Finally it was time to put the new plane all together and give it a test drive. I did not sharpen the iron to ultimate completion in case I needed to change its angle a smidge. I would hate to get it to 8000+ sharp then have to grind off some of that hard won territory.
Using a piece of trued-up aluminum bar stock as my fence and some waste mahogany from the scrap pile I gave it a go.
The results were very pleasing. A half-dozen passes and the work was done.
Now I can take the sharpening to the end point.
I now have no technical excuse to put off making some Japanese planing boards, it is now only a matter of time and priority.
Meanwhile I thought I would give my flea-market 1/4″ shouldered dovetail plane a run. The shoulder feature is mighty nice, but as you can tell the iron needs some reshaping and sharpening. The iron in the tool has been really boogered up and will need a lot of work to get right (sorry for the technical jargon folks).
The final step for the project will be to make a sawing template with a bevel matching the dovetail angle so that the female joint can be cut to match the male joint half resulting from the plane. I will be unlikely to make that a post, unless I have a really slow day and am in a complete idea desert.
In closing let me give a shout out to James Wright whose video on sliding dovetail joints was part of my inspiration for undertaking this tool making project. The other part was this video on making and using a planing board. I am anxious to get the decks cleared of the dozen things in line ahead of it to make my own planing board.
With the dovetail plane configured the way I wanted it was time to add the brass plate to the newly beveled sole. I grabbed a piece of brass from the scrap drawer and sawed it roughly to fit then drilled and countersunk screw holes for attaching it to the plane body. When I placed the screws the wooden body was too brittle (several cracks) for me to have confidence in that being the only method of affixing the plate.
Instead I cleaned the contact surface of the brass plate with 60 grit sandpaper and slathered it and the wood contact surface with G-flex epoxy to bring it all together.
Since the gluing surface was beveled enough vis-a-vie the plane body that clamping was problematic I simply got the pieces in place and executed and old fashioned “rub joint,” making sure there was intimate contact and at least a partial vacuum between the adherends and the adhesive and then just let it sit to harden. I’ll know tomorrow if that worked out well.
Next Day
The “rub joint” with epoxy worked perfectly! I was able to trim and clean the new sole relative to the wooden body so that they configured nicely, first with a Vixen file followed by sanding.
Using my granite block and sandpaper I got the sole pieces flat and coincidentally planar.
Re-drilling the previous screw holes, now filled with epoxy, and drilling new holes on the front half of the sole I got everything copacetic. I left the screw heads slightly proud and abraded them off smooth.
Now the tool is ready to assemble completely and give it a test drive.
The other day I was listening for the umpteenth time to jazz pianist Keith Jarret’s “Koln (Cologne) Concert,” the renowned and best selling solo piano album of time, I believe in any genre. Jazz may or may not be your cup of tea, and improvisational solo piano is an acquired taste but I hope that someday you, too, will reach that plateau of sophisticated consciousness to appreciate this album as much as I do. (Do I really need to insert a sarcasm tag?) Admittedly, personal tastes cannot be accounted for sometimes, I mean I have a younger brother, perhaps my closest friend, who listens to country music. Country music! Oh, the horror. It is almost impossible to believe that we share either any nature or nurture, but there it is.
Album cover art courtesy of ECM Records, via Wikipedia.
And once while I was in high school listening to some avant-garde ensemble music on the stereo (Amon Duul? Univers Zero? Mahavishnu Orchestra?) my saintly church-organ-playing mother gently knocked on the bedroom door and stuck her head in. “Don,” she asked in genuine bewilderment, “are all of those folks playing the same song?” My Baptist preacher father and mother were petty strict about the music in the home, no vulgar lyrics for example, but were far more flexible on the music itself outside of that constraint. I will note they probably remained convinced that they’d brought home the wrong baby from the hospital. They only knew that I listened to both Gregorian chants and jazz, and that did not fit into any template.
