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I've made a couple of wooden planes,one about 9" long and another about 12"long. Got my inspiration from Krenov who I greatly admired. Have all of his books and tend to go back through them from time to time for inspiration. My metal planes are all Stanley and have tuned them up a bit so they work fairly effectively. Krenov lead me to believe that wooden planes worked better than metal ones. So smart me set out to prove him wrong.Lee Valley at the time were selling real thick blade and iron combos so I picked up a couple and made the two wooden planes as per Mr. K. instructions in his book. Was I ever delighted about how nicely the planes worked.The thinest of shavings,no chatter no matter what I planed. Krenov was right. I only thing I found at first was they were a bit touchy to adjust for chip thickness,but after a bit of use it became much easier. That was about 20 plus years ago IIRC and still have and use them to this day.I've gotten double pleasure from them. The thrill of building them and the thrill of using them. AND THEY DON'T RUST.
Tom

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I have a few. Adjustment does take a bit of practice, although there are fast methods to get you close. Removal of the blade for sharpening is quick.
I don't have a thickness sander, if I have a number of Tops, Back/sides to do I'll reach for a wooden plane in preference to a metal . It's just less tiring.

I have a couple planes I have made in the style of Krenov using Hock blades and chip breakers. I have been thinking of making a jointer with the same style blade. I built a shooting board like Todd's and I was thinking a wooden plane would work great not to wide or to heavy.

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Okay, Todd.
This thread got me thinkng about my great grandpas plane that I ended up with.
It's just been sitting in my shop,
but maybe I'll "tune it up".
It's got a brass plate that has Studebaker Bros. MFG stamped on it.
South bend Indiana,
with a stamp in the wood that reads Ensenorworks, New York.
It's about 16" long, and the sole is 3" wide.
My Great Grandpa was a contractor long ago, turn of the century,
and I've always liked this plane, even though the handles broke off, and one replaced.
I'm gonna see if I can get it going, and join top plates with it.

You can download a copy of the book here: http://ebooks-freedownload.com/2010/04/making-mastering-wood-planes.html

Dave

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Some food for thoughts, and these ideas are my opinions and experience. I am not claiming to be the last word on any of this but will claim a fair amount of experience.
So FWIW
One thing that for me is significant is that my planes have evolved to have no cap iron or chip breaker. With a thicker iron I find it is completely unnecessary and the elimination of it greatly simplifies the making and usage of a wooden hand plane. The mouth opening is a critical feature to control tear out. Well that and the cutting angle. Maybe more so the cutting angle. Anyway I what I really mean to say is the mouth opening is what breaks the chip not the chip breaker. I love all those illustrations in the woodworking books showing the chips being broken by the breaker. The breaker is set 1/32" to 1/64" from the edge of the blade and the shaving is how thick ? That saving has been "broken" long before it hits the chip deflector, uh, I mean chip breaker, no I mean deflector.

Other things or some of my opinions about wooden planes: ( I own a fair number of metal planes, but they are either shoulder planes or block planes the rest are wooden )
They hit the ground with little or no damage.
They hit your work with little or no damage.
They slide across the wood with a feel that can't be matched.
They feel good in your hands (not cold, no sharp edges)
They are a more reasonable width.
( I would argue they are more ergonomic with a lower center of gravity. I can wrap my fingers around my planes and touch the wood as I plane. Better feed back so easier to control. Most of the work that is done these days with a plane is edge work or at least work that doesn't need a hard to sharpen 2 1/4" wide iron. The widest plane I use is 2" and that is a short smother. (When I say plane width I am talking about the iron width. ) All arounders are 1 1/2" wide and my favorties for joining plates are 1" or 1 1/4" wide. I find the narrow planes much easier to control and more comfortable to hold as I stated before. With planners and jointers and belt sanders so available to the modern woodworker most of the time people are not dimensioning stock with their planes. This is more of the kind of work that the wide planes are designed for. I would love to see LV and Lie Nieson make some narrower planes.
So why have a unwieldy plane that is designed to flatten and prep stuff and use it for edge jointing. The question for me is rhetorical. That is why I like to make my own planes. I can make them any size I want.)
Easy to modify for specific tasks.
Fast to make. ( It takes me about 2 hours start to finish and this includes flattening the back of a iron and sharpening.)
Inexpensive, about $5 per plane including irons.
Not as heavy as a metal plane. (It is often touted as a benefit of metal planes to be heavy. I don't find this to be true and again find the weight of a wooden body plane to be just right. Not too heavy and not too light.
As you can see I could go on and on.
Couple more thoughts:
Granidillo is my favorite wood for a wood hand plane. No need for a separate sole or throat insert. As stable as mahogany and quite hard and heavy.
I have a wildly fluctuating shop environment with massive Rh% changes at times and I have no problems with any of my Granidillo planes. In a proper Luthier shop with decent RH control wood plane stability is a non issue.
Link
More on plane design with regards to luthiery later.

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Oh, shameless plug:

http://linuxplane.awardspace.com/


Japanese version:

http://www.daikudojo.org/Classes/20060401/

I just thought of something else. I make Krenov style planes and lately I had been using a brass dowel instead of the squared off wood pin thingie that JK used. I found using a pin made things much easier to line up. You could assemble the plane and drill for the pin later. Lining things up was a snap. Well I found the brass pin didn't work nearly as well as the wood pin which in the Krenov plane has a fairly large flat. The straight brass dowel made the plane hard to adjust, it tended to grab the wedge too tightly which was made even worse by having to set the wedge to tightly because it didn't hold well. The typical wood one holds everything without having to use too much pressure.

I have though about retro fitting my brass pins with round wood ones or milling a flat on the brass one. This would tell me if it was the shape of the pin or the material. (I think it is a little of both with a boring explanation as to why) To keep the same blade to wedge relation ship I could re drill and use a thicker brass pin so after I milled the flat I could use the same wedge or I could make a thicker wedge.

