Insert

Work on the Alan Peter's music stool is continuing quite well. I'd come to the point over the Easter weekend where it was time for the seat to be dished and if you an avid follower of this sad misive, you'll probably remember that just before Christmas I found a decent 21/4" woodie in Penny Farthing Tools which hadn't had the life beaten out of it with a hammer and seemed in fairly decent condition.

This was going to be turned into a convex soled plane so that I could make the concave profile in the seat. I began by making taking some rough shavings from the sole using an existing woodie, after which it was planed to the exact profile with my LA LV jack and then sanded in to shape. The cutter was then poked through the mouth and the curve drawn in with a pencil, after which I set up my copy of David Charlesworth's excellent curve grinding jig, for use with the Tormek. This can normally be a bit 'by guess and by God' but I seemed to get the profile just right...somewhat of a change! The chipbreaker then needed a little bit of careful fettling to bring in to shape to match the curve on the iron.

The big problem then is that the mouth on the plane is no longer square, owing to the curvature both of the sole and the blade, so it needs to be re-mouthed. Routing out the shallow mortise for the insert wasn't too difficult...fitting the insert (complete with sliding screws for adjustment) proved to be a little more time consuming, especially the final few shavings to bring the mouth to around 1mm or so, which is adequate for this sort of plane.

Then came the fun part...making those curly shavings!




















It actually performed better than I'd anticipated...that little pile of shavings took about 15 minutes to make and brought me down to within .5mm of the line...so not a bad little Christmas present to myself!