Mixed Media - Making a wood & metal plane

[Dr.Al]

When making my Travel Tool Chest, I made a dedicated block plane to run in the track in the integrated shooting board. This is a photo of the plane:

That's actually the fourth attempt at the plane. The first one was an attempt to make it out of a solid block of beech. I need more practice at chiselling before I can use that approach! The second one worked okay but had a habit of clogging up and was hard to clear due to having a much bigger cross-pin thing. On the third attempt I drilled a hole in the wrong place and that resulted in it becoming firewood. The fourth version (shown above) works well, but I've wanted to have a go at something a little more ambitious so I thought I'd try a fifth version. If the fifth version fails, I've still got the fourth version as a fall-back option!

At the time of writing this, I've mostly finished making the latest version, but I thought I'd post it in the form of a work-in-progress despite it no longer being in progress. I'll do one update a day or thereabouts to try to tell the story gradually (and not necessarily in the order that I actually made things as I'll describe one part at a time whereas in practice I alternated back and forth quite a bit).

Materials to be used for version 5 are beech, American black walnut, brass, stainless steel and gauge plate (tool steel). Let's start with the blade, made out of 5 mm × 30 mm gauge plate.

I started by mounting the gauge plate blank in the milling vice and drilling a series of 7 mm holes:

An end mill was then used to join the holes together and widen the slot slightly, resulting in an 8 mm slot (I later came back and made it a little longer, although that was probably not necessary):

To save grinding time later, I milled a primary bevel on one end. I started by using a digital angle finder thing to set the blade at an angle in the milling vice...

...then milled the bevel:

This blade is going to be adjusted in a manner similar to a Norris adjuster, but there isn't really space in a little block plane for that sort of mechanism. Therefore I'm going to use something a bit custom (which almost certainly won't work as well). The blade needs some slots for the adjuster screw to push against. To allow for blade angle adjustment, these slots need to be curved, but the centre of curvature will depend on the position of the blade. That makes it impossible to come up with a "proper" centre (as it'll move when the blade is sharpened).

However, in practice, I'll be sharpening the blade with a honing guide and hence the end should stay square with the sides. Therefore, the amount of lateral adjustment needed should be very small and hence a slight mismatch in the centre of curvature of the slot shouldn't matter that much. To that end, I just picked a fairly arbitrary point along the slot and centred that point on the rotary table. I then milled a couple of 4 mm wide slots:

With a 4 mm centre-cutting end mill in the chuck and that end mill sticking out quite a long way (so that the chuck cleared the table clamps), I didn't hold much hope of getting through the cut without breaking the end mill, but I took very light cuts (about 0.1 mm per pass) and took my time and amazingly the end mill survived:

To provide a slightly nicer (and more comfortable in the hand) shape to the rear of the blade, I marked a curve on it using a 30 mm penny washer:

I then roughly hacksawed it to shape and then ground it smooth with a belt sander.

The blade then got wrapped in some soft steel wire:

The wire is there to help keep this stuff in place:

That's a mixture of methylated spirits and boric acid. The boric acid reduces the amount of oxidation that happens when heat treating. Heat treating without any sort of protection usually results in lots of black scale forming on the steel, but with the boric acid that effect is minimised. The boric acid forms some tough crystals on the surface of the steel, but they're fairly easy to remove by soaking in boiling water.

With the boric acid coating applied, I placed the blade in a little housing of heat-resistant ceramic wool and applied lots of heat with a MAPP torch:

Once it was glowing red and wouldn't stick to a magnet, I plunged it into vegetable oil to quench. After cleaning off the boric acid and lightly sanding it, I then heated it again (more gently this time) and quenched once it was a straw colour at the end:

I then gave the blade a rub-down on some wet-and-dry paper and it was ready for sharpening:

 

[Ali]

Stunning work!