Back to Keith Jarret and the Cologne Concert. The tale of the concert is a fascinating one. Jarret was emerging at the pinnacle of his prowess as a solo composer and performer after a decade in major ensembles and was embarking on his first major solo tour IIRC. Almost everything about the concert went wrong. He was exhausted from travel, didn’t even get a decent meal before the late-night Saturday concert, and the piano was an inferior, out-of-tune substitute for the concert Boesendorfer he had requested. He almost walked away from this steaming pile of circumstances but the impassioned pleas to continue from the promoter, a German teenager, persuaded him to have mercy on her and give a concert.
Despite, or more probably because of, the challenges — his exhaustion, the poor quality of the tool at his disposal (the upper and lower registers were essentially non-functional) — he drew on the unquenchable fire of creativity within him and sat down and began to play. Every note and combination of notes was being created uniquely in real time at that moment. The limitations he faced drove him to accomplish what is generally considered to be the most brilliant performance ever witnessed in the realm of improvisational jazz.
The parallels are unmistakable to me and for our tribe of creative artisans. I find that my interest in many projects depends on the difficulties inherent in them. I wonder how many of you are motivated by the same stew.
We might not have exactly the right tool or the right piece of wood.. We might be out of sorts. We might be tired or hungry or have a backache.
And sometimes in such moments we draw deep on the reservoir of creative genus we possess and magic happens at the workbench.
And sometimes in our shops we are all Keith Jarrett. a kid of Hungarian and Scots-Irish heritage from Allentown PA who set the world on fire that miserable evening in Cologne, Germany.
Somewhere along the way I picked up this gigantic solid rosewood plane of Eastern design and unknown genesis. I vaguely recall it being in a box of Japanese planes but since I turned 65 I am uncertain of this is a true memory or a false one. It does not really matter one way or the other.
The coincidence of building my Japanese toolbox and Wilbur Pan’s presentation to DC-area woodworking guilds led me to pull it out again and give it a closer look-see. I sent the photos to Wilbur and he shares my inkling that this may be a Chinese plane, not Japanese.
The rosewood body is heavy enough that it would be like planing with a large brick. To say the very least if there were a sharp iron in the tool there would be precious little chatter.
The piece of hammered steel(?) in the plane throat is only 1/8″ thick, probable too thin to be the cutting iron. But, it is not exactly configured for functioning as a chip breaker, either.
I asked a friend from China to interpret the pictograms but she was unable to decipher them so I have no idea what information is contained there.
I may just wind up buying a piece of 1/4″ tool steel 4″ x 6″ and grinding my own cutting iron, but am still scratching my head over this peculiar tool.
In the firmament of notable vintage tool events two pop up on my radar every year; the Martin Donnelly warehouse-cleaning auction in mid-July in central New York and the annual tool flea market and auction for the Potomac Antique Tools and Industries Association, or PATINA. The PATINA soiree is coming in less than a week, and if you are anywhere in the mid-Atlantic region it is well worth your effort to get there. You can find the details here.
I do not go as often as I used to since escaping Mordor, it’s only an hour north of DC but four hours from Shangri-La. I think I have been twice since moving to the hinterlands.
The outdoor tailgating starts at dawn and the weather is often (usually?) a challenge so make sure to dress appropriately. I cannot recall ever going when the weather was nice, but I’ve heard it is a theoretical possibility.
I have had amazing success at the tailgating, finding everything from derelict planes to be transformed into other tools, such as my parquetry shooting plane and the dovetail plane. I do not mind thrashing about with a $2 or $5 plane body for some wild scheme, but I would be hesitant to trash a $25 plane body. So I gather up a handful of the cheap vintage bodies to play with later on. I’ve also had great success in buying loose laminated old plane irons, and have been known to pick up my favorite model of old Stanley bench chisels for just a few dollars apiece.
By the time I’ve gone through the tailgating twice and made all my purchases there, the inside dealer’s sale is usually open and that is where I normally spend the rest of the day until I run out of money or energy.
Alas this year I will not be there as it is the first weekend of our famed Maple Festival and I am on duty there. These are the two weekends every year where our tiny county community of two thousand people are joined by tens of thousands of visitors to eat and drink all things maple syrupy. I’m not a huge maple flavor fan, but the buckwheat pancakes the size of trash can lids are to die for.
The new website for Handworks 2020 is now live and kicking. With virtually every maker of fine woodworking tools present as vendors and three adjacent venues and thousands of fellow comrades-in-tools it will be a memorable experience.
