Thread: Advice/suggestions for making a dedicated shooting plane

Originally Posted by orraloon

I will just repost some issues I had with that big miter plane due to it being glued up construction and the effects of heat and humidity plus being dumb and leaving it sitting in those conditions with the thing tensioned.

Wrong wood? Wrong glue? or bit of both.

Anyhow after the corrective surgery pleased to say it has been all good since then. I now slacken off the wedges on all my wood planes when I put them away and have fitted some insulation to the shed also.
Regards
John

I have heard local sawmillers refer to leatherwood as propeller wood due to its propensity to move and twist while drying.

Tony

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Hi ian (from Canada). I hadn't thought of a LH and RH version. I am planning on only making one (RH). What are the advantages of both? I would have thought that I could just flip the board over as required. Does grain direction come into play? Surely the action of cutting end grain is difficult regardless. Or am I missing something obvious and highlighting my lack of experience?

successful flipping of the board requires that both edges (front and back) be absolutely parallel to each other. In my experience this is rarely necessary as only one edge of the board needs to be completely straight and true. The straight and true edge becomes the reference edge and the adjoining face becomes the reference face. Even when working with machines, this "true edge" and "true face" are used as reference surfaces.

When working by hand, the reference edges and reference face are used to mark and then true the opposing edge and face to "near enough" parallel.
If you are box making "near enough" needs to be spot on, when making shelves or drawer sides, the need to be spot on is less so.

So if you end up with an out of parallel edge and face, using a left and and right hand pair of shooting planes compensates for the slight differences giving you two "shot" ends that are at right angles to the reference edge and face -- but not necessarily at right angles to the non-reference surfaces.


Does that explanation make any sense? Let me know if you need more information.


Stewie (above) has posted photos of his left and right hand shooting planes. They are not the same so I hesitate to label them a "pair".

If one really wants a shooting plane to edge joint, then the edges planed must be complimentary angles. The best way to ensure this is to use one plane for shooting both edges, and flip it over for each edge. This requires a plane with a straight/square blade/mouth. For example, the LA Jack would be a good choice as it also is low angle/bevel up.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by IanW

There must be some situations where working the opposite way might be helpful, but I've not come across any yet, so I too would be interested to hear what I've been missing out on. Or maybe it's better I don't know because a LH version would be useless to me in any case, I'm so dominantly right-handed I'd be fumbling away & end up with the edge more out of square than when I started, or the board too short by the time I did manage to square it!

hi Ian

Derek's shooting board with it's edge strip would almost entirely correct your "my left hand is not my dominant hand" issue



I hesitate to claim it would entirely correct the issue, but it would come pretty close to doing so

Originally Posted by derekcohen

Ian, I wouldn’t do this......

Derek, I probably never will, either....

I certainly agree that a low-angle, bevel-up blade handles end-grain better than BD blades even when both have the same effective cutting angle. Of that I have no doubt whatever & have demonstrated this to myself quite adequately on several occasions. My maths is too rusty to try & develop a mathematical proof, so lets just agree it has to do with vector forces & apparent blade mass in the low-angle position, making low-angle blades just more "solid".

But the OP wants to stick with wood, where bed angles of less than 35 degrees are simply impractical. He could go with a skewed blade, but I reckon a ramped board would be easier & almost if not as good as, a skewed blade.

What I was trying to point out about skewed blade beds & bed-angle doesn't apply to the Veritas. I've not had one in my hands, but it looks to me from the picture that they use a skewed blade, not a skewed bed. This is different from skewing the bed. For a given skew angle, the angle at which the blade exits increases as you drop the bed angle. Think of it like this: if your blade bed is skewed 10 degrees but is vertical to the sole, the mouth will be 10 degrees. If you drop the bed angle to zero, the leading edge of the mouth will be at infinity. So you don't need much bed skew on a low-angle plane to get a very decent skew to the mouth, and 10 degrees should be plenty. But my advice was purely hypothetical, I have only made skewed, low-angle rebate & shoulder planes, not a shooter...

If the blade bed is simply rotated wrt the axis of the sole to give a skewed mouth as appears to be the case on the Veritas, the exit angle depends only on the rotation of the blade's axis - to get a 20 degree skew to the mouth, the blade is rotated 20 degrees. If you skew the bed of a low-angle plane to 10 degrees, you'll get a mouth that is much more than 10 degrees to the plane's axis. Someone who is a whiz with CAD may be able to demonstrate the principle more clearly than my garbled description.....

Cheers,

I had to go check. OK, for a 15 degree bed angle skewed 10 degrees, the mouth is approximately 35 degrees to the plane's axis.

Cheers,

Aaargh, Ian! Just when I thought I was getting my head around things. I was only intending to skew blade but yes, like a skewed rebate plane, the bed is on an angle too. So the process of construction would be to make body, poke blade through mouth to scribe angle and then shape to that line. This would also make cap iron impractical. I am going to stick with laminated construction so this should make things easier. Will end grain shavings clear easily?

