Make a router plane from a chisel.

ladies and gentlemen welcome to woodwork for humans the series where even beginners can learn the fine art of joinery and we've been doing this by focusing on simple sturdy joints like the rabbit and the dado and and what's great about these joints is that you can cut the sides with a nice saw and then take all the waste out just with a simple chisel they're very easy to cut but once you've got that waste out of the middle well you might have some trouble with the bottom of the joint might be tough to get it smooth or even or to get it to the exact depth that you want just free handing it with a chisel cut well what do traditional woodworkers do when they run up against this problem well they grab the router plane here is the metallic stanley version and it is an amazing tool I love it you can see it's got a flat bottom and a pair of handles and then the cutter sticks out right here you can set it to any depth you want and you set it so that the sides ride on the top of your joint and this cutter comes right in the bottom and you can just clean up that joint adjust the depth make it dead flat and perfect it's a high precision tool the problem with these is that new ones are quite expensive and vintage ones like this are also quite expensive it's just hard to find a good affordable router plane but you know a metal factory made tool like this this is actually a pretty modern invention woodworkers must have had something before this tool existed and they did this is the really old-school version of the router plane and you can see it's it's really the same idea so it's block of wood with a cutter coming through it and the cutter sticks out the mouth down here it's flat on the bottom so it'll sit on either side of your joint and then you just work it back and forth to clean up and straighten the bottom of your rabbits and daters it's really kind of a brilliant solution to the problem of fixing up your joinery you can buy one of these and they're not super expensive on ebay you have to deal with condition issues it's kind of a gamble sometimes I think what's a better idea is we should just make one and instead of even having to find a cutter for it we're just gonna use a garden-variety bench chisel and if you have piece of wood and a chisel you can make this for no money this will be a zero cost build for a really useful specialty plane it's perfect there's there's nothing not to like about this oh except the name back in the day woodworkers they call this the the hags tooth or the old woman's tooth it's a little a little awkward to the modern ear it's not it's not respectful language I mean seriously woodworkers of the past get woke so here's the vintage tool and you can tell there is nothing complicated going on here this is a single block of wood with a cutter and wedge it goes through a mortise in the body and the cutter comes out mouths down here now the only complicated part is the mortise right in here hold on a sec okay this mortise is not easy to cut because it's tapered it's wide at the top and narrow at the bottom and it's also angled it goes in at about a sixty degree angle right here that makes it kind of tricky especially if you're a beginning woodworker and that turns a simple tool into a challenging build but don't worry I have come up with the foolproof method that will let even a total beginner get this mortise right on the first try even if you've never cut one before but first let's prep our stock I'm using a piece of rough cherry for this build mostly because I had it and it's big enough this project requires a lot of layout and you need a straight and square block to begin with this piece was really uneven and I probably spent at least a half-hour planing checking and marking clean faces and true 90-degree edges if you already have a square block of wood or if you can glue up some boards into a block that will definitely save you a lot of time to do my I'm gonna copy all the angles and dimensions directly off the original I've covered half of the tool in blue painters tape this is going to allow me to draw measurements and layout lines right on the tool and then just peel them off later without hurting anything to transfer my measurements onto my stock I'm going to use this little Craig measuring jig this thing looks cheap but I honestly use it all the time and it's a good alternative to a more expensive combination square I'll put a link to it down in the description now I'm really taking my time marking out my mortise in my bed angles these are the only really critical dimensions if you want to know more about the specifics you can grab the full set of plans or check out the free tip sheet and I've got links to both of those down in the description to get the width of the mortise I suggest using the actual chisel that's going to be your blade I'm using a half-inch 13 millimeter chisel and I'm adding about a sixteenth of an inch to either side so I have some room for lateral adjustment now if we were gonna cut this mortise the traditional way we would just grab a chisel and start chopping if you are an advanced enough woodworker and you feel comfortable doing that go for it but if you're more of a beginner I've got a foolproof method that's still gonna give you excellent results I'm going to take the front of my mortise strike a knife line across it and then carry that line all the way around the stock using the angle at the front of my mortise to draw the lines down the sides and basically taking the front half of the plane in line with my mortise cutting it off and taking it away and that's gonna give me access to the inside of the mortise it's gonna make it really easy to