Wooden Jack Mouth Repair

I have this old 16" woody that came along with a few other things in an auction lot.  I wrote about it back in April of 2020.  It has no maker's mark and I don't know if it was user-made or if it was a production plane.  But it was made from a beautifully quartersawn piece of beech, bark-side down.  The double iron is from Auburn Tool and there is hardly any useable iron left.

Unknown maker wooden jack

There are some cracks in the body that someone filled at some point.
But the body seems stable.

Here's the main thing I'm addressing today - a huge mouth

The mega-mouth wouldn't be a problem if I wanted to use this as a scrub plane.  But I thought I'd close up the mouth and use it as a try plane or a shooting plane.   I couldn't find any scraps of beech, so I used a piece of hard maple that's been in the shop for several years.

I cut out a piece the width of the mouth and shaped it into a pentagon.
Just guessing at the shape here - nothing guiding me other than old pics I've seen.

Lightly knifed a line around the patch

Then chopped and later routed the recess to about 5/16" depth

Got a good tight fit

It's not easy seeing what's going on in the next pic, but the camera is looking into the throat from the top of the plane, pencil pointing to the maple patch.

Bed is at left, front of throat at right.

After marking where the patch meets the front of the throat, I relieved material to make that transition less abrupt.

Then glued in the patch

And later planed it down

This shows the new tight mouth

I was very happy with this, but there was more to do.  First, the iron did not bed well when the wedge was tapped tight.

Large gap between iron and bed on left side

So I scraped the right side with a blunt chisel to remove some material ...

... and used the candle soot trick that I learned from Bob Rozaieski
to get a good mating surface after several iterations.

The next thing is that the fingers of the wedge were too long and that would enable shavings to get caught in the throat.

View from above: throat front at top of photo, right cheek under red arrow.
Yellow arrow points to the high point of the chip breaker.
Red arrow points to the overhanging end of a wedge finger.

So I trimmed the fingers shorter, and also relieved more of the ramp
to make room for the shorter fingers

Then I flattened the sole and planed the right side perfectly square to the sole.

Sole and right side square

The plane rests on its right side when used as a shooting plane

I got great results when using it as a shooting plane.  Really happy about it.  Next up: similar work on an old wooden smoother.