Thread: Panel-plane build

Originally Posted by Cal

Just on hitting one hammer with another, I was taught (by more than one person) never to do this as they can shatter. Maybe using two different metals, steel and brass would be a better combination.

Then you just pein em back together!

Sidenote: Is pein/peen one of those British English vs American English words? I can't seem to find a bias one way or another online

Best I can see is that pein is an alternate spelling of peen.

Knights New Mechanical Dictionary (Houghton, Mifflen and Company, Boston 1884) uses peen throughout. Knight was formerly chief examiner at the US Patent Office. And going by his other qualifications, probably spoke French very well.

Collins English Dictionary has pein (American) as an alternate spelling of peen

dictionry.com has peen as the British spelling. and doesn't recognise pein as a word.


so if there is a bias, it towards peen.

Ian, this plane build is certainly a credit to you, a job well done. I have enjoyed watching the journey over the last few days.
I too saw the bits for sale, but held off because I know it would sit in my shed for 5 or 10 years before I got a chance to get to it.

On hitting hammer on hammer, it is certainly a no-no. You are hitting 2 hardened faces together, the result will be small pieces of shrapnel breaking away at the contact points and firing off at any direction, this will embed into your body if it hits you, or worse an eye..
Better to use a proper punch, with a softer end for striking, the end will deform and mushroom after many hits, but it wont eject projectiles like the faces of the 2 hardened hammers will.

Just on the subject of hitting two hammer heads together, (and ignoring Matt's scurrilous comments on highjacking threads as being overtly provocative ) I think every small boy has delighted in hitting two hammer heads together. Great fun for some obscure adolescent reason. I think this was why in the woodwork shop at school there was a poster forbidding us to engage in such practice as it explained that sparks can fly from these two surfaces faster than a jet plane ( it made no mention of how many passengers they carried.)

Having said that, Matt is a very accomplished metal worker and probably takes adequate safety precautions such as safety glasses. I think a hammer would have to be unacceptably brittle for it to visibly damage.

Regards
Paul

I think this discussion about the safety aspects of hitting 2 hardened hammers together should be moved to its own thread, so as not to mess up Ians otherwise excellent thread.

OK, "peen" it will be from now on, from me...

'Pein' was how I first saw it & how I've spelled it ever since, so 'peen' doesn't look right when I type it. But if you were to pronounce 'pein' as the spelling suggests, it should sound more like 'pain', so 'peen' is really a better representation of how we say the word now.

As to hitting a hammer with another hammer, it was something I was told was verboten, too. However, not always a follower of 'the rules', I confess to having done it many times, myself. I suspect this is another of those hoary chestnuts that our elders like to pass on, because I doubt you could shatter a hammer of reasonable quality with another hammer. A striking tool like a hammer should most certainly be tempered back from the brittle stage. I've never met a hammer that couldn't be filed, & if I ever do, I most certainly won't hit anything with it!. However, work-hardening of the faces is another matter, and if you were to severely neglect a hammer used for heavy striking, I can see how you might end up with slivers flying off.

I can testify to the sharpness & penetrating power of these bits of shrapnel! As an 18 year-old, I was splitting fence-posts with a steel hammer & steel wedges. The hammer was fine, but our ancient wedges were heavily mushroomed & long overdue for some remedial forge-work. A sliver about the size of a 5c piece and about as thick as a piece of newspaper flew off at one point & buried itself deep in my left leg near the bottom of the gastrocnemius muscle. It was too deep to feel anything, so I thought it was just a glancing cut, but it kept on oozing blood & wouldn't heal. After a week or so I got a bit worried & fronted up to the local hospital. A front-to-back x-ray showed this very obvious shard of metal sitting in the flesh just shy of the bone. A quick probe with some pointy forceps and voila! Out the little sucker came, with almost instantaneous relief. I was lucky it hadn't done any serious damage & the incident was soon all but forgotten. And yeah, the old pot finally got around to cleaning up the wedges and annealing the tops after that. We boys reckoned he got a bit of a fright because he had such skinny legs, a piece that size would've chopped one in half!

EDIT: Brad & Paul - I don't think it's a digression to discuss hammers & peening & methods here. A lot of younger members probably haven't grown up fooling about with bits of metal like a few of us did, so I think it's fine to ask questions or give any opinions on how best to get those dovetails whacked into (or is it 'out of'?) shape. I'm open to any suggestions that might help improve accuracy & reduce the risk of marking up the parts you don't want blemished. As I said, it's not too bad if you use lots of small blows, because a mis-hit doesn't penetrate too much.....
Cheers,

Originally Posted by ian

Best I can see is that pein is an alternate spelling of peen.

Knights New Mechanical Dictionary (Houghton, Mifflen and Company, Boston 1884) uses peen throughout. Knight was formerly chief examiner at the US Patent Office. And going by his other qualifications, probably spoke French very well.

Collins English Dictionary has pein (American) as an alternate spelling of peen

dictionry.com has peen as the British spelling. and doesn't recognise pein as a word.


so if there is a bias, it towards peen.

