Category Archives: Planes

Bookshelf: Making Panels

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The final components in the bookshelf are panels to go in the back. Recall from earlier that I used my frame saw to separate slices from the rest of the stock; those slices were to become the panels.

I’d been dreading this part somewhat because milling those panels down to size always seems to be kind of a pain. It’s not that they have to be flat (they don’t; stuff that thin bends to a certain degree), and it’s not that they have to be the same precise thickness (they don’t; you need only line up things on the face). It’s that holding the work in place without obstruction had always been a pain.

So I put in yet another dog hole and made this planing stop out of two dogs, a clamp, and a piece of hardboard:

It turned out to be not so bad. I think it would be even better if I put in some tiny brads at the end of the hardboard to grip the end of the panel, but I haven’t gone too nuts yet.

Another thing I did finally was to put some serious camber on the blade of one of my jack planes. Since I have four, it would be kind of silly not to try. I did this by just letting my Norton 220 waterstone dish out as I was grinding out a new bevel angle. That stone dishes notoriously, but in this case, it produced exactly what I wanted it to:

This really made the panel-milling process a lot quicker and a lot less work. Yay.

Once the pieces were milled, it was time to cut them into various kinds of strips and parts. This process is just like with any other kind of board; you first joint and mark:

Then you get out some sort of saw, rip alongside the mark, and joint that straight. Check out the snazzy reflection of the wood in the saw here, the one that supposedly lets you know if you’re sawing straight:

When first approaching this task, I thought to myself, “A rip panel saw would be awfully nice right now, wouldn’t it?” But it turns out that the bigger tenon saw was actually a lot of fun to use on this thing.

With everything cut to width and approximate length, I put the pieces in the arrangement in which they’ll be glued. It looks interesting, to say the least:

Whether it’s a good idea or not remains to be seen. I haven’t glued them together yet. Maybe tomorrow. I still have to plow the grooves in which these things will rest, and therefore, I still have the part where I wish I had a plow plane ahead of me.

(And yes, all of this because I’m not using plywood. No, I don’t have anything against plywood.)

Taiwan: Final Tool Survey

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Here’s an inchannel gouge I got in Taipei. This is how all of the “local” carving tools there I saw were designed:

taiwanese_gouge

It’s fairly long, maybe about 9″ or so. But that’s not the first thing you notice about it–the lack of a handle is. They typically aren’t used without mallets.

These things are struck with a long, rectangular mallet made of a single piece of wood. They are somewhere around 2x2x9″, with one end rounded so that it’s comfortable. Due to the small hard area that they hit, the mallets quickly form concavities on their faces. So soon after you start using a new mallet, it tends not to slip.

Although it looks cheap, this gouge was not particularly cheap. The red at the end means that it’s made with “quality steel,” and I think the cost was about $8. I’ve tried it out and it works fine, but I think I’d prefer to make an appropriate mallet before doing too much with it.

The plane below is a little block-esque plane made by “Hsieh Hsing:”

tw_block_1

This one actually came with packaging, which advertised it as “Japanese-style,” despite the fact that it’s no different than any Taiwanese plane I’ve seen. It’s short (maybe about 4″ long), and has a thick, quality blade that was very easy to flatten. Its throat is rather wide open, which lends it to uses of more rough block plane, but it does a good job and I can’t complain about that.

The final Taiwanese tool I’ll describe is a little special due to the person who gave it to me. One of the reasons for this whole trip was to meet my future inlaws, and as scary as that may sound, it turns out that they were all really great. One uncle in particular is also interested in building stuff, so I showed him this blog and we talked a bit on the subject. He’s also the one who took me to the store where I got most of these tools; it would have been difficult to find without him. And finally, he gave me this little smoothing plane:

agus_plane

Thanks, Uncle!

I think I’m finally mostly caught up with updates from the trip, so it’s time to get focused back on my various projects; I’ve already got some stuff started and can’t wait to get back to business on that. I’ll have some updates shortly. In the meantime, enjoy this view from Mugumuyu near Hualien (those rocks are marble):

mugumuyu_pool

Taiwan: More Tools, Sitou

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Continuing with the survey of tools that I got in Taiwan, here’s a funky rabbet plane:

weird_rabbet_plane

weird_rabbet_plane_bottom

The body is pretty clearly some sort of white oak, the only such example that I picked up. The blade is laminated and decently thick. This was one of the more expensive tools that I got; I think the cost was about $15.

