giant Cypress

Inserts for a Japanese plane sole

I ran across this plane at one of the booths at the Somerset Woodworking Show back in February. It looks like a Japanese plane, with two important differences. First of all, in this plane, the chipbreaker acts as a wedge to keep the blade in place, unlike Japanese planes where the blade is held by wedge-shaped side abutments cut to match the taper of the blade. Although Japanese planes do have chipbreakers sometimes, the chipbreaker isn’t needed to keep the blade in place, and Japanese planes made with chipbreakers can be used without the chipbreaker in place.

The other difference is on the underside.

The shiny bit is an inlaid piece of metal that serves the same purpose as the touchpoint right in front of the mouth of a Japanese plane. It is set so that it sits just above the surface of the rest of the plane. As can be seen, the mouth is pretty tight.

I haven’t seen this approach to conditioning the sole of a Japanese plane before. It does solve the problem of wear and reconditioning the sole of the plane right in front of the mouth. On the other hand, the body of the plane is still made of wood, and as such can move over time. If any twist occurs, the front end of the plane will need to be brought back in line with the metal touchpoint.

I have heard of metal soled planes with touchpoints at the front of the sole and in front of the mouth, like a Japanese plane. Raney Nelson has made an infill with the sole profiled like that of a Japanese plane, but when I scoured his blog I was only able to find this mention of a prototype of such a plane.

The plane seemed to work pretty well. I wasn’t able to take very fine shavings with it, but to be fair this was in the middle of a woodworking show, the blade probably could have used some sharpening, and I’m sure the plane wasn’t tweaked. It didn’t have that slick wood-on-wood feel (despite popular belief, Christopher Schwarz does not have a lock on using double entendres in a woodworking blog) that wooden planes have compared to metal planes, probably because of the metal strip. Still, it was able to leave a nice surface on the piece of wood that was available to try the plane on. Besides, what do you want for less than $40?

Don’t fence me in

Some specialty Japanese planes have fences to help them do their job. For the most part, these fences are of one of two types. Above is a Japanese version of a moving fillister plane. In this case, the fence is a flat piece of wood, attached to the underside of the plane with bolts and wing nuts. The fence can be adjusted by loosening the wing nuts, sliding the fence to expose the desired amount of the blade, and tightening them again, which makes planing a rabbet to a given width a quick and easy job. The offset can be more easily seen in this front view of the plane.

Another type of fence is attached to the side of the plane. This is a Japanese plane that helps with the making of a sliding dovetail. The fence rides on two bolts with wing nuts on the outside, and locknuts on the inside.

To adjust this fence, the wing nuts are loosened, the fence is set to the desired offset, and the locknuts are tightened up against the fence.

This type of fence is used in other Japanese planes that rely on a constant offset to do their job, including the Japanese plow plane that started this whole blog thing. It should also be noted that these planes start as a solid block of wood, and are cut in half to achieve the fence mechanism

Recently, I found another Japanese sliding dovetail plane, but with a fence system that I had never seen before. Instead of a piece of wood riding on two bolts, this plane uses the principle of sliding wedges to accomplish its offset.

In this plane, only one bolt and wing nut are required. Loosen the wing nut, slide the wedge shaped halves of the plane past each other to the desired offset, and then tighten the wing nut again. The tightening of the wing nut on the bolt also draws the two wedges together, locking the configuration in place.

Here’s the underside of the plane to show the offset more clearly.

And a view from the opposite side.

This approach to adding a fence to a Japanese plane is reasonably clever, in that it requires less hardware and is probably more suited to making fine adjustments than the two bolt method because of the geometry of the sliding wedges. The accuracy of the cut that defines the wedges is probably not as crucial with this method, since it will work well regardless of the angle of the cut used, and if the cut is straight. In the two bolt method, the cut that splits the body of the plane in two needs to be parallel to the side of the plane, otherwise the fence will be skewed relative to the direction that the plane is cutting. This could be compensated for by the amount of play in the fence mechanism, but it still will be annoying.

But there is one disadvantage to the sliding wedge method that can be seen in the last photo. As the wedges are slid past each other to achieve a greater offset, there is less reference surface on the sole of the plane available for the plane to register on. Perhaps that’s the reason this is the only plane on which I have ever seen this mechanism.