Make your own Low-Angle Jack Plane

I get irritated when tools are out of the reach of the average home game woodworker like for the last decade or so everybody has been telling you that you must have a low angle bevel up Jack plane these things are game changers and you've got to have one in your shop except they're pretty pricey on the low end they're over $100 and on the high end you could spend three or four hundred that's a lot of money for a plane look I make planes all the time so why don't we just make one of these right here in the home shop with regular tools that lots of people own I mean what's the worst that could happen we could waste three or four days of shout time and destroy a bunch of useful materials would that really be sir actually that would be kind of bad I really hope that doesn't happen so it's not like I'm the first person to ever try this for instance this dude whose name I cannot pronounce did a beautiful low angle Jack plane but his is sort of a complex fancy build with a Veritas adjuster I'm thinking of something a little bit more low to the ground using common off-the-shelf parts no adjuster but I think there's got to be a reason where people don't usually make these planes in the home shop in fact there's two reasons hold on I did a sketch problem number one you can see that low angle 12 degree bed there down by the mouth the material of the bed gets so thin that if we made it out of wood like most homemade planes it would just shatter under the force of planing no wood is gonna stand up to that so we're gonna have to make it out of something else probably number two we typically adjust homemade wooden planes with a hammer and tapping the blade to advance it works just fine but if you look at our sketch what's that thing right behind the blade yeah it's the handle that's really gonna get in the way of hitting the iron with a hammer but I've been thinking about that and it's occurred to me if we can strike the rear of a plane to retract a hammer doesn't it make sense that we could flip the plane around and hit it on the toe to advance the hammer well I tried it on a few of my planes and we totally can it works there's that problem solved and as for that low bed angle and that thin mouth well it seems like we should just replace that the plane with something different maybe metal maybe aluminum I think that would work really well in fact I know it would work well because well I already did it here's my prototype and it's a good proof-of-concept right down here at the mouth I just put in a thick piece of aluminum and then filed that down to the 12 degree bed angle and it doesn't distort or flex or do anything it works fine this plane cuts only problem is it doesn't cut that great it's a little bit too light a bit flexible and even though this part is strong enough to withstand planing every time I tighten down the lever cap this whole block of aluminum wants to shift outward a little bit it's just not attached to the sides of the plane well enough and it's so thin I don't see a lot of ways to attach it to would effectively what we need to do instead is make the entire sides and bottom of the plane out of a single piece of material to build the real plane I'm gonna start with this piece of aluminum channel aluminum is strong but it's easy to work with standard woodworking tools I got this piece off of ebay and it cost 20 bucks it's the based expense for the entire belt i'll start by marking out the mouth location because that determines pretty much everything else i've got a full set of plans and you can use those if you decide to tackle this build when you design your body you have a lot of freedom in the way that it's shaped you need access to the blade and you need a spot for the handle but other than that you can just kind of try to make it look cool in my design i just went for a lot of flowing curves aluminum is very easy to cut but i filled my channel with wood to cut down on vibration and grabbing from the bandsaw blade it's mostly a safety thing but it's also gonna give me a cleaner finish on my cuts the great thing about aluminum is that it works with standard woodworking tools it cuts like butter but the finished product is still going to be durable much more durable and a wooden plane I'm using power tools for speed in this build but you can do everything that I'm doing with hand tools you can do all the cutting with a hacksaw files and sandpaper it'll come out just as good once the bandsaw work is done I'll knock out the support block and the body is totally roughed out then I'll take it to the belt sander and quickly fare in the curves a lot of the curves in this plane are too tight for the belt sander so I'll use round rasps to get into those tight spots this work goes quick and everything looks smooth and nice I also finish up with a cheap sanding drum mounted in the drill press and that gives me a beautiful final finish on all the interior curves for the flat spots plain old metal files will give you a finer finish than most abrasives I'm gonna make the rear infill by hand just to show that doing this with hand tools isn't a big deal anybody with basic hand skills can make this plan I'll start with a piece of walnut cut it to rough size and then lay out all the final dimensions and slowly work it down to my lines for stuff like this using hand tools is a real advantage you can slowly creep up on your final dimensions and get a very tight fit in my case the piece of aluminum channel that I bought is a tiny bit too short so I'm gonna want the in fills to stick out about an inch on the front and the rear so for this rear infill I need to cut away a step so that the channel can sit in the infill and the wood will come down and extend the sole out the bottom I'll start by making a series of cross cuts to define the area that I'm gonna remove I'll knock out the waste with chisel but I'll leave a couple of steps in the wood that's gonna give my router plane something to register against while I level out the bottom of my step once everything is smooth and even I'll knock out the last pieces the rear infill is done and it slots right into my aluminum channel none of this would work is particularly difficult but you can avoid all of it if you're smarter