Thread: New addition, I’ve been a good boy

Originally Posted by D.W.

.......Norris wasn't immune from it on panel planes, especially......

It would be hard to keep an infill panel plane "light", that extra metal adds up, "real quick". This one is about 13 inches, with a 2 3/8" blade. It weighs 8 3/4lbs in your money: New blade b.jpg

The lever-cap is made from a solid chunk of 3/4" brass - I probably should have hollowed the back out like the cast ones, but that would've been quite the job to do without a mill. The blade/chipbreaker assembly is a bit lighter than an equivalent Norris or Spiers, which cancels the extra weight a bit. The infill is very dense wood, so the overall weight is probably a bit more than an equivalent Spiers or Norris, but not hugely so.

Which begs the question, what did they use the darn things for? I've searched and searched for contemporary information on who used panel planes for what, with no luck. The name may be a clue, but names can be misleading (e.g. "mitre" planes). My plane certainly does do a great job on bookmatched panels where the grain is necessarily opposite on the two halves. The weight keeps the plane engaged nicely and evenly - it's a smoother on steroids. And even a large panel is not that big an area so I can manage the job ok, but I sure wouldn't attack a large table-top with it! However, a young person used to steady manual labour would not be so put off by a few extra pounds of metal, so who knows what they did with panel planes (some of which were significantly bigger than mine), back in the day??

Originally Posted by D.W.

....... Raney nelson warned me very early on to make my first plane (which is a 1 1/2 inch wide small steep angle smoother) small and quick, because it'll be hard to get it right. that was good advice. I later asked him about a curved side infill and he said something like "well, you'll get one you really like around the 6th or 7th". Raney didn't mean just one that functioned and looked OK, but really really good aesthetically with no flaws, I think. I never got that far).....

I give similar advice, for similar reasons, a small rear-bun smoother with a 1 1/2" blade or thereabouts, is a good first project, it's big enough to work on comfortably, but not a huge amount of physical work if you are using hand-tools (smaller planes still would be less physical work, but more fiddly & harder to keep things square & straight - my miniatures take at least as long to make as a 'full-size' job). It did take me a few planes to start getting things right structurally, but I'm a bit impatient & tend to go at things like the proverbial bull at a gate - a friend of mine, who is a meticulous type, made a perfect plane first try!

As to aesthetics, do we ever get that perfect? After a plane or two you can get things pretty consistent, but even after something like 30 plus infills (counting tiddlers), I have yet to make something that I felt was perfect in every detail - a couple are close, but there's always something I could have done "better"....

Curved sides are not all that much harder to do, but they are a bit more demanding, and always were, I guess. In old catalogues I've seen, Spiers charged about 10-15% more for curved sides in otherwise similar smoothers. The main thing imo is to get the sides bent to a very close match to the sides, which takes a fair bit of mucking about with the form, but once you had that right, and well-made peening blocks, you should be able to bang them up almost as quickly as straight sides. And any inconsistencies make fitting the stuffing more demanding...

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

Which begs the question, what did they use the darn things for? I've searched and searched for contemporary information on who used panel planes for what, with no luck. The name may be a clue, but names can be misleading (e.g. "mitre" planes). My plane certainly does do a great job on bookmatched panels where the grain is necessarily opposite on the two halves. The weight keeps the plane engaged nicely and evenly - it's a smoother on steroids. And even a large panel is not that big an area so I can manage the job ok, but I sure wouldn't attack a large table-top with it! However, a young person used to steady manual labour would not be so put off by a few extra pounds of metal, so who knows what they did with panel planes (some of which were significantly bigger than mine), back in the day??

Funny thing about the names that have been applied . ( Panel plane , Mitre plane , Mitre Jack ) We don't know who, when or why they were applied. As you say Ian the names are misleading. The name could have been given and become the popular term by the guy who wrote the description in some article or book. And his area of expertise may have been in some other area of woodwork in his book and the mention or naming of some other tool like the Mitre plane or Panel plane may not be accurate.

So I don't know about names . But if its got to be flatter than a smoother can give, which becomes obvious once the thing is polished, and not as long a process as a jointer would be , the panel plane has its place on anything where a wide enough flat counts. And at the time these planes were produced Mahogany was one very popular timber used at the time.

Quite often a the discovery of a tools purpose or potential is found in our own hands using it and some of the written articles would be better used as fire lighters.

