First home made tools
People have been making their own tools for a long time, but the economies of scale brought about by the industrial revolution took a big bite out of this. It just got easier to buy a plane from Stanley or Millers Falls than to either build one yourself or go the local guy who made wooden planes. But there have always been people who made their own tools for the simple reason that there wasn’t something on the market that did just what they wanted. There have always been people who liked customizing their tools to fit their particular needs, or who liked how they fit their hands, or who just liked to make a thing of beauty.
I wanted a steeper angle plane that could tackle gnarly grain. The standard “York pitch” plane has the plane iron intersecting the wood at a 50 degree angle. This works fine for most woods, but when you have curly and reversing grain, the plane blade tends to pry up chunks of wood. This is called “tear out” and it leaves woodworkers angry and tearful. The steeper your blade pitch, the less tear out you have. HNT Gordon, from Australia, has a line of wooden planes with the irons bedded at 60 degrees to deal with the wild grained woods that are common in his country. I wanted to try out making one myself.
So, the hardest wood I could find locally was called Tesota, or Desert Ironwood. As I found out after having bought a chunk of it, it’s native to the Sonoran desert only and is becoming endangered because of people using it as a carving wood and it makes great charcoal. It also grows painfully slowly, as do most things in the desert. Well, damn, too late now. It was hard as a rock and tended to shatter if not treated carefully.
My first attempt I didn’t get the mouth of the plane quite right, so I added on a 1/4″ sole of maple and got it right the second time. This essentially defeats the purpose of having a super hard wood, but I liked how it looked, and it was my first plane so I chalked it up to experience. The wedge is made of birdseye maple. It didn’t work too well until I put the slightest crown (probably a few thousandths of an inch) on the blade, now it cuts like a dream.
The second tool is a spokeshave from a kit. I used cherry with an interesting curly grain for the body. The wood doesn’t matter too much for this spokeshave since there’s a brass wear plate let into the base of the plane that takes the abuse of running across wooden surfaces. You still want a good hard wood so that the screw adjusters have strong, solid wood to hold onto, and hardwoods just take a shine so nicely. I’m very happy with how it turned out. It cuts wonderfully.
