Cut perfect grooves with this DIY tool!

ladies and gentlemen welcome back to woodwork for humans the series where we have been hailing it making our own specialty tools for instance last week I made this fantastic little router plane out of nothing but a chisel and a few scraps of hard work and it works great it works so well that it's made me I don't know kind of ambitious and I've been thinking what are the last few joints and details that haven't been covered by our homemade tools I've been thinking about drawer construction so let's say this piece of oak here was the side of a drawer and we wanted to put that bottom piece in but we would need to cut this groove this very narrow precise channel right in the bottom so we can slide that bottom piece in how are we gonna cut something like this with hand tools how the old-timers do it back in the day well they had a specialty tool it was called a plow plane and as you can see this is a complex fancy tool it's got a movable fence on screw arms it's got a depth stop and a bunch of different cutters you can put in so this can cut different grooves of various depths and widths in any piece of wood it's fantastic are we ready to make one of these maybe next week okay here's the thing about plowed Plains these are phenomenal tools and honestly we probably could build one of them but it's gonna be a huge involved project I think it might be unnecessary when I think about my actual career making furniture I did a lot of grooves for different components but they were almost all the same size they were usually 3/8 of an inch so instead of building a super complicated tool I think we could just build one specialty tool that plows a groove 3/8 of an inch and that's gonna take care of 99% of our furniture making needs and I've already started by prepping this piece of wood it is dense and it is hard and I honestly have no idea what it is but it doesn't matter it was free I'm gonna start by cutting a wrap to match the width of my 3/8 chisel so I'll set my homemade marking gauge directly to the chisel and strike a line across the bottom of my stock this rabbit should be around 3/4 of an inch wide my little Craig measuring jig makes it easy to find my depth and strike that line I want to make things easy for my rabbet plane so I'll use a chisel to chip out a little trench and define a knife wall that my plane can follow this is a wide rabbet so I'm using my plane without its fence and it can be tricky to start with no guide a great technique is to tip the plane over and put just the corner of the iron into your knife wall and then take a light pass you can see the little chip just curling up as I deepen that knife wall as I take the second and third stroke with the plane I'll slowly bring it down until the cutter is in full contact with the wood and I can start taking some full of shavings having that shoulder established really helps guide the plane now I'm still learning how to use this homemade rabbet plane and one thing I learned in this project is that the plane is gonna have a hard time taking shavings with the hole cutter probably because the iron is straight and not skewed so as I worked down my rabbit I eventually lost my shoulder line and my joint fell out of square no problem I'll just move my shoulder line up about a quarter-inch and re-establish that crisp 90-degree edge the moral of the story is that my rabbet plane works really well up to about 1/2 inch in width if I need to cut wide rabbits in the future I'll just cut the joint in two stages I'll take out most of the waste with the first pass and then come in and take the last quarter-inch working with narrower cuts like this the tool is just as accurate as any other tool I own my grooving plane is actually going to be a lot like a traditional molding plant so I'll grab one of those out of the collection and use it for all the measurements and angles in this belt of course you might not have a vintage molding plane to copy so I've got a complete set of plans available and you can find a link to those down in the description once I have the bed the escapement and the mouth marked with a knife I'm ready to start cutting the once again I grab my chisel and make a knife wall this time it's going to guide my desuka saw as I crosscut the bed I get the first angle cut perfectly but something went wrong with the second one and I drifted off my line no problem again I'll just move my line over a little bit and cut a new bed I admit this build is not going nearly as smoothly as my last several tool builds but that happens any time you make a mistake try not to get frustrated and lose your temper you can recover from most of your screw-ups I've already made two pretty big mistakes in this build but I'll give you a spoiler alert the tool still came out fine making the throat a little bit wider won't hurt anything and soon enough I'm chiseling out the waste with the bulk of the wood removed I need the bottom to be very flat and level for this job I really need a router plan luckily I built one in last week's video and it's just the thing for removing the last bits of waste and smoothing out that inside wall this is gonna be a laminated plane like my previous builds so we want to get this recess as perfect as possible while we still have easy access I'll give the walls a light pairing and I can also use the side of my chisel as a straight edge to make sure my walls are actually true another excellent