Anyway. Ive got some pictures of one being used is what I'm getting at. A restoration job on a Mahogany sideboard top that the join down the middle had split on and the boards had buckled. I had to re join it and re plane it flat but not plane away, not touch, the thin Satinwood cross banded inlay around the edge. So the cabinet scraper finished it all off.
IMG_9638A.jpg

IMG_9647A.jpg

IMG_9658A.jpg
Then finished with a French polish.
IMG_9695a.jpg

Rob.

Gorgeous bit of wood there Rob, and a very nice plane too - is it a Spiers?

That top is about the absolute maximum area I'd care to work with my panel plane, but I think that's exactly what I would have used for the job too. I thought they looked like book-matched boards in one of the pics taken early in the job but after studying the finished pic more carefully, they look more like a nice job of lining up the grain on two random boards. 'Twould have been nice to have had a store room of boards like that, eh?

Cheers,
Ian

Yes it's a Spiers Ian. Most jobs like that or larger I normally use my Stanley number 6. like making extension table tops and fitting the leaves. I haven't had to do one of them in a while though. Which is good. It was OK at 40 years old. 20 years later though. Its a fair bit of hand planing doing them! When its some nice Mahogany on an English restoration piece like that its a bit of fun using the Spiers. The more rustic style new tables can have larger tops but I do some of them with a number 3 or 4 or some are even just spoke shaved and then scraped.

This new Mahogany extension table is the sort of hand plane workout I'm talking about. I forget how long it was.
Eight reeded legs , Victorian style. I even advised the Lady client to go buy an antique . It'd be cheaper and nicer quality timber. She wanted new and exactly to her size and didn't seem to care about the $.

img174.jpg

img177.jpg

Rob.

Now that's a table!

Originally Posted by auscab

Yes it's a Spiers Ian. Most jobs like that or larger I normally use my Stanley number 6. like making extension table tops and fitting the leaves. I haven't had to do one of them in a while though. Which is good. It was OK at 40 years old. 20 years later though. Its a fair bit of hand planing doing them! When its some nice Mahogany on an English restoration piece like that its a bit of fun using the Spiers. The more rustic style new tables can have larger tops but I do some of them with a number 3 or 4 or some are even just spoke shaved and then scraped.

This new Mahogany extension table is the sort of hand plane workout I'm talking about. I forget how long it was.
Eight reeded legs , Victorian style. I even advised the Lady client to go buy an antique . It'd be cheaper and nicer quality timber. She wanted new and exactly to her size and didn't seem to care about the $.

img174.jpg

img177.jpg

Rob.

wonderful tables! Planing the outsides wouldn't be so bad, but unless you're able to get up on them without getting cricked up, the lean-over on the center of stuff like that has always left me walking in a lowercase r shape vs. a lowercase l. I recognize there are people with stronger minds and stronger backs than me, though!

Hey D.W… when you were being obsessive, did you work out how the metal of the infills were supplied?
I’ve never been able to find info on that.

Originally Posted by Clinton1

Hey D.W… when you were being obsessive, did you work out how the metal of the infills were supplied?
I’ve never been able to find info on that.

Hi, Clinton, when you say the metals, do you mean the castings, sheet for the outside, or do you mean the iron and cap iron?

The irons themselves have left me with a mystery that I can't solve -the earlier laminated irons. They are not long life edges as they're water hardening steel, but they can easily push to 63 hardness or slightly above and still have a very stable edge, and then show no carbides (see the smooth smudgy surface here)

https://i.imgur.com/mtrTWr4.jpg

And compare the edge to something like V11:
https://i.imgur.com/vGxX2OJ.jpg

The carbides in V11 are neither good nor bad, they give the steel longevity against abrasive wear at the expense of some edge stability.

A picture like the top one is what sort of tipped me off about the line of all newer steels being "finer grained and better quality than old steels, which were unpredictable"....tipped me off that that line is BS.

I've not found anything so far that I can make an iron from where the edge will be so fine-grained, but have high hardness, and not chip. We have all we need from a practical standpoint, so there's no need to solve this mystery but I have otherwise been able to duplicate almost anything else I could find after 1900 or so.

Once irons became all steel, they have alloying for hardenability in them to through harden and are not the same. Stanley's laminated irons are pretty good, but they will display carbides and tip you off that they have some surplus carbon.

If you mean the steel bar for the soles and sides, I'm sure that was becoming an industrial product at some point with grinders allowing steel to be rolled out into strips and then ground relatively accurately. It can be done on a large grinding wheel all the way down to saw steel if a bracket or guard is placed on top of the wheel, forcing the steel be ground thinner until it can pass under the bar. James hawley showed someone making a scraper in the 1990s in one of the last remaining job grinder shops in England. it was fascinating and probably answers the question of how they could make saw steel 250 years ago.

