Round Bottom Plane
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Paul has posted information on his blog site for those who wish to make their own round bottom plane for use on the next project: Stool.
Worth reading.
Joe B.
Impatiently waiting for the video on making this plane! Lol I’ve Ben thinking about ordering the bar stock to get ready for this project.
Dan
I’m thinking of hunting around car-boot sales for broken (to the point of being unusable and unrestorable) old small wooden handplanes for 50p or so (ones that are actually not worth restoring) and buying one or two and then using the iron out of one of them for my self-built handplane. You never know what kind of classic old Sheffield steel you might end up with!
In cases where old wooden smoothers have been totally neglected and are actually beyond repair, it’s often just the irons that are any good still. (I’m not suggesting you butcher a good or reasonably repairable old wooden plane).
If it’s not been looked after it’ll possibly need a lot of work, as it may have rusted, but I’ve done that sort of work before, and besides, it’ll be very cheap, and you end up with a classic iron that’s a piece of history too! 🙂
What do you think?
hi Dave you’ve got me thinking now i bought an old wooden coffin plane in the summer at a car bootsale that might fit the bill to be turned into a round bottomed plane it has an old Sorby iron in it i think this is possibly a replacement as it has a slot in it the same as a “stanley”iron, will this plane be to big or would it be better to start from scatch.
Eddy .. Liverpool, Merseyside, UK
,Cutting old blades to a new size could be a bit of a problem, suspect you would have to use a disc grinder but taking care not to over heat the blade
Wigan, Lancs. England :
i agree David but i dont think it would be any differant than cutting a new from flat steel stock i have a bench grinder that i’ll use and plent of water,it will be good pratice for when i do my scrub plane iron ,i was looking back to see how much i paid for the coffin plane and found it came for free with my #5 and #78 so nothing to lose really ,only thing is i will have to brush the shavings off the floor first or the shed will become warm very quickly haha .
Eddy .. Liverpool, Merseyside, UK
,Im really looking forward to both the blog series and then the video, making planes is something i have always been super interested in. If you used the o1 tool steel like paul suggested in the blog, would you have to heat treat it at all?
hi Stephen i would think all steel needs to be heat treated to retain an edge as it would be far to soft if not treated i cant wait to how Paul treats his new iron ,will this be the poor mans furnace
Eddy .. Liverpool, Merseyside, UK
,This is just an idea, for what it’s worth (this would be cheating, and probably a hideous butchery of an existing wooden plane) you could (possibly!!) take an old wooden smoothing plane, remove the blade, put it in your vice upside down, reshape the sole with various tools (spokeshave, etc?), with a curve in both directions (along and across the plane), then reinsert the blade so it just protrudes, even at the centre, trace the curve onto the blade with a pencil, then remove the blade and reshape it to that line on a grinder or belt sander…….. but that might be a complete cheat, lol. It’s just an idea that crossed my mind briefly!
Yes, possibly a hideous waste of an old hand plane.
Potential problems you might encounter? I’m guessing the mouth of the plane might open up too far at the sides if you did this (the same way old planes did when the soles were reflattened too often. So you might end up with a very chattery blade and lots of tearout. I’m not sure. I’ll personally just wait to watch Paul’s video and use an old blade probably!
Glad to see there’s a lot of interest in this. I too was going to go in the direction Dave Bulow suggested as I have some old plane irons with good steel lying around.
They would have to be ground to shape and re-tempering may be required.
Let’s see Paul’s version.
Joe B.
I am going to use a blade from an old Stanley transitional plane. I had bought a handful at an estate sale and there was one plane that was beyond hope for restoration, but had a decent blade.
O-1 steel in the states is about$15 for 1/8×1 1/4×18″… It might nobe abad be a bad idea to have some bar stock on hand for different planes…. But on the other hand it’s guys to use what you have first…
@edfly That’s a great idea!! A quick zip zap and bada bing bada bong. Finito!
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