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The English perfected what is known as the infill plane. It is a plane (any length, any bedding angle) that is made of a metal shell with a wood insert at the toe and the heel. They are typically made with a mouth that is a few thou wide. The advantage is purported to be that they are very heavy and therefor easier to get through the wood, but tell that to the guy who uses wood bodied planes that weight 1/2 of what these guys weigh. I have used several and own one, but don't see the advantage as much as an acolyte does. They are simply gorgeous though. There are a lot of people who make these for sale ($500 - $10,000 or so), and even pre-cut kits, but the grandaddy of them all is Bill Carter:

http://www.billcarterwoodworkingplanemaker.co.uk

If you have a spare hour, this is a remarkable site. He even has a 30 part youtube series on making one of these, something that has been on my bucket list for a long time.

He is full of cool woodworking techniques throughout that series. and all of his videos, but here is one that we can all use once in a while, the Blunt Chisel Technique (said with an English accent):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re_bp5Lp0To

I remember to use it only once in a while - I should hang a reminder in my chisel cabinet. I have a shallow gouge and 3/4" chisel set up - takes just a minute and works with any $2 flea market chisel.

Ed

The second link was wrong when I posted - been corrected.

Ed

Blunt chisel-slick! Didn’t know about this. Thanks

Very cool! Not dull, but sharpened at a 90 degree angle so it functions as a scraper when pushed forward.

Blunt chisel - AKA using chisels like scrapers. Very cool trick, I had not seen this one before. Now I need a few more chisels and gouges, I can see where this could be very useful.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

The blunt chisel is cool, thanks for posting I did not know this. That is how I sharpen the StewMac Ultimate Scraper; as mentioned above the chisel with the right angle acts like a scraper but with a useful handle attached.

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http://www.Harvestmoonguitars.com

Thanks for sharing that!

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Jim Watts
http://jameswattsguitars.com

Here's another supplier of infill planes & kits. He offers mechanical Norris style adjusters too.

http://www.traditional-handplanes.com/

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I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

Wow, that’s really cool. I’ve never seen that before. He says it works on steel too with regular wood chisel hardness; can that be true?

I wonder how many other tips are out there that I have missed.

Years ago, when I was first getting in to woodworking, I was talking to an old family friend. He had been a pattern maker by trade. He was getting pretty old and his mind was slipping. I mentioned that I wanted to get a cabinet scraper and learn to use it. He told me not to bother. He said any time they needed a scaper, they would grind the teeth and edge off a worn out file. Thinking he was talking about scraping glue or paint, I said something like “No I mean like thin tool steel that you can turn a burr on and flex while you scrape.” He said I didn’t want flexible and I didn’t need a burr, just grind a file. I didn’t think much about it and had all but forgotten the conversation.

Years later, I used the Stew Mac Carruth scraper for the first time. That conversation came flooding back. This is exactly what he was describing to me. The men in his shop peobably did this regularly for specific curves they wanted. Had I paid more attention, I could have been doing this all along. Sadly, he had long since past. I wish I had spent some time with him in his basement shop before he had to give it up.

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

A friend just finished these in January. He is an amateur and does not sell anything, and he likes to set up mini-production lines to build multiples. He has 5 identical planes he did in brass and ebony that are killer, and a few dozen total that he has finished:

http://billwebber.galootcentral.com/1902-028.JPG

Some of these are steel bottom and brass sides, and some are all steel. and the woods are Cocobola and Honduras Rosewood.

Ed

Vy nice planes!

I keep waiting for Alan Caruth to chime in. No doubt the blunt chisel came first. But anybody using a Caruth scraper should have quickly noticed the sharpening technique

very helpful. Thanks

Hi Ed,
Thanks for the links. Your friend's planes look like some of the nicest modern infills I have seen. It seems like many of the kits on offer cost as much or more than the old infills that are still quite usable. The infills don't have the adjustability(fixed frog) of the Bailey planes but work quite well for what they are set up for. I like the added weight, but ironically also like using wood bodied planes.
I have been thinking of transmogrifying an incomplete Bailey #6 into an infill style plane (leaving the throat a bit more open than the smoothers have). Thinking is as far as I've gotten - it's on the list.
I will have to grind a couple of my flea market "finds" into "blunt chisels" and see how they work for me. Always nice to learn something new.