Clinton I've often wondered about the source of materials and the form in which it arrived back in the days when infill plane making was kicking off. Up 'til the 1850s, there were few metal plane makers and they tended to use either cast bodies, or wrought-iron if fabricating them - the earliest surviving mitre planes are wrought-iron (which also resists rusting a little better than cast-iron & way better than mild steel).

The infill era really got underway around 1850. That coincides with the introduction of the Bessemer smelting process, which produced better steel in vastly greater quantities than previous processes so the price of steel started to come down radically. In those days, plate & bar was produced by manual rolling - skilled (& very agile!) blokes feeding the hot ingots back into rollers repeatedly until the required thickness was achieved. Although they were very good at it, I can't imagine they got the product as consistent & to the same tight tolerances as today's highly automated mills, and in any case, the mill-scale needs to be removed, so I guess the raw material was ground by some process such as David described. However, no-one seems to have recorded this aspect of the making, so I guess we'll never know.

Throughout the infill era, cast bodies were always offered alongside the fabricated steel bodies, they were cheaper to produce. But because cast-iron is brittle & easily chipped/broken, the fabricated steel bodies were preferred by a good margin, initially. That preference lingered even after malleable castings came into vogue, the more expensive dovetailed bodies still outsold cast. I've read that the late 48-50 series malleable-cast Norrises were extremely good "users" but they just didn't seem to have the same cachet as the dovetailed planes. Dunno, I've never handled one so could not comment on that claim, but it could easily be true.

I'd also love to know more details about the fabrication process in making the dovetailed bodies. How was the work divided up? Did specialist "cutter-outers" prepare the parts for other workers to peen up, or did one person make the whole thing in batches? The latter is likely in some cases as apparently, much of the work was done by piece-workers either working alone in their own shops or renting bench space in larger 'factories'. And how many man-hours did it take to make a coffin smoother? I'm 100% certain it would've taken many hours less than it takes me to make one....

Cheers,

This is a good read Clinton. You may have seen it.
There may be a mention about the steel used somewhere in there.

Spiers and Slater Mitre Planes | Martin Shepherd Piano Service

Hows this picture taken in Spiers later River terrace workshop. Probably where your plane was made if its after 1899.
Picture was published in Nigel Lamperts book on Spiers.

Untitled spiers picture.png

Line driven grinders some running in water baths with what looks like timber guides or fences above for guiding the metal / keeping it square or at the correct angle.

Barbara.McNaught.2-4.River_.Terrace.1900-scaled aa.jpg

Rob

Older the plane the lighter they are?

My 1885 type 5 Stanley smoother - IMG_5641.jpg

Great planes, even if they are a tad heavy...

Regards

Originally Posted by MartinCH

Older the plane the lighter they are?.....

Hi Martin, to a degree, yes. The castings were beefed up a bit sometime after the type 11 (which is the model I have at present), so 11s & earlier tend to be a bit lighter than later ones. The side walls were made a little thicker and the frog receiver area was fiddled about with, which would have altered weights a bit. (see Patrick Leach). Sole lengths can vary by at least 15mm for #4s too, so weights vary by quite a few % from type to type, Patrick's figure would be an average.

Are you showing us a #3 or #4? Leach gives a weight of 3.125lb (=1.42Kg) for the #3, which is close enough to what you have there. A weight of 1.37Kg would be outside the range of any 4 I've met, but I certainly haven't met them all! Patrick gives an average weight of 1.7Kg for the #4 & mine is on the light side at 1.6Kg, but that's pretty much the lower end of the range for a #4 in my (limited) experience.

Cheers,
Ian

Thats is a 4 Ian. I don't think shorter either.

As its lightweight and has its own particular style
- engraved patents everywhere , melted "puppeteer" castings, really nice rosewood handles
and good performance
it is my favourite smoother.

Originally Posted by MartinCH

Thats is a 4 Ian. I don't think shorter either.

As its lightweight and has its own particular style
- engraved patents everywhere , melted "puppeteer" castings, really nice rosewood handles
and good performance
it is my favourite smoother.

Very early castings were thin - pre laterals and such - thin enough that it's been identified as a problem in terms of leading to cracking with use.

However, yours looks good - nimble and not enormously thin. What is the frog design like - does it continue all the way down to the sole of the casting?