cut and pair the bed until it's perfect and then I'll just laminate the plane back together again once I've cut my knife line all around I'll use a chisel to make a knife wall that's going to guide my saw I'll start at the corners with my desuka saw and then slowly pull those cuts across my knife lines around the edges and over the faces of the sock I don't have to cut very deeply here the point is just to create a curve that will guide my saw later and ensure a perfect cut once I have a really accurate kerf all around my stock I'll switch to my Raiola with its aggressive rip teeth this cut is easy because I've created a path for the saw to follow it took a minute to set up but now it's almost impossible for my cut to drift off course and it only takes a minute for me to slice my whole block cleanly in half the faces of my cut need a little cleanup and you can plane those or just put a piece of sandpaper on your bench and sand them flat both approaches work fine now I have full access to the inside of my plane and it's easy to mark out the exact location of my mortise instead of chiseling the whole thing out slowly I can quickly cut accurate sides with my desuka saw and then chisel out the waste you can see here that I also saw another curve right down the middle of the waste and that's making it extra easy to clean out the bulk of the material here you can see me using my new joiners mouth that I made just a couple of weeks ago it's patterned after an amazing vintage mallet and I've got a video and plans if you'd like to make your own with the waste removed I'm using a controlled two-handed grip to carefully pair my bed flat and straight cutting the plan in half definitely adds a little bit of time to this build but you'd be amazed at how quickly you can cut this mortise when you have access to three sides even if you've never done a mortise before this technique makes it a snap and we're ready to glue this plane back together now I do a lot of glue ups on this old melamine shelf you can grab these any time someone throws out a piece of Ikea furniture they're very flat and glue won't stick to melamine now big flat surfaces like this tend to slide around during glue up it can really mess up the alignment of your parts so I sprinkle on a couple grains of salt and use a three clamp set up one clamp from the top will keep the front piece from sliding up and a clamp on each end will bring the scene tightly together those salt crystals will dissolve into the glue and just disappear as the whole thing dries while the glue is drying you can make your wedge I'm cutting mine from a cherry board for the curves on top you can draw them freehand and obviously I have clear drawings of this in the plans the wedge itself needs an 8 degree angle I've done this many times and I find it's helpful to make your wedge thicker and longer than you think you need that way even if you have to do a lot of planing and trimming to get a good fit you still have enough material when it's all over cutting the details for your wedge is easy saw the straight lines and chisel the curves or saw them out with a coping saw the tricky part is getting a good fit with your plane the handle of your chisel is definitely going to interfere with the back of your wedge and you'll need to scoop out some material there once the chisel and the wedge are working together tap on the back of your chisel and see if it will come out the mouth mine won't but that's a good thing my wedge is oversized and I've got lots of wiggle room for slowly adjusting the fit until the blade will come out the bottom once you have a little bit of blade sticking out stop and test the tool I've made a little test dado in this block and it has a very rough bottom even though my little plane is only half done it makes cross-grain shavings easily and quickly cleans up the bottom of this joint the tool works and I can move on to shaping so now my tool works but it's much too big and blocky it's very difficult to grip one of the things that's great about the vintage tool is it actually has amazing ergonomics these curves make it super easy to grab and hold on to and it's comfortable you can use it for a long time I want to duplicate as much of this curvature as I can but I think the original maker probably used some specialty tools for these really deep cuts this looks to me like you've probably used a moulding plane or maybe a large gouge to get this really long perfect curve on the front and the back some of these were made out of scraps of pre-made railing but this one wasn't it's not symmetrical and the profiles all wrong the craftsman actually cut these details now I've done videos before about cutting curves with flat hand tools and we could duplicate this shape but honestly I think it's too much trouble I think it's a much better idea to just use a slightly modified design that's gonna get us the same results first I the top of the plane to be much narrower for a good grip so here on the end of my piece I've laid out the material I want to get rid of I'll use my Ryoga to make two intersecting cuts that remove a big chunk of wood then I'll come in with my plane and add some round overs on that top edge this is already a huge improvement and the tool feels pretty comfortable I also want to clean up and refine the surfaces left by the sawing and this would be difficult except I recently made a rabbet plane that's capable of getting right up to the edges of things I'm using it without the fence and I can get right into the corner of these cuts for a smooth surface and a crisp inside edge I'll also use a chisel and a sanding block to refine some other sharp edges and torn fires once you've got your