I’ve finally finished the Small Smoothing Plane, well, almost finished, the lever cap could do with some more finishing and the infills need a few coats of shellac.
Appologies for the photography, taking pics of shiny brass is very difficult. I’ve just bought a light tent, but haven’t yet got any decent lighting to go with it, so a couple of pics on the kitchen table will have to do for the time being.
I took the plane to the Axminster/Lie-Nielsen show over the weekend, and the feedback was positive. Most comments started with “Wow, it’s hefty!” followed by comments about how good it felt in the hand. It also performs pretty well!
The plane is 150mm (6″) long, with a 40mm (1 1/2″) wide, 6mm thick iron.
I’ll post some shavings soon.
Cheers
Aled
Small Smoothing Plane WIP #2
I’ve done a little more work on the SSP over the last few days.
There’s a bit of work to do yet, but it looks like I may be able to get it ready for the show at Rycotewood next weekend. The priority jobs are to heat treat the iron and flatten the sole. Other jobs to finish the plane include tyding up the lever cap, shaping/sanding/finishing the infills, but if I run out of time, these can wait until after the show.
Being the most impatient man on the planet, I’ve already assembled the plane with a donor iron and lever cap, just to see if it would produce a shaving, and despite the iron being way too thin, resulting in a mouth opening of about 2mm, and not having flattened the sole yet, it performed pretty well, leaving a nice finish on Oak when going with the grain, but as would be expected, it tore out a little when going against the grain. The first shavings always give a great feeling of achievement, and I must say that i’m quite proud of what I’ve achieved so far, let’s hope i don’t screw it up as I approach the finish line.
Cheers
Aled
Small Smoothing Plane WIP
It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally making good progress with building the pre-production Small Smoothing Plane (SSP). I always (well maybe “always” is a bit of an exaturation as I’ve only been down this path once before) try to build a kit from the actual parts that are intended for sale, just to make sure that they fit together as they should, I can then take plenty of pics to put in the assembly instructions – which I’m completely dreading to write.
Here are a few of the WIP shots to wet your appetite.
Filing the sole
Checking the fit, note the small gap present for peining the brass to lock the shell together. (excuse the milling marks, I got a little carried away with the milling machine when cleaning the rivets that hold the blade support block)
Here’s the profiled block used to support the shell during peining, the cutouts are there to accomodate the blade support block and cross pin.
The peined dovetails – yes they’re supposed to look like that 
The three layers of masking tape does a great job of protecting the brass sides from rogue hammer blows. The brass is drifted into the corners using a round nose punch to ensure that the dovetails fully fill the voids.
Here are the dovetails roughly cleaned up, furtter cleaning will follow once the plane is stuffed and the infills are riveted.
I’ve also roughed out the infills, but haven’t yet taken any photos, I’ll take some tomorrow and post further details tomorrow night.
Cheers for now.
Aled
Small Smoother Progress
I’ve been doing a little work on my Small Smoother this week, but unfortunately made no real progress.
As I thought, the laser cut blanks for the soles of this palne turned out to have been hardened by the process of laser cutting – something that the profiling company ommited to tell me about. It’s quite amazing how hard O1 steel can be, the sharp corners of the plane’s sole took the teeth right off a brand new Bastard File!! The teeth on hacksaws just whimper and give up, and scribes just skate on the surface.
As with the development stages of the Small Shoulder, I tried to anneal a sole plate to “soften” the hard edges. The annealing worked to some degree, but there were still a few areas where the steel had not reached the required temperature, or cooled too quickly, which resulted in a few localised hard spots. Bugger!
I grudgingnly decided that this was just not good enough and ordered a new set of sole plates. These should be with me by the end of this week, so I can carry on with getting these smoothers off the ground.
On a brighter note, I’ve started to think about where to go next on my plane making journey. The wife was away on a hen night last night, so I had some peace and quiet to put pen to paper (pencil actually, but “pen to paper” sounds better than “pencil to paper”), and started sketching out a full sized shoulder plane along the lines of a Norris A7
I also have a full sized smoother project on the go, but it’s been put on the back burner for a while for a number fo reasons. Firstly because I don’t have the time to spend on it, and also because that I’ve gone down the route of screwing the sides to the sole. Tapping 20 odd blind holes in O1 steel is a painstaking and time consuming task!! (especially if you break a tap, and fail to remove it). I’ll post more on this project later in the week when I have some photos to show you.
Cheers
Aled
