Thread: Dumb & Dumber

My advice when making a plane is, “As the first step, get the blade you intend using!” It’s a no-brainer, since everything revolves around the blade. Well, I didn’t, & have egg on my face.

The story, as they say: I wanted to try my hand at a split sole, low-angle plane & so over the last couple of years, I’ve made several chariot planes, two in a more classic bull-nose configuration & two with more extended toes. The classic chariots, like the Norris 28, were mostly “bull-nosed” & I made a very small. The “toed” versions had fronts about 1/3rd of the sole length and are functionally more like mitre planes, though English mitre planes traditionally have 20 degree beds and I’ve opted for 15* on mine.
To form a low-angle mouth with hand tools, the only practical way is to cut the sole across the mouth, file the bed bevel, and re-join the pieces, usually with a tongue & groove joint, though vee joints were used by some makers. The joint is really only to register the two parts while the tails are scribed on the edge of the sole, and both pieces of sole are independently locked to the sides once the body is peened up. Sole b.jpg

If the thought of cutting tiny tongue & groove joints in 5mm thick steel sends shivers down your spine, I had the same reaction when I first read about it, but I found it to be easier to do neatly than I expected. With care & a little patience you can get a pretty close joint & by a bit of judicious peening, make it disappear completely (or almost completely). This is my first attempt, & if you blow the picture up enough, you can see the faint outline of the join in the middle of the long pin. Chariot 2.jpg


I was pretty pleased with that little plane, it has a fine mouth, a good clean bed, and all the joins are tight. The one thing that I didn’t do was add a cross-piece on the back, so the infill extended to the vertical part of the back of the side. Later, I wanted to fit a screw adjuster, mainly for the challenge, and I ended up epoxying the stud for the thumbwheel in the wood, which worked ok, but looked a bit amateurish. At the time, it seemed like removing the rear infill and fitting a brass cross-piece was tempting disaster, so I decided a better solution was to just make another plane & do it proper. I had some scraps of steel & brass the right size, and a nice little chunk of very dense, nicely figured Black Wattle, so the die was cast. I decided to go for broke with this one, and ordered a Veritas PM-V11 blade made for the Stanley 60 ½.

Out of impatience, I went ahead & started the build. For no good reason at all, I just assumed the new blade would be the same length as the Luban blade I’d used for the first plane. It’s the same width as the 60 ½ blade & the plane it’s intended for looks like a knock-off of the 60 ½.

The length of the blade bed is a crucial dimension; obviously, it needs to be long enough to give a firm foundation for the blade, but short enough to have some blade sticking out at the back for adjustment. So, based on the length of my Luban blade, I drew up side templates & went at it.
The build went smoothly, with no dramas (nothing like practice!), and in a test-run using the Luban blade, it gave a very good account of itself. I hadn’t quite finished lapping the sole (or cleaning up the sides) here, but it gave me nice 1 thou shavings: Test.jpg

I was feeling quite pleased with myself at this point, borderline smug, as the saying goes, until the new blade arrived. I put it in my new plane, and you guessed it in one - it isn’t the same length as the Luban, but about 12mm shorter. Veritas blade.jpg

Only two adjuster slots can be seen at the rear of the bed – my planned adjuster is only going to work for about 5mm of blade use, if that!

The Veritas blade is nice - even thicker than the Luban, so I had to shave a bit of the wedge to get it to fit snugly, and it gives the little plane a very solid and reassuring feel. I had it making coarse or fluffy shavings in short order: Test 2.jpg

It’s very easy to adjust with a hammer, and I could live with it quite happily as-is, but I’m really annoyed with myself for making such a dopey blunder. I thought about cutting the sides back, but that would take me up to rear edge of the last dovetail, which would look very odd & spoil the lines, so that idea was quickly dropped. Cutting a single slot in the back of the blade could work well, but the whole blade is hardened, so not sure if I could do it. I have an idea, but need courage to try it, I certainly don’t relish the idea of wrecking 80-odd bucks worth of blade! Other solutions are, make another plane with a slightly shorter bed, or simply fit a Luban blade instead of the Veritas. Both of which would bring me in a perfect circle!

To save face just a little, I took a good look at plane #1 & decided to have a go at removing the rear infill; it was glued in with epoxy, but not pinned, and although it hung on until the last few splinters, I got it out with no damage to the body. I soldered, then pinned in a ¼” thick crosspiece, which all turned out to be easier than I’d expected. Redone rear.jpg

When I replaced the infill, I took a leaf out of Bill Carter’s book, and made it slightly lower than the front & rear of the bed – it just fills the space & keeps muck out. Redone bed.jpg

So now I have two perfectly good little chariot planes. Both have a nice action and there is little or nothing to separate them. The woodwork came up well on both; the piece of crotch Wattle in #2 was very hard & dense & was a bear to work with, but has nice figure with a lovely swirly grain that flows with the body (and made carving the scrolls exciting). Adjuster, or no adjuster, they are both as easy to set, so that doesn’t separate them. The major difference is that #2 is slightly larger & heavier, which is what I was aiming for, so I think it’ll be the keeper. Done.jpg

Memo to self - take your own sound advice, stupid…..

Cheers,