My Hand Planes
Re: My Hand Planes
I really like this plane. It sure looks like it was a lot of work but it came out great.
Re: My Hand Planes
lol, honestly, that was probably one of the easiest planes Ive made in a while really. The cleanup of the bronze really didnt take all but an hour, and because of brazing it together rather than dovetailing, that cut out probably 4-5 hours of machining and all of the file work. Because I didnt try cleaning up the edges and left the flange, that cut out the few hours of grinding at the belt grinder and all of that cleanup from that too, lol. The mouth took maybe 15 mins to cut open using the hacksaw blade, and use the cold chisel to remove all of the excess braze really, then had maybe an hour of grinding with a cone wheel on the dremel to seat the blade well. I dont mind doing that since I just pull the bar stool up to the post vise just piddle with that as some "quiet time" to myself. 
So in all, this is my scrap metal miter plane and probably the easiest one Ive made yet, lol. The only thing is, because of the flange sticking out on the bottom, I cant use it on it's side like the other one, just use it like a normal block plane really, which is what I was going to use it for anyways. The stuff I learned from the big miter plane, I didnt make the same mistakes on this one and went at it a different way, and ended up with a much better result really, so if I make any more of those types of planes, Ill defenitely stick with this method from now on, lol.
So in all, this is my scrap metal miter plane and probably the easiest one Ive made yet, lol. The only thing is, because of the flange sticking out on the bottom, I cant use it on it's side like the other one, just use it like a normal block plane really, which is what I was going to use it for anyways. The stuff I learned from the big miter plane, I didnt make the same mistakes on this one and went at it a different way, and ended up with a much better result really, so if I make any more of those types of planes, Ill defenitely stick with this method from now on, lol.
Re: My Hand Planes
Well, a bit of an update:
The pipe miter plane is all done, got everything lapped flat, got the pin put in and peened over, which you can just barely feel them when you run your fingers over them. They were peened over into countersinks as usual and just a tiny tiny amount is sticking above the the surface like before, but as I said, you can barely feel them and they feel like irregularities in the pipe itself. The knob was turned out of some old coil spring from a train that I had straightened out and annealed a number of years ago and thrown in the drawer, so keeping with the theme of making everything on the plane from scrap metal, I think that fit it pretty well, lol.
It is very very comfortable in the hand as I said before and just feels like it conforms right to my hand in use, which is wierd looking at it, lol.
On top of that, I also forged out some tapered reamers a while back for an idea Ive had, and will probably be starting on those as soon as I find the right piece of wood for it, lol. Also yes, they fit in a brace drill, I made them that way so I can ream the holes out quickly and without any fiddling with everything, lol.
The idea Ive had for a while is to make some blocks that get clampped into the underside of my workbench, and have tapered holes in them. The angle on the reamers above is around 5-6 degrees, which matches the angle I have my table saw blade when it's set to zero, and belt sander set at when the table is pushed all the way back. I did it that way so that I can make up what looks like massive pencil sharpeners, or very similar to peg shapers that are used for shaping violin and cello pegs. (what winds up the strings)
I was thinking about this idea for a while and instead of having to run out to the garage and turn down a piece of wood to round to true it up, then just turn the taper on it like usual for posts and such on patterns, then part it off and you have alot of waste that gets tossed or turned away that way, and takes alot of time to set up and do all of that. So I thought about just taking something similar to a large pencil sharpener with the included draft angles built into it, stepping up in 1/8" sizes for the common size posts and bosses for patterns, and then I can just grab a wooden dowel out of that size, mark how long I want it, turn it in a few turns and you have draft angle put on it, light sanding, cut it off, then it's ready to be glued onto a pattern and the rest of the wooden dowel can go back into the bin next to the workbench, lol. That to me would save alot of time, energy, and wood.
With the tapered reamers, I can also make up dowel cutters, so I can make my own dowel makers, so I can make the nominal size rods from pine, cherry, mahogany, or whatever I plan on using for the patterns just out of offcut scraps that would be otherwise too big for making stuff from on the lathe. So I think that would save a massive amount of time.
That's the idea anyways and Im just trying to find the right piece of wood to make the blocks from. They will probably slide into a dovetail on the underside of my workbench, so the blade is facing down, and slide in and out when I need them, also my shavings/trash bin is right underneath of the workbench too, so as I use them, the shavings from it will automatically go into the trash can, lol. That's the plan anyways.
