Who’s been a busy boy then?
Over the past few months, many of you have enquired about how much progress I’ve made with the Small Smoother kit. I must be honest that the progress has been quite slow, due to a few other projects that I’ve been working on.
I’m coming to the end of an Oak sideboard build that I’m making as a wedding gift for my mate and his wife. I was one of the best men at his wedding a year last june. Hey, better late than never. 
The sideboard was built entirely using the Festool Domino, and it’s just Brilliant!! Due to my limited shop time, this project has taken me a couple of months, but I reckon that if I had worked solidly on it, it would have only taken me about two and a half days to get it to this point, including pre-finishing all the sub assemblies before the final glue up. Cutting all the joints literally took no more than a couple of hours tops.
I’ve also made a couple of small ceremonial chairs for Eisteddfodau. For those of you that arne’t aware of Eisteddfodau, they are a tradition that go back many centuries here in Wales. Eisteddfodau consist of singing, reciting, and literature competitions (mostly in the welsh language), and children from the age of around 3 to 103 compete in their chosen categories. The winner of the main literature competition traditionally wins a chair. I was asked recently to make 2 small chairs for local Eisteddfodau, and here’s what I came up with.
The chair is about 9″ high, but although it’s very small, it took a good few hours to make, there’s not a straight line on the whole chair. The wood is Beech, finished with Osmo Polyx oil, this oil is rapidly becoming my finish of choice, it looks good, is durable, and is easy to apply, what more can you ask of a finish? I’d love to make a full size version of this chair one day, not quite sure how I’d go about it though.
Having got these jobs out of the way, I can now concentrate on getting the Small Smoother kit back on the road.
Cheers
Aled
Bits n Bobs
Hi it’s been absolutely hectic since my last post. The end of term is always busy in school, but this year was especially so, with fitting in welding and turning courses, as well as the usual reports, trips etc.
The turning and welding coures I completed were excellent, I could do a little turning before attending the course, but still learnt a lot.
On the other hand, I was dreading the welding course, as my previous experiences with a welder had always proved very hit and miss, and extremely frustrating. Yes, there’s a “but” coming. But, by the end of the second day I was welding like a pro – swearing, telling dirty jokes etc. – and even did some vertical welding on the third day (stright runs and a christmas tree weave). By this time I had completed the required tasks for an NVQ2 qualification, but still attended the fourth and final day, so that I could get to grips with a TIG welder and do some Aluminum welding.
Welding Ali is very difficult, as by the time you get enough heat into the joint to weld, then wait another millisecond, and you have a puddle of Aluminium on the bench and a bloody big hole in your work. I was so impressed by the TIG welder though, that I’m pricing one up for the school workshop, yes they’re expensive, but it’ll definately add to the students experience, and when they get to the workplace, they’ll have another string to their bow.
Following the busy time at work, things have been virtually on hold on the hand plane front, but as it’s now the summer holidays, I (in theory) should have a little more time on my hands. I’ve managed to shape the tote on the large smoother today from enlish Walnut, and hope to get it ebonised either tomorrow or saturday. I’ll post pics of my ebonising experiments tomorrow, it really is astonishingly simple, just wipe on a solution of wire wool and vinegar, wait a few minutes, and hey presto, it turns a nice deep, rich brown colour. I’ll also post pics of the tote, pre-ebonising for you to have a look at.
Cheers
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
Small World eh?
Just a quick post to say how powerfull (and scary) the internet can be.
As some of you may know, this site “went live” last Wednesday, and to my complete amazement I had a request for a my first plane kit waiting in my inbox on Friday morning. This in itself blew me away, but to put the icing on the cake the request came all the way from Sydney Australia. Needless to say, the package was shipped via Airmail, and should touch down on the East Coast in the next couple of days.
What’s even more amazing is that Peter, my Aussie “customer” – I find it quite weird thinking of fellow woodworkers as customers – living on the other side of the planet has Welsh ancestry.
Small world eh?
Cheers
Aled
Welcome
Hi there, and welcome to infillplane.co.uk. It’s a work in progress at the moment so if you have any questions, or if here’s anything you’d like to suggest, please don’t hesitate to contact me via the Contact page.
The aim of this website is to act as my blog page and also as a shop window for my Infill Plane Kits.
I’ve posted a little about me in my About page, but very briefly, let me introduce myself. My name is Aled Dafis and I live in the small village of Caerwedros in West Wales with my wife Heledd and two boys, Osian and Guto. You may have guessed by now from our distinctly Welsh names that our first language is indeed Welsh, in fact I have to think a bit before typing in English so please bear with me.
My main interest is Woodworking, and combining this interest with my background in Engineering has lead me to start making my own tools. If you check out the Plane Kits page, you’ll find that I currently offer a Small Shoulder plane kit, and am working towards offering a Small Smoother kit in the near future.
Here’s a pic of my Small Shoulder Plane for starters.
I’m not sure what else to add at the moment, but I’ll try and keep you updated as often as possible with my woodworking and planemaking projects.
Cheers
Aled