tool for plane making is a regular old file the one I'm using here is a Nicholson handy file it's got a built in handle different teeth on each face and one edge is ground safe which means it has a no teeth put that safe edge toward the inside while you're filing the walls and the file won't cut that nice surface we just made with the router plane I'll throw a link to this tool down in the description now I'm ready to glue on the second half of the plane which is just a scrap of walnut I'll spread my glue thinly on the plane body which will keep the glue out of the throat I'll also add a few grains of salt to keep things from sliding around for clamping my bench makes an excellent surface because it's solid and flat I only need a couple of clamps because I'm adding a scrap block to the top to even out that clamping pressure I'll also clean up most of the glue squeeze-out while it's still wet that'll save me time later on when the project comes out of the clamps it's already starting to look like a good joinery plan I left the top overhanging on purpose and now I'll plane that down and level it off the lower part of the plane which we might call the skate is a little bit too long and it's slightly uneven I'll use my measuring tool and a plane to straighten that out and make it consistent keeping an eye on these details will make the tool work much better now I've got a nice piece of maple that's already the right thickness and I've laid out a wedge in pencil I've got good details for the wedge in the plans but you can also just draw these freehand they are not complicated I'll do most of the shaping with my rail of a saw and a plane and I'll cut the curves with a coping saw when my wedge is roughed out it's exactly what I want a nice tight fit and way too big I like to leave lots of extra material on my wedges and slowly dial them in for a correct fit now slowly test-fitting the wedge is a little bit tedious to watch so let's skip to the part where it mostly fits now the wedge is much narrower it fills the whole mouth of the plane and you can see a relief cut in the back for the chisel handle I'll mark the bottom of the wedge where it sticks out of the mouth and then cut that flush I did a test cut off-camera and the plane removes material well enough but the mouth jams really badly you can see how the shavings are stuck in there we need a much better escapement for chip clearance and I'll draw in a few curves with my pencil and slowly carve them out with a chisel against my bench hook most people just use the bench hook for sawing but it also gives you a safe and controlled stop for chiseling I've got a whole video on making these they're quick and easy I made the same cut on the plane body and now the mouth has a gently curved opening that should let chips just fall right out I'll finish shaping the body by cutting curves in the corners and Ferenc them in the sanding stick you're going to be pushing pretty hard on this tool so take your time and shape the heel into something comfortable you can also check out my rabbet plane video for a more detailed look at shaping these joinery plans now a tool like this really benefits from a depth stop and you'll find depth stops on most anti plants I'm gonna do a pair of them for stability I have two thin pieces of hard maple and they're going to be perfect for this high friction application I'll put the pieces on my plain body scored the edges with a knife chisel a knife wall and use my bouzouki to make some shallow cross cuts finally something goes right in this build and I get all four cuts on the first try I'm a professional i chiseled the waist away from my saw cuts and soon enough I've got my router plane and I'm leveling out these recesses my stops fit really well but I'm also going to need thumb screws to adjust their depth and lock them in place and that takes a little bit of planning here you can see I've drilled two small holes all the way through the plane these holes are going to guide my auger bits from both sides of the tool and ensure that everything lines up now I'm going to bore these holes out with a large bit on one side and I've marked my bit with tape so I don't go too deep then I'll flip the plane over and bore out from the other side all the way through the exact bit sizes you are going to use depend on your hardware hold on this will all make way more sense in just a second with the holes drilled I'll mix up a little five-minute epoxy and put a little bit just around the edges of my holes then I have these quarter inch nuts and I'll drop these into my holes and add a little bit more epoxy around the edges you want to resist the urge to just slather glue in there you'll only gum things up and these nuts don't need much adhesive to stay in place you could probably just use a couple of dots of superglue well the epoxy sets up on that hardware I'll also need slots cut in my maple pieces you can see at board two quarter inch holes that define the ends of my slots and I can just take a chisel and slowly chip out the waste between them be careful here as you're chiseling with the grain and it's pretty easy to split these pieces you can also just thread a coping saw into your holes and saw the waste out by the time of my slots are cut the epoxy is dry enough and I can assemble my death stops I found these great little wing screws down at the big-box store they were about a dollar fifty each put them together with some little washers