Last week I spent a number of evenings sitting at the kitchen table drawing cross sections for each pair of hollow and round planes which make up a traditional half set of planes. I have made a number of hollow and round planes previously. But because I was basing each individual pair on an example from my collection of planes, the planes I built didn't look like they belonged in the same set. So I felt the need to step back and draw a set of planes in cross section to work out what I wanted a set to look like.. To start with I down loaded a page from the Sandusky Company catalog which showed a number of their h&r planes in cross section. I increased the size of the pdf until the outline of each plane's height equalled 3 1/2 inches. With that dimension established I was able to use a six inch ruler to measure all the other dimensions of each plane directly off my computer screen. Two interesting facts resulted from this all this repetitive drawing. The first is that if my scaling is correct, Sandusky planes are on average an 1/8th inch thicker in width than those of many other historic manufacturers. In my collection I only have a few hollow and round planes produced by Sandusky. These few fitted well with in the penciled cross sections I had drawn. Most of my other planes were definately thinner in the body by about an 1/8th. The second interesting point concerned the bevel cut on the outside face of a hollow and round plane. The vertical height of the bevel when viewed from the side is usually 1 inch on most other manufacturer's profiles. Every Sandusky plane I measured had a bevel 3/4 inches high. One thing I discovered by doing the drawings of a complete set is that given a consistant height of bevel across planes of varying widths, the angles of the bevel of each pair of planes is different for each pair of planes. This was a surprise. In the past, I have cut the bevel on a batch of different width planes at one set angle, thinking that this was the proper thing to do. Live and learn.

The other thing I did this week end was to sit down with a note book in the shop and start writting out a production plan, detailing every step involved in creating a plane. The purpose of all this work is to record the machine settings for each set-up for each step. To test my mental step by step plan, I ran a test pair of planes through the plane-making process. A lot of little things I do without thinking had to be added to the draft work plan. I started to think that maybe this might make an article.....Who knows.

In the past, I have cut the angled sides of the plane's bed and throat using a tenon saw and an angled guide block to keep the saw on line and perpendicular. Becuse I want to cut all the bed and throat angles for each pair of planes at the same time, for uniformity, I worked out a table-saw set up which allows me to make these cuts while only having to reset the angle of a miter-fence twice.

.