plane into a state where it's easy to grip that's most of it but you might also want to cut away some corners here to keep them from being fragile or tough on the hand and you also might see this throat that's been cut out in the front this makes it much easier to look down the front of the plane and actually see what you're cutting these details are very easy to cut in our plane I'm just gonna lay them out using a random round object from the shop and then I will cut them out with a coping saw then I'll come in with a sanding stick to fair out those curves and a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a dowel will help me clean out that mouth that I just made now this is a wooden plane and these are typically adjusted with hammer strikes hold on just a second so with the original planes set up like this if you want more iron you just take a hammer and tap the iron and then if you want less iron you tap on the face of the tool and that brings it out so that you can adjust it and put it back together again the problem with this is that tapping on the top of the plane like this does damage the plane this vintage one has a lot of hammer marks here and it's starting to get a little bit chewed up the cherry that I use to make my plane is a little bit on the soft side and I'm concerned that constantly hammering on the top of it is gonna beat up this tool really quickly so I've got a solution to that here's the finish tool and what I've just done is I've installed a strike button over here and it's just a carriage bolt that I've glued in carriage bolts have this little square section underneath the head so after I've drilled a hole I also need to chisel out a little square where that's gonna fit and then it's just a little bit of five-minute epoxy and drop this in and once you have a strike button like this then adjusting the plane becomes easy and you really can't damage it if you want more iron you just tap the back of the chisel no big deal and if you need to get the iron out just give that strike button one or two good whacks and everything comes right out and you can reset your depth once you have a strike button you can really hit the plane as often as you want as hard as you want with the metal hammer and you're not gonna damage it it's a detail that you see on a lot of vintage planes because it makes them last longer and that's great for everybody with the construction complete I sanded the whole thing with 220 grit and I'm going to apply boiled linseed oil and paste wax to the body of the plane but I'm gonna leave the inside mortise totally bare and not put any wax on the wedge these parts rely on friction to work and adding a lubricant like wax will only hurt the planes performance a little bit of oil on the outside of the wedge won't be a problem once it's soaks in now that the plane is finished let's learn how to set it accurately I've made another test data if I just want to smooth out the bottom it's easy enough to tap the iron until you can feel it just taking a light cut then you can work your way most of the way in from one side cleaning and leveling the bottom as you go to avoid blowout on the far side flip the piece and the vise and finish the last bit from the opposite direction another thing we might want to do is make our dado deeper by just a bit you can get a really accurate depth setting from this tool by taking a piece of heavy paper like a note card and cutting it in half put a piece of paper under each side of the plane and then tap the iron down until it's just barely touching the surface of the wood then take out your paper spacers and start cutting I've used thick paper here and this is about the heaviest cut the tool can take so I angle it a bit to skew the iron and make the cut easier and leave a cleaner surface you can see when I'm done the joint has a flat and even bottom and very crisp edges I can slide in a shelf or another component and this joint is gonna work perfectly so here's the finished plane and you can see it looks a lot like the original your really similar I made mine a tiny bit longer because I have big hands and this way I can get all of my fingers on it that's a little bit more comfortable for me um this was literally a zero cost build for me I already had the chisel sitting around and then just a block of cherry and now I have a tool that's really almost as good as the modern metal tool for no money if you'd like to make a tool like this I have a great set of plans available at rex krueger comm slash store they are always very affordable of course my patrons never have to worry about how affordable plans are because they get all of my plans for free they also get early access to videos I write blog posts do tool reviews talk about books I make exclusive content for them I do a lot of things from my patrons because my patrons make this all possible and I can't thank them enough if you'd like to be part of the amazing community of craftspeople that's happening right here on this channel going over to patreon.com/scishow screw ger and check out the rewards I have for the people who make this all happen and I always want to end my videos by thanking my viewers I wouldn't be here at all if people didn't watch these videos and like them and comment on them and come to the premieres and have a conversation with me I love what I do and you guys watching right now you're the ones who make it possible thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 104,559

Rating: 4.9409013 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, wood, plane, router, hand tools, cheap tool, homemade, chisel, router plane

Id: -FdA0ImXjbI

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020