 

[Dr.Al]

The next job to work on was the cam that will nudge the blade from side-to-side to provide a bit of lateral adjustment. I started with a bit of 303 stainless steel and turned a section down to 18 mm:

I then mounted the bar in the milling vice and cross-drilled and tapped the hole M5:

I fitted a cap screw into the tapped hole and used it to help align a centre-finder and scribe a line across the end, parallel with the threaded hole:

After marking a centre punch point along that line, I mounted the bar in the four-jaw chuck in the lathe and adjusted it until the centre punch point was on the lathe axis:

I could then turn an 8 mm diameter cam on the end of the bar:

After sawing the bar end off in the bandsaw, I mounted it in a collet chuck and turned the reverse end down:

That end also got a 3.3 mm hole drilled, drilling until I reached the M5 cross-hole. The hole then got tapped M4:

That hole will be used for a grub screw, which will lock a piece of stainless steel M5 threaded rod into the cross-drilled hole.

Finally, I turned a simple brass bush for the cam to rotate in (it should give a smoother action than trying to rotate the cam in a wooden hole).

Next up is the adjuster, which will be used to move the blade in and out and will also form the "handle" that rotates the cam. I started with a bit of brass bar in the lathe, knurled it at the end and then shaped it:

To shape the other end, I used my home-made soft-jaws to hold the adjuster. I could then shape the end and drill and tap a blind M5 hole in the end:

The tapped hole is deep: too deep for most of my M5 taps. However, I have a long-series M5 tap, so I extended the threads deeper using that by hand:

This photo shows how the adjuster components fit into the blade slots:

 

[DanZac]

@Dr.Al The write ups of your work are on a par with the quality of your work, which in itself is outstanding.

Thanks for sharing, and please keep continuing to do so. As with the work of many others on here, your projects inspire me to get out there and keep on trying.

 

[Dr.Al]

@Dr.Al The write ups of your work are on a par with the quality of your work, which in itself is outstanding.

Thanks for sharing, and please keep continuing to do so. As with the work of many others on here, your projects inspire me to get out there and keep on trying.

Aww, thanks DanZac. That's really nice to hear.

 

[Dr.Al]

To make a lever cap, I started with a bit of 5 mm × 30 mm brass flat bar. I drilled two holes, tapped one of them and then used a corner-rounding end mill to round off one end:

I used a couple of washers to mark out the shape of the cap (the bigger washer provided an edge against which to push a ruler for marking a line tangent to the two diameters):

It got roughed out to shape on the bandsaw, using my home-made vertical saw table:

I then used a little Axminster mini belt sander to sand it to shape:

The screw for the lever cap is a bit unusual. I wanted a relatively fine thread (as the brass bar is quite thin) so went with M6. However, the slot in the blade is quite long and quite wide (8 mm) and I didn't want the lever cap screw to drop into the slot. To work around that, I made the screw in two parts. The first part looks much like a normal "cheese head" screw, except that there's no slot in the screw head. The second part is a knurled "nut" but with a blind hole. The two parts screw together around the lever cap (they'll probably get glued together in due course), and the "cheese head" provides a bigger contact area on the end of the screw.

The screw components can be seen in the next photo, along with the lever cap which has now had a bit of attention with an angle grinder to make it a bit more shiny:

The next photo shows how the screw goes into the lever cap, hopefully making it clear how it all fits together:

To hold the lever cap in place, a nut was needed as I'm going to fix a bit of threaded rod into the body (rather than having a screw like you'd find on a Bailey pattern plane). Making the nut was just a case of taking a piece of 303 stainless steel, knurling it, drilling and tapping an M8 through-hole and then chamfering and parting off:

This photo shows all the adjuster and clamp components together:

 

[Dr.Al]

The last major part is the body. I actually started this first, working on the other parts in gaps in the body-making process. I started with a block of beech (left-over from when I made version 4, so already the right dimensions). I marked up the bed angle at 36° with a mouth at an angle 90° to that:

I'd intended to do it at 37° but only realised that much later. I don't think the difference of 1° will have the slightest effect on function, I just thought it worth mentioning the discrepancy. 37° was chosen as the equivalent angle of my Quangsheng low-angle jack plane with a 12° bed angle and 25° bevel.

The beech block was chopped up into three pieces, one of which is scrap. My sawing was a little inaccurate and I ended up with a bit of a rounded edge on the bottom of the front piece, but that's no big deal as the bottom face of the body is going to be planed down by about 3 mm later on:

I wanted some accurate (in depth, mostly) slots and holes in the body and the most accurate tool for that sort of thing that I have is a milling machine, so I mounted the back piece in the mill vice at a 36° angle, milled the face and drilled and tapped an M8 hole:

I was a bit careless with the end mill (not choosing my travel direction correctly) and there's a bit of tear-out, but it's not the end of the world. I'll consider it a lesson for next time (if there is a next time). The depth accuracy is important as the block plane is quite thin (compared to a bench plane) and I wanted to get the holes as deep as possible (without going all the way through) for strength.

