No 6 (copy of Norris) in Process

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D_W

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7 years ago, I figured out how to use the double iron since nobody clued me in that you could find instructions for it in a book (I know a few people love that story). At that time, I was building infills - 3 up to then (two from scratch and a kit), and had bought roughed out metal parts to make a Norris A6, which I was going to remake as a 55 degree plane with an adjuster. Thankfully, I didn't do that, it would've been rubbish to use.

The stanley turns out to be capable of anything, but having bought a bunch of vintage infills and finding out that they're not the 7-12 pound boat anchors that a lot of current planes are, I'm kind of glad to get back to it (I'd rather make planes than anything else, I guess) and make some in that weight class without the thick metal parts and gargantuan thick irons.

I think I've forgot most of the lessons that I learned on the first go around, and after doing the filing work on these purchased parts and then knocking them together, it'll be easier just to go back to doing all of the metal work (including the rough work) by hand. The maker of this kit made it so that once you do the finish filing, the whole kit is exactly as wide as the iron, which I will have to rectify by tapering the width of the iron and cap iron (making the iron narrower than 2" is not desirable to me) The objective is to have no marks and no showing dovetails, which I didn't quite achieve. For me, they always come back a little bit when I fit the infills, anyway, because the sides get flexed. I will have to finish file the sides of this thing later after peening the cross pins.

I did learn one thing - it's much faster to finish the sides draw filing than it is to lap them after just draw filing off most of the rough stuff, and much less physical work. They won't be dead flat and square, but they'll be close enough to look like they since 220 grit wet and dry is my level of finish.

I also learned that I need to get a better tapered reamer, but the round holes cleaned up fine with a round file after these pictures were taken. I'll just have to do a little bit of additional peining.

(the metal parts are roughed with pins and tails, but you have to file them and pein them together. There was also a lopsided bronze casting - rough cast - for a lever cap, which was pretty hard to clean up, but there was enough of it to do so. It's a lot more physical work to start from bar stock, but easier to get everything the way you want it).

This is why I was asking for A6 or no. 6 pictures the other day. I would like the woodwork to be right. It takes too long to make them to make any more junk, and the infill wood (something dry and dense with no pores) is pretty hard to come by.

https://s11.postimg.org/jn90xhhjn/20170610_142449.jpg
https://s11.postimg.org/dnl9ttwr7/20170610_142500.jpg

I may lightly pein the little voids on the one dovetail on the one side. It would be quick to draw file off.

My metal-work arsenal for these consists of a 1x42 belt sander and a drill press (and a whole bunch of files), but that's more than I had 7 years ago. I still prefer the files. They keep you from rushing and it feels good to file the metalwork.
 
Broke a tap off deep in the lever cap yesterday. i guess i was looking for an excuse to make another one from scratch, anyway.

Anyone else want to build one? If so , I'll post measurements when I get back to it next weekend.
 
I had once a tap broken in a delicate alumium casting. I went to a motorcycle restauration shop and they had a spark erosion machine or how ever it was called. It was no problem for them to remove the remains of the tap. I guess they deal with this kind of problems all the time, but it is a pretty specialised peice of equipment.
 
Corneel":12p11d9e said:
I had once a tap broken in a delicate alumium casting. I went to a motorcycle restauration shop and they had a spark erosion machine or how ever it was called. It was no problem for them to remove the remains of the tap. I guess they deal with this kind of problems all the time, but it is a pretty specialised peice of equipment.


I'm thinking one of three things.
* Heat the lever cap in a fire and drill it out with a good quality hss bit
* get a carbide burr or bit and try to drill it out
* throw it away

I'll probably try 1 and 3. It's tapped for a no 10 screw right now but drilled through both sides. I can drill all the way through from the other side with a quarter inch bit after burning out the temper and use a retaining rod peined in instead of screws.

I'm sure tool and die and engine shops are good at getting them out, but it might take me longer to find one than it would to just make another cap out of brass bar.
 
Is there any way of cutting a slot in the end? If so you could back it out with a flat head screwdriver.
 
memzey":3e5326zs said:
Is there any way of cutting a slot in the end? If so you could back it out with a flat head screwdriver.

That's not a bad idea. I could drill an oversize hole and peen in new brass and redrill and tap, too. It's not something that will be under much stress.
 
I understand that a tap broken off in brass can be dissolved out using alum without harming the brass. You can find details by googling something like: broken tap removal alum.
 
If you can get a hole drilled in the broken piece, difficult, then you can use a tool called an Easy Out to remove it. Be careful though because they are made of pretty hard steel and can break easily if you lean on them. I think I would take it to the nearest motorbike shop they remove that kind of stuff all the time.
 
