Thread: Of planes & adjustment systems

Originally Posted by Luke Maddux

.......The planes without the rear handle must have a somewhat different action to use, right? It almost seems like it might be anatomically more conducive to "correct" planing technique, given that you have to apply more downward pressure to the rear? I guess over the length of a smoother that's a bit irrelevant, but still......

Different for sure, Luke. Not sure it's any better, ergonomically or otherwise, just different. The slightly lower position of my right hand, or the angle of it, gives me the feeling of a little more control, but for a long session, I think a handle is easier to live with. However, that probably has much to do with my being used to planes with rear handles.

The extra weight of an infill means you don't have to apply much weight at all. I know Peter Sellers likes to say a plane cuts under its own weight, but he obviously doesn't tackle too may Aussie woods! Planes cut ok "under their own weight" for a while after sharpening but exactly how long depends on the blade material & the wood it's cutting. If you are planing up a board of She-oak, it won't be many strokes before you find yourself leaning on the plane a bit to get the blade to engage - with my infills, that takes a little longer. A purist would say you should stop & sharpen immediately at that point, but most of us like to spin out the time between sharpening a bit.

Having owned & used infill planes for a decent amount of time now, I have a different opinion of them than I had 40 years ago. Back then I was in lust simply over the look of the things - their curves, the mixed-metal dovetails and some exotic wood like Ebony combined to make them highly seductive. My very first experience of one was rather disappointing though. It was handed to me with, "Here, try a real plane". It was real enough, but badly set-up (the cap-iron was set far too rank) and not very sharp. By that stage of my career I had learned to fettle my couple of Baileys tolerably well, and the Norris I was handed wasn't a match for either! It was another 20 years before I acquired my first infill, though I think that had as much to do with my bank balance (or lack thereof), as being put off by that first exposure.

A couple of infills stored in a strategic spot will give your shop great credibility to potential clients - you could probably justify the cost of a very nice Spiers or Norris on those grounds alone! A good infill, well set-up can be a very nice tool to use - my newish panel-plane has no peer for planing panels (must be how they got their name?! ), but for the majority of everyday jobs I automatically reach for my well-worn old 5 1/2 or 4. My Baileys won't do a couple of things as well as the equivalent infills, but they do well over a greater range of tasks.

So there you are - the confessions of an infill addict - I could give them up if I tried, you know - honest!

Cheers,

I got a couple of spare hours this arvo & had another play with the plane. As I said, I wasn't happy with a couple of things, one being the cap-iron. The 1/16" steel looked cute, but was just too flimsy for the job. I cut out a piece of 1/8th mild steel & decided to see how difficult it would be to reduce it to the 2.25 or so I would have liked. Answer: bl**dy difficult!! I made a holding block and lapped it on a length of 60 grit zirconium belt, and I lost track of how many strokes I gave it before I gave up, but I got it down to 2.7mm. At that point I decided that would do & made the new cap with it. Turned out ok, & far more solid thn the first aattempt: Cap-irons.jpg

Another problem I wanted to address was the cap-iron screw. The slot in the Veritas blade is much wider than in blades made for cap-irons & the head of a typical screw (~16mm) barely fits across the gap. This made it difficult to keep the iron in place when tightening, it wanted to slew no matter how carefully I tightened it. I had an idea that making a new screw with a shallow lip to fit inside the slot might solve the problem. Because brass is so much easier to deal with, I prototyped it in brass. It works like a charm & I'm wondering if I need to bother with a steel one, brass should last a lifetime or two.

And finally - I stuffed up a bit setting the pivot-point for the adjuster - it is supposed to be exactly 3 5/16 inches from the bottom edge of the mouth. Somehow, it ended up a couple of mm closer, and the blade would only retract to a point where it was still a teeny bit exposed. So I filed a bit out of the main nut to allow the travelling spigot to pull up a couple more mm. Here are the modifed cap-iron screw & the modified adjuster Modifications.jpg

That did the trick nicely, and has the added advantage that if I screw it back hard, the spigot locks in the groove & holds it steady when inserting the blade assembly.

Much better - adjustment is now working as it should: Test 2.jpg

I still need to spend bit more time on lapping the sole, so next time I get a spare couple of hours....