Once again Roy Underhill will be the Saturday morning speaker, always a great crowd pleaser.
The Barn On White Run (that’s me!) will be present with loads of our polissoirs, waxes, polishes, and other items for your viewing and purchasing pleasure, and I will be giving demonstrations once an hour on using all of these items.
Plus my friend John will be joining me with the latest developments in ripple molding cutters.
As the days grow closer I’ll be blogging frequently bout the event and our participation and experiences there.
One of the accessories I want to make to accompany my new Japanese tool box is a traditional Japanese planning board, complete with sliding dovetailed “feet.” Since the only dovetail plan I owned was really too small for such a task a new one needed to be made from a derelict 1-inch rabbet plane body.
Once the new sole angle was established to match my dovetail gauge it was time to re-make an old iron to serve the intended purpose. Placing the old iron in the body showed how much steel needed to be removed to get the cutting iron and the sole angle to match each other.
I highlighted the iron with marker and shooting a line from the new sole surface against the un-beveled side of the iron with a carbide scribe I now knew how much steel to grind away.
I ground the new line with no bevel to establish that line perfectly.
Once that was done I ground away most of the bevel on the power grinder and then finished it off by hand on my granite block and 60 grit abrasive belt.
I moved on to 120 grit and set the iron in place to assess the fit.
Several months ago I was at a tool flea market and picked up this sharpening jig just because I thought it was neat and the price was right. I use jigs to establish the blade geometry but finish them up freehand, so this might come in handy when rehabbing a damaged edge. Ironically, I made a wood version of this concept and found it useful, so I look forward to giving this unit a tryout.
A week ago Saturday I had the great good peasure to spend the day with two DC area woodworking groups, the Manassas Woodworkers and the Washington Woodworking Guild, as they co-hosted a day of Japanese toolification with my friend Wilbur Pan of Giant Cypress fame. The event was at the Manassas group’s space which turned out to be almost perfect for it. I did not take an exact head count but the room was crowded with an estimated 75-100 folks, some of whom came from surrounding areas as distant as Fredericksburg or even the Virginia frontier. Since I have been in that circle of woodworkers for a long time I knew many of the folks in attendance.
Beginning at noon and winding up at supper time, Wilbur walked the audience through the many facets of using Japanese tools in his woodworking, taking pains to refer to those areas where Japanese tools are different from European traditions and where they are similar and complimentary.
Systematically he reviewed the major tool categories — planes, saws, and chisels — including a full menu of reference information ranging from metallurgy and manufacturing technology to edge geometry to ergonomics and kinesthesiology. My impression was that this was unfamiliar to many in the audience, but there is no way anyone could depart at the end of the day without a deeper understanding of woodworking in general and Japanese woodworking in particular.
In addition to Wilbur’s tools for the demonstrations, WWG member JayC brought his sizable inventory of tools for show and use. This was one of three or four tables Jay had set up for his tool collection. As we were cleaning up and clearing out afterwards I noticed Jay giving instruction to some of the attendees who wanted to try things out.
I finally got back to my daughter’s home around 9.30, just in time to Skype with other daughter and SIL. It was a darned near perfect day; breakfast with a friend who is a political mechanic, strategerizing about disrupting the malevolent Virginia political establishment, woodworking toolism with friends old and new all day, a delightful dinner with same, and ending with Mrs. Barn and me chatting with the ones we love most dearly.
One of the projects soon to be underway in the studio is to make one (or three?) Japanese planning boards complete with sliding dovetail legs and perhaps even a dovetailed planing stop. But first I need a dovetail plane. I had another derelict 1″ dado plane up on the shelf so the raw material was already in hand. This poor thing had the snot beat out of it in ages past, so it was $3 at the PATINA tool event two years ago. If you are anywhere close to northern Maryland on March 14, you should go. The deals are simply amazing.
The first step was to decide on the dovetail angle on the sole and cut it on the table saw. It was sooper dooper easy, I just got out my zero-time-zero-cost home made dovetail template from the drawer and set the saw blade to that angle, positioned the fence, and ran it through.
Done.
Follow along on the remaining steps of the journey in the coming posts.
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