Thread: Make grooving planes

Hi Dick. I think I saw an article in a recent copy of AWR. Author was Vic Tesolin and it should have had dimensions included.

Making a wooden grooving plane - Australian Wood Review

Originally Posted by Pac man

Making a wooden grooving plane - Australian Wood Review

BINGO!!!! Thank you, that's exactly what I need.

I wouldn't take much advice from vic, but saying that obligates me to tell you what I'd do.

You can do this more neatly if you like, but this type of plane will outwork any plow plane because the skate is near full width of the iron and the cut is supported. It is made from a scrap cutoff of O1, open sided, and the wedge is just softwood plywood. The iron does not need to be tapered, there's no complication, etc. If you want to get the wedge out, you just tap it from the side and it pops right off. The mortise is just marked and sawn with the mouth around the size of the iron and then open it a bit for feeding and excavate a little of the wear in front of the wedge so that shavings come up and out rather than getting stuck.

The cost of this for me was zero - just pick some kind of straight stock that you have around and have had for a few years so that you don't end up with something that twists.

In this group are examples of "goodness" in planes. Top right is this plane, takes an hour, lasts a lifetime, costs nothing or near it. below that is a pencil grooving scraper, also nothing in cost. Bottom left is a layered laminated poor man's dovetail plane and below that, a regular moulding plane made traditionally (easy on me, when I made them, I didn't know what the finial should look like and have been too lazy to fix that).

https://i.imgur.com/GBnbjb3.jpg

views from the top and bottom. The iron needs to be just wider than the skate plus a tiny bit (is that +2 tiny amounts for adjustability?)

55 degrees for the bed - wax it and it'll work like silk even though it looks like spoiled milk.

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

https://i.imgur.com/SN6crcu.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/RAPK1tN.jpg

This is just cherry. There isn't a person on here who would wear it out in their lifetime, including me. Tall helps you keep it vertical and oriented like a moulding plane will make it feel like you're using one.

Depth of the fence to the lowest point is depth of the groove plus however far down you want the fence to hang over the side of the work. If you want the fence to be a bit shorter, you can always plane a little off of it.

by the way, with the type I showed above, measure everything off of one flat front face. It doesn't even matter if the wood is even thickness as long as a face is flat. You will be shocked how fast a plane like this is to make and shocked how well it works.

Alright then. I'll just order some 1/4" O1 steel and use the maple from an old desk I found in the trash. It's pretty stable. I'll just need to laminate it to get the thickness needed. I don't think 3/4" will be thick enough.

Originally Posted by banjopicks

Alright then. I'll just order some 1/4" O1 steel and use the maple from an old desk I found in the trash. It's pretty stable. I'll just need to laminate it to get the thickness needed. I don't think 3/4" will be thick enough.

No (3/4" won't quite be enough) - if it's a little bit fat, you'll like it more. The one in the picture is about 1 1/4" total - the bigger the butt, the more comfortable it is to push, and it's a plane that can take a pretty big stripe out of a groove if the wood is good enough to permit it. If not, you can just cut to partial depth with thinner strokes and then fatten them up.

This is the kind of bulk work that if you take smoothing shavings, the hobby will be short. Plow planing and rebate planing, et, is material removal, and when used right on most projects, will be no slower than a router in total (and more predictable).

For purposes of proportions, since I didn't give anything but bed angle, I just checked my plane. The bottom of the fence to the top of the plane is 3 3/8", the length is about 9" and the back of the mouth is about 3 1/4" from the nose of the plane - at the bottom of the skate.

The iron is probably 1/8" thick, which I had laying around as an offcut from making plane irons or something. If you make your own iron, only the last inch or so needs to be heat treated. You'll groove a thousand drawers before you go through an inch of iron length.

Is there ever a need for a nicker?

no, not really. If it's shredding the top of something, just lighten the starting cut and do all of your drawer sides to a shallow depth and then advance the iron and go through them to finish the job.

A nicking iron is for two things - in something like a moving fillister (rebate) plane, it establishes the end of the cut. The iron is to cut short of where the nicking iron does so they aren't fighting each other. If you were to make a nicking iron pair for a grooving plane like this, you'd actually want the iron to be a bit narrower than the cut to give relief on both sides.

The other use is on cross grain cuts, though it helps on a moving fillister plane on long grain cuts.

The iron is supported well enough with this plane that if your wood is agreeable, you'll have no tearout issues. Adding nickers will complicate things and they will need to be sharp to work properly.

When you make the iron, you want it to have a little bit of relief on each side - just a little. How much, I don't know 10 degrees maybe? You can file that on by hand.

I'm a little harsh on vic here, partially because he's got some significant holes in what he knows about planes, and partially because his article with all of the little pieces greatly overcomplicates this, and then he ends up with a diminutive little plane and this is more like rebate work - you want something comfortable to use with a relatively loose grip so you can push the thing against the drawer and then just push it forward. Squeezing, etc, gripping little planes is a recipe for sore ness. The mass of little pieces that he's putting together is fiddly.

We owe it to ourselves if we're going to be efficient to make some of our own tools both efficiently in the make and efficiency and comfort in how they work. This is a type of plane that was in the roubo plates (someone tipped me off to it), though the versions in the roubo plates were neatly made. That's perfectly fine.

I've made 6 pairs of hollows and rounds with a closed mortise, and I can't honestly tell you that it's a better idea for me to make them at 8-10 hours a pair neatly than it would be for me to make them in this style and then later glue a side on if they really need it. Vic approaches things like someone using power tools, supposing the plane needs to be really hard or we'll wear it out, it's made with a hard wedge (something we really don't want unless the wedge is bearing on metal), and it has to be pulled, which most of us wouldn't do.

It makes for a better article because it looks neat and it's kind of got the something for nothing gimmick, but the roubo type is really something for very little, and less than the nothing of the article.

If you make one of these, get it to feed, etc, you will be shocked at how neat the grooves are - especially if you've used a plow plane to make drawer grooves. It's half the effort of a plow plane and four times as neat as far as results go.