Infill as Metaphor, or another folly depicted

So, on with the show. The object in question is an ordinary curve-sided and handled Spiers infill in need of what I believe the British call "attention". It came with the top deck detached and sported a short nub of a handle remnant. The handle was broken an inch or two up from the bottom -- a common site of fracture. The larger part of the handle had been lost to antiquity.

I chiseled and pried out the handle tenon and nub and then thought to start taking pictures for posterity.

What you see here is the general configuration of most infills...at least those that I've opened. To be clear: the mortise or slot you see in the body of the lower rear infill was cut by a Scot , perhaps Spiers himself, not me. That is to say, the back infill is a three piece assembly fitted together, glued and then pinned with 1/4 inch mild steel rods in two places. The rear pin you see here. The other pin lies about mid-body.

Lots of choices are available in how to go about attaching a new handle. One fellow on the WWW recommends doing it with the upper bed/deck and pin undisturbed. In that case the tenon of the new handle has to branch around the pin. I think it makes for a pretty dubious fit, but I've tried this once or twice for infills with top decks firmly in place. I don't like the process and doubt I'll do it again.

So for this plane, I removed the pin using a thin 1" diameter cut off blade in a Dremel like grinder and pried both ends out from the middle. Breaking the peened rod ends out of the side walls takes a bit more effort than you might imagine. Other times I've drilled and punched them out before tackling the handle remnant and upper deck. As I say, there are lots of ways for the adventuresome fellow to address the various details.

The new handle blank itself comes from a 5/4 piece of East Indian Rosewood. The board is about 6" by 4 feet. I scored this a couple years ago and don't take pieces from it often. It is reserved for what you're seeing here. It was flat sawn and the grain runs anterior-posterior like all conventional handles. Given how the blank looks here, the final appearance of this piece may surprise you later.

I've done this initial cutting-out before using coping saws and powered jig saws. I don't want to do it that way anymore. This summer I splurged and went out and bought a $100 band saw.



To atone for the band saw sin, I decided to knock the edges off with a gouge and lignum mallet I bought when I was 17...40 years ago! It is unchanged. I wish I could say the same.

This is hard wood and if the gouge isn't up to it, this is a poor technique. I don't carve much and enjoy playing around so that's what I use here.

I imagine many would look at the blank and think of a router and round-over bit. I don't like the noise, bother or process. It won't by itself give you what you want anyway.

The trick, if there is one, to doing this is to have sawn the blank not to small and not too big, and then to whack out stuff with the gouge, but not too much and not too little. Clear enough?


My next step was the #49 Nicholson wood rasp...connected to the blond handle in the background. Lying just beyond it is an finer toothed unhandled #50.

This is very pleasant work and goes quite fast. At least that's so if the rasps are being used to smooth a nicely chiseled shape rather than remove large bulk.

What you see here is the product of the #49 and the half round wood file in the foreground.


Here's more of the same a little further along. Two of the Norris brothers showed up there in the background to keep an eye on what was happening.


Of course, throughout this wood sculpting process you'd be fondling the handle, getting the curves right, adjusting the feel.

At this point I was happy with everything about the fit in my hand. Sadly, once assembled the top of the handle sat about 3/8" too high for the blade to seat against the bed. About half the wood under my index finger had to be removed. You may or may not notice that in the later pictures.


So here I've followed up with a little coarse sandpaper and then the maroon pad.

I had used this other handle to trace out the pattern for this one. I would have used it in the first place for this plane, but some fool got into the basement sometime in the last year and took the thickness from 5/4 to about 1". The mortise width on this plane is close to 1.1". Yes, it could have been shimmed. I just didn't want to stoop to a shim fix. Whim.

So, at this point in the story I go off camera and I take out the pin, trim and fit the tenon and mess around a lot getting the deck to seat firmly and tightly. This entails getting the rust and grunge off the to-be-covered-up steel edges. Fitting the mouth/lips of the mortise around the inner curve of the lower part of the handle is not an easy matter. There's a shot latter of how this turned out. For now let's just glue it up.

