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Category Archives: tools

Violin-making planes

At the beginning of the year, in their Tools and Shops issue, Fine Woodworking included a short piece about some violin-making planes that I had made. Since then, several people have asked about them, and how they are constructed. A recent request prompted me into writing down some instructions and, in the hope that they might be useful to others, I’m going to post them here.

A few of these planes are shown below with a Record No 4 in the background to give a sense of scale.

Side view

Three quarters view

Close up view of wedge

I’ve used a variety of hardwoods: box, cherry, elder, hornbeam and beech and made a variety of shapes and sizes for different tasks. The longer plane lying on its side in the foreground is for shaping violin cornerblocks, for example, while most of the others are for the final stages of arching the top and bottom. Some of these have flat soles for planing flat or convex surfaces; others are gently rounded both across and along the sole and are used for refining concave areas of the arching.

The design is extremely simple as from the photographs of this little plane, made of elder, show: just a body, a wedge and a blade. It’s quite possible to make a plane like this from a solid block of wood simply by chiseling out the required shape. But I’ve found that it’s easier and quicker to adapt the method James Krenov describes in his book ‘The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking’ for making much larger planes. Essentially, the idea is that you saw two slices off the block to make the sides of the plane, shape the bed and throat from the middle section, and then glue it back together.

Here’s an attempt at step by step instructions.

1. Find a suitable blade, around 0.5 inch inches in width and 2 to 2.5 inches long. It’s possible to make one out of an old chisel blade. Another idea is to use a blade that once was part of the set that accompanied a combination or plough plane (these sometimes turn up in second hand tool shops having parted company from the original tool). Or you can buy a new blade from a supplier of Ibex or Herdim violin planes.

2. Now you need a small block of wood, preferably sawn on the quarter. Box, holly, elder, hornbeam, fruit woods and beech are all good. Plane all sides accurately square, though you need not worry about the endgrain faces (diagram, step 1). Then saw it into a sandwich (diagram, step 2) making sure that the layer in the middle (the filling of the sandwich, as it were) is a little wider than the blade you have chosen. Plane the sawn surfaces, keeping them square so that you will later be able to glue the sandwich back together without visible glue lines. The final width of the filling of the sandwich needs to be just a whisker greater than the blade.

Diagram of steps in making a finger plane

3. Saw the central section (the sandwich filling) across at 45° and 85° to make the mouth and throat of the plane (diagram, step 3). Keep the wedge-shaped waste piece because it will be useful later. File the 45° surface smooth, flat and square.

4. Glue the sandwich back together, adjusting the distance between the two filling pieces to give a tight mouth (diagram, step 4). Clamp up and allow plenty of time for the glue to cure.

5. Clean up.

6. Try the blade in position. You will probably need to plane something off the sole so that the mouth is just wide enough for the blade to peep out. Bear in mind that if the sole of the plane is going to be curved, the width of the mouth will initially be wider at the sides of the blade and you’ll eventually need to adjust the mouth to an even width by enlarging it centrally. So keep it on the tight side for now.

7. Plane or file the sole to the desired profile. This is most easily done by holding a block plane upside down in the vice and moving the workpiece (ie the plane you’re making) over it in the same way that a cooper’s plane is used, though on a much smaller scale – see photograph.

Using a block plane in a vice

Jig for holding wedge

Jig for holding wedge while planing

8. Rough out a wedge. A simple jig like the one in the photograph makes it easier. I like to use a wood of contrasting colour and, if possible, to include a streak of sapwood. But that, of course, is just a whim and of no functional importance. Make the wedge overlength to give leeway for later fitting and leave any fancy carving of the thick end until after the fit is perfected.

9. Put the wedge and blade into position and estimate where to drill for the crossbar that will hold them in place (diagram, step 5). The position isn’t critical but, if the bar is placed too low, it may tend to obstruct shavings as they emerge into the throat. I’ve found that placing the bar about half way up the finished plane works well. Measure the combined thickness of the blade and wedge at this point. Then use a mitre gauge to draw a line on the outside of the place corresponding to the position of the bed. Scribe a second parallel line in front of it (ie towards the toe of the plane). The distance between the two lines should correspond to the combined thickness of the blade and wedge. Draw a third parallel line 1.75 mm further forward again. This is to take account of the 3.5 mm diameter of the cross pin. Half way along this line is the point to drill. While it’s good to get this point placed as accurately as possible, don’t worry too much because you’ll be able to accommodate any inaccuracy by adjusting the wedge.

10. Drill a 3.5mm diameter hole centred on the position that you’ve just marked using a drill press. Before drilling, fit the waste piece that you’ve saved tightly into the gap between the sides of the plane. This will minimise breakout.

11. Turn a short length of hardwood to a diameter of 3.5 mm. Or make it using a dowel plate. Glue into position and trim it off when the glue is dry.

12. Using a coping saw, saw out the curve of the top of the plane. Refine the curve with a knife or file.

13. Then there’s rather a lot of fiddling about to do. Thin the sides of the plane. Adjust the length. Curve the ends. Fit the wedge. File or plane the final profile of the sole and then adjust the curve of the blade and the throat of the plane until you’ve got a tool that does exactly what you want it to do.

14. Obviously, the dimensions, bed angle and other details of the plane can be altered to suit your own requirements.

I’ve no doubt that there are many better, faster, easier and more ingenious ways of making finger planes than this. If you know of them or invent them, please let me know. In a later post, I’ll try to give a bit more detail and discuss modifications and refinements. (See here.)