Cheets,

Today I did some final fettling on the new plane. I'd only roughly lapped the sole up to this point, so today I stretched a new length of Zirconium belt over the tablesaw & had at it. There were some deep pits in the sole I needed to remove, but I'm afraid it would have taken a week to completely eliminate a couple of them, so I decided to quit & clean up on some finer grits (240 is as far as I go these days). Some other minor issues were attended to, like the left side of the lower lever cap that was a bit 'fat', making it look like it was crooked. I filed, sanded & re-polished that, and made sure it was bearing down on the cap-iron evenly across its full width. I also needed to tidy up the channel for the adjuster because it was preventing it from moving over far enough when fully retracted, which made getting the blade assembly past it a real fidddle. Amazing what removing a tiny bit of wood can do!

So it's now finished to my satisfaction. The adjuster suffers from the blade-slewing fault inherent in this design, but it works smoothly enough now, albeit rather quickly. With a fresh blade & just a little mucking about with he set, the plane took full-width 1.5 thou shavings, end to end of my test board. That'll do me... Final fettle.jpg

So, what have I learned from this exercise? I'm now a bit wiser in the ways of the "Norris" adjuster & I think I've adequately answered the questions I had when I started out. I'm now as sure as I can be that the reason Veritas went for the configuration they use was for two reasons a) simplicity and b) compactness. My idea of using subtractive threads works more smoothly, but at the cost of needing much more room to get the same amount of travel.

I think this will adequately illustrate the point. I made a short adjuster which I though I might add to a chariot plane (following a Norris precedent). Here is the shaft of my adjuster (rear) compared with the Veritas shaft: 3 shaft comp.jpg

On my shaft, I've got 52mm of thread (30mm of the coarse & 22mm of the smaller, fine thread, both R.H.). The Veritas has 38mm of thread (21 R.H & 17 L.H).

My adjuster gives me a total travel of 7mm from fully retracted to fully extended, while the Veritas gives 13mm, so they get twice the travel using a threaded bit that is 27% shorter: 2 extended.jpg 1 retracted.jpg

The the problem is that I may have difficulty when the blade wears down, and I need to switch to the next hole in the blade for the adjuster spigot. The Veritas has heaps of overlap, but mine is going to be tight - I think it's ok, but I might have to wait 20 years or more 'till the blade wears down enough to find out for certain!

Lotsa fun.
Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

The the problem is that I may have difficulty when the blade wears down, and I need to switch to the next hole in the blade for the adjuster spigot. The Veritas has heaps of overlap, but mine is going to be tight - I think it's ok, but I might have to wait 20 years or more 'till the blade wears down enough to find out for certain!

Lotsa fun.
Cheers,

Ian

I feel that the feeling of being there to witness a possible failing will far outweigh any shortcoming.

Bsides which, with the number of planes you have made I don't really see any of them them wearing out this century if you use them reasonably equally.

Regards
paul

Don't tell him that Paul, if he wears one down he might offload it if he has spares......

An absolute beauty of a plane Ian. Have you ever done a step by step tutorial for a newbie to follow?

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Originally Posted by taz01

...... Have you ever done a step by step tutorial for a newbie to follow?.....

Funny you should ask, Adam. .
I'm in the middle of writing what I hope might be helpful to anyone with no prior experience of working with metal, but interested in making metal planes. Learning through mistakes is one way to do it, but it can be both costly & discouraging, so while they're still fresh enough in my mind is a good time to talk others through it. There is plenty of stuff out there in print & U-toob land, but it's not easy to find the bits you really need, & we face a few problems in the lucky country when it comes to obtaining materials, so at least one useful thing, I think, would be to guide you through that part.

I did an article on making a 19mm shoulder plane (a topical subject? ) for AWR recently (issue #99), and also wrote a few pages on making dovetailed infills for a couple of others who wanted to get into it, a coupe of months ago. Making a shoulder plane by riveting the body together is a fairly simple construction method & a good introduction to metalworking, so I reckoned it might be useful to put the two things together as a small 'booklet' that I can just email to anyone who asks. I don't want to infringe copyright by re-using the magazine pics etc., so I'm re-writing that from scratch. The magazine article was also pretty brief, thanks to 'editorial restrictions', so I'm expanding on it, but it's going a bit slowly atm, due to other commitments.