Bottom line is I have gone back to using a Krenov style pin and on really small planes a straight wood pin.

Link

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You can use a brass pin and glue a wood shoe to it. This will give the larger contact area and wood-wood contact for the easy adjustability of the wooden Krenov-pin-with-flat-side and the ease of assembly you get when drilling after glue up.

Very easy to make the shoe from a square of wood drilled down the center and then cut in half.

-jd

I have done just that on a recent plane but drilled all the way through a square and didn't cut in half.
L.

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Cut to size.....Beat to fit.....Paint to match.

That will work. Were you happier with the way it adjusts ?

-jd

Yes, it adjusted just like my other planes that I had made before I switched to my new and faster method. I have made mostly Krenov style for over 20 years and only recently tried the brass pin method. ( I guess it was a few years back and not that recently ! time flies.) There was a TV show called "Woodworks" with David Marks that had a episode on plane making. I made the planes and parts of the planes, helped with the dialog etc. on that episode. I tried to come up with a more streamlined version of the Krenov plane for that show to make the process easier to shoot for the show and make the process to make a plane easier for folks watching the show. I have about 6 planes I made for myself with the brass pin that I need to replace the brass with a wood dowel on some and replace the brass pin with a bigger one that has a flat milled on one side. The pin needs to be bigger so that after milling the flat the blade and wedge distance to the ramp is the same. So I haven't figured out if it is the flat or the wood or both that makes them work better. I do have a skew plane I made years ago for a dedicated shooting board plane in which I used a wood dowel. I haven't used that plane in a while but I don't remember any issues. I have been meaning to do this for quite a while
Link

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Cut to size.....Beat to fit.....Paint to match.

How can I get irons for less than $5?
The price of a good iron is the only thing that has been stopping me from making my own wooden planes. For the cost of a good blade I can usually get an old user stanley bailey or equivalent and for the price of a cheap blade I can usually find an old rusty stanley that needs cleaned and tuned.
However I've been having a hard time finding a jointer.
Thanks

For myself a few bucks a plane is not a big deal. I"m not going to choose one style over another over a buck. When you say you can usually find a Stanley, what does that cost you? I drive my new F150 out of the driveway, and it cost me a plane!

The way I keep the blade cost down, and the quality up, is to make my own blades out of O1. I have to admit to having a few new Stanley planes worth of stuff caught up in the gear to do that, but I wanted that stuff anyway. Also, in the 30 years I have been making planes, I bought a lot of blades, so getting to the point I am at today, was costly. But it needn't cost anyone else much money since all the info one needs is on the web.

Smaller planes, most lutherie planes could be narrow bladed could be made out of files, at least the old files, or other found metal. A jointer to join plates for flat top guitars needn't be all that wide. And since the geometry is different anyway, it might as well be a specialty plane.

On the breaker thing. I am not convinced that breakers aren't needed. But for a lot of lutherie wood, any decent wood, they are certainly not needed. And it does make life easier.

I started out with Krenov planes, and would have been happy to believe they were the best, for ever. They have their problems though and the wedge crosspiece is one of them. I have come to accept that the Japanese system is way better for the most part. And in the Western world the wedge held in abutments is also an improvement. Once you get the hang of it, it is also faster to make mortised planes. Even in the Krenov video, the guys are constantly pulling out the shavings by hand.

One thing I have done occasionally is to seal the endgrain with epoxy. I don't do it normally, but it can be an advantage.

Another way I depart from Krenov practice is I don't waste time on shoes. They aren't needed and probably hurt the plane. I think the modern world is one where it is also rare for people to stick with any design long enough to wear it out. I have probably 70-100 planes, and I have only started making molding planes, most of those are variants on bench planes. I like making them. I have only worn one of those planes out. And it mostly occurred because I was using it on plywood with fiberglass surfacing. I won't resole a plane until it wears out. It takes no more time to do as a repair, so why waste time initially, and turn the whole thing into a Hydrometer. Quite a few of my planes are made out of woods like beech, maple, or white oak. It is rare to loose even a few thou off these planes from wear.

That is consistent with what I experienced as well. I always thought the weakness of the Krenov style planes was that the spill tends to get caught on the big cross pin and clog the the plane. I decided to make the one with a small metal cross pin and found the plane was hard to adjust. I had to re-drill to move the pin forward to make room for the wood shoe, but it fixed the adjustment problems. Of course after adding the shoe, the cross pin is big again, but can easily be shaped into a triangle to minimize clogging (which I still need to do).

I've seen several episodes of that show, but not the one on making planes.

-jd

Todd, you get 5 irons @ 3 1/2"nout of 18" bar so it is a bit cheaper. 2" is the size I use the least so the cost is more in line with the 1 1/2" or 1 1/4" stuff.





A shoe on a Krenov style plane isn't a practice. Plenty of planes made without soles or shoes. Student planes are usually maple and soles are added to learn the process. I use Granidillo and there for need no sole. I don't constantly pull shavings out and don't agree with your assesments about the Japanese system or the wedge in abutment being better.
I don't think the Krenov style to be the "best", it is however the best for me and my work and most likely the easiest to build especially for the neophyte.
FWIW I am not a fan of Beech for planes. Beech isn't stable enough at least for my planes.

What do you think they do on a thick iron? I have heard that some folks say they preload a iron. I might buy that on a thin iron. The thing is it is loading the blade the wrong way, at least to add support. Any deflection caused by the wood is going to separate the chip breaker and iron. I haven't noticed any decrease in performace. One thing I am certain of is that a chip breaker is a chip deflector not a chip breaker.

L.

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Cut to size.....Beat to fit.....Paint to match.