I’m going to post something about my planes to try to renew my enthusiasm for doing it and push on to the next level. I’ve now completed a half set (even numbers) of hollows and rounds. The anomaly is, I haven’t yet done the #2 (chickened out, but I will get to it) but I have done a #11. It’s taken ages, because there’s lots of tooling to make and lots of techniques to learn. I can now complete a pair of planes in a day if I stay focussed and don’t get interrupted, which is very rarely. It often takes several days in practice.
You can tell from the wedges that they started pretty rough but now I’d say I’m getting to a good amateur standard, they look good and perform properly.
After a few pairs I went off and started making other planes, but realised that the overall standard wasn’t good enough so I went back to the hollows and rounds to practice the basics. It’s been a process of gradual improvement, but the #11s, # 18s and one #14 have been made with my “new system” and are starting to get a lot more consistent, to look nicer and perform really well.
Oddly, the first plane I made was a #14 round, but I made its companion hollow recently, which hopefully shows how they’ve come on. But even the old one works pretty well, if it clogs sometimes.
Next innovation will be skewed mortises, and once I’ve done a few of those I’ll get on to sash planes, which was my original goal. Skewed rabbet plane tomorrow.
You can tell from the wedges that they started pretty rough but now I’d say I’m getting to a good amateur standard, they look good and perform properly.
After a few pairs I went off and started making other planes, but realised that the overall standard wasn’t good enough so I went back to the hollows and rounds to practice the basics. It’s been a process of gradual improvement, but the #11s, # 18s and one #14 have been made with my “new system” and are starting to get a lot more consistent, to look nicer and perform really well.
Oddly, the first plane I made was a #14 round, but I made its companion hollow recently, which hopefully shows how they’ve come on. But even the old one works pretty well, if it clogs sometimes.
Next innovation will be skewed mortises, and once I’ve done a few of those I’ll get on to sash planes, which was my original goal. Skewed rabbet plane tomorrow.