Lets start on toat now......

Originally Posted by goodvibes

Lets start on toat now......

gv, do you mean the thing at the back of a plane that you hang onto, or did you mis-spell your breakfast?

Why not just call it a 'handle' - it's as good a handle as any..?

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

gv, do you mean the thing at the back of a plane that you hang onto, or did you mis-spell your breakfast?

Why not just call it a 'handle' - it's as good a handle as any..?

Cheers,

I just find it an interesting example of language misunderstanding.

I've heard hard core woodies refuse to call the rear handle a tote, because they view it as a nasty Americanism.

And yet my Hand Planing By Modern Methods (modern being a mid 1900s advertorial for Record planes) states that the "tote" is a modern version of the older English "toat" which is known to have been in use for a few hundred years or so in the mother country.

Digressing even further from the subject at hand, this is true of many words which are condemned in England as horrible modern American corruptions of the language. In a surprising number of cases these can be traced back to old English words, and local English dialect terms, which emigrated to the US. And survived there after disappearing in England. And then become nasty Americanisms when they recross the Atlantic and come home.

Well done on making this lovely plane Ian. It looks lovely and obviously works as intended.
Your method for peining the dovetails lines up with every method Ive seen.
Great stuff.

As I said to Luke, I spent a bit of time standing in front of my tool cupboard, trying to figure out how to re-arrange things so my new beauty has somewhere to sleep. The answer turned out to be pretty simple, when I found the panel plane & my 62 clone will fit side by side in the space where the 62 & my dad's old 5.5 used to live. So I just removed the ramp that held the 5.5 & 62 clone, added a side to the insert, and put in a shelf. So now the P.P., LA jack & the old 5.5 occupy the space that was once filled by 2 planes: planes 9_17.jpg

I used the new plane quite a bit flattening/smoothing some small panels for the alterations. It's really nice to use! I thought the weight might get a bit tiresome, but you really don't notice it, at least not when it's used for a few minutes at any one time. It sat on the work so solidly, and the shavings rolled out & the surface it left was more than adequate for this job. Definitely a keeper, & I think I'll be finding lots of excuses to use it! I'm so chuffed with the way it has turned out, I ordered some gauge-plate today, to make a start on the couple of other planes I have long intended to make.

Oh, and just to keep me from feeling too damn smug, I made some absolutely classic newbie style blunders today. First I transferred a set of dovetails onto the pin side the wrong way round, then when I remade the tails, I sawed the straight cuts, then grabbed the bowsaw to cut out the waste & started cutting out a tail instead of the waste. I don't think I've managed to do that for many decades!

Keeps me honest.......
Cheers,

Ian

That's what makes us human. Our fallibility. Strength and weakness all rolled into one.

Don't stress. That plane makes up for a whole heap of faux pax. A bit like carbon trading certificates .

Regards
Paul

An absolute glove-like fit! It looks snugly at home in there.

Don't fret too much about the mistake. Yesterday I was sawing some half blind DTs for a drawer front when I realized I had undercut the baseline on almost all of them on the back side. Not something I regularly do, and not usually a huge problem, except that I was sawing with the "show" side away from me! It would've looked awful.

Easy fix, I just reversed the drawers and made that the back end of the other side. Still a pretty significant "ok, time for a break" moment.

What're you sawing DTs for? A new project or something for the shop?

Cheers,
Luke

Originally Posted by Luke Maddux

An absolute glove-like fit! It looks snugly at home in there......

........What're you sawing DTs for? A new project or something for the shop?......

P'raps a bit too snug, Luke, I'd have liked more separation between it & its stabelemate so they don't scrape against each other when replacing them in their stall. But that's all the room I had to work with, so I've just got to be careful for a while til I get used to it. In fact, this is a 'temporary' solution, anyway. I have a plan to re-vamp the whole section, when/if I finish the extra planes that I want to make. My alterations were a bit odd - I attached a side to the part where formally, there was a ramp for the two #5-sized planes. I did that by dovetailing a board into the dovetails joining the support to the shelf. It sounds a bit odd (& it is) but it worked nicely.

But that wasn't where I made my idiotic mistake. As you can see in the pic of the whole unit, my #7 sits on a long ramp in the centre. This ramp is hinged so that I have easier access to the shelves behind it. To guard against the #7 slipping back & falling on the floor if it were accidentally bumped, I tacked a little strip of wood onto the shelf. That has worked very nicely for years, but the 'gallery' is a very snug fit, so I had to remove the strip to slide it out. It occurred to me that if I attached a piece to the bottom of the ramp, I could attach my safety-stop to that, instead of the toolbox itself. So no problems, I whipped up a piece, cut 3 tails on it & attached it to to the bottom of the ramp. Problem solved:

ramp.jpg

But it wasn't quite as smooth as that. The combination of being an oblique join, and my mind being somewhere else conspired to have me trace them with the piece back to front. The most embarrassing part is the penny didn't drop until I went to glue up!

Try #3 was finally successful, so all's well.....
Cheers,

Cheers,