I've been trying out a new plane and a new plane blade carving the back plate of my current build. The plate is Spanish Cedar, so a mahogany-like wood, fairly soft. My process is to drill many holes to depth to start to carve a plate, knock of the chunks with a chisel, and then rough with planes, so I tried a new plane and a new blade this time.
I ordered one of these from Lee Valley: http://www.leevalley.com/en/garden/page ... at=1,41182 I got the curved sole version, and hoped that it would do a good job of carving the inside of the plates. Plane is well made, the blade holding screw pushes up against the blade rather than down against a frog, and seems to flex the blade a little if you do it up too tight. I sense you could break something if you got on it too much. The throat of the plane is very open, there is no chip breaker, and it can move a lot of wood quickly. The mouth is quite wide so the plane can take a big bite for roughing, but isn't sensitive enough for finishing. I used it as a scrub plane to rough out the inside of the plate after drilling holes for depth and knocking out the waste with hammer and chisel, and it did a great job. Very happy, it did exactly what I hoped it would do. Next I will try it on a spruce top plate and later a maple back plate. I suspect that with the wide mouth it will have a tougher time with the maple.
I also got a toothed plane for my Veritas 18mm finger plane: http://www.leevalley.com/en/garden/page ... at=1,41182 My experience with a toothed veneer plane was that it was somewhat slow but you could cut in any direction without regard to grain or fear of tearout. Same thing here - you can even use it uphill against the grain on the outside of the arch, and it roughs cross-grain quite nicely. 80 grit paper in an RO sander smooths the teeth marks quickly. One small problem - it produces grainy sawdust, not shavings, and they pack in the throat of the tiny plane and block it quite easily. They won't tap out, and you have to take the blade out to clear them, which means resetting the blade every couple of minutes. The mouth is about .020" wide ahead of the blade, so I will grab a small feeler gauge and use it to push the dust out of the throat, see if that works.
Plane reviews
Please put your pickup/wiring discussions in the Electronics section; and put discussions about repair issues, including fixing errors in new instruments, in the Repairs section.
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