Traveling

Well, I built 8 pairs of sash, glazed and painted them 4 times in 4 weeks. Granted, I was working every day for about 15-16 hours. Ah...one of the many joys of owning your own business.

After the truck was loaded I set out on my epic adventure.

Day 1

Leaving Portland in the early morning for my first stop, Baker City. My hometown.

One word of note, the pictures in this post were taken out of a car window moving at between 65-80 mph. Not the best.

Day 2-Leaving Baker City on a lovely morning. No clouds and all sun which would come back and bite me later in the day as I crossed into Utah sweating buckets.

Entering Idaho.

Beyond this point there be dragons. Boise is the farthest east I had ever driven until this point.

Welcome to Utah. Hot!!

I spent the second night in Salt Lake City with some excellent friends. Good food, good company and Tour de France on Tivo.

This photo is for you, Grandma. Amazing building.

Day 3-After my poor 15 yr. old, 4 cylinder truck struggled to make it up and out of Parley's Canyon, we made it into Wyoming.

And then onto Nebraska. Which turned out to be my favorite state. I really liked the flat grassland and the wild weather.

So innocent looking off in the distance.

But later in the day it took on a more menacing look.

I was going to stop in North Platte which is in the panhandle of Nebraska but these dark clouds pushed me to go up the road to Grand Island. When I got into my hotel room and turned on the television there were all sorts of tornado warnings and watches for the panhandle area. I was glad that I had moved on.

Day 4- Early morning Nebraska farmland.

Finally, the destination. It is so small.

The first pair installed. What a moment.

The rest of them went in and then it was all over. I was finished onsite by early afternoon. Then what did I do? I went to downtown Atlantic, IA

Nice little factoid.

Short and to the point.

Day 5-Downtown Oakland. A town nearby on the way back to the freeway.

Abandoned church in Nebraska.

I drove on Day 5 from Atlantic, IA to Cheyenne, WY. It was a long day.

Day 6 was a short day into Salt Lake City. Just in time for Pioneer Day.

Day 7 was Salt Lake City to Baker City and finally on Day 8 I made it back to Portland.

I had a lot of fun traveling out to Iowa. It won't be soon forgotten.

Final Steps

The final steps for the plane are cutting the throat, fine tuning the iron, and making the wedge.

In this photo you can see the float in use to finalize the throat. The throat was carefully cut with a chisel. 

Shown here are the template plane wedge (top) and the wedge blank for the new plane. 

This is the wedge's finial. 

Here you see the finished plane. 

The finished new plane next to the sample plane. 

Side-view of the finished plane.

Cutting the Sole

In keeping with the hand-built nature of this project I decided to cut the majority of the sole waste with my rip back saw.

The photo above shows the first two cuts I made along the profile (shown in pencil). 

In this shot you can see that half of the waste has been removed and the cut has been made to allow the removal of the second half. 

This photo shows the majority of the waste removed. At this point I used the scraper to finalize the shape of the profile. 

Making the Plane, part 2

The block for the body was cut out of 2" thick beech.  When looking for material I was seduced by some lovely grain and forgot that the grain should be parallel to the sole of the plane.  It is the most important factor when looking at material for your planes.  When the grain is parallel to the sole there is less likelihood of any movement in the wood which might affect the operation of the plane.
Before I cut the sole of the plane I made a scraper that matched exactly the profile I wanted. According to a chapter in this Garrett Hack book, the final shaping of the sole could be made with a scraper blade.  I wanted to use a nice clean new scraper blade but I found that it was too hard to shape.  Instead, I used an old plane blade donated by my friend Justin.

Making The Plane, part 1

So, the first step in making my plane was to do some research.  I have a couple of sash planes that I use often.  I looked at these planes first and did a detailed drawing of the better looking plane.

After reading a couple of texts on the subject I knew that I had to either make or purchase a float.  The floats at Lie-Nielsen are quite nice but a little pricey for me.

I decided to make my own.  I went out looking for steel.  I needed something that was soft enough for me to file but would also hold enough of an edge to file wood.  After running into some dead ends someone at Winks Hardware said I should try key stock.  For about a $1 I got a 1/4" square piece of metal.  I was a bit skeptical at first.  

I filed about half a dozen ridges in it like what I had seen in some books. It was extremely easy to file.  

Here is what it looked like after a few ridges were filed in it.    It works wood brilliantly and I have used it for other tasks since I made it.  I am very pleased with how it functions.

The next thing I made was the pitchboard.  It was a fairly simple template that marks out the cuts that need to be made for the escapement area.

Iowa or Bust

photo courtesy of S. Licht, architect

A unique project has come my way.  I was asked back in December if I would like to build some sash for a project in southwest Iowa.  The structure is a ferry building that was a part of the Underground Railroad network.  The date that the building was constructed was 1850.

We finalized the paperwork in April and I got started right away.

A couple of challenges that I faced were making a sash plane, and working with a material that I rarely work with (Southern Yellow Pine). I'll dedicate future posts to the making of the sash plane as well as the journey of the sashes from their first stages to their installation in Iowa.