The big characters on the blade and on the red part of the sticker comprise the brand name. On the rest of the sticker, it says something like, “very good quality,” and it seems to hold true. Everything mates perfectly, the mouth is tight, and it produces good, smooth shavings. I managed to do some panel-raising with it.

[edit: This seems to be a Taiwanese version of the mado-waku-shakuri-kanna that Toshio Odate mentions on page 106 of his Japanese Woodworking Tools book.]

Next up is this wooden spokeshave:

taiwanese_spokeshave

This is a little larger than most western wooden shaves (maybe about 60% larger), and it was not their biggest model, which was enormous. The “37″ is the production number (apparently out of a run of 100). The blade is hand-forged and decently easy to hone; you can straddle a 2.5″ stone with it. It works well. Cost was about $8.

Next up is a rounding plane. We’ve seen a bunch of similar tools under the brand Mujingfang, but this Taiwanese version uses a metal plate rather than the wooden wedge found in most of the others (I didn’t see a single wooden wedge in any Taiwanese-made plane while I was there):

taiwanese_rounding_plane

The size is printed on the top near the toe. As with all of the other tools I bought, it works spendidly. I think the cost was about $10.

[Edit: The place where I got these tools is JCwoodworking. They're at Section 1, ZhongQing North Rd, 100, Taipei (台北市重慶北路1段100號). The Google maps location is currently a block off; it's about one block north, just south of the circle on the east side of the road. The "about us" map on their web site has a better map.]

So switching away from tools, let’s look at some tree stuff. One of the places we went was Sitou, which is home to the Sitou Forest Recreation/Nature Education Area. It’s an experimental forest run by National Taiwan University, and you can see many different kinds of trees that they’re playing around with. They even have a California redwood or two there, which is kind of fitting, since we have a Dawn redwood in Henry Cowell Redwoods Park here.

In any case, there are a bunch of things you can look at, and one of the most interesting is the Skywalk, a walkway on a trestle that extends from the side of a hill that goes right into the forest canopy. It’s not every day that you can just walk around the middle of a bunch of Japanese Red Cedars:

sitou_skywalk

(Yes, there are birds, bugs, spiders, and all sorts of stuff up there.)

The forest is hardly old-growth, though. It was once dominated by the Formosan Cypress (Chamaecyparis formosensis), but like so many good trees, it grows slowly and is far too valuable for people to actually want to conserve in any reasonable fashion until all of the trees are gone. But there’s one cypress of note there, a giant 2800-year-old cypress considered a “sacred tree:”

sitou_giant_cypress

Of course, the only real reason it was spared is because it is too hollow and crummy to be used for timber, so they called it “sacred” instead. Hmph. In any case, it’s pretty amazing.

Various handles and knobs

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I’m in the process of varnishing four saw handles, a plane tote, and a plane knob. Here are half of the pieces.

As usual, I’m not being terribly speedy here. It’s been seven months since I started working on that tenon saw handle in the center. Things happen but I like to think that sooner or later, I get back to this stuff. (Especially since I’ve had the saw blade sharpened almost since I started on the handle and it’s otherwise ready to go.)

The larger hand saw handle in the rear is for a Disston D-8 that will become one of my new rip saws, somewhere at around 7TPI. This will be in addition to a No. 7 (I think) that’s going to be a larger 4.5TPI rip saw. The handle for that one is also in this batch, thankfully. Both of these handles were glopped over with some awful green paint that I needed to strip before the refinishing process started. What is it with the green paint?

The initial finish on these two handles was a mix of “colonial maple” stain, some satin polyurethane, and tung oil, for an oil/varnish blend (this makes the rays in the beech look nice). After a few coats of that, I’m now putting on satin polyurethane. I like the way that a top coat of polyurethane feels on the other handles I’ve done (as opposed to alkyd varnish and oil/varnish blends), and it seems to hold up better. It takes a little more effort to get polyurethane to look decent, but it’s not that bad.

I think I need one or two more coats on the handles.

The knob is from a Millers Falls #22 jointer plane that’s been waiting for restoration. I did not use the oil/varnish blend on this (or its accompanying tote), because the ray structure in this tropical wood did not seem worth bringing out. I may be done with the plane parts; I’ll evaluate that later.

Shooting board

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I made a shooting board a couple of weeks ago. As with the bench hook, I don’t know why I did not do this earlier.