Small smoother

Back in February, I wrote about meeting the Canadian planemaker, Konrad Sauer, and trying out a plane that he had made. It performed so well and I liked it so much that I immediately asked him to make me one. Here’s a picture of the plane that I tried. He calls it the XS No4, which I imagine is short for extra small – although there may be another more complicated explanation. What attracted me to the plane, apart (obviously) from the fact that it worked so well, was its simplicity. No handle, no adjuster, no cap iron – just a thick blade pitched at 52.5° and a tight mouth.

xsno4quarterview.jpg

I was delighted to get an email from him a couple of days ago to say that he had started making it. And just to prove it, he attached these photographs.

For anyone interested in planes, his website (Sauer and Steiner Toolworks) is a fascinating place to visit. He also writes a blog that is well worth reading – not least for its intelligent comments on making and using hand tools. I particularly enjoyed his thoughts on dovetails written when he was in the middle of cutting a stack of them for drawers for cabinets that he was making for his own kitchen.

Back to the binding and purfling

Now that the repair that I wrote about in my last post is complete, it’s time to get back to the guitar that I’m currently making. I’ve routed the ledges for the binding and purfling to sit in – a job that I never approach without trepidation since it’s so easy to ruin weeks of work by a moment’s inattention when you’re using a tool whose cutter revolves 25,000 times a minute. Fortunately, there were no mishaps. I never much like using an electric router – nasty, noisy, top-heavy things. But the next task of preparing and bending the binding strips will be easier to enjoy.

Bracing the soundboard

The great photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, is said never to have re-arranged a scene or cropped a negative. It was, I suppose, his entirely admirable desire to show things as they actually were rather than how they might have been. Of course, being French, he dressed it up in fancy language. “Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif” was how he put it.

Why do I bore you with this? Well, because yesterday afternoon when I was about to take a photograph of the struts being glued onto the soundboard, I caught myself on the verge of tidying the bench before the shot. Why on earth did I think that was necessary? I’m not trying to write an article for one of those wood-working magazines where, if the pictures are anything to go by, projects seem to reach completion without a tool being removed from a rack or a shaving falling to the floor.

Anyway, I stopped myself just in time. Here is where I’ve got to with the guitar that I’m working on at the moment.

Preparing the soundboard

The soundboard is nice piece (well, actually two pieces, of course) of close-grained spruce from Le Bois de Lutherie, which I joined and thicknessed to about 3mm – producing lots of shavings, as you can see below.

Then, using a Dremel mini-router in a shop-made device, I cut a channel for the rosette that I wrote about in a previous post, a few days ago.

Here’s the top, cut roughly to shape with the rosette inlaid.

Scraper plane

The cocobolo guitar back that I showed in an earlier post is now jointed and I spent some time yesterday bringing it down to a thickness of just over 2 mm. The grain of the two halves runs in opposite directions after ‘book-matching’, which makes it difficult to avoid tearout along the centre join. And even without that, cocobolo is hard and difficult to deal with. The tool that solves these problems is my Millers Falls scraper plane.

I bought it several years ago in a second hand tool shop and never found it worked well enough to be useful until I replaced its thin cabinet scraper blade with a thicker one from Ron Hock. This transformed its performance and, although I suppose you could do the job with a cabinet scraper by hand, I now think of it as an indispensable tool.

Since it works with a negative cutting angle, a scraper plane doesn’t remove much material at a time. So, if you’re starting with wood that is way too thick, you need something that’s faster, even if it leaves a rougher finish, to get down to somewhere near the final thickness before switching to the scraper plane. A good tool for that is a smoothing plane fitted with a modified (toothed) blade but I’ll save that discussion for another post. Pictures of the scraper plane below.

Hand tools

Last autumn, I met Konrad Sauer at an exhibition of woodworking and woodworking tools held at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire. He’s a plane maker and let me try out the small smoother (shown in the photograph below) on a piece of American walnut. It wasn’t a highly figured piece of wood but the grain was far from obliging. The plane worked perfectly, taking a full width, tissue paper thin shaving and leaving a surface that required neither scraping nor sanding before applying a finish. Even more impressive however, was the plane’s performance when I turned the board of walnut around. The finish this time wasn’t quite as polished – how could it have been? – but the fact that here was a tool that could take a shaving against the grain without leaving areas of roughness and tear out was a revelation. For a guitar maker constantly needing to work highly figured tropical hardwoods to a perfect finish, it was almost too good to be true. Of course, I asked him to make me one and though I try to be patient, I check his website from time to time hoping to read about progress.

The website is full of interesting things but it’s especially worth reading the ‘Nuts and Bolts’ section for his discussion of why he makes his planes almost entirely with basic hand tools. Some of the reasons are obvious: such tools cost less and take up less space in the workshop. Others are more subtle: working by hand, although apparently slower than working with machines, means that an error can be caught before it turns into a costly mistake. Taking an extra shaving with a handplane is much more controlled than using a machine with a cutter head revolving at 3,000 rpm – not to mention safer and quieter. And working by hand allows him to adjust the plane that he is making by, say, making its handle a bit smaller or its blade angle a bit steeper, so that it’s exactly as his customer want it. These are just the same reasons why I build musical instruments by hand.

xsno4quarterview.jpg

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