Plane and fancy

This is a long overdue post. It begins with the fact that I got all wound up over carving after reading Chris Pye's book, Wood Carving, which you may google. Then this morphed into a project of John's, namely making custom picture frames for his paintings. My job is making the frame. Now you may go to the Home Despot and buy commercial moldings and make your frames out of that if you wish. But I soon realized that I would have to make the moldings myself. And I refuse to use a router. So it's back to basics. Let us build shaped planes and use them to shape the moldings on which we will do carvings, out of which we will build frames! Really unwinding the Industrial Revolution.

Back in the pre-router days, people used planes to make moldings. They had all kinds of elaborate shapes. I wanted to start simply. So I decided to make a hollow and a round. One cuts a hollow, the other makes a round out of a raised piece. Now I have made some miniature planes but this is real stuff. Tough. First, you have to make a blade. The blade is the crucial part of the plane. I used an old rusty crosscut saw for the purpose. In retrospect it was much too flimsy. But hindsight is wonderful.

I started out with the rounder. This is a concave blade, an upside-down U.
First problem is to find your raw material. Maybe a circular saw blade. I used a handsaw blade, but I think a circualr saw blade would be better. I cut it roughly to shape, with a hacksaw, and I started out with full metalworking equipment, the milling attachment on the Taig. At least I got the bottom of the thing milled out flat.
But there was no way I could cut a semicircle with the mill. I do not have a rotary table! Nor yet a cutter of exactly the proper radius. So, when you have to cut shapes out of metal, you resort to drilling:
Since I am drilling a semicircle, I stuck a steel pin in the backing board at the proper radius. It fits into a hole in the proper point of the proto-blade. This, at least, ensures you are drilling on the radius of a circle. Do not move the backing board. Clamp it, preferably. You are trying to drill overlapping holes. Then cut off any webs and clean it up with files. At this point I decided to give it a preliminary grind, as I usually do with my hand-made tools.
Terrible mistake. You should not use a flat grinder to sharpen a curved tool. I do not know how Tormek & Co. do this, but their grinder just ground me flat! I ruined the blade.

So I took a deep breath, said some unseemly things in several languages, and decided to make a hollowing plane instead. U-shaped. The iron for this was made exactly the same way as the previous one, but when it came time to grind, I rotated the blade. I made a jig for the purpose. I also use the jig to sharpen gouges. Don't have a picture of this (yet) but it's just like sharpening a gouge, only the blade is flat. At last a nice edge. So I hardened and tempered. I will soon post something on this. And I had a semicircular plane iron, only shaped U instead of upside-down U.

So now we have to make a body for the plane. We are making the Krenov plane style. It is a laminated thing, you saw off the middle and glue it back again. I have been here before and will not repeat it. But here are the pieces of the plane.
Here we have the iron, the sawn-put cheeks, and the middle part, sized to take the iron. We have simply drilled a hole to let the chips escape. The middle part is shaped for a wedge, to hold the iron in. For the record the dimensions are 145 x 50 x 23 mm. The 23 mm is a curious number, it must be something in inches, but I don't do inches.

Observant readers will note a terrible mistake. I did not drill registration pin holes when I sawed it apart. I paid very dearly for this mistake. Almost as bad was the fact that I did not draw layout lines on the outside of the body. When it came time to cut the throat opening of the plane, I cut my own throat. So put down layout lines on the outside -- it saves infinite trouble. You must cut the throat at the smae angle as the bedding angle (45 deg) . In the end (OK, confession is good for the soul) I used plastic wood to remedy my mistakes. Here half a millimeter is crucial. No big deal to cut the throat; but cutting at the proper angle is another matter. You want a very, veye, narrow throat on these things. It has to shave, and the throat opening roughly equals the thickness of the shaving you will take.

Now on to the rounder. I cut a block of wood exactly like the previous one. I remade the blade. It is still in a rough stage. But the curvature is right. Exactly the same radius as the hollow. So now we can use the hollow to shape the rounder.

Note the plastic wood infill on the hollow. But it works. It planes. It is not as smooth as I would wish. I need a fence to keep the hollow straight. It needs a thicker iron. But it planed down the sole of the hollow.

I used a circular rasp at the end, and sandpaper wrapped around a piece of pipe at the end. But the rounder has a nice shape. A few flaws. They are correctable. This time I remembered to drill registration holes. Oh yes, andI have sawed the back end of the hollower to a curve. Else it digs into your hand. Live & learn.

It is time to saw the thing apart. I can hardly wait to make an ogee, q.g. If circles cause all this much toil, I wonder how I will do the ogee. Stay tuned.

