Adjusting a Bench Plane Mouth

everyone welcome back to another quick tip well all of the entries have been received for the plain drawing and I am happy to say that we had the drawing this morning and the winner of the plane was Sam Tinsley so Sam as soon as I get your address I'll be shipping your plane out to you but with that in mind before we go and ship this plane out I do have one more quick tip that is related to metal body planes that I thought I would share with you and this tip has to do with setting the Frog and how close the Frog is to the mouth basically how do we make this this mouth tighter now this isn't something I would do on a jack plane or a try plane or a jointer plane you're not really all that concerned with mouth tightness on those planes but on a smooth plane typically you want the tightest mouth you can get because you're just taking real fine shavings with these just to put that final surface on the board so what I want to talk about today is just a little tip on how to adjust that frog to get the tightest mouth without a lot of trial and error so the first thing that we're gonna need to do is go ahead and take this iron assembly apart we talked last time how to adjust the cap iron now we want to talk about adjusting this frog now what you can see here if I flip this over you know that that's a pretty wide mouth for a smoother you know that's something like I would have for a Jack clean or try playing that mouth so what we want to do is we want to move the Frog forward to close that mouth up now you could do this by trial and error but I found that there's a really quick way that you can do this that I thought was a really great little tool so what I'm gonna do because I'm going to loosen these frog screws here and I just want to want them slightly snug because I don't want the flop the Frog rattling around but I do want to be able to adjust it because I'm gonna have to put everything back together so now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take the iron and I'm gonna back the cap iron up a little bit and snug it back down I'm going to take a piece of masking tape and this is just regular old masking tape you could use painters tape you know whatever you got doesn't really make a difference you're sort of using this as a shim we're gonna take the masking tape and we're gonna put it on the iron and you can wrap it around or you know do whatever it's you just want to make sure you've got one layer or two layers depending on how tight you want that mouth of tape there on the iron so now we're going to put everything back in place we're gonna push the masking tape through and we're gonna put the cap iron back on lock everything down so now I'm going to flip the plane over make sure the tape is out of the way you know you don't want the tape clogging up the mouth so I'm going to look from the top I don't know we'll see if you can see this here but I'm going to turn the adjusting screw on the back of the frog and I'm going to move the Frog forward until the blade makes contact with the front of the mouth of the plane and that's as far so basically what you have is a closed mouth now that frog has moved as far forward as it can be and the iron is actually contacting the front of the mouth but really what's contact from the mouth of the tape not the iron so now we'll take it back apart we'll take the iron out and we'll tighten up those frog adjusting screws so we don't lose that setting and now we'll go ahead and remove the tape we'll reset our cap iron to be about an eighth of an inch away from the edge of that iron tighten it up put everything back together there it goes okay look my irons not centered there I'm gonna slide it over just a little bit get it centered lock everything down here we go you lock that how about now okay now when I advance this iron what we should get as the iron gets closer to peeking out little lateral adjustment and there we go and now we have a plane I don't know if you can see even see how that is but you've got a plane now with a nice tight mouth no other mouth nice and tight we'll go ahead and take a few test shavings see how she performs and there we go nice smoother shavings

Channel: Bob Rozaieski

Views: 21,494

Rating: 4.681592 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, hand tools, hand plane, frog, adjustment, mouth, smoothing, fettling

Id: yGbDQ6dc45k

Length: 7min 33sec (453 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2014