Specialty Planemakers File
Cameron Miller
>Here's one of my "special" dovetailing files that I've used for many years (this one is a bit worn out now but I still include it with my "traveling kit"). It's made of carbon steel but has been specially bored out to reduce heat buildup from the friction of cutting thousands of dovetails. It has 2 safe edges so it's great for roughing out the side walls of the dovetails. If the safe edges were ground at an angle - which I've done with some of my files - then it would be even better as it would allow me to get closer in to those pesky corners.
Nah, real story is that I was doing a 3 day demonstration of planemaking at a major woodworking show here in Australia way back in 1994. At another stand in front of me and to the right there was a company selling specialized drill bits that would drill through just about any high carbon steel you could throw at them. They were drilling everything from car pistons to files, rasps and even other drill bits. I even brought in an old HSS planer blade from home so that I could be sure that this mob weren't faking anything. They weren't! It was most impressive!
Anyway, at the end of the 3 days the guys at this stand had, well basically, all of this scrap metal. I noticed that many of the files had "untouched" faces for 3/16" or 1/4" inwards of the file - enough for, say, doing the dovetails on planes for instance? I asked one of the guys what he was going to do with the files and he said he was going to trash them, then looked at me and saw what I was already thinking. Anyhow, I walked away with a bunch of these "Swiss cheese" files and the guys were pretty happy that they wouldn't be wasted.
The files worked flawlessly for dovetailing - I mean why not? they were brand new and of high quality (no Chinese cheapies here.) By far the BEST thing though is the looks on people's faces when they see them at one of the shows. They don't quite seem to understand just why the files are the way they are.
Of course I always start my answer off "Well, the holes are there to reduce the friction......." :-)
Now with the little planes in the picture...
The smaller one on the left is the first dovetailed plane I ever made, which was done about a dozen years ago now. I'd made woodies for several years prior to that but I was always put off with the idea of dovetailing a plane. I thought it was too hard to do and beyond my scope. I was basically crippled before I'd even started with that way of thinking!
One day though I just thought "Stuff it! I'll give it a try" and this was my first result. The mouth is waaaaaay too big but that's about the only thing I wasn't too happy with. I used it as a "mini scrub" plane though and it worked fine. This one's made from brass sides and has a steel sole. The infill is African blackwood and I can't remember where the blade came from?
The plane on the right is also dovetailed but is entirely out of brass. The infill is Indian rosewood and the bed is lower, with the blade bevel uppermost. The blade is a HSS planer blade (from memory). This plane has a finer mouth and I used it primarily to clean up the endgrain and inlay veneer on a children's book I was making at the time - a picture book where half of each picture was wood. With the metal being all the same it's difficult to see the dovetails at first glance.
The wood base is just a laminated "blank" block of Brazilian mahogany left over from my guitar making days. That's a different story though....