More Plane Dealing

Long ago I thought I might end up making miniatures (little did I know) and a little Stanley plane showed up at a hardware store, cheap, and I bought it. It turned out to be awful. Stanley used to make good tools but I fear that they have fallen into the clutches of the dreaded marketroids, creatures with MBAs whose god is the bottom line. Perhaps Stanley meant it to plane balsa wood. (By the way, balsa in Spanish means raft. This fact did not escape the eagle eye of Mr Thor Heyerdal, when he built Kon-Tiki out of balsa logs and sailed it across the Pacific. But he didn't plane anything on that raft.) So anyway, I thought a new body might help rescue the marketroid monster. I could make a new body for it. Krenov method, natch.
Above the original plane, ugly black, minus the blade. You can see that it's a cheap channel metal with a cap which goes into slots in the metal. Below it is a block of wood, blade on it, as we lay out the long rips that make the cheeks of the planes. If you search for "Krenov planes" you should find the post I did on the method, in great detail. The blade calipered out to 25.4mm wide, so it's an inch in RGU, exactly.

And there it is all cut out. Notice I drilled the registration holes already. This is a mistake. I should have read Krenov (or Finck) more carefully! There is a reason for this. We want a very narrow throat on the plane. The way we do this is by planing the plane! We plane the sole (with another plane, of course) until the blade just goes through. Many a planing failure is due to a wide throat. Moral: clamp it together so's the blade is about 1-2 mm above the throat opening. Then drill the registration holes.

So we went to the gluing-up operation, made a wedge, and out came Plane Jane.
Already much better than the original ugly; but when I finished planing out the sole it was much too wide. See above under mistake. So I had to inlay a piece to close the throat. A good throat depth is 1 or 2 mm; more than that only for very rough planing indeed. Good practice for inlay work, look at it that way.
The inlay is a piece of copper beaten out from old gas pipe. You do not need Titanium alloy in a wooden plane. Copper is much easier to work. Jane is a vast improvement on her original form; but the blade is really too short so it is hard to adjust. It is also very difficult to sharpen. It is difficult to hold the proper angle on such a short blade. But I am one up on the Stanley marketroids. I will be very happy if I can figure out what to make of the leftover original parts.

One of these days I suppose I should post all the stuff I have learned on tuning planes so that they actually plane. But Mr Garret Hack has already done so; read his The Handplane Book (q.g.). Lots of good information in Krenov and Finck, too. There is probably all sorts of stuff on line but I haven't looked. If you buy a Veritas plane from Lee Valley (q.g.) or a Lee-Nielsen plane, you can plane out of the box. You will pay dearly for the privilege. No others need apply. You buy a secondhand plane, or build one yourself, you have to learn to tune it. It is not difficult. End of rant!

Alaska Transportation II

In my visit to Talkeetna I posted about trains and planes. This is a follow-up. I drove into Anchorage the other day -- a 130+ Km drive that I don't like to do at all; on my way back bingo! I saw a train stopped in Wasilla. Instant pull off and unlimber the camera. Push to extreme tele:
And there she is, 4325. Double headed, in fact, pulling a longish train up to Denali Park, Talkeetna, and maybe even Fairbanks (although I doubt it). The consist, as we rail freaks (actually, the railroads themselves call) the list of cars being pulled, was all passenger stuff.
No doubt full of tourists. "Tourist" may be a bad word; but it is extremely important to summer survival in Alaska. Everyone depends on it. I'm glad the consist is so long; means lots of people are headed to lodges, campsites, "and etc." up near Denali.

So now, you are thinking, he's going to put some airplanes into the post! You know me quite well, I see. Of course. I happened to walk by the Willow floatplane dock, and stopped to take some pictures. The occupants of the dock were these guys:
In the center is the iconic De Havilland Beaver, built in Canada in the 1950s by De Havilland (Canada). A magnificent airplane, with a huge payload capacity and a big radial engine with a mellow, basso sound. I can tell it's a Beaver (or maybe an Otter, slightly larger) from the sound of the engine alone. To its right, a smaller floatplane I can't identify offhand -- maybe a Cessna; and a Strange Plane to the Beaver's left. More on that. As I stood and wondered, as if by magic a party of fishermen appeared and loaded their paraphernalia onto Strange Plane.
When they were all buttoned up and ready to go, they got a push away from the dock...
Engine started, we taxied out towards the "runway" -- don't think this is correct on a lake, but anyway...
And off we go!
Destination: unknown. Some Remote Lake, AK.

Some work with binoculars and Google reveals the identity of Strange Plane. It is a Found Aircraft Ltd (Canada) Bush Hawk. If you Google these terms, you, too, can find out all about the Bush Hawk. Glad to see the Canadians are still making bush planes. De Havilland, of course; but also the Noordyun Bushmaster (a classic) and now the Found Bush Hawk. Bravo Canada!