Thread: Handplanes - profiled - HOW are they made?

actually, that makes a lot of sense. It would be hard to create some kind of jigging setup that would do a very fine job on these blades.

What's far more practical is putting marking fluid on a blade and then grinding it off like you're feeding it into a sander (as in, cutting the profile on a 90 degree rest first, or close)

There's nothing particular impractical about filing, but it would get old if you had to do 5 a day, and the grinder would be needed to finish the grinding after heat treatment, anyway.

The more you grind things, the more you get to freehanding. I posted a set of chisels in another thread - everything is freehand ground on them on a platen and a contact wheel with some parts hand lapped and filed where grinding isn't practical or would take away lines.

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Totally different kind of grinding, but same idea - as long as the wheel is moving fast and doesn't overheat things, it's easier to do than slower work (the bevels on these chisels are ground after the chisels are fully hardened - if they're ground on first, or filed on, which is pleasant to do - unpleasant things happen in heat treatment (the chisel warps toward the bevels if they're even, leaving it shaped like a banana - if the bevels aren't even in size, it warps both upward and sideways, and then you have to regrind, anyway.

At any rate, not surprised that makers will use grinders as it's been the case for at least 250 years (except when planes were made in volume, the person grinding the irons would not have been the person making the plane).

Making a mark and working to it without having special jigs is a good way to work - it carries over elsewhere. It only goes awry when you get older and can't see.

Originally Posted by woodPixel

I've been following a few chaps who make hand planes since the Great Handplane Challenge started.

I've been astounded while following, and when looking back, on the work of msbickford.


Can anyone tell me how he obtains such an incredibly perfect match from the planes profile to the iron? It is crazy perfect....


What is this witchcraft????

(His book does not cover this.... grrr)

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WP,

Some of Stavros Gakos's Youtube offerings may show how he profiles a blade?

don't overthink it if you can help it if you want to create some of these profiles - do what you can with simple tools (when you start buying special scribes, use specific wheels, etc, these things can get expensive. You can do a lot of this work with common wheels graded to have a strong corner (grind only straight in, not against the sides) and before hardening an iron, and then use chainsaw files and "safe cornered" triangular saw files wherever you can find them inexpensively - you'll be filing unhardened steel, so you don't need the best of the best saw files to ruin.

The chisels shown above, all of the transitions are filed flush with common files, just with the teeth ground off anywhere they bite and you don't want them to. The inside curves are done first with a coarse double cut files, then cleaned up in two steps with a chainsaw file and then a small triangular saw file.