Pretty familiar sight, eh? Yes, it's dried and spongy Gorilla Glue oozings after an over-night clamp-up. I overdid glue volume in the mortise cavity and it's nice to see the excess got out along the sides of the handle and through the hole that the rear pin had occupied.

I need to point out that the orange pictures like this one are taken without the camera flash.


By using the camera flash, as I have here, the colors are rendered much cooler, as in more blue. It's true that if I were a less imperfect person, I would pick one...flash or no flash... and remain consistent. Hobgoblins. Little minds. You know the line.

This picture reminds me to mention that it's relatively important to line the planes of the upper bed with the lower bed. And then try to secure this alignment with a couple of clamps.

This is also a good picture to get a better sense of the look and patina of old brass: the lever and screw. I never, never disturb the brass. It sickens me to see polished lever caps on these old men (he says, oblivious to the destruction and carnage he perpetrates elsewhere). At this point the original wood finish is still intact more or less, and I call your attention to the slight orange tint compared with the nearly purplish brown of my replacement wood. Aesthetically, I don't care much for wood finish and tend to leave tool woods to the patina of sweat, grime and skin oils. Odd sensibilities wouldn't you say?


Here's an even better view of the handle's coloring. I hope you see kind of a mallard green and purple along with the reddish brown. In fact the green and purple are more striking in real life. It's a very beautiful but subtle wood.

The original wood on these old Spiers is quite dark and extremely aromatic when you cut it. Intoxicating actually.


Someone must want to see the other side.

Let me call your attention to the steel side plates. This one shows rather conspicuous pitting. In fact, I've done a fair amount of rust removal and filing on this side up to this point...just not as much as the other side.

Intermixed throughout this whole process I'd have my way with the steel and pits and rust whenever my hormones and tensions seemed to need a little release. That is to say, my approach is non-linear, disorganized, whimsically iterative...in a word organic.


The dried glue came off very easily via the peel, scrape and cut method. Then a little hand sanding and delicate needle filing in the crevices and here we are. Really just a pleasant half hour job that I strung out for longer.

Recall the purple and green tints. They're gone only because a bulb above the bench was my only light source here.

By the way, that's foamy glue in the pin hole, which still needs to be drilled through, filled, peened and filed.

But by this time I was itching to do a little work on the sole. You can see why.

I cleaned off a 9 X 12 inch granite surface plate that I bought new from one of the machinist supply outlets...probably Enco. $20 for it and $20 for shipping....something on that order.

The bluing is traditional Dykem HiSpot . It's about the consistency of grease. I roll it out with a three-inch rubber roller brayer (printmaking section in an art store). Set the plane on the plate and giggle...er...no, sorry... jiggle it a little: Blue transfers to the high spots. The lighter blue is generally a true high spot. The darker blue around it is smear that's been pushed off a high spot. If you were scraping, you'd try just to slice off the light spots. I can tell you that from eyeball estimates of this sole with a straightedge and light, that the distance between high and low is probably on the order of 0.002". Not huge by any means. I guess the guys who don't worry much about flat soles wouldn't go further. But I've used this plane and think it could do a lot better with some sole work. I'm not working on this sole because of appearance.


After about 30 minutes of heavy filing and spotting, this is where I end up. Primarily my goal up to this point is simply to get to a rough stage where 1) most of the width just in front of the mouth, 2) a far forward toe mark and 3) a far backward part of the heel are in the same plane...that is, that they spot blue. Nothing beautiful, symmetrical or particularly uniform.


I took about a dozen photos of the stages that the blued sole went through but decided not to put them up. The changes are subtle and belie the large amount of metal removed. I'll confess that I then cleaned off my granite surface plate and put down a 9 X 12 sheet of 120 grit SiC dry-wall screen. I was very gentle in taking 10 or 20 passes. As always, when I rechecked the result of that kind of extra effort, both by straightedge and by spotting, I had severely degraded the flatness and was well on my way to replacing the formerly flat surface with a dome. Evidently I cannot learn from experience. Ashamed, I backtracked and spent another hour or two correcting the damage I'd produced in less than two minutes with the abrasive sheet.


