Thread: Help on old hand planes

Rob, those (Bickford) planes look nice eh! no brass, no bling, simple, traditional but still nice,...they sure do add up when you buy them as sets! when compared to those Paul mentions, the old ones are good value, relief, i checked mine over and they still good so i save a few bucks, so i'm safe


have you got a forge!<insert envy emotive here> i can think of few little woodwork tools that would be great to make on a forge, i got an anvil but no forge, i got a cold echo (thats south aussie for stubbie) for the end of the day though, thats two out of three!

Those Bickford planes look real nice Chippy, He has followed the style of the 18th century planes with the chamfers and the wedge by the look of them. possibly the length as well. Cherry ones would look extra nice but I am sure it is softer than beach ,maybe only slightly. I'm not researching this ,just going on memory.
I have worked with a lot of Cherry, Oak and Walnut the last 20 years and if I was making them it would be so I could mould Oak .

I bought my forge off an antique dealer freind 30 years back, no one wanted the stuff back then. He transported a 1890s farm blacksmiths set up over here by train loaded up his ute and took it all around Melbourne trying to sell it. a forge , Peter wright anvil, and three tea chests full of rusty tongs and gear. a box full of unusual axe heads got knocked of on the train, my friend cant describe tools to well so I don't know what they were, but they made an impression on him because he has not stopped trying to tell me how amazing they were They could have been the German type I have seen with the stamped patterns?? Any way no one would buy it from him so at the end of the day whenever he could not sell, he sometimes dropped in to have a go at me, his last chance . a ute full of rusty steel for $350 I think it was, and Ive been playing with it ever since, joined the Vic B/smiths association for a while ,did some welding courses , it's good fun every now and then . and gave me an understanding of how Machines and tools are made, starting where it all came from ,the Blacksmith.

I went off and got some cheap files, some saw dust to anneal them , ringbarked two trees growing over the top of my sewerage , and went twice to bunnings after picking up the wrong grinding discs firt time, and am about to try and get the coke going in the forge.

If you have the anvil Chippy you have got the hardest past done, build the forge . You can build better than you can buy, Old hand cranked ones are fun but electric is better. I converted mine . I will show it later.

A cold echo ?? ok seing as though I was thinking of you when I went to put the stubbie in the fridge I made it a Coopers

Rob

very interesting about the forge and all your smithy equipment, its something i'll have to learn about one day, for the couple of small things i want to make/replace (cos i cant find them anywhere for sale nowadays) i thought i could just make a fire, heat the steel and beat the crap out of it with a hammer (only about 15mm thick iron) , but what do i know about blacksmithing ..it seems it has sawdust involved (thats a bonus!) so i should be able to get a handle on it should i get around to practising it!

echo's are south aussie for stubby, i cant speak to facts, i'm not wiki or looked on wiki but the way i remember it was when short bottles of beer were introduced, at least i dont have a memory of short bottles before then (before that it was i'l buy a bottle of beer or usually a dozen and get one free, no such thing as being called long necks), in the other states they called em stubby's but here we introduced deposits on bottles and cans to stop the litter we all used to see on the side of country roads and elsewhere so they ran a big advertising campaign and called em echo's, because the beer bottle, keeps coming BACK ...Back ..back ...back ..back ...back


cheers
chippy

Sorry ntjeep - bit off your topic - but I think this guy is good value - lots of videos ...

Originally Posted by ch!ppy

echo's are south aussie for stubby, i cant speak to facts, i'm not wiki or looked on wiki but the way i remember it was when short bottles of beer were introduced, at least i dont have a memory of short bottles before then (before that it was i'l buy a bottle of beer or usually a dozen and get one free, no such thing as being called long necks), in the other states they called em stubby's but here we introduced deposits on bottles and cans to stop the litter we all used to see on the side of country roads and elsewhere so they ran a big advertising campaign and called em echo's, because the beer bottle, keeps coming BACK ...Back ..back ...back ..back ...back


cheers
chippy

Thats a good idea, Chippy, we should be doing that here too. it comes up on the news every once and a while here that we should have refunds on bottles like SA.

Paul, The guys forge started to draw the smoke well once it got going , he should have spent the five bucks on the t piece so the ash does not get in his fan though. And the extended shots of his face started driving me bonkers too Thanks for showing though. A forge that size is not to hard to make, Ive been thinking of a smaller one for work, I scored a vacuum cleaner of hard rubbish the other week for one, The old Electrolux type that the flow can be reversed on.

We have The Smithy section on the forum now, so I thought I would post the attempted Annealing of the files and making of some floats over there, I put up some pictures of todays effort. If it works out I will put the tools up here as well.

https://www.woodworkforums.com/f266/d...9/#post1592894

Rob

Hey you mob, thanks a lot for the replies! A bit more to study now, I'll trawl the sites soon, great stuff!