I don't really trust a tapped hole with a relatively fine pitch (1.25 mm) thread in wood, but there isn't space in such a small plane for a threaded insert without it punching through the bottom of the body. When I finally assemble the plane, the threaded rod that goes into that threaded hole will be daubed in epoxy, so the surface area provided by the thread should hopefully give a strong join and I won't be relying on the structural integrity of the threads.

With the tapped hole done, I needed to make the space for the adjuster mechanism. I started by using a 12 mm Forstner bit to make the pocket for the brass bush in which the cam runs:

A 10 mm end mill was used to open that pocket out to give clearance for the adjuster screw and I then used an 18 mm end mill to make the pocket for the cam body and to open that out into a slot to give the rest of the space of the adjuster. I was a bit slow switching from plunging the end mill to moving the X-axis to cut the slot and that resulted in a bit of burning of the beech. I'll probably try and clean it up a bit later, but it shouldn't cause any problems if I don't:

The sides of the body were made from a bit of American Black Walnut. I planed the sides to give an even thickness, then cut a couple of slices off. I decided to do the glue-up in two stages, firstly gluing the two beech body parts to one side, using a mill parallel as a flat surface to hold the two body bases in line with one another:

Once that glue had been left for a few hours, I glued the other side in place:

 

[Dr.Al]

Once all the glue was dry, I turned the straight slot into a tapered one using a 10 mm chisel. This photo sort-of shows a before-and-after shot: I've opened out the one side but not the other:

I could have done this on the milling machine at the same time as milling the slot, but I'd have needed to rotate the vice for each side of the slot and it's a lot quicker and easier to just do it by hand. This photo shows the finished slot with the little brass bush fitted into its pocket:

The following two photos show the two extremes of movement of the adjuster mechanism.

It's not a lot of movement, but it will hopefully provide enough to ensure the blade is aligned properly with the body (as I said before, the blade will be sharpened with a honing guide, so the end should be perfectly square to its sides). The cam can be mounted in either orientation (cam at the top or cam at the bottom). With the cam at the bottom, the effective angular rotation of the blade will be slightly more than it will be with the cam in the position shown in those photos.

The next job was to shape the body a bit more. Firstly, I reduced the thickness of the sides to about 4 mm with a hand plane:

I want some rounded corners on the plane (as I had on the previous versions), so I marked the corner shape with a 30 mm penny washer:

Shaping it was all done with power, firstly the bandsaw:

Then my woefully underpowered little disc sander:

More shaping will be required once the body is reduced to its final height, but that's a job for later.

 

[Dr.Al]

Despite England having left the Victorian Era a little while ago, it's still quite difficult to buy brass flat bar in metric sizes. The lever cap (which was made from 5 mm × 30 mm brass bar) stock came from China and was an unknown grade of brass, but I wanted the base to be made out of CZ121, to match some other bits of brass I'll be making in the next post. Without being able to buy metric sized bar, I went for some 3.2 mm × 50.8 mm (1/8" by 2") flat bar. I "painted" it in marking blue and, after plonking the body on top, I marked the shape with a scriber:

The marked-up brass bar:

It was this marking exercise that was the reason for making the wooden part of the body full depth. The slot should match the expected size on the bottom face of the plane. If I had made the wooden body in its final depth, then the slot would have opened up more (due to the angle of the blade-mounting face) and the size of the slot would be harder to gauge.

