Musings

Finishing Kerfing Plane Tune-Up

Since I had very little invested in my set of kerfing planes I felt no hesitancy in attempting to modify them into greater usefulness, even if the result was their destruction. Fortunately it did not.

Clearly the solution to the knuckle scraping problem illustrated last time was to elevate the position of the trailing hand.

Since the bodies of the planes were made from Baltic birch plywood, my favorite material for prototyping (although probably far too often the prototypes remain the final in-use version for a lot of things) I just cut the handles off and remounted them to a more satisfactory position.

The only real challenge was to make sure that the glue line between the plane body and the newly re-located handle fit closely so that the new glue line was robust enough to withstand the use.

It was. I glued the handle in its new location then went back in and rounded out the front of the hand hole and it was ready to get back to work.

As you can see and I can testify the new posture was perfect for continued use without having to be attentive to the blood flowing out of my pinky knuckle. For someone who re-saws by hand a fair bit, this is a big deal.

===============================================

PS I am still trying to post the next video. I must have forgotten some trifling step in the process, but a soon as I remember it the video will go up.