My version of a round plane.
Skip in Falls Church
>The HOA in the neighborhood that we live in tends to be a bit fanatical. One of the requirements is that the boards on both sides of the front door be a particular style. They are either 1x6 s with four 3/4 inch diameter grooves (flutes?) or a similar vinyl product. The vinyl pieces are about $80 each and wooden parts don't seem to be available locally. (The townhouses in the area were built 30 years ago so that isn't too surprising.)
In any case we received a notice that we had to repair/replace one or both of ours. Spending $160 for a couple of pieces of vinyl didn't really appeal to me - neither did either paying someone to make it. Buying and putting a molding head cutter on my cheap table saw wasn't terribly appealing either. After some thought, I decided to make a plane to reproduce the molding - sort of in the Krenov style. Since the grooves were 3/4" diameter, I took a birch dowel and put it in one of the grooves and marked the depth on it. Then I cut it, smoothed it and glued it to the bottom of piece of maple 1x4. I ripped a couple of pieces of 1x4 maple to 3/8" to use for the cheeks. I then set up the body of the plane just like a Krenov plane and transferred the throat markings to the cheeks.
I then cut out the throat and laminated the three pieces together with the bottom of the cheeks even with the top of the dowel. This ensured that the depth of cut would be exactly the same as on the original pieces. I decided to add a fence so I could get all the grooves evenly spaced and straight. I used �" oak dowels and some scrap red oak I had around. The final question - what to use as an iron? A2? O1? HSS? An old stainless steel blade from a chefs knife? I picked the blade from the chefs knife even though it was only 1/8" thick. J I used the piece I cut from the mouth to get the correct shape on the blade and refined it a bit after I got it in the plane.
So how did it all work? Well, with the thin blade, there was a lot of chatter. Also, since I wasn't sure what I'd use for a blade - the mouth was a bit wider than it should have been. Were I to use this plane more than once every 30 years, I'd probably buy a replacement rabbet blade from Lee Valley like the one mentioned in a thread a few days ago. I'm sure that would close up the mouth and reduce the chatter a bit. While I got the mouth geometry fairly close, the throat geometry was far too small and resulted in a lot of throat clogging. In my quest to get the wedge as close to the blade as I could to reduce chatter, I set the pin a little too low and bottom of the wedge closed the throat up a bit too much. I can probably alleviate that by reworking the bottom of the wedge a bit but I suspect it won't come close to curing it. However, the plane did the job and I have two boards that meet the HOA requirements. It was a fun learning experience regardless.
I'm going to try to include some pictures - but I've never done this before so don't be surprised if they don't turn out. I'm afraid the pictures are not of very good quality in any case.
Skip
