Adventures in the handplane SIG, Part II

Making Krenovian Woodies

Guillaume Dery

Introduction

So last Tuesday was a special day for the some of the handplane SIG members, we made our own planes! Our moderator, Jack, had offered this to anyone who wanted to participate and he was going to lead the charge and provide adult supervision/talk us through the building our own planes.

Due to overwhelming response from the OWA membership, we had to split into two groups to do the build. Being a keener, I volunteered for the first group. The build took place at Glen Briggs’ shop (our usual SIG hangout).

Disclaimer: Making your own tools is addictive! If you hoard your shop time like a miser and want to devote it solely to making furniture, please abandon this post immediately! Disregard all the benefits you could reap from building your own tools and run away from the computer screen right away! Jack is a prime example of this. I believe he started off innocently enough at one of Lee Valley’s plane building seminars. However, it seems to have mutated in an incurable disease. He has made quite a few smoothers and last time I dropped in on his shop, he had a prototype grooving plane (I call it a prototype because, although it looked fully functional, he was already planning the next revision), was working on a new smoother with integrated Norris adjuster, had finished his own plane hammer (from brass rod) and I helped him and Terry (another OWA member) get their Moxon vise prototypes off the ground (they did the hard work, I provided sarcastic asides). Since then, he has made a production run of hammer heads for the OWA membership. So, as you can see, this tool building thing can be quite an addiction. You are right to be scared. Personally, I call this the slippery slope, Mark 2. Or perhaps we are just greasing the already slippery slope…

In attendance were the following:

• Glen – I wonder if my insurance covers this – Briggs (our gracious host)
• Charles – Where do I attach the power cord on this plane – Anderson
• Ken – I’m going to have to build a pegged box to hold this – Dixon
• Guillaume – I wonder how long I can milk this not having a shop – Déry
• Jack – I’ll keep building tools until I need more furniture – Schwass (our benevolent SIG dictator)

So before I go any further in describing the actual process (as has probably been done countless time on the web), please allow me to provide a bit of background and to do some philosophizing. 

One of the reasons I jumped at the chance to participate in the build, although I already have a sufficient arsenal of handplanes (If I ever finish the shop and get them out of storage), is that I firmly believe that to get the most out of a tool, one has to become intimately familiar with it’s workings and the relationships between the parts which make the whole. To become a better sawyer, understand a saw and the function of every part and configuration. To become a better planer, understand the components of a plane and how it interacts with wood. I could go on in this vein but that is probably best left to another article at another time. Needless to say, one cannot become more intimately familiar with a tool than when building it oneself. This is the same reason for which I encourage people to add a few vintage Stanleys to their plane arsenal and to refurbish them. You understand the way a plane works much better than when you just get a LN or a Veritas which work great out of the box. What is wrong with working great out of the box you ask? Well, when your entire experience has been with properly functioning tools, you have no idea where to start to correct issues when they do arise for one.

Still with me? Good, obviously you tolerate my ramblings and I haven’t scared you off with my disclaimer. On to the good part, the actual build.

Let me preface this by stating that what we built was a very basic Krenovian woodie, sans fancy lever caps, laminated sole, etc. This was a plane in its most simple form. So here are the materials and tools which are needed for this, as procured and provided by Jack

What you need

Plane Material:

• 1 plane blank (this took the form of hard maple baseball blanks, chopped to length by Jack)
• Retaining pin (although a lot of people use wooden ones which are perfectly acceptable, Jack managed to coerce someone into turning some nice ones out of brass for us)
• 1/4" dowel (cheap home-center stuff. This is just used to pin the parts together and will be part of the cut-off waste)
• Blade ( we used the LV replacement blades for their Taiwanese planes)

 Tools Needed:

• Low angle block plane
• Chisel(s)
• Smoother or jack plane
• Accurate square
• 6" rule
• Clamps

Consumables:

• Wax paper
• Masking tape

Power Tools Used In the Shop:

• Bandsaw
• Chop-saw
• Drill press
• Jointer and Planer (optional, this could be done with handplanes)

The Process

Prior to getting together, everyone was provided with their own blank with the objective of 4-squaring it. As an aside, once you figure out which face will be the sole, you only need to 3-square it (the sole and both sides).

So we all arrived at Glen’s shop with our hand tools and maple blocks in tow, ready to make some planes. Jack handed out retaining pins and blades to all and sundry and we were off to the races (or at least awaiting word from our wise master, Jack…)

Step 1: Par 4.
Drill ¼ inch through holes at each corner. Placement is not critical as this is to insert the dowels for alignment and will be cut off in final shaping. Off to the drill press we went.