As it turns out, there’s a repeating pattern of things I don’t know here. I have no idea why I dovetailed the lip onto the front. I did this on the bench hook, too. It didn’t take long and it wasn’t hard, but why? I also don’t know why I decided to do two little pieces for the front lip instead of one big piece.

The Veritas low-angle block plane works fine for shooting stuff of this width. You could use a low-angle jack plane for this, too. But I now see why people like their miter planes. I don’t really see myself spending so much cash on one of those for this purpose, though.

I need to make a rack for my chisels and small saws. The bench is a mess.

Scrub plane: finished

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I decided to rub out the finish on the scrub plane last night, and call it “finished” for now.

I had remarked to my friend how much rubbing out a finish changes it. In this case, there are a lot of minor finishing screw-ups that somehow got less bogus in the process.

Looks aren’t everything, though, and in this tool’s case, maybe it isn’t even ugly enough for its intended task of hogging off wood. In any case, I have a new toy, and I want to try it out tonight.

Scrub plane: Starting the finish

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I did the final shaping and glue-up of the scrub plane’s tote a while back. That, along with the edge chamfering, left me with this:

I tested it, and found it much to my liking.

Because the tote will likely see heavy use, I decided to varnish it, and before doing that, I decided to stain it. I had a can of “golden pecan” (a pigment stain) in the cabinet, so I tried it out on a test piece of beech. It didn’t seem horrible, so here is the plane after two coats (with sanding between):

There is a little blotching. I believe that I should have probably done a washcoat. It seemed to have avoided a lot of problems on that old saw handle.

Though passable now, I feel that I should sand and do another coat of stain. The second coat evened things out a lot, so a third should do it most of the rest of the way?

After that step, I would like to even it out with clear varnish. Satin polyurethane again? It’s worked well for me so far.

Scrub plane: Fitting the tote

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I decided to attack the long, wide groove to fit the tote today. I wasn’t too sure how to approach this, so I decided to see if a router plane would do what I needed it to. Having never used this tool (a Millers Falls #67 with a Lee Valley blade), I sharpened the blade and tested it on a piece of Douglas fir that usually sees test victim service. It seemed to work, so I set out clamping the plane body to the bench, marked the sides, and sawed down as much as I could:

Then I attacked it with the router plane until I got to the bottom. I had to remove the last part by chisel. (Next time, I will try to design the tote so that I can do the whole thing with the router plane. This was a severe pain in the butt.)

Finally, I shaved the edges of the groove so that the tote would fit snugly:

This could have turned out a little better, I guess. I was a little paranoid about trusting my lines when I sawed down, and it turns out that I shouldn’t have–they were dead on. In the end, there’s sort of a small gap on one side of the groove between the tote and the body. All in all, though, this went a lot better than the complete disaster that I expected…

Scrub plane: Tote and body back

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Faced with a dearth of time to work, I’ve been flailing around at shaping the tote/handle for the past several days. I’ll get home, take a few whacks at it with the rasp, file a little down, and so on.

Today, I decided to cut the “razee” part of the body. Seems to have gone okay. Here’s the body, along with the current tote:

The tote isn’t exactly the prettiest thing in the world right now, but it is at least comfortable. I haven’t gone far beyond this level of finish because I haven’t decided which tools to use now (can’t use the rasp any longer because the finish is too rough). Files? Sandpaper wrapped around a dowel? A scratch stock? Anything I can find?

Scrub plane handle, Part 1

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I think I used too much glue when laminating the plane body, creating a slightly larger gap than I was expecting, but that’s life. It does seem solid, and that’s the important part.

Yesterday, I cut a triangle out of a board for the handle, and today, I traced out the rest of the handle from the printed drawing. Then I knocked out the inside and back with a coping saw. Coping saws are a pain, but a having a solid workbench is a godsend, and nowhere was this more evident when I roughed out the outline with a rasp. I’ve never had much success at using a rasp before, and I realize now that it was due to having a bench shake all over the place.

That’s a somewhat-maligned cabinet rasp there. It seemed to work fine, and it also didn’t cost me anything (woot). Of course, the real test will come when I use it to shape the oval profile of the grip, but it doesn’t seem like it will be a problem.

Truth be told, cutting out the handle was a lot more fun than I expected. If the rest of the shaping goes even half as well as this, I’ll really have no excuse for not getting to work on those saw handles.