The pipe miter plane is all done, got everything lapped flat, got the pin put in and peened over, which you can just barely feel them when you run your fingers over them. They were peened over into countersinks as usual and just a tiny tiny amount is sticking above the the surface like before, but as I said, you can barely feel them and they feel like irregularities in the pipe itself. The knob was turned out of some old coil spring from a train that I had straightened out and annealed a number of years ago and thrown in the drawer, so keeping with the theme of making everything on the plane from scrap metal, I think that fit it pretty well, lol.
It is very very comfortable in the hand as I said before and just feels like it conforms right to my hand in use, which is wierd looking at it, lol.
I was thinking about this idea for a while and instead of having to run out to the garage and turn down a piece of wood to round to true it up, then just turn the taper on it like usual for posts and such on patterns, then part it off and you have alot of waste that gets tossed or turned away that way, and takes alot of time to set up and do all of that. So I thought about just taking something similar to a large pencil sharpener with the included draft angles built into it, stepping up in 1/8" sizes for the common size posts and bosses for patterns, and then I can just grab a wooden dowel out of that size, mark how long I want it, turn it in a few turns and you have draft angle put on it, light sanding, cut it off, then it's ready to be glued onto a pattern and the rest of the wooden dowel can go back into the bin next to the workbench, lol. That to me would save alot of time, energy, and wood.
With the tapered reamers, I can also make up dowel cutters, so I can make my own dowel makers, so I can make the nominal size rods from pine, cherry, mahogany, or whatever I plan on using for the patterns just out of offcut scraps that would be otherwise too big for making stuff from on the lathe. So I think that would save a massive amount of time.
That's the idea anyways and Im just trying to find the right piece of wood to make the blocks from. They will probably slide into a dovetail on the underside of my workbench, so the blade is facing down, and slide in and out when I need them, also my shavings/trash bin is right underneath of the workbench too, so as I use them, the shavings from it will automatically go into the trash can, lol. That's the plan anyways.
Re: My Hand Planes
sorry for such a long reply, got wrapped in a bunch of different projects and different things all at once and couldnt get on here. The cutters were very sharp and worked really well tbh, I still need to make the 7/8" and 1" ones, but that shouldnt be too hard to do. I took some 1" quartersawn hard maple and drilled a series of holes in it with progressively larger and larger drill bits as it was going down, then reamed them out to slightly over the finished size, then sanded and planed the top off of it using the belt sander and block plane.
I still need to make the blades for them, but just to test it, I had a dull spokeshave blade that I clamped to it and it worked pretty well, and left a pretty decent finish for what it does, lol. I should also be able to clamp a block plane to it and use it as the blade instead, but that makes for a higher angle and can help with woods that want to tear out a bit more, but Ill have to see how that works.
Now I can measure how tall I want the post to be on the pattern, just mark that height/line on the end of a dowel rod using a pencil or pen and just turn it into the pencil sharpener planes to cut the 5-6 degree taper on the end of the dowel rod till I get up to that line, then cut it off maybe 1/4" from that line, drill a hole the size of the dowel into the pattern 1/4" deep with a forsner bit, and glue it in. That'll save me alot of time and waste from having to run out and use the lathe and trying to turn a piece down between centers just to get a small piece out of it, and having alot of waste both in wood and in time. I can just cut the dowel off at the right place with the taper on it, and put the rest of the dowel rod back in the bin for later, so no waste there except what was removed for the tapered section. There's 3/8", 1/2", 5/8", and 3/4" so far, and like I said, I still need to make the 7/8" and 1", but now that I have most of the bugs worked out of it, it should go pretty quickly and easily, lol.
The tapered reamers above, the square one really didnt work that well in wood, but would be good in metal for creating blind flush rivets in brass or mild steel, it would load up with dust way too easily and was very slow doing it in wood, but the spoon bit style just ate through the wood and opened it up pretty quickly, leaving a pretty good finish.
Now I can measure how tall I want the post to be on the pattern, just mark that height/line on the end of a dowel rod using a pencil or pen and just turn it into the pencil sharpener planes to cut the 5-6 degree taper on the end of the dowel rod till I get up to that line, then cut it off maybe 1/4" from that line, drill a hole the size of the dowel into the pattern 1/4" deep with a forsner bit, and glue it in. That'll save me alot of time and waste from having to run out and use the lathe and trying to turn a piece down between centers just to get a small piece out of it, and having alot of waste both in wood and in time. I can just cut the dowel off at the right place with the taper on it, and put the rest of the dowel rod back in the bin for later, so no waste there except what was removed for the tapered section. There's 3/8", 1/2", 5/8", and 3/4" so far, and like I said, I still need to make the 7/8" and 1", but now that I have most of the bugs worked out of it, it should go pretty quickly and easily, lol.
