMG_5892.jpg

Then I stopped and inspected and the view from the top was not good .
First I just thought "Oh Ive bent the sides in" But then realized I had bent and compressed the bridge!!
A bit of swearing happened at that stage.
There was no way it was coming apart unless I drilled and cut out the bridge. So the first attempt at a fix was to get and polish a narrow piece of steel to use as an anvil. With the body upside down I peened out the compression then planished it with the face with my small brad hammer. Some careful tapping helped straighten the brass.
IMG_5893.jpg IMG_5897.jpg
And it came pretty good. PHEW! There was a bit of wobble left, to the side forward of the pins which should sand out.
IMG_5898.jpg IMG_5900.jpg

The next thing was to peen those ends and sides at the front.
I cut a piece of 2" Oak to hold the body and needed a perfect fit down the end so no hopefully no distortion would happen there.
I roughly cut the U shaped end in the wood and applied some PlastiBond filler and some plastic bag off cut, fitted the body and went and had lunch, giving it an hour and a half to set. With a steel block on one side I peened the opposite side. Taking it out to do the sides on the anvil. A carefully fitted polished edge piece of mild steel kept things on track for the side DTs. That piece of steel had a slight taper which I could drive in tighter where needed to help sort out some of the distortion of the previous accident.
IMG_5904.jpg IMG_5905.jpg IMG_5906.jpg IMG_5908.jpg

With some relief that it all went well I was very happy. That was some good fun!
IMG_5918.jpg IMG_5909.jpg IMG_5910.jpg IMG_5912.jpg IMG_5913.jpg

IMG_5917.jpg
I roughed off the excess with 80 grit on my horizontal sander. I wasn't game to go anywhere near the steel pins though.
IMG_5920.jpg IMG_5921.jpg

Back to the bench and I filed it up. And I'm feeling very satisfied with that.


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Now for the sole.


Rob.

Hi Rob

Wishing you my thanks for putting up such a large array of photos of each step. Really get a better feel for the the process, jigging for each step, and tells a great story

Cheers

Martin

Awesome work Rob,

There’s something meditative mediaeval in bashing(Controlled manipulative of a material [emoji849]) in making metal move too one’s needs lol.

Metals just a harder Timber that’s all,

One trick I did when making the “Body” way back then Rob was I got some larger Bolts, I think around M12/M 14 filed the tops flat, an filed the nuts Flat on one side only, an used them inside the plane body, too hold it apart were I needed it, a drop of super glue would help, if all that makes sense.

I’m eagerly waiting the next episode [emoji41].

Cheers Matt.

Great progress, Rob. Even I still feel a strong sense of relief when each step turns out well.

I hesitated to comment on that bridge when I first saw it, but I remember thinking the deep cleft on the bottom side could make it liable to collapse when you started beating on the pins. On V2.0, maybe shift the bottom pins up a bit towards the top so there is more metal supporting it? Or perhaps do a 'cupid's bow', which doesn't remove so much metal? They are surprisingly easy to do, all you need is a small round file & a small triangular file: ETP 4 b.jpg

Matt, that's a clever idea to use a bolt for internal support. Turning the nut a bit to lodge it firmly in position would be much easier than filing a piece of 3/8 steel to fit! Why couldn't I have thought of that?! Kudos!

It is certainly very satisfying when you file off rivets & dovetails and see a perfect, flat surface - I think that's a good part of what got me hooked on this silly plane-making caper....

Now for the last lap, eh? My daily dose of advice here is, don't go for an exaggerated dovetail look - just file a very small tapered chamfer on the brass. That will hold the body very firmly and give you far fewer anxious moments. And I hope you've left plenty of protrusion of the steel to fill the corners where the chamfers are widest, something I still find hard to judge accurately, even after banging dozens of plane bodies together. 7 b pic.jpg

I think my experience in peening up separate sides made me too stingy with the mitre planes. An extra allowance of .5mm protrusion of the pins creates a lot more work at the filing-off stage, but it's very handy when trying to fill those corners completely.

I've mentioned this before, but what I find helpful is to put the job aside when I think I've got it done & go & mow the lawn or wait 'til next morning, then give it a very thorough inspection with 'fresh' eyes (& wearing my best pair of specs!). It's amazing how often I find a corner or two that looks like it needs a bit more work on it. A second close inspection when you are halfway through filing-off is also a good idea, it's easier to see any faults with some of the daggiest bits out of the way & you still have a bit of spare metal if any do need a bit more attention....

Cheers,
ian

Originally Posted by Simplicity

One trick I did when making the “Body” way back then Rob was I got some larger Bolts, I think around M12/M 14 filed the tops flat, an filed the nuts Flat on one side only, an used them inside the plane body, too hold it apart were I needed it, a drop of super glue would help, if all that makes sense.

That could come in handy thanks Matt. I could use that to hold or even jack apart my low spots. Ive got a couple after sanding that are still low.