So, this has come to a conclusion (the broken tap). I was out of town for a little while, but got back tonight and broke out a mapp torch and heated the entire side of the lever cap to cherry red. The tap is high carbon steel, and I don't know what alloy the bronze is (I didn't contact the guy who cast the lever cap). Nor do I know much about metal other than toolmaking steel, but I saw somewhere that the melting point of most bronzes is in a range that I was unlikely to threaten with a single mapp torch (1700 F or so) and plenty high to have a wide margin between running the temper out of the steel and the bronze melting point.

At any rate, the broken pieces of the tap kept me from accurately drilling on the side that it broke off in (that might not make sense if you've never tried to drill one out, but the bit certainly won't drill center of the hole if there's a bunch of random rubbish in the hole itself). By a stroke of luck, my two original holes lined up exactly and I was able to drill the now not-so-hard tap out from the other side and refresh the threads in both holes.

While I was on vacation, I ordered a new tap set in 10-24 (this time HSS, and US made - the old tap was also US made) so that it would be in my mailbox when I returned. Maybe one of the best investments I made a couple of years ago was buying a full US-made set of jobber drill bits (29 bits, I think). I have always used import drills until going to a hardware store local to my in-laws that specializes in US made stuff. The flutes on the drills are so sharp that they will cut you if you mishandle them, and I have yet to sharpen any of the drills despite using them for everything metalwork that I've done. They are a treat, and the kind of thing I'm often too cheap to pay for (they were on sale for about $68, which now seems like a bargain). Unnecessary detail to talk about I guess, but this kind of stuff has become a lot easier with good bits.

I can polish the lever cap tomorrow and fix any uglies in its shape (the casting was pretty rough, so I'm sure that as it gets close to polished, areas in need of correction will reveal themselves. And then get on to the infill, which will be cocobolo.
 
Continuing on:

Squaring up a dried bowl blank to start. I can't remember if I have any high speed steel planes left other than this continental smoother, but in the end, I just went back to the stanley to do most of the work. The continental plane will get sort of dull on this stuff quickly and then cut for a long time with a mildly damaged edge, but it does sharpen well on natural stones. It's no-doubt high speed steel, though, because you can intentionally grind it so that the edge turns orange in the heat and when it cools, it's lost no hardness. Anyway, the stanley dulls differently - it cuts well for a little bit, feeling sharp, and then the clearance runs out all of the sudden and it's got to go back to the stones (it is O1 steel, I know I've said before, I made the iron - the plane itself is a type 20, supposedly junk according to pundits - or am I a pundit?)

https://s29.postimg.org/9l4b7sznr/IMG_2 ... 510021.jpg

(salvaged cap iron is shown after a little bit of finish work on a trizact belt, more to come - as I mentioned previously, the cap iron was worked down from a st. james bay rough cast bronze cap)

I had stashed this billet and some others away in the past, thinking I'd make more infill planes than I ended up making. since this plane is small (2 inch iron - I wish I'd have gotten a 2 1/4" kit instead), I'm afraid it may lack in mass if I use a medium hardwood for the infill. I don't really like the plane that much itself, but I don't want to waste the whole kit, so I'll finish it and perhaps waste the cocobolo billet on it. More cocobolo isn't hard to find, but finding it dry in a reasonably large billet without it being old and cracked is another matter.

I no longer have a bandsaw, so resawing happens with a hand saw. A pleasant process, but not one I'd want to do for pay due to the time it takes. Any hurrying while resawing results in more planing of an awkward billet that's not that easy to hold with my end vise dogs (if you've ever done more than smooth cocobolo, you know it's not that nice to plane, anyway - and this one is full of shiny silica particles), so slow and pleasant it is. Backsaw and hand saw (this one a "hudson no 12" branded saw, 6 points) seem to be about the same speed, but the oily cocobolo packs the teeth on the backsaws so light pressure on the hand saw to avoid a jarring dig into the wood works nicely. Surprisingly, after three cuts through the billet, the "hudson" still has a fair amount of bite. I have ruined billets with bandsaw blade wander in the past, so the extra hour or so that this takes is no big deal - maybe even time wisely spent given the rarity of dry billets.