Eventually I was tired of metal work and wanted some woodwork. I went over the flattened sole with a flat carborundum stone for a minute or two in order to smooth up some of the file lines and put the still less than flat plane to wood.

This is mahogany with mostly straight grain. While the shavings are a bit thick at this point, I was gratified to see evidence of flatness in the width and length of the shavings.


I took a break and came back to put in the pin. The Spiers man had drilled this hole about 5 or 10 degrees off perpendicular to the long axis of the plane. I wanted a line from one hole to the other and the easiest way to do it for me was to use the lathe. The drill goes in one hole and a center mounted in the tail stock goes in the other hole. The plane isn't clamped. I run the lathe slowly, hold the plane in my left hand and turn the tail stock screw with my right. Done in less time than it takes to describe it.


The original pin had a 0.235 diameter. My replacement piece of 1/4 rod was 0.265. The hole I drilled on the lathe was nominally 0.25. I stuck the rod in the lathe, turned off 0.030 and put a tiny dip in each end of the rod and cut it to length. Yawn. Better think about getting yourself a metal lathe. No?

You can just make out the new pin setting In the hole. In the vice is an old throw-away lathe center. I'm just experimenting with the divots and the center to hold the plane still while I'm peening. Put the lower pin divot on the center and start peening the upper one. I've done this (replacing pins) enough times to have learned that leaving the pin too long is poor form. Too short is even worse. There's an optimal length. I never manage to find it. Today I was sweating it that I could fill the two counter sinks.


Here's the proof it turned out okay. It is extremely pleasant to see the pin disappear as you file it down. It always looks like it won't somehow. Different steel or whatever. Yet it always disappears in the end.


I've nearly run out of tasks. But we do need to get back to the sole. I haven't tried out this cast iron lapping plate for a year or two. It weighs 30 or 40 pounds. There are probably lots of them lying around dormant in old machine shops. Beat the bushes. Resurrect one yourself. Unused, they are very sad and lonely.

In the jar I have some medium grit SiC I bought in a local rock hound shop. Nothing special about it. I sprinkled it out and squirt out a little 3-in-1 oil. Just experimenting. I've used kerosene, mineral oil, paraffin lamp oil, paint thinner. Functionally it doesn't seem to matter too much. One will seem too thin. The other will seem too viscous. After a few minutes of this kind of lapping, I clean off all the grit and oil and re-spot the sole on the granite plate. I decided this was good enough.


The loose grit left a fairly coarse surface so I polished it down a little by sequentially wrapping wet-dry paper of 400, 800 and 1500 grit around a 1-2-3 block. These are pretty cheap in import quality and have advertised flatness tolerances around 0.0005. This shined things up fine. I just didn't clean off the oil slurry for this photo.


So now to unltimate �smoother� function.

I guess you'll have to take my word for it that these are fine and consistent smoother shavings. They require little effort. At this point, for me, it's mostly tactile and kinesthetic....the feel...the quality and consistency of the vibration in the context of movement . For me, these sensations correlate with what I'll later see and feel of the wood surface.


So now that the rehab project more or less turned out okay, I've gone back and done a bit more cosmetic work both on the steel and the handle. There is a thin line in this silk purse sow's ear business. I don't want to wind up with a Gloria Swanson.

The handle still hasn't received any kind of applied finish. It darkened dramatically by hand sanding. Yes, same paper: 400, 800 and 1500 using a little 3-in-1 oil as lubricant.


Not bad, eh?




Oh, by now someone is probably dying to point out the long spur and it's vulnerability. I agree completely. In part this is the result of having to trim height to get the handle under the blade. Like an optical illusion. Still, the spur is too ostentatious, and certainly will get whacked if dropped. But for now I'm planning to leave it to the gods or someone else.


Hopefully, a few of you enjoyed this pictorial of reconditioning, refurbishment, rehabilitation, rejuvenation, renewal, repair, restoration, renovation. I don't know what to call it.