I recently purchased an infill casting from Mr P and now that I have finished all that I was doing before hand, I can finally start working on it and also, as promised, document the progress here.
As soon as I received the package in the post, I traced around the outside of the casting and marked out the position of the mouth so that I could make rough sketches of the shape of the infill and have a look at what could become the final form of the plane.
It also reassured the advice given from Mr P that an un-handled infill of this size wouldn't look quite right.
Unfortunately, after tracing around the casting and making drawings, I had to get back to my work and so left the casting until now.
Now, before anything else, I must apologise for the quality of the photos I upload in this thread, its really difficult to photograph my work in my shop due to the lack of light, both natural and artificial, and using my phone camera is not easy to say the least...
I have begun to start with the casting, so first things first, I needed to clean off any oil which is on the casting so it doesn't bleed through and ruin the finish when I eventually get there. (<--Read this as 'between receiving the package and now, it has stained some wood so now I know'
)
I then found some timber which is thick enough to work as the infill (possibly as a guinea pig test so I can see where my errors are going to be).
I'm not sure entirely sure what the timber is, I think its either Mahogany or Sapele, but what I do know is that it is quite old and at times, can be tricky to plane?!
So using my fore plane, I started planing the datum edge and face so I could then rip down the lump rather than planing off all of the waste. (As I had just replaced blade in my bandsaw, I didn't really want to change it again because the lower guides are a bit of a pig to set due to the limited space, so I settled with the blade which was on there at the time -it did a reasonable job.)
After ripping the lump down, I did some more planing to remove the bandsaw marks, but left the block too thick so that I could creep up to the final thickness later.
Using the drawing I decided I liked the most, I stuck it onto the timber to cut around on my bandsaw and drill out the handle with my drill press.
As you can probably tell from the photos I have included, I wanted the handle to be made from one piece rather than the base infill and the handle as separate pieces, so to do this, I part cut the handle section vertically into 3 pieces.
To remove the side waste of the handle, I sawed it off using my dovetail saw.
Then in order to achieve the curve in the infill which backs onto where the blade will be, I used my drill press again to remove the majority of the waste. (Unfortunately, when checking the photos, this one was too fuzzy and so I can't show this part... )
Instead I'll show where I got to today and leave it at that for now.
I now need to find some in-cannel gouges to make shaping the blade support area easier for the next step.
Thanks,
Harry
As soon as I received the package in the post, I traced around the outside of the casting and marked out the position of the mouth so that I could make rough sketches of the shape of the infill and have a look at what could become the final form of the plane.
It also reassured the advice given from Mr P that an un-handled infill of this size wouldn't look quite right.
Unfortunately, after tracing around the casting and making drawings, I had to get back to my work and so left the casting until now.
Now, before anything else, I must apologise for the quality of the photos I upload in this thread, its really difficult to photograph my work in my shop due to the lack of light, both natural and artificial, and using my phone camera is not easy to say the least...
I have begun to start with the casting, so first things first, I needed to clean off any oil which is on the casting so it doesn't bleed through and ruin the finish when I eventually get there. (<--Read this as 'between receiving the package and now, it has stained some wood so now I know'
)I then found some timber which is thick enough to work as the infill (possibly as a guinea pig test so I can see where my errors are going to be).
I'm not sure entirely sure what the timber is, I think its either Mahogany or Sapele, but what I do know is that it is quite old and at times, can be tricky to plane?!
So using my fore plane, I started planing the datum edge and face so I could then rip down the lump rather than planing off all of the waste. (As I had just replaced blade in my bandsaw, I didn't really want to change it again because the lower guides are a bit of a pig to set due to the limited space, so I settled with the blade which was on there at the time -it did a reasonable job.)
After ripping the lump down, I did some more planing to remove the bandsaw marks, but left the block too thick so that I could creep up to the final thickness later.
Using the drawing I decided I liked the most, I stuck it onto the timber to cut around on my bandsaw and drill out the handle with my drill press.
As you can probably tell from the photos I have included, I wanted the handle to be made from one piece rather than the base infill and the handle as separate pieces, so to do this, I part cut the handle section vertically into 3 pieces.
To remove the side waste of the handle, I sawed it off using my dovetail saw.
Then in order to achieve the curve in the infill which backs onto where the blade will be, I used my drill press again to remove the majority of the waste. (Unfortunately, when checking the photos, this one was too fuzzy and so I can't show this part...
)Instead I'll show where I got to today and leave it at that for now.
I now need to find some in-cannel gouges to make shaping the blade support area easier for the next step.
Thanks,
Harry
