Disaster strkes again!

My son and I have a joint project. We will make custom picture frames. He will paint what goes inside. A Fair division of labor; beause I am not an artist. Oh, I will do a reasonably artistic carving. But that does not make me an artist! When we add computers into this mix of art and craft, we have a recipe for a disaster, and that's just what happened. I have no bones in telling you the whole thing. Someone may learn something from it, after all. The thing about our custom picture frames is that they should not be vanilla store-bought frames. They should be carved by hand. And shaped by hand. The latter idea is my contribution to art. So, OK, I have to make a frame for a picture, and I even have to carve it. I have been practicing the carving part . And making tools for it, because commercial tools fall far short. The carving is the easy part. Shaping the ground is the hard part.

So this is a very lengthy introduction to a new subject: making weirdly shaped planes. I have absolutely zero experience in the area. So please bear with me as I learn. Nowadays weird shapes are made with routers, but I defy any router user to make his own shaped bits. But before routers were invented people planed moldings with planes. So I have said, let us make two planes: a rounder and a hollow. Both semicircular. And here follows the tale of these two guys. Here's what I have learned. People have not done this for about a hundred years. Some have. But they are not easy to find. Furthermore, the ubiquitous router gets in the way.

First you make the blade. So I want one one blade that looks like a semicircle. I lay it out and I drill holes that match it.
Next step is to drill some holes close to the profile of the piece. There, I knew I could get a picture into this thing. After that it's all file work. Tedious. But art knows no limits. File away and you, too, may be an artist. Much more important yhat you understand what I am tryng to do than how I did it. After all I have yet to succeed. And that's where disaster comes in. I have so far ruined two hollows. More to follow.

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!

Plow Plane, 0.2

In the last episode, we had plow plane v0.0 complete with flaws. Must make a new one. Now a plane, full-size or miniature -- I should say, a wooden plane -- is a block of wood with a peculiar hole in the middle. One side (back) is a ramp, at a precise angle, that supports the blade; the bed as it is called. The front side is another ramp, at a different angle. There are two ways (that I know about) to cut these holes. One is to drill, by hand or by press, some pilot holes at the correct angles. (The correct angle depends on what kind of plane it is. Typically the back ramp is 45 deg.). Then you hollow out the hole, with chisel or, better, a planemaker's float, which is a cross between a rasp and a chisel. The other way, popularized by the late and great James Krenov, cabinetmaker extraordinary, is to take a block of wood, saw it into three pieces longwise (rip), cut the middle piece to shape -- a simple task -- and glue it all back together again.

So I decided to do it the Krenov way. The rabbet plane of the previous post was done the first way; it was very difficult! I had, of course, no planemaker's floats. Fortunately, courtesy of my daughter, I have an old table. I cannot say what kind of wood it is, but it looks very much like some relative of mahogany, stained walnut. It's nice wood. First job is to cut the basic block to size.
Sorry about the background. I've put newspaper down on my all-purpose dining, crafts, and arts table. But there's the block. How big? Interesting. What I did was measure Mr. Liu Ban, introduced in the last post. Then I played around with my old slide rule until I got a decent scale. (How old-fashioned! A slide rule! But it is much more convenient than a calculator. You can move the cursor around until you get a nice set of numbers far, far faster than punching numbers into a calculator.) The scale turned out to be 0.4; so the new plow is 66 mm long. All other numbers are nice whole mm. You can see that the block has been marked out into three parts. The middle is where the blade goes. So I made a new blade, microforge stuff, 4mm wide. The middle stripe is 4mm wide and it should have been wider, because you need some clearance. Hindsight is wonderful.

Next step is to drill some registration holes. This is so that when you put the thing back together again, it all lines up. It is a sandwich, you see. Then we cut the sandwich apart along the dotted lines. A classic rip cut. Mr. Krenov used a bandsaw for this, but he was working full size. If I had a small enough bandsaw I'd use it too; these cuts are critical.
For this I used my miniature Dozuki saw. A Dozuki saw is a crosscut saw, but I used it because it has a paper-thin kerf. Above, the three pieces of the sandwich. In retrospect I should have drilled another two registration holes; not fatal. Now we mark out and cut the front ramp. I used the Krenov Kanonical angle, 62 deg. Liu Ban is 90 deg. I didn't like that, although it works perfectly well. I wanted a ramp.

So there, cut out, is the filling of the sandwich. All angles correct, no fuss with floats. The registration holes were drilled such that they acommodate supermarket bamboo skewers, used for barbecues. I use them for dowel stock; they are about 2.8mm. So we push the skewers through the holes and assemble our sandwich.
It might be a plane! The blade is much thicker than in v0.0; it is a piece of Sawz-all blade; makes magnificent blades (or knives!) Took a while to make and sharpen; worth it. Note the super micro machinist's clamps. Available from Lee Valley. At this point I realized I should have cut the center section a tad thicker. Sigh. So I filed the blade down a bit. Tedious. Moral: cut outside the scribed lines! Or scribe a little wider. In this scale a tenth mm is too much. Next step is to glue the sandwich together.
When gluing, there is no such thing as "too many clamps." You never have enough clamps, much like friends and money. After unclamping, we have to cut a groove in the bottom of the plane to accomodate the skate. Plow planes ride a skate, probably because wood would wear out in no time. Cutting the groove was very difficult. If I did this for a living I'd figure out some kind of a jig. But the result is now
The skate is a piece of scrap sheet metal I found somewhere. It is in place, but not glued. A temporary wedge has been made for the blade. A pin to hold the wedge (in fact a common brad) has been added. At this point you have to fuss around until it all lines up. I epoxied the skate to the groove, screws are out of the question. The epoxy is drying as I write. I even filed a registration groove into the back of the blade to mate with the skate. That was a very difficult thing to do, but I did it. Swiss files are wonderful. Preliminary tests of v0.2 are are very favorable.

I have gone into all this detail (practically a tutorial) because I wanted to show how a Krenov plane is made. It is much easier than the traditional way. It is even easier if you work full size, because a tenth millimeter error won't hurt. Of course, you should read all of Krenov's books. You can Google him to good effect. The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking is the one you need if you want to make planes. Also very good is David Finck's Making & Mastering Wooden Planes (q.g.). Finck is one of Krenov's pupils. And if you are making full-size smoothing planes and don't do forging, you will need irons (blades) for your planes. See the Hock company's web page. You could also cut down regular plane blades, as Krenov did.

And I have introduced a new abbreviation, q.g. Patterned after q.v. which is Latin for quod vide (which see), it means quod google. Punch it in and go.