Boutique hand-plane iron holder...
Greg Sloop, Portland Oregon
>Well, probably, the less gracious of you would use some other term than "boutique." You know who you are. Bite your tongue. It's the best I could come up with on short notice.
I thought some of you, who have taken the "avant-garde" low-bedding-angle bevel-up, multi iron approach might find this interesting, though certainly not of any earthshaking import. (If you've come up with something a lot better, I'd be glad to hear about it. Here's what I produced with a minimum of five minutes of thought.)
I find that as I've accumulated more and more irons - two for my LN 60.5 (25, and 40 degrees) and currently four between my LV 62.5 and LV heavy smoother (25, 37, 53 x2) and a handful of scrapers - that I really need a place to put them all that holds them in a reasonable way.
I don't want them stowed in a tool box, because that won't really work when I sharpen them, as I wouldn't be near the box and I'd prefer something more mobile, and less heavy and less of a hassle. A box in my shop would simply accumulate a vast array of items on top of it and be completely inaccessible. Thus, for me, the box idea is really out.
Storing them loose is even worse. I haven't yet managed to cut off a toe, but I was sure that was coming, so I had to come up with something.
I'm sure this will horrify Adam, but since I had pieces of MDF around, and spare electrons, I decided to cut some blanks on the TS.
The one on the far right was done some time ago, and fit the bevy of irons for my LN 62 - which if you haven't heard the story, I sold on the Bay for enough to get the LV 62.5 and some extra irons. I'm still waiting for LV to make some toothed blades for the bevel up series, but I'll be adding one of those too when they come around. I had one for the LN 62 and it was very handy at times. I probably want one or two more irons for the planes I've got now, but I'm pretty happy currently - more a minor want than a need.
The LV irons are thicker than the LN ones. I can't recall exactly how thick the grooves in the first one are, but the new ones are pretty perfect. Here's how I did them.
I have a Incra fence system on the table-saw, and it makes cranking these out pretty easy.
The spacing between them should be around one inch for my taste. (I did the first few grooves with .75" spacing, and that's too narrow.) Closer is fine for the hand scrapers.
Start at one inch in. I just use the 1/8" TS blade and two passes. Run the first one, move over 3/32" and run a second. Now move to two inches, and repeat as many times as wanted. (Ok, so I know the space between the irons is less than 1 inch, but it's still better than 0.75 was ok!?)
I made my scraps three inches wide and around 8 inches long, though for the hand scrapers, 4-5 inches would be better. Three is just fine for plane irons.
You'll probably note on the close up below that the first four grooves are at .75" and the last four are at 1" - that was not an error, it was a design feature. (Kind of like spyware for Windows - Bill intended it that way. Didntcha' know? It's called the "Unless-churn-computer-consultant-full-employment feature." But I digress...)
Once the dust cleared out of my lungs I was able to get these pictures.(No planes, or plane irons were injured in the making of this post.)
Well, that's probably it for me for a while. Have a good Fourth all.
Cheers,
Greg