Thread: freebie jointer plane tuneup

I was working on the no 7 plane today and it kinds of work now.
I did 3 things:
1 Measured and even out all the frog landing pads. They were all on different levels and one wasn't even fylly milled. That fixed the issue of frog being tilted sideway by almost 5 degree.
2 Fitted the frog to sit flat and not to rock, frog and body are in contact on 1/2 to 2/3 of the landing pad surfaces now, but now on all pads at the same time :] . Could be better with scraping, then again it is good enough to work.
3 I almost scraped the high spots on the sole. So i made my surface plate dirty with yellow oil paint, and transfered that to plane, then sanded with a sanding block in painted areas until the paint was gone, and finished by few pases over sanding belt layed flat over the surface plate. i think that worked much better than checking it with markers, because paint did not sink into casting.

results are satisfactory
plane works both ways, with and against the grain, with minimal tearout, mostly without any (blade cap at 1mm)
planed wood is flat acording to my metal ruller, so less than 0,1mm diviations over 40cm length of the ruller.
plane take off high spots as high as 0,05mm on knoty pine log :] shavings are mostly 0,1mm almost full length of the log and mostly full width of the blade. Never had a plane this big to compare how it should look like, then again i mostly need it for making guitar necks, and finished freatboard is even shorter than the plane.

now i only need to paint it pink :]

Originally Posted by kokodin

I was working on the no 7 plane today and it kinds of work now.
I did 3 things:
1 Measured and even out all the frog landing pads. They were all on different levels and one wasn't even fylly milled. That fixed the issue of frog being tilted sideway by almost 5 degree.
2 Fitted the frog to sit flat and not to rock, frog and body are in contact on 1/2 to 2/3 of the landing pad surfaces now, but now on all pads at the same time :] . Could be better with scraping, then again it is good enough to work.
3 I almost scraped the high spots on the sole. So i made my surface plate dirty with yellow oil paint, and transfered that to plane, then sanded with a sanding block in painted areas until the paint was gone, and finished by few pases over sanding belt layed flat over the surface plate. i think that worked much better than checking it with markers, because paint did not sink into casting.

results are satisfactory
plane works both ways, with and against the grain, with minimal tearout, mostly without any (blade cap at 1mm)
planed wood is flat acording to my metal ruller, so less than 0,1mm diviations over 40cm length of the ruller.
plane take off high spots as high as 0,05mm on knoty pine log :] shavings are mostly 0,1mm almost full length of the log and mostly full width of the blade. Never had a plane this big to compare how it should look like, then again i mostly need it for making guitar necks, and finished freatboard is even shorter than the plane.

now i only need to paint it pink :]

How do you usually make guitar necks? I'm just completing my first guitar, and used a template to trace out dimensions, but did most of the shaping by eye. I planed the blank flat before cutting the neck, but once it was flat, there were few places I could get a plane on it without running into something. I came to the conclusion that rough work with a drawknife was a good start, then spokeshave, scraper and finally, very minimal sanding (sanding just looks like a good way to lose all crispness on any details around the peghead, etc, and it's not faster for me - I hate sanding.)

Since this is my first guitar, I'm pretty much just busy making mistakes on it so that the second one will be good. Funny color for a guitar because it's american cherry with rubbed varnish. Sloppy routing around the electronics cavity is because I rarely use power tools, especially for routing against a template, I got some boogers in the routing.

I have a lot of rasps and files from making wooden planes, so fortunately didn't have to buy much. The body and neck only have about $30 worth of material in them, plus $10 for a two-way truss rod.

https://s22.postimg.cc/e2znya7z5/20180805_123155.jpg

(the fingerboard on the other side of this is just maple - no problem planing that since there's nothing at the ends of it to run the plane into.

I think you picked a very resonable way to shape it. I was a crazy kid when i made my first guitar, and it was strat so similar design. but i only made few so i am not a big guru like ben crow from crimson guitars on youtube foe instance.

my first, and basically every subsequent guitar were a story by itself, mostly of equaring tools. But what worked for me every time was a 10 mm thick template, and a router with bearing to trace it. i mean two, top and bottom bearing straight cutters, i also have round shaping bits for neck profile, i usualy make wide D shape, somewhere around 24-28mm (if i remember corectly) radius trailing the bearing on a fretboard in a sled-jig-cradle-thing
if the router bit won't jump out, and dig something, it is a neck, if it does ... scrap unfortunately. succes rate 50-50 so far :]

i usualy cut fret slot first on a dimensioned fretboard blank, nail it on the neck blank with two thin nails trough fret slots without glue , and using nails as guide pins glue the fretboard on still flat no radius yet. after glue sets i cut off the extra freatboard pieces and fit it to the neck either with plane or router with tracing bit (or both), then i do the radius on the back and the last part would be the front radius and shaping the rest of the neck

my guitar from 2010 still works and is in tune so i think it wasn't the bad way to do it. only i cringe at myself now when i think what device worked as a crude router for that build (homemade drill press with 70's low speed aluminium bodied powerdrill)
let's just say that safety wasn't my priority then, but it is now

Thanks for the comment. Yes on the order. I slotted the neck when it was flat stock, after tracing the profile out. I had to do it that way because I mortised the truss rod groove by hand, thinking I'd make the entire guitar by hand and cut the binding channel by hand, too. That didn't go so well.

I wanted only a minor radius on this body, but screwed up by having a roundover bit over-depth from making cabinet doors. I don't like the heavy roundover, but there are a lot of modern telecaster offshoots like that.

I do like to work entirely by hand when possible, because I never ruin stock that way. Even though this isn't high cost stock, I still hate to waste stock.

radiused the fingerboard first (maple) It was pre-slotted, and supposedly pre-radiused compound, but since it's flatsawn maple, it warped and it was overthick to start, so I had to plane the compound radius down (I left it as such) and then sand it to smooth the planing marks. It also cupped, so I glued it to the fretboard by laying two long sticks face down and having them apply pressure on the sides.

It seems like there is a million ways to do things and a million different possible orders for the steps to get to the same conclusion. AS with everything I've made, it also seems that for the hand stuff, getting the rough work close to final dimension (which is easy by hand - happens slow so that you don't blow past lines with a quick misstep), and do the hand work efficiently with minimal fussing and attention to proportion. Too much fussing, and proportion gets lost somewhere.

I think this will be a good playing guitar, but I'm waiting for tuning machines. The hardware kit that I bought was $60. There's no way the tuners are any good, and the pickups were ceramic junkers that would've forced routing the cavities overdepth (no thanks), so I replaced those, too.

the neck is dead quartered and straight, so as long as none of the frets come up (I'll tack them with a drop of CA on the ends if they try), it should play well for a long time.

I'm glad I didn't try to make an archtop L-5 style guitar first!