Hi again Canadian ian. Yes all makes sense but I was thinking more along the lines of flipping end to end. This keeps reference edge still against fence and surely square is square at either end

Ian, I would suggest metal bodied (infill), 40 degrees bevel down and skewed (15 degrees would probably be fine) so that you can use it in anger sometimes when that's warranted.
a
I made one a couple of years ago (shootenstein on youtube). I made mine out of purpleheart and steel, and with a wedge (which caused it to bow with skew - I filed that out over several hours with a vixen body float, which does OK with mild steel - probably a dozen times faster than a file - lapping that is out of the question. The bow was several hundredths as I recall).

Instead of turning the bed with the iron outside of the bounds of the infill, I just marked the skew on the sole and kept the iron and wedge within the sides of the plane. I made the video on youtube right after finishing the plane. It took not that long to get more influential with the plane and not fiddle - it works better than any commercial shooting plane that I've ever used (and I had a LN and the LV skew).

If making with wood, I would at least have a metal sole. I know there are wooden planes around on forums, etc, but they will suffer mouth erosion fast and it will make them undesirable to use in fine work, or really any work.





shootenstein suffers from neglect, and prior to this picture, also took a 3 1/2-4 foot nosedive onto a concrete shop floor courtesy of the mrs "cleaning" some of my shop area. minimal damage, still works fine - but shows a scar on the lower front from the dive (filed the scuzzle off and moved on).

The heavy shavings are really handy for panel/shelf ends to get close to a mark where a hand sawn board end isn't OK. This kind of work is generally done in a vise with a bench plane, which is probably equal in effort and time.

What I was trying to point out about skewed blade beds & bed-angle doesn't apply to the Veritas. I've not had one in my hands, but it looks to me from the picture that they use a skewed blade, not a skewed bed.

Ian, the bed is skewed, not the blade (i.e. opposite to what you expect) ...







From my website review ....

The blade is also bedded with a 20-degree skew, as with the Stanley/LN, for a true skew cut. This is a great feature of all three of these planes. Not only does this allow for a slicing cut which lowers the effective pitch of the blade (in other words, lowers the cutting angle) to produce a smoother finish, but also the progressive entry of the blade into the wood reduces jarring on impact (which is noticeable when compared to planes with a square blade).





All are approximately 15” long with a 2 1/8” base width to fit the Stanley #52 shooting board track.

Regards from Perth

Derek

But the OP wants to stick with wood, where bed angles of less than 35 degrees are simply impractical. He could go with a skewed blade, but I reckon a ramped board would be easier & almost if not as good as, a skewed blade.

The strike block plane I built has a 38 degree bed ...



Straight blade (as used on a ramped shooting board) ...



However, David (DW) made a fabulous version as an infill with a skewed blade as well.

This plane has been used by many over the years at various wood shows and demonstrations and stood up very well.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by derekcohen

The strike block plane I built has a 38 degree bed ...



Straight blade (as used on a ramped shooting board) ...



However, David (DW) made a fabulous version as an infill with a skewed blade as well.

This plane has been used by many over the years at various wood shows and demonstrations and stood up very well.

Regards from Perth

Derek

The brass wear strip solves the erosion problem (which is severe pretty quickly in regular use if that part is wooden.

The fact that plane works fine with the lower pitch is saying something, too, as those kenyon irons aren't horrible, but they're nothing to write home about.

Originally Posted by derekcohen

Ian, the bed is skewed, not the blade (i.e. opposite to what you expect) ...Derek

Derek, I don't want to labour this, I think we are simply using different terms to describe the same things. Let me try to clarify.

In my terms, the blade of the Veritas is rotated (about the axis of the plane), rather than skewed, as in A. You can call it skewed, it's not incorrect from a semantic point of view, but it differs significantly from the situation in B, which is what I mean by a skewed bed, in which the axis of the bed remains in line with the plane's axis: Blade bed geom b.jpg

Given the construction of the Veritas, rotating the blade-bed makes sense, it's more practical to set up for machining and possibly more robust.

It only matters if you intend making a skewed-mouth plane. For a wooden shooter, skewing the bed is the method of choice, rotating the blade is not practical (it was done for badger planes, which also have skewed beds, but that's a special case ). It's actually quite easy to do if making a laminated body. But what you must realise is that putting a 10 degree slant on the bed will not result in a 10 degree skew of the mouth, but something more. As I measured a rebate plane of mine last night, a bed ramp angle of 15 degrees and a skew of 10 degrees results in a mouth skew of 35 degrees relative to the plane's axis. For a 38 degree bed, the mouth will not be skewed as much.

Mountain Ash, don't be put off by the discussion, it is really quite simple to make a skewed bed for a laminated plane & doesn't require any fancy calculation at all, you can soon work it out with a couple of bits of scrap wood & cardboard. I'm curious about the angles myself, so I'm going to spend a bit of time today playing about to satisfy my own curiosity. I'll take some pics & report back....

Cheers,

Thanks Derek. The Veritas could serve as a good style to copy. Couldn't mimic shallowness of bed angle though! Decisions, decisions ��