Wooden Smoother(s) Tune-up

Over the years I've acquired a couple of wooden smoothing planes.  The first is a coffin smoother by J. Pierce with a Chapin-Stephens iron (more info on this plane here).  The second, a German-style plane sold by vom Cleff & Co., has a Peugeot Freres iron (more info here).

The two smoothers

Both planes had wide-open mouths, a little over 1/8".  After having success closing the mouth of the jack plane (last week's blog entry), I thought I'd fix these up.  First up is the J. Pierce plane.

That open mouth doesn't help with smooth planing

Cut and shaped the patch, traced its shape with a knife, ...

... then chopped out the recess and glued in the patch

One complication here was that the recess wasn't wide enough for the router plane to remove wood in the center of the recess.  So I leveled the recess floor at right and left sides with the router and used a chisel freehand for the middle, checking the depth as I went.  It all went smoothly and I got a mouth opening about 1/32".

Small slit of light is the opening

... and right away I was getting nice shavings

But there was a problem and more work to do.  Even though the plane seemed to be working OK, I could easily fit a feeler gauge (forgot what size) through the mouth, up between the iron and the bed.  It took ump-teen iterations (way too many) of scraping the bed and checking the fit to get rid of the gap.  But finally between the feeler gauge method and the candle soot method, I finally got a good fit.

One thing that I hadn't checked initially was the wedge.  It turned out that the underside of the wedge was not close to flat.  So I planed a few shavings off it and that probably saved me several iterations of the scrape-and-check method.

Big hump in the middle of the wedge's underside

Finally, I flattened the plane's sole.  I had done this before, but I was surprised how out-of-flat it was when the iron was installed.  It really does flex the body when the wedge is tightened on the iron.

Marked the sole in pencil, then (with iron retracted a bit)
used sandpaper on glass to flatten the sole

It's really easy to create a side-to-side belly on the sole when lapping on sandpaper.  I ended up planing a (very) slight hollow, then just a few strokes on the sandpaper got it flat.

The German smoother had a similarly large mouth.

The German smoother

Mouth a little over 1/8" wide

One difference with this one: after shaping the patch, with the iron in normal position,
I butted the patch's longest edge against the iron's cutting edge (to give front-back positioning)
before knifing the outline.  This gave a good fit with very little trimming needed.

After glue-up and clean-up, got a very tight mouth: between 1/64" and 1/32"

This plane also had other issues that needed fixing.  First, the wedge's fingers were too long, which could lead to shavings getting stuck and clogging the throat.

Arrow shows where the finger overhangs the cap-iron.
The pencil lines on the finger show where the cap iron starts to curve
and that's were they need to be trimmed.

Trimming the wedge fingers

Reshaping done on the finger at right

When I had initially rehabbed this plane, I put a fairly large back-bevel on the flat side.  I wish I hadn't done that and had flattened it properly at the time.

Huge back-bevel on the flat side of the iron.
I used to use the block at the right to lift the back end of the iron
when honing the back (a different kind of "ruler" trick).

I ended up grinding back the iron's cutting edge and then regrinding the bevel.
Now I can use a 0.010" thick plastic shim as the "ruler".

And here are the two soles

Holy mackerel - these two planes really cut nicely now!  Especially the vom Cleff plane.  I can get shavings in the 0.0005" thickness range and a beautiful surface finish.

And as long as I was at it, I looked at a couple of smoothers I made a few years ago.  One of them just has a single iron and I've always gotten chatter when using it.  After getting the iron to mate much better with the bed, there's no longer any chatter.  Wow - the devil is in the details.  It really pays to tune up those wooden planes!