Thread: Wooden hand plane built by Kuffy

Well I, for one, think it's great!

What is it, around a No 5 size? 10-15 inches?

One thing that struck me about it is that you spent the majority of the time shaping the wood, which, to me, indicates that there's not quite as much to making a wooden bodied plane as I originally thought. I never thought about how many steps you could skip by making it laminated instead of out of a single piece of wood.

The quartersawn RRG is great. I love that stuff. As far as I'm concerned it's my favorite of the Eucalypts. I was lucky to bring a few significant pieces of it home with me.

Great job, and, based on the shaving in the photo, it works as well (which I guess is mildly important)...

Cheers,
Luke

P.S. For some reason I always pictured you as older...

Nice work mate! Looking forward to the next video.

Thanks Luke, I am 35 years old and growing older and fatter each day

The plane's overall length is approx 340mm (13 1/2"), and the distance from toe to leading edge of blade is approx 200mm (8"). It is about 60mm (2 3/8") at the highest point not including the blade and is 70mm (2 3/4") wide. I don't know how much it weighs because my scales keep saying "get off me you fat bugger!". It feels kinda heavy, but in use it feels really quite light and slips over the surface with little or no resistance, which may be evident in the second testing video.

I think it took me about 27 hours from start to finish not including the messing around editing the footage and then uploading the damn thing. If I just made it square with slightly rounded corners it would have taken me about 90 minutes. Basically after I have cut the bed angle/escapement and joined the four parts together and jointed the sole, from there all i need to do is put the brass pin through and make a wedge and round the corners and I would have had a perfectly good usable plane. But it wouldn't have looked cool and that is by far the most important point . I possibly could have saved some time if I could carve my way out of a paper bag. I did about 60% of the work with my 18mm HSS japanese chisel.

I think I am most of the way there to getting the second video uploaded, but I have to head out for a few hours so i'll make it public sometime early this evening.

What an interesting plane.

Well done on making something different.

Brilliant! Got to love the shape and finish. Great video as well. What dimension did you use for the mouth - 8mm?
Cheers -Peter

Really cool. Can't wait to see how it runs.

Cheers fellas. I have updated the initial post with the second part of the video which I finally managed to sneak through Youtubes defenses.

Lappa. the mouth opening is approximately 51.8mm wide for the 50mm blade and it is approx 7.2mm thick?wide?

Mate,
That is fully sick mate,
AWSOME
You the man
My Maria she would love that.
Does it do fully sick burnouts too or just drifting A
Full respect matttte

lol Matt, I did have thoughts of doing a stop motion thing where the plane looks to be moving around by itself. and yes, I would make it drift and do donuts. I will probably do it at a later date. I'll need to give the blade a genuine razor sharp edge and put it to some nice straight grained resinous pine or cedar which will be easy to plane and have the shaving hold together nicely so I don't break it when I move the plane 10mm at a time.

Harrrr, that's a crackup Kuffy! Works well to by the look of it.

I can't see how you are going to take shavings off a donut Kuffy, but it sure looks good.
A great idea in shaping it like a sports car, maybe another could be made like an aeroplane, although the wings could get in the way!

Love the choice of timber, and I'm sure you had fun making it.

Alan...

I have many years of experience with taking shavings off donuts, though they are quite big shavings, bite size you might say

Yes, an aeroplane hand plane has crossed my mind also. Make it like a big military cargo plane and the wings can be like the handle thing that the HNT smoothers have.

Excellent bit of fun, Kuffy, and if that's your first plane, you were far more successful than I was with my first! There's a long tradition with making decorated planes, or planes in the shape of something like a shoe, in Europe, but it never really took hold in this part of the world. So you might be in the vanguard of a revival?

One comment - I will be interested in how you find that long toe after some use. Most planes keep the before-blade length 1/2 to 1/3rd of the sole behind the mouth, but that ratio looks to be reversed on yours. I made a small smoother with a very long toe, a few years ago, and ended up cutting it back because it couldn't do what it was meant to do, which was to work small areas in the middle of a wide board or top. But your plane could make an excellent small jointer for box making.....

Cheers,

Thanks Ian. I spent some more time yesterday playing with the plane on the surface of that same piece of tassie oak I tested on in the 2nd video to see how long it takes before the blade starts to tell me "sharpen me! for the love of god, sharpen me!". It lasted about 25 minutes. So I am happy with that. Whatever toolsteel HNT are using, it is good stuff. Although I was only messing around with a poorly secured workpiece sitting on a workbench which is not flat at all, I found yesterday that the plane prefers to be pulled rather than pushed. Like a Japanese plane. Its good, I can lock my right hand fingers behind the blade, and my left index finger behind the windscreen so I don't need to grip the thing with a gorillas grip.

I have had this idea floating around in my head for many years, but I never did anything about it because I figured it would have been done to death with internet age by now. But last week when searching for examples I came up with nothing. Which makes me think I must be the only 4yr boy trapped in a fat mans body