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DISCLAIMER: Please don't send me any hate mail - I am NOT responsible for the photographs included with this page. My dear father, to whom this hand plane was given, dug it out of his shop (some 2500 miles away from me) and took the photos himself. I love him dearly, and he is responsible for my foray into building things, but he has no clue when it comes to hand planes. Yes, I already know that the wedge is backwards in the photos taken with it installed in the plane.
Being originally from Western Canada where wooden moulding planes are about as plentiful as polar bears in Miami, they have always held a certain mystique for me. I have read about them and, being unable to procure them locally, I decided I wanted to try my hand at making them. This is quite difficult having never seen them but there are a number of excellent resources available.
Of course, this always involves the obligatory trip to the library and the purchase of several books on the subject. It is unfortunate that, at the time, the WWW was not yet prevalent, as I find great information on woodworking online these days. When I made this plane the research was all grunt work.
After satisfying myself that I had flushed out enough information on these planes, I started to collect information on metalwork. My father-in-law happens to be a jeweller and used to make medical instruments in Germany. He is well versed in metallurgy and was a great deal of help. With his assistance I selected the appopriate grade of tool steel, and put together a small collection of tools and materials with which to make the blade of this plane.
I started with a piece of rock maple for the body. I cut it to shape then proceeded to form the moulding on the bottom. Why did I choose a complex profile instead of a simple round or hollow? Because I am a darn masochist, thats why! Actually, I had a project in mind that required a shape of this type so that was also a driving force, aside from my stupidity. The silly thing is I made several of these but never kept one for myself, so the project didn't benefit anyway. In fact, I think (as I am writing this 8 years after the fact) that by the time I made these planes, the project in question never came into being.
The profile, as with the spring angle, was scratched into the body with an awl. I used a Dremel, some files, and an 1/8th inch chisel to form the finished profile. I had a wooden profile I made to gauge how close I was to being finished, but I hogged out most of the waste using the table saw. Holding the plane just past the blade I set the height of the blade to just shy of the scratch mark then set the fence to hit the side of the plane. Successive passes at different depths removed the majority of the wood and I only needed to clean up the profile with the other tools. It is important to note here that I originally made the plane about 14 inches long, then cut the 10 best inches out of the piece to give me the finished length. I did this to compensate for any irregularity that arises from working near the ends.
Laying out the blade location came next. It is important to get as tight a mouth as possible, and to get the plane blade perpendicular to the long axis of the body. After scratching out the layout on the body, I used a tenon saw to cut the mouth opening in the body. Then I used a drill and a chisel to cut the blade tang mortise. The saw cuts must be very accurate but I made the mortise undersized a bit. Then I took my two plane floats and cleaned everything up flat and neat.
I made a cardstock template of the blade using the body as a reference. A hack saw and a grinder were utilized to the shape out of a plate of tool steel I purchased. Using techniques shown to me by my father-in-law, while making the floats, I softened the metal, filed it clean, filed and ground the blade profile and bevel, then hardened and tempered it. This sounds like it was quick but the process really took me about a week per blade.
I finished it off with a wedge of rock maple that was thicknessed then cut to shape with the bandsaw. The actual ramp on the wedge was tuned with a hand plane. I finished it with a coat of aniline dye, to make it look a little older, and wax. Then I sharpened the blade and tuned the plane. To top it off I even ground in a maker's mark with my dremel (I didn't have a maker's stamp obviously).
The finished product actually performed suprisingly well. The next plane performed even better, and so on. Really, it is an excellent thing to have done, but I think I would find myself an old one and tune it up if I was looking for something for a project. It took a lot of work to complete.
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