Wooden Scrub Plane - Part 1

This will be mostly a pictorial essay.

A few months ago at an estate sale, I picked up what appeared to be some kind of homemade plane blade and I thought that I'd make a plane body for it.  Eventually I decided on a scrub plane.

1 1/2" wide and just under 7/32" thick

The iron had been thicker and shaped somewhat like a banana, but I worked on it with a hand-cranked grinder, a Dremel tool and diamond stones to get it reasonably flat.  The other day I drew up a plan and found some scrap wood for the plane body.  The available wood determined the overall length of the plane.

A rough plan - some numbers changed after this pic was taken

This plane body will be made with a two-piece construction.  The shaping of the throat is done on each half and the two are glued together - you just have to be very precise about the glue-up so that the bed surfaces line up right.

This unknown species wood came from a table that was being thrown out.
It's very dense and heavy.  Each piece is 1 1/16" thick.

The two pieces mated and the top initial layout done

After transferring the lines to the inside faces, I cut the recess for the wedge and iron using a 90° block and a small saw.

Cutting the deeper recess ...

... and leveling the bottom with a router

Didn't get the sawing perfect, so using a chisel with the 90° block to clean up

Repeat with the breast line (front of throat), but not as deep

... and the two halves look like this

And when they're mated, it's starting to look like something

There's more material to be removed in the throat and it's more saw and chisel work.

This saw cut is as deep as the wedge/iron recess at top of throat,
but drops to zero depth at bottom

After chiseling out the extra material it looks like this

There's a little piece at the bottom of the wedge abutment that needs to be relieved and this was done with a chisel.

Pointing to bottom of abutment - that needs to be angled towards the cheek

Here it is after angling those two triangles

This view shows that bit a little better

Two more things before glue-up.  First, add the "eyes" that make if more comfortable for fingers to pull shavings from the throat.  Second, make sure the iron fits OK.

These are the "eyes"

This was more side-to-side room than I wanted, so I planed about 1/32" off
an inside face of one of the body halves.

Glue-up: extra clamps were used to try to keep the two pieces' bed surfaces aligned

Next time I'll write about the iron, the tote, and (hopefully) finishing up the plane.