The brass bar was mounted in the mill vice and four holes drilled and countersunk. A slot was then milled with an 8 mm centre-cutting end mill:

A smaller (4 mm) end mill was then used to take a bit more material away in the corners to save filing effort later:

The shape was then roughly bandsawed out:

After cleaning the marking blue off with acetone, the base was placed on top of the body and the hole locations marked for pilot holes to be drilled:

With the pilot holes drilled, a marking gauge could be used to mark the amount that needed to be removed from the bottom of the body to make space for the brass base:

My Stanley #4½ made light work reducing the depth of the body, making some funky shavings in the process:

The planing operation exposed the bottom of the cam hole. I was expecting that: I'd deliberately drilled that hole as deep as I thought I could get away with given the depth of the plane. A small slot will be needed in the brass plate to allow for the end of the cam bush, but that's not a big deal. Sorry for the blurriness of this photo:

The following photo shows the reduced-thickness body sitting on top of the base. The discrepancy between the two slot sizes is (hopefully) obvious and this shows why I wanted to mark up the brass bar from the full thickness body. The right-hand end of the slot will eventually be filed to match the taper angle of the blade-mounting face of the body:

 

[Dr.Al]

I've never made any wood screws before; following this experience, I'm not sure I ever will again! I wanted some custom wood screws to help hold the brass base to the body. I'd like these wood screws to be as invisible as possible, so I don't want a slot of any sort in the screw head. Therefore, I thought I'd have a go at making some custom screws, out of CZ121 brass to match the brass used for the base.

Turning something long and thin is always a bit of a challenge. The way I approached it was to start with a bit of 10 mm brass bar and drill a centre hole in the end. I could then move it out from the chuck and support the end with a tailstock centre and turn a reduced section in the middle:

I ground a custom HSS tool to (very roughly) match the profile of a commercial wood screw and then turned a 2 mm pitch thread on the middle section:

A chamfering tool was then used to shape the two ends of the threaded section:

That left me with a two-in-one wood screw...

...which I held to the bench vice in a rather unconventional way and hacksawed into two pieces:

I then mounted each screw in the soft jaws and turned a point on the end.

That process worked really well for the first pair. The second pair snapped during threading, as did the third pair, so I switched to an alternative process where I made them one at a time. I didn't take any photos, but it was essentially the same as the process above (still with a tailstock support), except that the threaded portion was half the length and the bit on the end providing tailstock support was cut off and binned after threading.

With that done, I had four custom screws to help hold the base in place.

The screws got waxed, and the inside face of the base was sanded to provide a better glue "key" and then everything was prepared ready for gluing the base to the body:

In that photo you can see the clearance slot that's been milled to allow space for the cam bush poking through the hole in the bottom of the wooden body.

 

[galooph]

One of them looks happy

 

[Dr.Al]

Gluing the parts together didn't go entirely according to plan. The first three screws went in reasonably easily and tightened nicely. The last one snapped off:

To deal with that, I took the body over to the pillar drill and used a 5 mm spotting drill to drill out the screw.

I thought of a couple of ways of dealing with the remaining hole and decided to go with the easier and quicker option with a more complicated option as a fall-back. I quickly turned a new part that I'm calling an "epoxy screw". This isn't threaded as such, but has a couple of shallow grooves cut into it to give somewhere for some epoxy to go into and hopefully give the epoxy a better grip on the brass:

It got slathered in epoxy and some more got shoved in the hole and then the "epoxy screw" got pressed in and then clamped firmly in the vice:

My fall-back option if that hadn't worked would have been to drill and tap a hole in the base and body and then use a home-made machine screw to fill the hole.

Once the epoxy had been left for 24 hours to cure, I wrapped the body in masking tape (to try to keep any oil away from the wood) and mounted it in the mill vice:

I used an end mill to reduce the thickness of the screw heads to about 0.5 mm:

I then peened the edges of the screw heads using a ball-peen hammer:

The first two (at the rear of the plane) were done just with the ball-peen hammer, but I was struggling with accuracy. On the second two (at the front of the plane) I decided to try an alternative approach and held a pin punch on the edge of the screw head and hit the pin punch with the hammer.

Once the heads were peened a bit (I've never done this before so I'd no idea whether I'd done enough), I put some 80 grit sandpaper on the bandsaw table and started attacking the bottom of the plane:

I kept sanding with the 80 grit sandpaper until there wasn't even the slightest sign of any remaining will-to-live, then switched to 120 grit wet-and-dry:

After that I gave it a bit of attention (but probably not enough, bearing in mind I was rather fed up with sanding at this stage) with 180 grit and 240 grit and then decided I'd definitely had enough for now.