than me and just by a longer piece of aluminum next I'm gonna mark out my 12 degree bed angle rough cut it on the band saw and then start hand lapping it with coarse sandpaper on my table saw glass would work really well here too this is another place where slow is good the bed of the plain is the one area that needs to be absolutely perfect everything else can be fixed or adjusted later on but if you've got a bad bed the plane just won't cut it's got to be flat and exactly square to the sides so I take my time slowly lapping it down and checking it frequently with a machinist square once I'm happy with the bed I'll clamp the rear infill into the plane and drill out the mouth after I've removed most of the material with the drill I'll connect the holes using a small file then I can thread a hacksaw blade into the mouth and finish cutting in both directions then I'll have enough room to get in there with larger files and square up the mouth opening now at first I thought I was gonna be able to file that 12 degree angle into the mouth with the whole thing in one piece I was just gonna like take files and just sort of ride down the infill and gently file away that material so that the bed would be at that 12th degree angle I wasn't sure that that was gonna work and it totally didn't work at all plan B I just quickly cut out the toe of the plane and I'll be able to reattach that later when I do the front infill to file in the mouth clamped in the offcut from making the bed that's got the correct angle and it's gonna allow me to guide my files you can see in this side shot why filing out that narrow mouth never would have worked with the plane in one piece it's a very shallow bed and there's actually a lot of material that needs to be removed I need plenty of room for tool access but now that I have the toe cut away I can get in there with any size file I want and remove the material quickly and efficiently as I progress I use a square to see if the bed and the mouth are coplanar right now they're not so I have to keep working I got everything really close with files then I jointed the edge of a board glued on some sandpaper and used that as a custom lapping plate to smooth everything out then I glued the rear infill into place and finished lapping that so that everything was even for the front infill I just used this big hunk of walnut but you can laminate up smaller stock if that's what you've got on hand you want a tight fit between the infill and the body but then as far as the design goes it's mostly how it looks and feels so get the infill in place look at it shape it look at it again shape it some more grab it and see how it feels repeat and when you like how it looks you're done now I also need to replace the aluminum toe piece that I cut out before and this infill needs to extend one inch out the toe of the plane it's got an overhang just like the rear one does but after just a couple minutes of saw and chisel work the aluminum plate fits and it's ready to glue in now the plane needs a handle and obviously I could just cut that out of a hardwood board and be done with it but I'm really enjoying the blend of wood and metal in this plane and I want to keep that going in the handle so I laminate it together several sheets of aluminum with small slices of hard wood into one solid blank once the epoxy dried I traced on a shape that are really like from a rare old plane that I have this handle is durable and it also looks nice I'll include this design in the plans so that you'll have it with the shape laid out it's just bandsaw sander more sander and then a lot of hand shaping lots of people do the round overs for a plane handle on a router table but I'm just not getting my fingers that close to a spinning router bit doing it by hand gives you a nice result and a custom fit yep since I promised that this was going to be a low-to-the-ground basic build you might wonder why I'm putting all of this time into the handle well I'm showing off obviously once the handles done I just need to chop a mortise into the body and then glue the handle in a tight fit between the body and the handle means the glue hardly needs to dry and I can get right on with the belt now after a lot of painstaking work and finally in the homestretch what I mostly need is hardware for the plane I'm gonna make the lever cap out of this piece of aluminum plate that I just got out of a dumpster I'll rough out the basic profile on the saw and then do most of the shaping on the belt sander the big radius on top of the sander lets me do nice curves and smooth transitions you can do all of this with rasps and files but even a cheap sander makes aluminum work very fast I'm also gonna need a thumb screw and I've got a quick formula for how you can make one you'll need one brass pipe cap and 1/4 20 brass screw that screw has to be brass otherwise when you tighten it down it's gonna mess up your plane iron just put the screw into the pipe cap rotate it a couple times to make sure that the screw is totally plumbed and then fill the cap with five-minute epoxy let it dry overnight and it'll be perfectly solved the flat sides on the cap are gonna give you plenty of grip for tightening it down and the epoxy holds up just fine I did one of these a year ago and it's still rock-solid I've got links to all the parts materials and tools for this build down the description now I'll drill and tap the top of my lever cap running the screw to test it and then drill and tap the sides for quarter-twenty machine screws now it's time to test assemble the plane you might notice this iron here and I also made this 100% at home I've got an entire video on how to do it you can check that out to learn my easy home recipe for heat-treating once the whole thing is together then it's on to the long process of lapping it so I'm back to the sandpaper on the table saw and even with aluminum this takes a while you can't skimp here once I've got the sole trued up I'm going to take a little bit of time to just pretty the plane up I've gone this far and I want it to look nice so I'm gonna sand shape deburr fill in cut and apply a nice coat of linseed oil to the whole thing to bring out the look of the wood and I've got to be honest the finished product does look really