Thread: I have read Kingshott, but am still confused

Anthony

I know what you mean about the details. This website can help: Peter McBride is a jeweller in Melbourne who makes and restores hand tools as a hobby. He gives a number of interesting technical points including a discussion of how to match the dovetails with the mouth of a skewed chariot plane.

Best of luck and make sure you show us what you come up with.

Anthony

I have made a couple of planes where I have had to form a mouth in the sole. What I do is firstly draw an elevation through the plane (see attachment for what I mean) showing the blade thickness. From this you can determine the width of the narrowest part of the opening.

Once this is determined, I drill a line of holes just shy of the minimum width as closely spaced as possible . This should be done in a drill press with a fence setup to keep the holes accurately in line.

When you have your line of holes I get a small round file and file through the cusp between as many holes as I need to get a hacksaw blade into the slot. One trick with the hacksaw if your slot is of sufficient width is to use 2 blades in the frame to give a wider kerf.

Then it is just a matter of gradually opening up the slot with a file. A coarse cut 4" of 5" file is usually what I start with.

It is not a quick way of doing the job but with patience you can get a very good result.

The blades I have cut slots for have all been 5mm thick so the bottom opening is quite large relatively speaking. If you were trying to do a mouth for a 2.5mm blade you would find this a lot harder to do.

Hope this helps,


John

Originally Posted by JTonks

When you have your line of holes I get a small round file and file through the cusp between as many holes as I need to get a hacksaw blade into the slot.

You can also save a little time by making a mini hacksaw from a metal cutting jig saw blade. If you look around you can sometimes find blades that about 30% the width of a standard hack saw blade.

Thank you for the responses, that was quick.

Jeremy - the site for McBride is excellent. Nice to see we have someone with such skill and passion in our corner of the world. His description and photos on sweating a sole is very interesting.

John - thanks for the information. Seems you have already tried this. It may not be the last time I call on your help. The Kingshott book is a pleasure to read but I become frustrated by the lack of essential detail. That is how I got stuck here, but it won't be the last time I am sure.

Thanks all.

Anthony

Hi,
I have read on the internet elsewhere that Jim Kingshott's original manual for this book was lots larger but his publisher edited it down in size to make the selling price lower and thus the book more "marketable". This probably explains why the details you are after are missing. Jim was certainly not an ideas man but very practical - see his videos on using planes.
The book also has a number of errors where the text and the diagrams/pictures conflict most noticeably with one another, e.g. the location of the mouth of the jointer plane. See the following site for a list of these errors and what the correct information should be:
http://www.nonesuchtools.com/kingshott.html
Happy plane-making
Paul

Re the mouth in the sole. if make the sole a two piece, and put two or more dovetails in the front section you get a satisfactory result. Thats the way I did it.