Functionally complete

Just what do you use a tiny plane for? How about making another small plane? I make the wedge over wide because Cocobolo always chips on the sides. Here I’m thinning it with the last mitre and a #3.

Then some testing on apple.

Here you can see the secondary dovetails (if you look at the previous post, the brass pins are straight (it is kinda hard to see but they are). I didn’t get a photo but I used 5º, cut in about ¼ of pin width (at the root), feathered to zero at the bottom of the pin (ditto on the tails) .
No peined photo ether, because they looked like doo-doo. The sides are fine but the brass work hardened and broke on some of the edges (see the next photo).

That is what I call a mouth too closed. It works but you can tell it isn’t happy (it feels like it is going to clog and the shavings are a bit too rumpled).

The wheels are still on

A little bitty mitre plane, part II. Same length but a wider blade (15/16″). So far, so good, no train wrecks.

I like this bridge a lot better, way more subtle: a rounded V stopped with lambs tongues. The paper the planes are sitting on shows some of the designs I was working on, didn’t use any of them, this one came to me as I was filing it.

Tails on the sole, pins on the sides, which makes it easy to make the body and sole as two units, they slide together (and apart) so I can adjust, clean up, etc as needed.
You can see the “gutter”/rabbit on the sole, I think I’m going to jettison that feature as it is a real pain to do the back curve.
You can’t really see it, but there are little “bumpers” down by the mouth that center the blade but allow it to pivot (to correct an out of square blade, or, heaven forbid, a out of square bed).

Now that the dovetails are nice and neat, I’d like to permanently assemble it but I can’t (unless I brazed it, as I did the front, bridge and ramp), the wedge might (eventually) lift the body off the sole (probably not, as there is enough slop/divots that peining would fill in the imperfections for a good tight fit but I’ve another plane that is lifting so I’m not going to press my luck). So I’m going to have to dovetail the dovetails, which, after peining (aka beating on metal and hoping only the parts I want to bend/move actually do move), I’ll have crimps holding the sole on and sides in.
On the right of the sole, you can see the line of the mouth, which hasn’t broken through yet. That is my hedge against warping: after peining, there is going to be some distortion, and as I flatten the sole to get rid of it, the mouth will open up, how much I don’t know but hopefully not much. By leaving the the mouth closed, I can remove a lot of metal before I start to swear.

Here is photo of milling the bed, looking from the back of the plane. It is hard to see in there so it is a bit of pain making the cuts. That is a ¼” endmill, the next step is to go a 1/16″ endmill so I can get squarish shoulders down by the mouth (yes, they are quite fragile but the carbide ones I’m using cut really well, even when I’ve got the entire cutter buried in the wall).

A very small miter plane

And then the wheels fell off

Ah, the sin of hubris. It usually bites me about half way into a project. Like this one.

I was cleaning out the blade bin and finally committed to chucking out some blades that were well past their “best used by” date. But wait! Doesn’t Bill Carter cut down blades for his small miter planes? Hmmm. So I cut them up; even though there was less than ½” below the slot, they are hardened to about an inch above (cut the top with a hacksaw, the bottom with an abrasive wheel). They would make nice marking knifes.

I then proceeded to crank out a tiny (4″ x ¾”) sole and body, no plans, no nothing, just metal, a mill and torch.  The sole is ¼” mild steel with a silver brazed steel ramp; that way I have a one piece ramp that never, ever moves or changes (unlike a wood infill).
I used a technique I got from Karl Holtey’s blog and put a rabbit down the sides, it is supposed to render any gaps invisible and should lend a bit of support to the sides. And I find a sole of that thickness on a such a small plane a bit jarring.
I dislike split soles, I just don’t like the idea of a hinge/break there. So I cut the bed/mouth in one setting on the mill. I mounted the sole at 20º and roughed it with a ¼” endmill, then switched to a 1/16″ to make the mouth area as square as possible (ie remove the radius from the ¼ cutter). I cut until the bottom of the sole just starts to bulge, that give a about a zero mouth, lapping the sole will open it up. I cut the mouth a little wide (½ the diameter of the endmill on each side) so I don’t have to file it square. I messed up here and the mouth is way too wide or the blade too narrow, I haven’t decided yet, maybe I’ll retrofit some “kickers” to center the blade.
The brass was work hardening a lot from the bending so I annealed it by heating it to a dull red and dunking it in water. Boy, does that work well.

Then proceeded to assemble the sides to the sole. And the wheels fell off. You may have noticed I put the tails on the sides, because I feel that the wedge wants to lift the sides off the sole. Well, I made a really bad choice because the brass wasn’t near as noodley as I somehow expected and it really, really did not want to flex and slip onto the pins. I made a royal f’ing mess of things but managed to get it assembled and peined. I was not a happy camper. After a big time-out, I decided to go for the old and distressed look. Still, it a major effort to get the sides sorta straight. Next time, tails on the sides just like everybody has done it through the ages. And file some voids to move metal into (yuck, I’d rather not move lots of metal).

For the bridge, I used a chunk of steel and carved on it a bit. And brazed it in; at this point I just didn’t feel up to pinning it. I milled the front square, reduced the thickness of the toe and brazed on a face plate. Konrad Sauer has a nice article on how to file a lamb’s tongue (scroll down a bit), that is simple and fast so I tried it. And it is. The wood (Cocobolo) is just about done, waiting for glue and lacquer to dry.

Post Modern Spoons

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The Spoon from the Black Lagoon

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Or, what to do with a spoon gone bad? In this case, I was trying to carve a ladle, ran into a bark inclusion which broke the neck. The “spines” are bamboo skewers used as dowels to hold the piece together. The finish is water colors covered by Watco Dark Walnut top coated with shellac. The base is a chuck of spalted red oak planed with a scrub plane to leave a “rippled” surface. It is finished with BLO and shellac.

Extreme spoons

Some flights of fancy in white oak, all from the same tree. Mostly hand tools (gouges, rasps, scrapers, sand paper), some bandsaw work.

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