The tapered reamers above, the square one really didnt work that well in wood, but would be good in metal for creating blind flush rivets in brass or mild steel, it would load up with dust way too easily and was very slow doing it in wood, but the spoon bit style just ate through the wood and opened it up pretty quickly, leaving a pretty good finish.
Re: My Hand Planes
Now for the plane I was worried about for a while, the one I was going to have to make the pattern for. It is called a quirk router, which is just a fancy grooving plane, but can go around curves for doing grooves or pockets inside of a radius/round corebox, cut the bottoms for drawers, and all kinds of stuff you would need a groove or slot cut into something, but due to the way the blade is designed, it can cut through the stuff with no tear out or blow out like you would get with an electric router. A good example is my first toolbox, I used plywood for the body of it, which was made from an old flask I had, but when I went to cut the groove for the drawer bottoms, it would just disintegrate the plywood and tear it all up, and had quite alot of blowout and such of the plywood, but because of the way the blade is made, it will score the wood when getting pulled back, then scoop that wood out on the forwards stroke, so you dont get that tear out or blow out.
https://blog.vintagetoolpatch.com/2022/ ... outer.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbEEDnmsvnw
I thought it was quite an interesting pattern with the one leg/arm of it sticking up like it does, and a really odd shape to it, so I wanted to take it on as a challenge, so here's mine, all carved out of cherry, which everything has draft and is ready to be rammed up to be cast in bronze.
The underside was carved out with the spoon gouges that tried to eat my finger, top was cut out with a jigsaw after drilling some holes for the radiuses in the corners and the D shaped hole where the blade goes, and then just took the whittling knife to round everything over and feel right in the hands.
The fences were made by doing the same, drilled holes for the corners and used my rotary planer in the drill press to plane down to the bottom of the radius on each side, then cut it in half and shaped. Then it was glued together with some other pieces so that they have the shape needed, and I made up some followers since the bottoms of the fences have a key that will get fit into the body of the tool to keep it aligned/square.
That one's been on the list for a while and Ive gotten into situations a few times where it would have been the perfect tool for the job, but kept putting it off because I didnt think I was able to get it right with the skills or tools I had, but after getting those spoon gouges made, I was pretty much ready to get started on it, lol.
https://blog.vintagetoolpatch.com/2022/ ... outer.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbEEDnmsvnw
I thought it was quite an interesting pattern with the one leg/arm of it sticking up like it does, and a really odd shape to it, so I wanted to take it on as a challenge, so here's mine, all carved out of cherry, which everything has draft and is ready to be rammed up to be cast in bronze.
The fences were made by doing the same, drilled holes for the corners and used my rotary planer in the drill press to plane down to the bottom of the radius on each side, then cut it in half and shaped. Then it was glued together with some other pieces so that they have the shape needed, and I made up some followers since the bottoms of the fences have a key that will get fit into the body of the tool to keep it aligned/square.
Re: My Hand Planes
One last thing to show: I took the offcuts of bed frame from making that tapered reamer above and took it out to the forge, and forged them into some scissor calipers, lol. Ive seen them in old patternmaking supplier catalogs and thought they were pretty cool.
So I went out and decided to forge out my own design that would be easy for me to use, lol.
The thumb wheel acts as a depth stop so the calipers will only close to a certain point, so if youre carving the finger grips out like on the quirk router above, when carving a spoon or dome shape, or if you need to reach in around a flange on a pattern or inside of a turned bowl or vase, I can reach those in around the stuff, give the thumbwheel a flick to cause it to spin over and jam up against the post on the one side. Then you can open the calipers up, take them out of the part or over the flange, and when you close them back up, that nut acts as a depth stop and it goes back to the same exact spot, which I can then measure how thick the wall thickness is. I can set it to what I want and you get alot of feedback from the calipers so you can feel when it's got a high spot and it's rubbing, so you can see where the high spots are and where they need to be taken down to carve the backs out of a pattern to get a uniform thickness all throughout. Ive already used them a few times for different things and they work pretty well, lol.
Not really a plane, but thought it was still neat and odd enough to show and that someone would find it interesting, lol.
- Screenshot at 2024-05-25 23-48-34.png (247.71 KiB) Viewed 3564 times
Not really a plane, but thought it was still neat and odd enough to show and that someone would find it interesting, lol.