https://s8.postimg.org/huuopdr6d/IMG_20 ... 329246.jpg

Just before I did this, I took the salvaged lever cap (which had filed - in the curves - and profiled with a belt grinder - on the front flat) and subjected it to a trizact belt. I don't have a good belt grinder, or not a big one (it's actually a decent US made unit, 1x42, but cheaply made compared to the expensive bigger belt grinders). Following that, I used some coarse aluminum oxide wax stick on a harbor freight buffer. The stick I bought years ago when I thought I might like to make a sharpening routine out of lapping compounds. $6 for 2 pounds of al-ox stick, or maybe it's 2kgs. It's a huge stick, and not particularly fine like the expensive green sticks we use to sharpen sometimes - the coarseness is better suited to this - following the trizact and filing. It's so strong that it can actually do minor shaping and remove sloppy filing to some extent. I'd file something more interesting into the shoulders of this cap if I had higher hopes for this plane, but quick is good in this case, and it still looks better than the later norris lever caps that were just a slab of flat brass.

https://s1.postimg.org/ps3ftu8a7/IMG_20 ... 401435.jpg

The knurled screw is not part of the kit, but the kit does come with one that is functional. I replaced it with one I have on hand for cosmetic reasons. This one was made by johnny kleso years ago (rarebear on US forums). Raney Nelson gave me several once he went to making his own - johnny had made some for Ron Brese and Raney, but both decided to make their own once they *got big*. I have no way to make these, so I have to mooch or settle cosmetically. I have some that George Wilson made me, and they are classy and more unique, but the thread pitch doesn't quite match my tap, so I couldn't use them. I'll polish the front of this screw later with autosol so that it matches the shine of the cap. There will be trouble with this cap later when I fit, because I'm sure there is some error in the drilling of the side holes on the plane as well as the side holes on the lever cap. It's just the way it goes when you don't have proper machining tools, but it can all be corrected in final fitting - it's just a lot more work and a potential cosmetic threat if it's too far off.

The roughed out pieces of cocobolo are lined up on the plane - they have to be cut down further. I don't like the way the grain looks like it came from a bowl blank on the plane bed, because that's how it will look on the handle. It should be either rift or quartersawn, but I don't have any cocobolo rift or quartered. I wasted a much better quartered blank on a large coffin smoother. Hopefully, heavy oil and age will make the lines disappear. I cut the pieces in sequence on the blank so that when they are glued together, it won't look as obvious that they were sawn - there is some disconnect to the grain due to the resawing. If the infill was long with the handle sunk into it (or rather through it) like on a panel plane, I wouldn't have to resaw (that would've been easier), but it's not that style and it wouldn't end up as neat and tidy.

https://s24.postimg.org/amkmes991/IMG_2 ... 048089.jpg
 
As a separate and aside, cocobolo is really filthy to work with. The oily dust is like fine dirt.

I do use a chop saw to cut the bed angle in cocobolo, to be scraped later the way Bill Carter advocates. On nicer-to-work wood, I'd do it all with hand tools, but cocobolo isn't that nice to plane across. Anyway, point of that being that if the dust isn't caught at the point of exit from the saw, it clouds the air like smoke. I'm not allergic to it, but I can tell a difference when breathing it.
 
d_w I think that your last picture is incorrectly linked.

interesting posts- I am following with interest.
 
Thanks for the heads up, Marcros. I'd rather post pictures to the forum, but with the file size limitation, it's just easier to post them to an image host than it is to resize them. It leads me to make errors like that, though.
 
Getting the overstuffing for the sides was a lot easier than I guessed it would be. They're long enough to cut like a tenon slowly with a dovetail saw (the overstuffing is 1/8th plus a little slop to be trimmed off later).

Just mark them with a pencil, cut the tenon, stick a bullnose or shoulder plane in a vise and work them over it. The only check necessary is to place the sides on the plane from time to time to make sure no gaps are developing, and then use a cheap square to check the depth of the cut being made and make sure it's uniform and square (same thing, no gaps).

The curves aren't quite right, but I need to make the handle first before I finish them off as the front curve of the handle hole looks better if it's a reasonable match to the curve on the overstuffing (or the other way around, I guess). I always have to do that type of stuff in two steps, anyway - it's the curse of ADD, that I lose the ability to think and judge within an hour or so and have to set something aide and look at it later.

https://s1.postimg.org/sxio8vwtr/20170622_071008.jpg

https://s9.postimg.org/zflqadjkv/20170622_071016.jpg

https://s22.postimg.org/x2l46uqw1/20170622_071042.jpg

The front was worse because the piece is too small to use easily with a bullnose plane - easy to round over the tenon sides.

(the slater bullnose was thrown out by a friend of mine - it was his dad's - sentimental guy!! It had no iron, but the irons are tiny and easy to make. It is really a great working plane.)

White pencil marks will come off with final trimming, and glue should fill any small gaps and make them invisible since the wood is dark.

I noticed on the two overstuffed commercially made planes I have (a mathieson and a norris - old ones), the fit of the overstuffing is dead perfect, even after a hundred years. I'm pleased with the first try on this, but it's not the equal of the work that was done on those planes.
 
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