Thread: One down ...

Nice bit of kit, Derek! The colour & fiddleback figure of the wood looks just like the bit of 'Rock oak' I got from BobL - could it be from the same source?

It's rather like a big scorp, but as you've demonstrated it, with better control of the cut, presumably due to the 'toe'? I've been getting along a lot better with my simple scorp since I had my epiphany with it a couple of years back. It does a pretty good job roughing out, but leaves a much rougher surface than your travisher. I clean up after it with a little double-radiused plane that I made half a lifetime back, but it's not the most comfortable tool to use, particularly now arthritis is setting in. It's also badly worn at the mouth after years of use & almost as hard to control as the scorp. My attempt at a 'bigger & better' replacement for it I mentioned to you some time ago was a miserable failure that ended up in the woodpile. Looks like the better course is to make one of them there wood-ravishers for myself. I've been thinking about giving one a fly for a very long time, & I've got all the necessary ingredients in my scraps box, so no more excuses!

Thanks for the nudge (again!)
Cheers,

Nice looking tool. The only travisher I've played with (some time ago) had much beefier handle bars that seemed to fit the palm. Yours seems to be more spokeshave shaped for fine control under finger pressure? Not that I know what I'm talking about, your clearly taking clean shavings and I never managed a clean cut, but that was probably an issue with sharpness I think.

Ian, I would agree with you that the wood is more likely to be Rock Oak. It has a She oak-like appearance but not quite enough. I do recall being given a chunk a while back, and it may have been from Bob (sorry Bob if I forgot this).

Regards from Perth

Derek

I need to be careful here. Claire builds and sells these planes, and I would not wish to reproduce her methods or plans since they are her livelihood. I chose to modify the travisher in the video and update the design to match the latest one. To do so, I examined many photos on the 'web - almost all were by Claire, since it seems that few, if any, have built this version. I have suggested to Claire that she makes a new video ... although the current video is very worthwhile. What I will do, is post a few pictures of the processes that I needed to do that take her video a step further.

I started with 1" wide x 2.4mm thick O1 steel. You may make out my scratched marking ...



The cut out blank(this is already quite different from the video) ...



The jig to cold bend the blade ...



In compression ...



This is how much springback there was ...



This was the second blade I made. The first was bent around a template of the final shape, and with the springback was far from the desired curve. The second time around I was ready for this and just bent it enough to fit ... got a little lucky ..

How it fits ...



For heat treating I made up a small oven with some scrap stainless steel and bricks. The MAPP gas was only just hot enough to get it to the desired red.



... and then it went into the oven. Luckily my wife was busy baking Christmas cakes. I made sure she first sampled the brandy ...



This is the completed blade. Interestingly, when the steel is bent, it becomes concave along its length, which is like adding a hollow grind. This makes it easier to hone the back of the blade.



This is the jig for grinding the hollow. When the steel was flat I ground a shallow bevel - just enough that I could register the wheel on the centre of the bevel as I was after 30 degrees. (The eagle eye will note that the white Norton wheel is back - a rounded edge is needed to grind the inside curve).



The brass mouth was made in the same manner.

This is resulting hollow grind ...



.. and angle ...



Fitting the blade and brass mouth: the basic shape o the travisher has been cut out on the bandsaw. The fit between sole and blade is a little off ...



After rasps, files and scraping ...



Now with bolts ...



... into inserts ...



Mark off the area where the throat will be cut, and saw the waste for easy removal ..



Chisel it away ...



Clean up with rasps and scrapers ..



Now to prepare the brass mouth: the toe needs to be tapered at 6 degrees. The reason for this is to allow for a varying blade angle - if you rock the travisher back, it will take a deeper cut. Rock it forward to take a fine cut.

The disk sander is set up at 6 degrees off vertical ..



I masked off the area not to grind (I did not want to grind over the bolt holes), and tapered the mouth up to the edge of the mouth ...



Once done, all was screwed back together. Now we have a working travisher ... or should have ... so a test cut ...



And that's where we came in ..



Regards from Perth

Derek

That's the second new thing I have learnt this morning from these fora!!

Never heard of a travisher before!

Being a Philistine I would be inclined to use an Arbortech and a sanding disc!!

Nice looking tool, thanks for the run through on the build.

Just wondering if they are intende to be adjustable for blade wear?

It puzzles me why there does not appear to be a way to adjust for blade wear in the existing design. The amount of blade loss, however, is not expected to be significant if sharpening is done well. I will post on the method at some point. It is very efficient.

If I need to adjust the blade, I will simply extend the holes for the machine screws and turn them into slots.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Derek,

Looks like a great tool. I, too, am interested in how you adjust the blade if it becomes necessary. What if it had been too coarse or too fine from the get-go?

Also, I'm tip-toeing here... but is there any chance I can talk you into swapping those phillips screws for slots? I feel like this is a somewhat traditional aesthetic and it would really improve it. Just an opinion of course.

Excited to see it in action.

Cheers,
Luke

Luke

I did spend time tuning the blade set up. I found that it needs a very small projection above the brass mouth. Small as in a hair. The angled brass mouth then acts to open or close the mouth. In other words, set the blade and then adjust the depth of cut when using the body (toe down and it cuts a fine shaving, pressure on heel and the shaving is thick). This is part of the advantage of the travisher - it allows for adjustment of shavings just with finger pressure, unlike a plane, where the blade must be adjusted.

Screws? I would love to find/use slotted screws. The problem is that these are machine screws and need to run into a metal insert. The only match I could find was metric - M6 - and all of these used Philips heads. I would change over if it was possible.

Regards from Perth

Derek

our favourite Canadian retailer does slotted head brass machine screws in imperial sizes. You would just have to change the inserts over or re-cut the threads

gamut.com also sells steel and brass in slotted, flat head, m6 of various lengths.

If you want to swap them, and I could somehow play supporting cast in making the shipping cheaper, let me know.

Thanks Luke and Ian. I had a look on eBay, and it was easier to order from there. I was able to get M6, which means I just have to swap out the machine screws and not the inserts.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by derekcohen

......It puzzles me why there does not appear to be a way to adjust for blade wear in the existing design. The amount of blade loss, however, is not expected to be significant if sharpening is done well.........

As Luke has obviously been doing, I've also been mulling over travishers for the last couple of days, and the do-or die blade installation has me concerned, too, but perhaps unnecessarily. I've mused about ways of making it adjustable, but any method I can think of involves a lot of faffing about & detracts from the beautiful simplicity of this design, which I would be most reluctant to do unless I could see some real advantages. However, I very much doubt that blade wear is likely to be a concern for most people. Unless you are very savage with the stone when re-sharpening, one blade should easily carve more chair-seats than your average amateur is likely to make in one lifetime. Different matter if you build chairs all day every day and have to sharpen several times a week. In that case, I suggest you would have significant blade wear in a few years no matter how gently you sharpened. However, the solution is pretty simple - just replace it....

I've also been thinking through the build & the initial setting-up. I can see one likely pitfall is the width of the mouth - it will have a big effect on effective blade exposure. Could you give us a reasonably accurate width of that part of your travisher? Nothing like starting with a proven successful configuration......

Cheers,

hi Ian, Derek and Luke

I think that if you built chairs "all day every day" wearing out the blade on your travisher would be very low on your list of priorities.
At that sort of volume, I'm sure you would be proficient with hollowing tools like a scorp, hollowing adze, etc and the travisher would be used much like a smoothing plane -- right at the end when only the final tool marks need to be removed.