The two screws that were peened with the pin punch look really good:

The two that were peened with the hammer aren't quite as good, but they'll have to do:

 

[Dr.Al]

The next job on the body was to open the mouth out. I'm not a big fan of filing, so I thought I'd save myself a little bit of effort by using a long end mill to get rid of some of the waste:

That left the mouth looking like this:

My portable workbench provided a handy method of holding the body a bit higher up to make the filing job more comfortable:

After filing:

I want the sides of the plane (especially the right-hand side) to be at 90° to the base and I was a bit concerned that if I just attacked the sides of the brass base with a file, I could easily file away some of the wood and end up out-of-square. To avoid that, I got an angle plate and taped some UHMW-PE tape to it (UHMW-PE is very low friction tape):

After clamping the angle plate down to the bandsaw table and pushing a sheet of 120 grit wet-and-dry paper up against it, I could press the base of the body against the taped angle plate and rub it back and forth to sand the side:

This also had the advantage that most of the brass swarf stays in line with the brass base and doesn't get rubbed into the wood.

I kept going until I was sanding wood as well as brass and then moved onto the corners, which I dealt with in the portable workbench vice with a file (this photo was actually taken after I'd sanded only one side, hence the masking tape still being there):

The body was still a millimetre or so too tall at this point (it needs to be 30 mm high to fit into the groove in the tool chest shooting board), so the top got planed down, taking light cuts and checking with the shooting board groove.

After doing that, I used the little Parkside disk sander to reshape the curve on the top/rear edge. The last sanding job was to sort out the inside faces (which had got a bit oily from when I flattened the base). I did this using some strips of mesh sandpaper held onto a 1 mm thick steel rule:

The final job was to apply a couple of coats of my favourite finish, making sure the finish didn't get into the tapped hole:

After the first coat of oil, I glued the threaded rod in with Araldite and then applied a second coat.

It could then be assembled ...

... and tested, first on edge grain ...

... and then on end grain (which is what this plane is mostly intended for):

It works really well on the tool chest shooting board:

Finally, I tried using it to plane the face of a board, despite this not really being an intended use. It worked remarkably well and didn't even leave any tracks from the blade corners, which surprised me as I hadn't cambered the blade even slightly (I probably just got lucky).

I quite enjoyed planing the face of the little board with the little plane; it's not something I've ever done with a block plane (and I won't be throwing my #4 away any time soon!) but there's something really satisfying about preparing edge, face and end grain of a board using a plane that you've made yourself.

Out of interest, I thought I'd weigh three block planes for comparison (not that the weight matters especially - none of them are heavy):

The metal block plane weighs 750 g, the all-wooden-bodied plane weighs 225 g and the new one weighs 415 g.

It feels very comfortable in the hand and is a lot easier to adjust for a fine cut than the all-wooden-bodied plane. It's very easy to clear the shavings: just turn the plane upside down and they fall out. There are definitely things that I could improve if I could face the idea of making another one, but overall I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

 

[Dr.Al]

I decided to make a spare blade for the block plane. It's always handy having two blades (even if only because it occasionally allows me to lazy and put off sharpening for a bit!).

This one was a bit of an ordeal to be honest. Making it proceeded in much the same way as the last blade (and took about 2 hours). I then hardened it and tempered it as before. When I came to sharpen it, I was finding it impossible to get an edge on it, suggesting it wasn't properly hardened. This will be for one of the following reasons, but I've no idea which:

1. I didn't heat it up enough before quenching when hardening.
2. I took too long going from heating to quenching.
3. I overcooked it when tempering.

Whichever was the cause, it needed to be dealt with, so I went back to the start and heated it up to cherry red before plunging in oil. I decided to use the domestic fan oven for the tempering process this time, so I set the oven on 220°C and chucked it in. With hindsight, I should have wrapped it in something to even out the heat a bit: when I came back to it a little later, the tip was blue, suggesting it had reached a temperature in excess of 285°C (according to the chart in the book I use for reference when heat treating. I wouldn't have expected that from a fan oven (and I've tempered stuff in there before with no issues).

Ah well, back to square one again. Third time lucky thankfully (I was going to give up if it didn't work this time): I heated it back up to cherry red, plunged it in oil, tempered with the blow torch again this time and then the process of grinding and sharpening went nice and smoothly. All's well that ends well as the bard put it.