Simplified Krenov Style Plane Design
Phil Smith
>A couple of years ago the Holston Valley Wood Working Club taught a plane class on making Krenov style hand planes. We used David Fink's "Making and Mastering Wooden Planes" as a guide for making the planes. The book has an excellent description of how to cut and assemble the planes. I built a block plane which works well.
But base on my experience with cutting, clamping and aligning all of the parts I looked for an alternate method to built this style of plane. I have developed what I think is a simplified method which uses only 2 pieces of material to assemble the plane body.
Below is a picture of a finished smoothing plane with 50 deg. bed angle.
Picture of mouth.
The process is based on using a pair of mirror image jigs and a router to rout out the inside of the plane. Picture of the jig is shown below:
The jig was made from scrap poplar. To make the jig you cut block with the desired plane bed angle and glue the edge of the block to another board which will eventually become the fence for the jig. I then cut another block with a curved profile and glued it in line with the first block. The distance between the blocks is adjusted to give the appropiate gap between the bed of the plane the leading edge of the plane iron. Gap depends on router bit size and guide bushing combination. Once the glue has dried carefully cut the jig in half on a band saw to produce a perfectly matched pair of templates.
To produce the plane above I clamped the templates to a 2" X 4" X 10" piece of Ipe and routed out a section that is slightly deeper than 1/2 of the plane iron width. Once the two halves are routed I use a flat surface such as a table saw or jointer and carefully line up the two halves to ensure that the bed is lined up, clamp and drill a single dowl alignment hole at each end.
Once the two halves are produced, fitting of the cross pin, plane iron to the mouth and wedge are the same as the standard Krenov design described in Fink's book.
I have made patterns for planes with 35, 45 and 50 degree bed angles. The 35 degree is for a low angle, bevel down block plane which works well on end grain.