Thread: A #3 sized infill that fell short of expectations.....

I don't know if I even presented this plane to the jury when I finished it, I've had a search and can't find it anywhere. I'd been on a flurry of plane making at the time & probably thought you'd all had enough for a while. It was meant to be my ultimate small smoother, the one that would see me to the end of days, so I put everything I thought I knew into it. The infill is Solomon Island "ebony" (Xanthostemon melanoxylon) which is a beast of a wood to work with, hard as the hobs of hell & inclined to chip where you least want it to, but lovely when finished, & sooo tactile:
3-sized Smoother.jpg

I already had a very functional small infill based on a 1 5/8" Veritas blade. This had been an 'experimental' project where I was interested mainly in playing with a variation on the Veritas adjuster to see if I could do it better than Veritas (yairs, I know, but you have to aim high even to hit low... ).
Smthr with Veritas blade.jpg

In fact, this turned out to be one of the sweetest planes I'd made as far as function is concerned. The adjuster is ok, I sure slowed it down, but it still suffers from the slewing effect inherent in this design, of course. The thick-ish (1/8") PM-V11 block plane blade takes woods like ringed gidgee in it's stride, assisted by the heavy cap-iron I fitted.

But it doesn't look right! The slightly narrower body isn't in proportion to the length (I couldn't make it any shorter & still fit a rear tote without having way too much hangover). It's fine in profile, but viewed from above it looks like it needs a decent meal! I thought, ok, I know what I'm doing now, so I'll build the best plane ever....

'Cept it didn't turn out quite as expected. It looks the part, I'm satisfied with that, but I tried to be really clever and added a couple of brass buttons under the blade where the thumbscrew bears down, pinching the idea off Karl Holtey. The plane I saw had a single brass button right under the thumbscrew, but it was a single-iron plane so he didn't have a channel in the bed for the cap-iron screw head like mine. So I put a button either side, which made it a bit trickier to get them both aligned with the sole & blade-block, but after some careful filing & testing I got that sorted.

The plane worked ok with a nice enough feel:
First shavings.jpg

...but the "simple" cap-iron I used for the first trial was a left-over from some other project. It was a heavy (3.2mm thick) thing & caused the blade to flex when tightened down:
3 Blade flex.jpg

..and I thought this was a recipe for some vibration when the blade had such limited contact with its support.

So I made a new cap-iron, in my now preferred style with the full curve at the end that sits under the end of the lever-cap.
Attachment 521857

I normally fit a lever-cap using the blade assembly intended for the plane so I can sit the edge of the LC right on the top of the "hump" of the CI. This allows the blade to be moved up & down a bit with little change in LC pressure on the blade. But I got the new cap-iron bend a bit off (easy to do with my primitive bending jig!) and the LC was sitting too far back over the hump. It was a bear of a thing to adjust, it would go from not cutting at all to a coarse shaving at the merest tap.

I put up with it for much longer than any sensible person would, until the day before yesterday when I was trying to set it for a fine cut & it simply refused to comply. I pulled it apart and thought "right, I'll flatten the curve a bit with a mallet & file it a bit to get the top closer to flat where the LC bears on it.

Ha! after an entire morning of fiddling with it, the problem was worse than ever - flattening the curve caused the edge of the LC to lift off the blade & in trying to correct that, I ended up with an even smaller radius to the hump which exacerbated the setting problem! Eventually, I did what I should've done in the first place & re-made the CI, making sure the curve was very gentle in the critical area (new CI at the top in pic).
5 Old & new CI.jpg

Problem solved, it can now be set for coarse or fine shavings easily:
6 Coarse shavings.jpg 7 Fine shavings.jpg

So perhaps it will now see te sort of use I had envisaged. I'm not done with it yet, though, I have this feeling that it would benefit further from a heavier blade & cap-iron like the infills of old sported, so I'm planning to test that idea at some point (but not for a while). I can increase blade thickness by quite a bit because I ended up with a mouth that is a little larger than I'd planned.

But that'll be a story for another rainy day...

Cheers,