All of my planes have been 'designed' from scratch, and there are a couple of potential pitfalls in doing that, so I'll include a few scaled drawings of side profiles that I know work ok, to start on. Once you've got a working plane or two under your belt, you'll be ready to fly solo....

Anyway, I'll get it together eventually, so if you are keen, I'll put you on the mailing-list & you can have a copy as soon as I get it done.....

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

Funny you should ask, Adam. .
I'm in the middle of writing what I hope might be helpful to anyone with no prior experience of working with metal, but interested in making metal planes. Learning through mistakes is one way to do it, but it can be both costly & discouraging, so while they're still fresh enough in my mind is a good time to talk others through it. There is plenty of stuff out there in print & U-toob land, but it's not easy to find the bits you really need, & we face a few problems in the lucky country when it comes to obtaining materials, so at least one useful thing, I think, would be to guide you through that part.

I did an article on making a 19mm shoulder plane (a topical subject? ) for AWR recently (issue #99), and also wrote a few pages on making dovetailed infills for a couple of others who wanted to get into it, a coupe of months ago. Making a shoulder plane by riveting the body together is a fairly simple construction method & a good introduction to metalworking, so I reckoned it might be useful to put the two things together as a small 'booklet' that I can just email to anyone who asks. I don't want to infringe copyright by re-using the magazine pics etc., so I'm re-writing that from scratch. The magazine article was also pretty brief, thanks to 'editorial restrictions', so I'm expanding on it, but it's going a bit slowly atm, due to other commitments.

All of my planes have been 'designed' from scratch, and there are a couple of potential pitfalls in doing that, so I'll include a few scaled drawings of side profiles that I know work ok, to start on. Once you've got a working plane or two under your belt, you'll be ready to fly solo....

Anyway, I'll get it together eventually, so if you are keen, I'll put you on the mailing-list & you can have a copy as soon as I get it done.....

Cheers,

You don't even need to ask. Please put me at the front of the waiting list for that guide!

Best regards

Adam

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I'll jump on the queue for that info too please Ian, but I'm in no hurry

OK, give me a couple more weeks and I should have it done. I can probably break it into 2 or 3 pdf files small enough to attach to a post & you can all view or download them at your leisure - I'll see how it goes...

Cheers,

Fantastic
Effort Ian,
Please keep me posted

Cheers Matt

Ian, Like a number of others, I would also appreciate any information you are willing to pass on. I have looked at a few u-tubes and they seem light on for details in some of the areas you seem to focus on, placement of leaver cap and finessing the blade bed to mention a couple. Look forward to your downloads.

Tony

Amazing what you don't notice until you've been sensitized!

I was sharpening my low-angle jack/Stanley 62 clone today for the first time since I started mucking about with adjusters. I had noticed it had a "Norris" style adjuster, but had never taken a really close look at it before - at least not with my new-found interest & awareness of the Norris system.

Blow me down if Mr. Quangsheng hasn't anticipated me by years! The shaft of this LAJ adjuster uses two RH threads, just like I'd thunked up: LAJ adj.jpg

But having access to much better machinery than I, he's put a really coarse "driver" thread (14tpi on an approximately 7mm shaft). The smaller shaft is 5mm, with 32tpi (which doesn't match either M5 or 3/16 NF??). Very nifty - the spigot travels a bit faster than the one I made with 20 & 32tpi, but the benefit is it's a little more compact.

The other feature I spotted, which wouldn't have entered my consciousness a few weeks ago, is the "flattened" pinion & driver nuts. I did this on mine to gain a bit more usable thread from a shorter shaft, & they've done the same, presumably for the same reason. LAJ adj nuts.jpg

So whoever made the working drawings for this particular clone put some original thought into it - they may have borrowed the basic idea, but tweaked it a little bit (just like Lie-Nielsen, eh? ).

So I'm still waiting to have a truly original thought that no-one else has beaten me to by years.......

Cheers,