My Hand Planes

[cae2100]

Thanks pat, they're comfortable for me to hold and use, so that's all I really cared about really, lol.

Yea, if you ever get the chance, I would stop in and check colonial out, Im planning on taking my toolboxes out because my parent want me to take them out to show some of the planes and other tools that Ive made to him. I just need to get the time to go out really, lol. Anvils sure have gotten expensive the last few years, as with everything really. You used to find them for around $2 per lb or less, but since all of the amateur blacksmiths and knife makers became a thing, the price of anvils just skyrocketed. I cant even think of wanting to pay $10 per lb for an anvil, which for that point, you might as well just make your own, lol.

[cae2100]

Well, the carving/spoon planes that I was making the chisels to do, I was sitting there looking at the screen the one day and it occurred to me that it would be easier to just hammer those out than to try to make the patterns and cast it out, lol.

Screenshot at 2024-04-20 00-34-33.png (229.81 KiB) Viewed 206 times

I was wanting one with a 3/4" radius, and one with a 1" radius, which were the same sizes I use for my swages/forms that I use to make my gouges usually. The shape is nothing but a bow tie shape that has been made into a double ended spoon, so the offcut pieces from the side planes were hammered out and turned into those planes, lol. The mouths were chain drilled and then filed out to open them up, then drilled for 1/4"-20 threads to hold the blades in. The drill bit wandered pretty badly on the one, but it doesnt hurt the functionality of it really.

I took the round ball grinding stone in the dremel to get rid of the forging lumps and bumps and clean them up a little bit, then stuck them back in the forge to get them orange hot/bright red hot, and took them out to cool just till they lost all of thier color, then started coating them again and again with pine tar till it stopped smoking off, then held it in the exhaust of the furnace to heat them back up and bake the pine tar on them. That creates a very tough coating that nothing short of a grinder or sandpaper will remove. It's a bit different than an oil finish, like when you season a pan because it is a very tough, shiny, and smooth finish vs what you get with oil. It looks like the japanning on the old tools imo.

I still have yet to give everything a final sharpening/honing, but just rough grind, they work really well and are very easy to control tbh. I can defenitely see myself using them to finish up contours and blending parts together for coreboxes and such.

The incannel gouges and everything, I forged those out a while back and they were just ready for heat treat, just like the blades for the side planes, so I just saved everything up and heat treated it all at once to save on propane and time, and do it all at once. I had forged out a few lathe chisels too and heat treated everything while I was there, so now its time to decide what style of handles I want on them, and go make them, lol.

The thumb/spoon planes above, even tho I just forged those out, the truth is, I will still use the chisels and everything on a plane pattern coming up because casting it is the only way to make it, and the pattern uses a bunch of the same designs as those spoon planes or a spokeshave, so Im just working my way up to getting ready for the complicated one, lol.

[greentwin]

That is cool !

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[Jammer]

Those look great. Are you going to cast any in Bronze?

[cae2100]

thanks guys, and probably not that I have them in steel. The one coming up will be in bronze tho, which Ive been putting off patterns for, so it may be a little while, lol. Right now, my casting stuff has gotten half buried again, so I just try to make the stuff in other ways for now, like forging, which I can do whether it's rain or shine, lol.

Our neighbors moved out and they pulled the trailers and everything out, so I no longer have neighbors all the way till you get into town, so the forging stuff, Ive been doing that at night when it's cooler out. Right now, I was working on some stuff and that coping saw I had just was pissing me off continuously because it was so flimsy, so I decided to go out and forge a new one out, and have been playing with trying to find just the right piece of steel to make a long tapered reamer from to make something similar to a peg cutter/shaver that they would use for making violins or cellos. They're more or less just a large pencil sharpener that has a very long and shallow taper, usually 5 degree cone in them, so I figured I'd make a set of them going from 1/4" up to 1" or so. I plan on just clamping them to the workbench, then instead of running out to the lathe every time I need a post, or a round boss for a pattern, I can just grab a wooden dowel and turn it into the size hole I need, and it'll cut the taper on them up to the length I needed, then I can cut it off and glue it right into the pattern ready for light sanding and finishing. That should make that stuff alot quicker, and since you dont need to run to the garage, set up the lathe, turn down a piece of stock to round, only to get a small section, that would save alot of time and waste since there's always a little bit that would get tossed from on the lathe. This way, I can turn it into the peg cutter to cut the taper, cut that off, and put the rest back in the bin with no waste being thrown away because it can be reused later easily enough.

The coping saw, I have the frame done up, but it'll be the style of the antique marquetry saws where the frame is super rigid, but the handle part is in two parts, that way you have the handle, and the end of the handle is threaded and tightens up everything to pull the blade tight. This is about as far as Ive gotten on it, just need to go out and drift the holes to get them perfectly round and heat treat it, then it'll be ready for handles and hardware. It was all cleaned up last night with a file, so it looks alot better now tbh. It's completely forge welded together and is pretty stiff, but wants to bend side to side, so by heat treating it, it should get rid of that bend-ability and make it pretty stiff while very springy, so perfect for a saw frame.

[Jammer]

You must like Altoids.

[cae2100]

lol, just outside of frame of the pic, there's a box of 6 or 7 altoids tins still in the plastic, lol. When I go places, I get car sick usually, so to keep my stomache settled for the car ride, I usually am sucking on some altoids, hence why I always have a pack in my pocket when I meet you guys at algonquin, lol. I keep the tins because they're good for storing screws and little electronics bits and pieces.

