Plough plan?

If you have a router plane, you could put a fence on it (the Stanley comes with one) and use it for the groove. This would take a lot of patience because you will need to readjust the blade to go deeper and deeper. I wonder if you could use your mortise gauge set to the width of the router platde to scribe two lines along the groove to give you a smooth start (clean walls) at the start, then take some passes with the router plane to get down, say, 1/16″ to 1/8″. Use those walls to guide your tenon saw or maybe even a rip handsaw to cut the groove shoulders down to depth. I’m hoping this would let you get in with a chisel to hog out much of the material, bevel down. When you are close to depth, come back with the router plane to get a level bottom. If that doesn’t work, you’d just have to keep adjusting the knob on the router plane.

I have no idea if this would work, but you could experiment. By the way, what I have in mind is the narrow 1/4″ router blade. You may run into a challenge keeping the router plane from wobbling.

I wonder if you could modify Paul’s “poor man’s rebate plane” to be a grooving plane? See, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTuOtmlRhAI . You’d skip the fence on the bottom of the plane, use a 1/4″ chisel, and then cut a rabbet on the bottom of the plane, say, 3/8″ tall and however deep is needed to expose the other edge of the bottom of the chisel. You’d need to figure out how to add a batten or fence, or you could start your groove with the router plane, then run this in that groove, no fence needed.

All guess work, but I have sunk a groove with the router plane before. Good luck, and keep track of your reference faces!

Ive done as Dave has in the past. If you go that way take your time, its easy to get in trouble trying to hurry.
BrianJ

I have been in the process of updating a stairway in our house (built by my grandfather) with walnut treads, and I decided on a sugar maple inlay on the treads for a little extra decoration. The steps were 10″ deep, 32″ wide and the inlay strip 5/16″ wide, so cutting with a handsaw didn’t seem like an option. I needed a groove, but had no plough plane.

I did the knife / chisel approach for one step. I should’ve used the marking gauge and it would’ve helped with areas where the knife wanted to follow the grain (against my trying to be careful about it). There were a one or two small areas it wasn’t as tight as I would’ve liked but everything looked good. It also took quite a while to get one done.

The second one I tried to do a knife wall and then use my stanley 71 router plane (has no fence) . There was a lot of wood to take out for the 32″ long cut, and the router plane had a tendency to undercut parts of the wall if you weren’t very careful (and stubborn where the grain was complicated). There were more areas I didn’t like on the end result of that step than the first one. It was faster than just chiseling it out, but less accurate. There was definitely a loss of control.

The real solution I found was a stanley 45 combination plane. The next steps I made were much easier to cut with the 45 (and depth was more consistent over the 32″ span). I was very pleased with the results.

The combination plane does beading and many other things as well, so you would possibly do better to look at that instead of just the plough.

good luck

-Stephen

It is pretty easy to make a plough plane based on the poor man’s rebate plane. I’ve done it and would be happy to post pictures if anyone was interested. I would suggest making two mirrored copies so you can cut in either direction.

I originally made this as an alternative to spending $100 or more on a Record or Stanley plough plane.

Here are a few pictures of what I did. Basically, you just make the poor man’s rebate plane and then add a groove to create a skate to make it a grooving plane.

In the future, I am probably going to make a simpler version with a fixed width (i.e. 1/4” groove, 1/4” from the edge, 1/4” deep), and will possibly look into finding a dedicated blade. It is probably a good idea to make a ”mirrored” pair so you can cut grooves in either direction.

I think this general style of side escapement plane could be modified to make a shoulder plane or moulding planes. Cutting the side mortise is far simpler than cutting a mortise (and slightly easier than laminating a plane body) so provides an easy way of making and experimenting with making planes.