Old Chinese houses are an inexhaustible creative space in terms of wooden interiors. To me, something alike is associated with childhood memories of a countryside house in Zhejiang.
Now that the veneer I used to build up the bed of the plane has had a chance to dry, we can start fitting the bed of the plane to the blade. My experience has been that this is one of the steps of setting up a Japanese plane that intimidates people. It shouldn’t be. If you have the coordination to fit a mortise and tenon joint, you have the coordination to do this task.
First, I trim the excess wood from gluing the shim in using a flush cut saw and a chisel to trim.
This process involves putting something on the back of the plane blade that will rub off as you tap the blade in. I’ve used a variety of things for this. In the past I’ve used the following:
a pencil
a Sharpie marker
a dry erase marker
camellia oil
graphite powder
holding the blade over a candle, allowing soot to land on the blade
They all work. There are probably other options as well. This time I’m using a pencil.
Tap the blade into the plane. Because of the veneer, it won’t go all the way down.
Then back the blade out. You’ll see dark marks on the bed of the plane. These marks are where the plane blade came into contact with the bed of the plane, and represent the high points of the bed. It will look something like this.
Now that we can see the contact points, remove the wood in those areas with your favorite implement of destruction. Again, there are a variety of tools that can be used:
a file
chisels
plane float
small scraper
I like using a combination of a milled-tooth file and chisels.
The areas that are fair game include the bed of the plane and the sides of the grooves. The upper surface of the groove should never be touched.
I’ll remove enough wood so that the marks disappear. The bed of the plane now looks like this.
Scribble more pencil on the back of the plane blade, tap it in, and remove it. What should happen is that the marks now cover a wider area of the bed.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Good music helps this task move along. I was listening to an old Hüsker Dü album. The goal is to get the edge of the blade to within 5mm or so of the mouth with just hand pressure.
If you pay attention during each cycle of removing wood and tapping in the blade, you’ll get a sense of how much the position of the blade changes with each cycle, and then you can decide if you need to be more cautious or more aggressive.
And the contact points should be evenly spread across the bed of the plane. This means that the blade is well supported by the bed of the plane, which will hold the blade firmly in place when in use.
I have friends who love to restore old Stanley planes. One of the steps in that process is to take the frog and sandpaper on a flat surface to make sure that the frog is flat. This is for the same purpose — to provide support for the plane blade. But I think this process is far more enjoyable than sanding metal.
At this point, it will be pretty easy to tap the blade with a hammer to bring the edge to the level of the sole of the plane, and you shouldn’t need to tap too hard to do so.
The total process took about 30 minutes.
One last note on fitting the blade — I’ve heard woodworkers fret about ruining the plane at this step. The only way to ruin the plane is to remove so much wood that the blade sits too far down. This is hard to do. And if that happens, you can just glue in another shim and start over.
Two months after a Taiwanese acacia tree fell during a rainstorm, it was split into logs – with each end sealed using wax and white acrylic paint. While these logs still need time to dry, older ones are being transformed by art students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) into sculptures, such as a muntjac deer symbolising nature’s sublimity and a snail representing the burden of one’s family. Teaching the sculpture class is Margaret Chu Cheuk-wai, a part-time lecturer at CUHK’s department of fine arts. Her goal is to inspire students to upcycle discarded materials and unleash their creative potential. “Even rugged pieces of wood can be transformed into great artworks with your creativity,” she said.
If you can, establish a place in your home for crafting, said Hinda Mandell, a professor of communication at Rochester Institute of Technology and the editor of “Crafting Dissent.” Get your materials together and assemble them wherever you want to create, she said. “When they’re right there, then you can begin fiddling and tinkering with them,” she said. “Because the goal is really not so much to make something. The goal is to play, even if you have a break for just a few minutes.”
Sounds like a vote in favor of getting into the shop, even for just a short time. Also for leaving the tools out.
[Note – this step will most likely not be necessary for a new Japanese plane.]
Now that the blade is sharpened and the corners are ground back, we can start fitting the blade to the bed of the plane body. As I noted before, the blade sits too low in the plane body. The cutting edge sits below the bottom of the plane with just hand pressure. Ideally, hand pressure would put the blade about 1/16-1/8" (2-3mm) from the bottom.
Also, there’s some rubbery goop on the bed of the plane. I think this is because the fit of the blade was too loose, which led to the blade sitting down too low, and the goop was added to the bed of the plane body to address that.
This method certainly will work by building up the bed, but I think I can do better.
The first step is to get rid of the goop. It took me about 10 minutes with a chisel and file to clean up the bed. I also made sure to get the goop out of the side grooves as well.
We can build the bed back up with a thin piece of veneer. I’ve seen paper and business card cardboard used for this purpose, but I like to use a veneer for this task. I resawed a veneer just shy of 1/16" from some maple.
Trim down the sides so that the veneer will cover the bed of the plane. Also keep in mind that there will likely be a slight taper inward from the top to the bottom. My veneer is long enough that it extends past the top and bottom of the bed.
I used liquid hide glue to glue the veneer in place, and tapped the blade in to serve as a clamp. The thickness of the veneer raises the bed, and stops the blade from going all the way down the throat, so now it stops well short of the mouth.
To apply some pressure to the bottom part of the veneer, I use a scrap piece of wood and butt it up against the veneer that’s sticking out the bottom, and use a clamp to hold it all in place.