good I mean just because this is a workhorse tool doesn't mean it needs to look like one it can still be pretty but the looks don't really matter what it's time to do now is test it and as soon as I went to test it out I couldn't because this glue joint right here had just popped right open which makes sense if you're counting on epoxy to hold together a tool like this you're going to be disappointed it needs some sort of mechanical interlock to hold together so I went to Home Depot and grabbed some brass screws I drilled through the sides into the body and then added a light counter sent to each hole then I ran the screws in until they filled up the countersink sawed off the heads filed everything flush and then real apt and polished the sides of the plane when you do it this way you still end up with a little bit of the screw head in that countersink and that's enough to hold everything together really well but by cutting off the screw heads and lapping everything flat you end up with a sleek look and it doesn't mess up the aesthetics of the plane now I'm finally ready to test it right off the jungle I can see why people like to use these planes as short jointers this plane is absolutely surgical on the edge of a board it does a quicker and cleaner job and most anything I've ever used and since I was doing my first test I decided to play around the adjustment I pulled the iron back further and further taking progressively finer shavings until I was taking pretty much dust off the wood the surface I was leaving was excellent and the plane is very adjustable you can get any amount of iron you want and then of course it was time to try on some board faces and here the plane did I don't know okay the long length of the soil keeps it from getting into the hollows of the boards the way a shorter smoothing plane would and overall you've got to work a lot harder to get a good surface also when I was doing coarse-grained boards like this oak here the plane did have a tendency to leave some light aluminum streaks on the wood this is the reason that Stanley stopped producing aluminum planes decades ago I kind of thought that modern alloys like the one I used would be strong enough not to stay in the wood but it turns out I was wrong about that if you just kiss the plane with a tiny bit of furniture wax that issue goes away and the wax lasts for a really long time but it is still definitely annoying just like every other plant I own this one was really great on some woods not quite as great on some other woods kind of a mixed bag sort of like every tool on woods like cherry it took some incredible shavings and left a really nice surface some other boards like oak work it kind of man of course one of the big things you hear about low angle planes is that they are perfect for end grain and here I have to agree you can just put a board in your vise hack away at the end grain and this plane leaves a surprisingly nice surface with very little work on the user end and then I took it over to the shooting board and here I was really impressed this thing glided through the end grain of this oak board and it was just as good on walnut cherry all the other species that I've tried it's easy to see why people are so attached to these plans for shooters this one probably works better than any other plane I own of course this is the part of the video where I want to say you can build your own low angle smoothing plane for like 40 bucks by the plans build the plane don't buy those factory made tools from those corporations crush the man but I really can't say that the truth is this tools performance is very mixed it does some things well some things not very well I definitely would call it an essential tool if you gave me a choice between this and one of my regular Stanley number five Jack plans I would probably take the number five it's more versatile and dependable but the thing I don't know is is this plane only sort of mediocre because I didn't do a super job of building it or because it's just not that great of a tool problem is I don't have anything to compare it to I don't own commercially made low-angle Jack plane so here's what I've been thinking maybe I should grab the Stanley that's the lowest price one out there and see how it compares I'll put the Stanley low-angle jack up against mine and see if there's performs any better I've always been kind of skeptical about low angle planes to begin with so that should be sort of fun now I don't take free stuff on this channel so if I'm gonna buy this plane I have to do it out of my own pocket so please let me know down in the comments if you actually want to watch a video like that so I have some idea whether or not that's gonna be money well spent and since we're talking about money projects like this would be impossible without my patrons on patreon they always encourage me to experiment and try new things they had a great reaction to this plane when I showed them some of the initial prototypes and they urged me to keep going and get it as perfect as I could not only to my patrons give me the financial support that makes stuff like this possible they also provide me with a community of peers that gives me the enthusiasm to keep going when stuff like this gets tough if you'd like to be part of that community go on over to patreon comm and take a look at the early access rewards and exclusive content that I have only for my patrons and for everybody who's watching thank you so much for coming along on this whole journey with me it's been really exciting and I hope it's not over let me know down in the comments what direction you think it should take from here on up and thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 36,972

Rating: 4.9801655 out of 5

Keywords: plane, low angle jack plane, hand plane, jack plane, make your own hand plane, woodworking, low-angle jack plane, how to make a hand plane, wooden hand plane, block plane, hand planes, how to sharpen a plane blade, lee valley low angle jack plane, veritas low angle jack plane, planer, low-angle plane, smoothing plane, low-angle jack, plane iron, bench plane, wooden plane, how to sharpen a plane, wood hand plane, handplane

Id: hwR0AzvLrx0

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 09 2019