Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Thanks @str8tedge . Yes regarding sharpening, completely agreed!
About other catalogues – the page I found the Marples catalogue on was here: http://www.toolemera.com/Trade%20Catalogs/tradecatalogs193.html
There are a few others there too. The one of most interest to me at the time was the Marples one, but you might find other interesting ones too, I don’t know? – best regards, Dave
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!
The other day while searching on the internet for something I did come across a scanned copy of the Marples catalogue from 1938 ………..all 282 pages!!! It seems back then they published it as a book! It’s the most incredible, in-depth catalogue of hand-tools with diagrams I’ve ever seen. It really is quite amazing.
I don’t know if this is of any interest to any of you. And if you’ve seen this kind of thing many times before then I do apologise, but I was quite excited, just because it’s so in-depth, and thought it’d be quite useful (for someone like me at least) to help identify some really really specific odd tool that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I don’t know what you think.
Anyway, here’s the link in case you’re interested: http://www.toolemera.com/bkpdf/MarplesCat1938.pdf
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?
-
AuthorPosts