Re: My Hand Planes
Looks like the blade for the plane would be the most difficult part. The scissor calipers would be very handy for lathe work. Do they make different sizes for smaller work? I guess you could really go down a rabbit hole with many sizes and depth.
Re: My Hand Planes
You can find this style here online, but the scissor calipers design seems to have faded from existance.
https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/to ... em=05N2201
Here's some pics of some that Ive found that you could probably make from basic forging and some basic machining. For the posts and rivets and such, I made the rivets on the lathe and drilled in with a really large spot drill so it had the cone, then when I put them through, I just took the ball peen and gently worked them out to get them to flow outwards onto the flat surfaces of the parts (no countersinks), and after doing that, just worked it back and forth till it freed up.
I found alot of the commerical ones for bowl turners are quite expensive, but there is a double ended ones like these ones (no 9 in the image) on amazon and are fairly cheap, and come in pretty small sizes for really small work. I didnt really care for that style because you'll be fiddling with it to try to get the measurement while holding everything together, and it is only for mirroring the thickness on the other end, you cant set it and use it for carving and such.
https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/to ... em=05N2201
Here's some pics of some that Ive found that you could probably make from basic forging and some basic machining. For the posts and rivets and such, I made the rivets on the lathe and drilled in with a really large spot drill so it had the cone, then when I put them through, I just took the ball peen and gently worked them out to get them to flow outwards onto the flat surfaces of the parts (no countersinks), and after doing that, just worked it back and forth till it freed up.
- homemade-thickness-caliper-2.jpeg (41.05 KiB) Viewed 3541 times
Re: My Hand Planes
Also, as for the plane blade for the quirk router, it is a bit different looking, but it really isnt that hard to make really, all it is is just drill a 3/8" hole in it, then cut from the bottom of the blade to the hole, and use a triangle file to file a triangle shape in it. The nicker side would be the hardest part, but I think just being careful and using the edge of the triangle file, you should be able to file down and create that without too much issue.
The plane blades for the pencil sharpener planes, those will be pretty easy to make and Ive already got a few ideas how to deal with those, lol. I have some other planes I made up too that need to have the blades made for them and finish the wedges in them, but with this heat, I dont want to be in a 100F+ garage trying to cut them up and grind them to shape, lol. So Ill just make all of the blades up all at once once it cools down, plus as I said, I need to make the other two sizes first (7/8" and 1"), but just need to find the right piece of wood for those, lol.
But I made these up also, one flat bottom plane, which Im not sure what to do with, a compass plane, and a convex sole plane, which the convex sole plane was the one I was really after more than anything, but I had enough to make 3 from the piece of wood I had, so why not?
I have some wedges already cut and stuck in them, but they arent shaped or anything because the blades arent done, and I want to size everything with the blades in them to see how much I want sticking out and where the finial is at.
They're made of cherry, but this time, I tried a little experiment and tried staining them with 100% lye drain cleaner in water to darken it, and in person, it looks like a dark red mahogany, but it's quite figured too as you might be able to see in the pics. The bottoms have been since scraped to remove the runs of shellac, and waxed, which made it all look the same and not as dirty looking on the bottoms. I have one more plane on the list, then I think Im pretty much done really, lol. I was wanting to make a scrub plane, but with the pipe plane style.
The plane blades for the pencil sharpener planes, those will be pretty easy to make and Ive already got a few ideas how to deal with those, lol. I have some other planes I made up too that need to have the blades made for them and finish the wedges in them, but with this heat, I dont want to be in a 100F+ garage trying to cut them up and grind them to shape, lol. So Ill just make all of the blades up all at once once it cools down, plus as I said, I need to make the other two sizes first (7/8" and 1"), but just need to find the right piece of wood for those, lol.
But I made these up also, one flat bottom plane, which Im not sure what to do with, a compass plane, and a convex sole plane, which the convex sole plane was the one I was really after more than anything, but I had enough to make 3 from the piece of wood I had, so why not?
They're made of cherry, but this time, I tried a little experiment and tried staining them with 100% lye drain cleaner in water to darken it, and in person, it looks like a dark red mahogany, but it's quite figured too as you might be able to see in the pics. The bottoms have been since scraped to remove the runs of shellac, and waxed, which made it all look the same and not as dirty looking on the bottoms. I have one more plane on the list, then I think Im pretty much done really, lol. I was wanting to make a scrub plane, but with the pipe plane style.