Step 2: Shave your cheeks.
This is a real simple exercise, figure out the width of your blade, plus a bit of room for adjustment and another extra bit to clean up the cut and account for the kerf. Let’s just say that 1/8th of an inch on either side. This will be the width of your center block. Minus that from the width of your blank, divide by 2 and presto, you know at what distance you need to set your bandsaw blade to slice off the cheeks. As an example, let’s say your blade is 1 ½ inches and your blank is 3 inches. Blade plus ¼ inch (1/8th per side) is 1 ¾. Blank (3) – 1 ¾ = 1 ¼ inches. Divided by 2, the nominal cheek thickness is 5/8. Set the fence at this distance and slice off that cheek.

Step 3: Joint prep.
Since we had access to power tools and were in a bit of a rush, no one seemed inclined to clean up those bandsaw marks up with a handplane… Off to the planer (side note, you should re-joint one side of the center block prior to the planer to ensure perpendicular and flat reference faces or plane the first face prior to slicing off the second cheek). Start by cleaning up the center block, ensuring you remove the same amount from both sides and that the thickness remains slightly greater than the width of the blade. Now set this piece aside and clean up the sawn face on each cheek. It is good practice to run both pieces through together to ensure that both cheeks are the same thickness (unless you want a lopsided plane). Reassemble and check the fit to ensure you will have a good glue-line joint (you did mark the sole with a triangle prior to band-sawing so you’d know which order pieces went in, didn’t you?).

Step 4: Time for bed.
Now it gets nerve wracking, we are going to cut our bed for the iron (and also the rest of the mouth opening). Off to the chop-saw we line up, like little duckies in a row. I had visions of a York pitch but since the saw was already set for 45 and I didn’t feel like friggin (or should that be frogging… no, wait, that’s for Bailey planes…) around with angles or resetting the saw, I, like everyone else, settled for a standard 45 pitch. I won’t get into mouth placement as that is a matter of taste, plane size and function, alignment of the stars, etc. The first cut is the bed (the 45 degree cut in this case).

Step 5: Make your bed.
Yay, hand tool time! That 45 degree bed needs to be planed smooth, perfectly flat and exactly 90 degrees to the sides. Take your time and do it right as this ramp will support your blade in use and there is no part more critical to the proper operation of the plane. Check your progress with a square and straightedge regularly.

Step 6: Humpty Dumpty, mouthing off.
Once step 5 is done, reassemble all the parts, pin them together, insert your blade and mark where it intersects the toe block. Carry this line around to the sole and mark the sole. This would form a zero clearance mouth if you cut the toe block exactly to that line. The reality however is that the mouth will open up a tad when we back bevel the toe ramp and a bit more when we true the sole. Off to the chop-saw again to whack off the clearance ramp in the toe block at 60 degrees (as memory serves me, which it rarely does). This is the point where Jack has me dig my off-cut out of the scrap bin; turns out I will need it for the wedge.

Step 7: Pin-holes for pinheads.
Again, memory is failing me on exact measurements… However, this is where we laid out the hole for the retaining pin. As I recall, we mark a line 1 ¼ inch up from a cheek. Then align the toe block on the cheek (you can drive in the dowels to ensure alignment) rest your small rule on the angled ramp and mark the point where 13/32 intersects the line you drew on the cheek. This is your center point for the indexing pin. Off to the drill press and drill a ¼” hole (in our case as the brass pin was turned at ¼ inch on the ends). Reassemble the entire plane using the dowels and carry that hole through to the other cheek.

Step 8: Make Red Green proud.
Tape, tape and more tape… Mark where your cheeks intersect the middle blocks then take the entire thing apart one final time. Now mask off the inside cheeks (leaving clearance for the retaining pin) as well as both ramps. You do not want to have to cleanup squeeze-out inside the plane.

Step 9: Sniff some glue
Based on Jack’s recommendation, we used standard yellow glue. Let’s just say that Jack has had some spectacular delaminations using 5 minute epoxy and won’t recommend the stuff… paint your glue on, pin with your dowels to ensure alignment and clamp the snot out of it to ensure a good glue line. Set it aside to grab and have a beer…Wait, what’s that Jack? There is more still to do?

Step 10: Wedgie
This was so simple it wasn’t even funny. Grab your off-cut, go to the bandsaw and slice off a wedge. Mine ended up being about 1/8th of an inch wide at the bottom and ½ inch on the top. It rides low enough to support the blade fairly low and fits tightly across its entire face. The only pain is smoothing the face of the wedge that makes contact with the blade… We actually took the planes out of the clamps after about 45 minutes. This is where we stopped for the night. Astoundingly, the entire process took less than 4 hours with only final shaping left to be done. That is our homework, to finish shaping the plane to our liking (bandsaws are your friend), true the sole and make fluffy shavings. Had I known how easy this was, I would have done this a long time ago. It is amazing how our minds tend to throw up imagined obstacles and complications which don’t really exist. My thanks to Jack for taking us through this and providing guidance…He’s kinda all right for a crusty curmudgeon!

I did finally get that beer