and you have excellent no fuss hardware I will drop a link to these down in the description with the hardware installed my depth stops are easily adjustable I can slide them up and down to whatever I need them and give my wing screws a little twist to lock everything down now I can slide in my chisel and my wedge and give the whole setup a tap to tighten it and now we're ready to test so I've got my plane and I'm ready to set it up to make the first cut first thing I want to do is make sure my iron is set at the correct depth it's really good to begin your cuts with a very very light cut so I'll tap it in a few times with a hammer and then take a piece of scrap stock and just run it along that cutter and I'm looking for it to take the lightest possible shaving when I've got that I can also set up my depth stops I use my little blue measuring jig for that and then everything set and I can get going now there's no fence on this tool but a lot of similar early tools also didn't have a fence the craftsman would tack a batten down to the stock a batten is just a strip of wood that's gonna guide the plane I'll take this narrow scrap and I'm just gonna clamp it across my test board with a couple of C clamps I'll double-check that the batten is in the right place and then I can bring in my plane I'm gonna tilt it just slightly to the left and take a very light shaving with the corner of the cutter and that's gonna help me establish a shoulder you can see the little curl of wood the plane creates while I make this tiny little starting cut now with an even two-handed stroke I start deepening my groove you can also stop at this point and tap the iron a little deeper you can take a fairly heavy cut with this tool once you've got that groove established you can really waste away material quickly the tool is no longer jamming and I have long shavings that fall right out I've got my depth stops set so I just keep blasting away until the plane stops cutting then I have a groove at a consistent depth over its whole length the corners are crisp and the bottom is flat and even I can put a piece of stock into my groove and the fit is so tight I kind of have to shove it in if this were a real component like a drawer bottom I would clean the edge down a tiny bit to get a looser easier fit a chisel a couple scraps of hardwood a couple of random pieces of hardware and we have an excellent little joinery plane that will plow a groove into pretty much any piece of wood and instead of making a big complicated plow plane if I needed another size groove well this wasn't very difficult I would just make a second one of these with a different size chisel definitely two or three of them would cover everything you could ever need and of course you might want to make one of these and obviously I have a great set of plans on my website and they're very affordable but as you're watching this build you might be thinking to yourself oh I really need to make that rabbet plane and oh wait I need that router plane - they're kind of important for making this tool you might want to get all of them and I can make it a little bit more interesting I've taken my grooving plan plus my rabbet plane and my router plane and I've put them together into my specialty plane bundle and I've got some other specialty plants like a couple of weeks ago we made this inexpensive and very effective spokeshave and before that I actually made a low-angle Jack plan and it was a lot of fun I'm going to put all five of these plans together into the same bundle if you were gonna buy them separately it cost you fifteen bucks but I'm gonna sell the whole thing for ten dollars and once you've got your planes built you might be thinking oh I need a little project to test them out on well a great project is my nailed rabbeted wall box it uses several of these planes and it's quick and it's fun I'm going to throw that in for free so when you buy my specialty plane bundle you get five joinery planes plus a free project for ten bucks go on over to rex krueger comm slash store pick up the bundle and build up your shop and what we're talking people sometimes ask me hey Rex you're always talking about patreon what are your patrons get for their monthly contribution well they're gonna get this plan plus they're gonna get that whole bundle of plans I just talked about plus they get all of my and they get early access to all of my videos they get articles and blog posts and exclusive videos and a bunch of other stuff I do a lot from my patrons because patronage is what makes all of this possible if you'd like to get all those free extras plus be part of an amazing community of craftspeople go on over to patreon com slash Rex Krueger and check out the rewards I have for the people who support this content and of course if you're just here watching these videos I feel incredible gratitude to you to the viewers make this possible as much as everyone else does thanks so much for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 219,042

Keywords: Wood, woodworking, groovy, grooving plane, plane, hand tool, homemade, chisel, rabbet plane, router plane, router, rabbet, diy, groove, how to route perfect grooves, tongue and groove, cutting a groove with a table saw, cut centeres grooves, diy cutting board, cut grooves in boards, juice groove jig, using a router to cut juice groove, tool making

Id: -dwBiQL1Nag

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 22 2020