[cae2100]

Well, I got bored and was out in the shed and forging some things out the one day and was looking at the one piece of offcut pipe, it was around 1 1/4" long, 4" OD pipe, around 3/16" wall thickness, and I was looking at it and thought "I wonder if I could make a plane out of that..."

Needless to say, I stuck it in the forge, hammered it down to make parallel sides, and rounded the insides up on a 1 1/2" steel bar as a mandrel to get the ends nice and round, and to space the inside apart just perfectly so it looked like a pill shape. It ended up being around 1 3/4" wide, and 5 1/4" long, and I had a 7", 2" wide, 1/4" thick piece left over from making the side planes, so I took that out to the power hacksaw to chop it into pieces.

The blade angle was 20 degrees I think, just used a coarse file to file it till it looked right and to matched the angle of the pipe's height so I wouldnt have to remove any of the pipe, and wrapped it all up in bailing wire/fencing wire to hold everything in place, put brazing flux all over the inside joints, then cut some manganese bronze brazing rod into small sections and dropped it in there around the inside, then stuck the whole thing in the forge. It took around 10-15 mins to get it all up to temp and watched till the braze wicked to the outside of it, then I turned off the forge and just let it sit in there for an hour or so till it cooled down.

I cleaned up the braze using the dremel, using the little sanding drums, and got everything nice, then stuck it in the cleaning vinegar pickle as usual for a day or two, that cleaned up the forging, got all of the scale that was left on there off, and made the grinding/sanding marks completely disappear, so it was a uniform texture and it had all disappeared. I stuck it on the shaper and just flattened the bottom of the plane, which probably only took 30-40 thou off before it was flat, so it didnt take long at all. I had some braze that flowed into the mouth, but I wasnt too worried about that since I wanted a really tight mouth on it, so the tiny amount that the shaper did open it, I was able to grind a hacksaw blade in half height wise and use that to cut across the mouth to open it back up, then used a sharp angle cold chisel to lightly chisel and scrape the bronze out the mouth, which worked really well without distorting the mouth really.

[cae2100]

The mouth was just open enough with the blade protruding through that you could fit a piece of paper folded up through it, so just enough room for shavings to go through when the blade was where I wanted it.

After that, I started on infill, which I used a piece of cherry firewood I had here that has been drying for around a year in the basement next to the woodburner, so I knew it was really dry. I wasnt sure which one I really wanted, but ended up using the one on the bottom, lol.

Everything was cut out, shaped, and it was actually alot easier than I thought it would be due to the experience I had from the other miter plane. After that, the infill was finished with BLO and a few coats of shellac, then wiped down with paste wax to buff it out.

I went back out to the forge and found a piece of 1/2" x 1 1/2" x 2" long flat bar off-cut in the scrap bucket, so I stuck it in the forge and started hammering it out to forge out the lever cap for it since I was wanting the lever cap vs a wedge this time. I hammered it down to make it a bit oversize and made it a hair over 3/8" thick, then fullered down and drew it out so the stem was around 5/8" wide, and looked long enough. I then stuck it on the side of the anvil and hammered down on the top corner to drive it in on itself and create a tapered edge. I took that over the horn and just pounded it over slightly to cause it to bend and arch slightly.

I laid out the cross pin and drilled it, and realized that I screwed up and the hole was in the wrong place to do a hole through the lever cap, so I just took the grinder to the lever cap and ground a groove in it, and put a rod across as a bar (I have a nail in it in the pic tho), then drilled and tapped it for a thumbscrew to act as a jacking screw. I plan on making a new thumbscrew for it, but for testing purposes, it worked fine, lol.

It is very comfortable in the hand and will defenitely replace my block plane in the toolbox. The hand fits right over it nicely and the snecked part (the rolled up and forge welded part on the top of the blade) just cups to the hand pretty much. It weighs around 1 1/4lbs, so it's got a good weight to it, and it just glides through the cut. It's actually easier to use than my block plane is really, lol.

The blade was one that I forged out previously of some steel flat bar I had sitting around from when I made the glue pot base, and forge welded a piece of carbon steel (bed frame) to the bottom of it for the cutting edge, then rolled up the back end in a jelly roll and forge welded it together. I made that up when I forged out the frame for the original steel dovetailed miter plane, so it has been rattling around the toolbox for a while now, so figured I'd just use it for this, lol.

It ended up being 2" wide with flanges, a little under 1 1/2" inside, 1 1/4 - 1 5/16" wide blade, and is a hair under 6 3/8" long, and around 1 1/2" tall, so it's not the biggest thing, but fits nicely into the hand nicely. I can sit there and pull 0.001-0.002" shavings off of it all day long, and it'll leave a glass smooth surface every time, even going through knots and such, or I can take up to around 10-12 thou before the shavings start to stick in the mouth. So overall, it works very well and cuts through everything like butter, lol.

[cae2100]

And a bit of an action shot, I think everyone likes those

I was just using it on a small piece of pine that was full of knots, but it just cut right through them like nothing and left a glass smooth suface with no tearout.

That's all for now, and yea, just a little file work to do on the lever cap for the pin to fit into with a chainsaw file/rat tail file, then to fit the pin/bar in place and peen it into the countersinks, then it'll be all done.