Here's another one for you guys to chew on, it's a simple one that I made up, but here is my version of a leather fillet plane. As leather fillets are quite expensive for use on patterns, you can easily spend $40-50 on just fillets alone when working on patterns for a larger project, and as my wax fillets supply is dwindling down pretty quickly, I figured Id look into leather fillets and try to figure out what made them better than the wax fillets according to the old patternmaking books.
The reason Ive found that leather preceded wax fillets was not because they were really any better at holding up against the sand, but at a point in time, the larger commercial foundries would wait till the molds had just cooled enough that the metal had solidified, but were still very hot, and would take that sand, re-mull it right away, then make new sand molds using them, all while the sand was still quite hot. The hot sand would cause damage to the wax fillets on the patterns, and so they tried to find something else to use instead that could withstand both the heat, and the abuse of the sand being pounded down on it. Alot of the patterns switched to wood fillets for a while, but it couldnt be turned around corners or shaped to form to the contours of alot of the patterns, so that created problems, till someone came up with the idea to use leather scraps and cut them into ribbons that could be glued into the corners and worked with the same fillet irons that was used with wax, and that would be able to bend around whatever profiles, and could withstand the heat.
Today, you have alternatives such as wood filler, bondo, or durham's water putty, but each of those have thier own benefits and downsides, so I figured I'd follow the progression of fillet making and just experiment with leather fillets for a few since they do give a little different look to a pattern/casting when they're applied. My problem is that leather fillets are quite expensive just to play with/experiment with, so I had this idea to make a leather fillet plane by taking a V chisel and putting it into a hand plane body.
The body is just a laminated design to make it easier for people to make one if they wanted to that watches the video, whenever I get that finished and edited. It uses a V shaped blade, which was the corner of a piece of bed frame, which bed frame is some pretty good steel for this kind of stuff and really holds an edge well, but because of the bed frame having a radiused inside corner, it acts like a round gouge with V chisel sides.
The bed angle is 30 degrees, blade is ground to a 20 degree angle, is cut 1/2" from the corner of the bed frame up, and that gives a 3/4" wide blade at the top of it, with a flat ground across the top of the V profile. The wedge goes on top of the V portion and creates a triangle shaped tube, so due to the 30 degree low cutting angle, that causes the chips to not want to curl up, but wants to go right up the middle of the V profile, and comes out the back of the plane in your hand, that way there's no binding or bunching up of the fillet material that would need to be cleared as youre cutting the leather fillet material. The wedge that holds the blade in has a large head on it, which also doubles as a palm rest, and makes it look like a squirrel tail plane.
The radius in the corner of the V from the bed frame is beneficial because it adds room for the fillet to push into the corner when applying them and be formed into a radius, otherwise if it just had a really small radius or a sharp corner in the root of the V, it would end up being pushed into the corner and have no give, so you would end up with a straight chamfer instead of a nice round fillet. The resulting fillets cut have a radiused back, and flat front to them, which when glued in and worked with the fillet irons, it would shove them into the corners and create the traditional fillets that we know of.
The body is made of black cherry, which the stuff around here is quite hard compared to normal cherry wood and works really well for making planes from. The profile was just cut out with a coping saw and shaped with my whittling knife, so it still needs sanded to clean up the surface and get flatten out the facets from the carving knife. Other than that, it works really well and after sanding, Ill give it a few coats of shellac to seal it up and then it'll be ready to go into the toolbox and be used.
I get these grocery bags of old leather scraps for cheap from various local places that I usually make my chisel covers, knife sheathes, and other stuff like that from, so the pieces that are not big/wide enough to make that stuff from, I can now take the plane to and turn them into a few feet of leather fillets rather than just throwing them away. The blade can be advanced or retracted in the plane to make larger or smaller fillets, so you can make any size fillet by changing the depth of the blade. Also yes, the sides of the plane are flat and parallel to each other, that way I can set up a ruler as a guide, clampped over the piece of leather, to create nice straight fillets, just working my way over to use up the leather scraps as effeciently as possible.