Strike Block Plane

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Nigel Burden

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I decided to build myself a Strike Block Plane for use on my shooting board.

I had some Cherry that I'd bought at The Oak Fair three years ago which was just wide enough for use with a Sorby 2 1/4" double iron. The bed angle is 38 degrees which is low enough for a wooden plane.

After planing the billet square I marked out the bed angle, iron position, abutments, throat, mouth, and wear.

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I started by making a knife line across the centre of the mouth and chiselling in a short distance, gradually opening the mouth a little.

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Then I started chiselling out the throat, staying shy of the pencil marks.

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Once I had reached the wear line I chiselled through from the mouth.

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Next I sawed down the abutment lines with an old pad? saw and then chiselled out the abutments.

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The next stage was to open up the throat a little and chisel out the slot to take the cap iron screw, check the fit of the iron, and smooth out the bed, throat opening, and wear. Then I shaped the sides of the throat.

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At this stage there was a lot of work with a blunt chisel, (ground flat across the cutting edge), scraping everything smooth, making sure that the iron didn't rock and that I had sufficient clearance in the throat and wear.

Next came making the wedge. I used Beech for this as I had no available Cherry left.

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Marking out the wedge template above.

I will post more photos in another post, as I've reached my limit.

Nigel.
 
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I will be watching this with interest as I have yet to try doing a chopped out throat plane. I did make a big shooting plane but with glued up construction. Blade I had was a 2&1/2'' Kenyon so built the plane around that. The extra heft helps with shooting.
Regards
John
 
I will be watching this with interest as I have yet to try doing a chopped out throat plane. I did make a big shooting plane but with glued up construction. Blade I had was a 2&1/2'' Kenyon so built the plane around that. The extra heft helps with shooting.
Regards
John

I'm afraid I built this with the available wood which would take nothing wider than 2 1/4". I even had to take a 1/16" off the side of the iron and cap iron.

Nigel.
 
So back to marking out the wedge.

I offered a piece of picture mounting card up to the abutments and wedged it in place so that I could mark out the abutment line, then cut out the card and marked around it on the wedge.
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I then cut out the wedge which I'd already planed down roughly to size.


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From here on there was a lot of fettling, scraping with one of my blunt, ground off chisels. These work very well as scrapers where you want to creep up on the line. A plane makers float would probably have made life easier, but I don't possess any. Another thing I use for removing, smoothing is a piece of wood about 1/2" wide and 4-5" long tapered to almost a point to which I glue various grit sand paper.

When I was satisfied that the wedge was fitting reasonably well I decided to test the plane before the final work finishing off the plane.

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The above photo shows the shavings taken on some pieces of scrap wood.

I then rounded off the rear of the plane using a chisel and a no 4 plane followed by sanding and scraping. I then chamfered the edges with a chisel. I decided to ad a strike button at this point.




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More fettling followed to make sure that the wedge fitted tightly. Although the plane takes good shavings I think I might need to play around with sharpening to get it to take better end grain shavings. The iron is sharpened to about 22 degrees with a small secondary bevel of about 26 degrees. I decided to go shallower than normal due to the lower bed angle.

Nigel.
 
More fettling today removing some of the bulk from the mouth end of the abutments as end grain shavings tended to block a little. For some reason it doesn't plain end grain particularly well, but with the grain it planes well and leaves a good smooth surface, which is not what I expected. So I guess there's more fettling to be done.

Nigel.
 

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