The Brese Small Smoother Kit: Session Two

June 18th, 2009 in blogs

Derek Cohen, member

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For those interested, follow me through the second session of building Ron Brese’s Small Smoother kit.

In Session 1 I had infilled the plane with a practice Jarrah infill. This was to work out the design and see if the plane would work appropriately with a 60° bed. Ron usually makes only 50° and 55° kits, and this kit, which was a custom bed, proved to need a few tweaks.

We left off with the plane looking like this ..

As it stood, the mouth choked when planning, shavings collecting in the mouth, and compressing until the lever cap had to be removed to eject them. Ron was aware that this was a possibility and sent me a few suggestions. I had similar thoughts, so set up a sequence to complete these mods.

The first was to increase the clearance inside the mouth by forming a slight radius in the front infill. The original was angled at 20°. A radius could increase this to 25° without shortening the handhold. This was done on the belt sander…

This made a significant difference. Shaving began to flow out of the mouth …

However this was still not satisfactory as the mouth continued to choke.

So the next mod was to alter the angle of the lever cap. I could see that it was too thick here and impeding shavings. Here is the original lever cap..

I was not sure how much to remove and just decided to “make it look right”, hoping that this would also be right.

For this, the quickest and easiest method was to create a quick jig for the belt sander – just screwed the lever cap to the end of a stretcher and used the mitre gauge for stability.

This was repeated at two angles, before hand sanding to shape.

Yes I know, it is not quite finished. This was to test out the new shape. You can see how much brass was removed (original outline in blue) …

So, how did this fare? Once again there was an improvement. The shavings were flowing more easily … but I felt that this could be a little better still.

So the third mod was to return to the first mod and increase the radius to 30°.

Now we are cooking!

…and ready for the Ebony infill!

At this point I need to go back two Christmases time to a Galootaclause gift of this length of rough sawn Ebony (seen here alongside Ron’s kit). The two were a match made in Heaven.

First stage was to plane it square with my trusty HNT Gordon Trying Plane …

I planed three sides square, then removed the fourth side on the bandsaw (saving as much of the Ebony as I could). This process included checking the grain direction and arranging it as I wanted (as much quarter sawn as possible). Finally, with careful handplaning, the infill slid in evenly and with just enough space for an ultrathin layer of epoxy (to be added on the final fit).

This was now cut to shape on the tablesaw. 20° slope on front infill and 60° bed on rear infill.

Tuning of the bed was done on 240 grit W&D sandpaper. This was simply clamped to the bed of my bandsaw, and the wood pulled over it (one direction only to avoid rounding over the face). Frequent checks were made for square in both the vertical and horizontal, with pressure place on the area that required more removed.

Here is the final result ..

Here are the infills marked out for shaping ..

After the documentation of the First Session (in which I infilled the Jarrah), BB asked me how the screw holes were created so accurately. Actually, BB, I did demonstrate this in the posting: the holes were marked with a spring-loaded awl ..

Since this time round the infills were a slip-fit (that is, the Jarrah were a tighter fit as they were not intended to be epoxied), I needed clamps to ensure that nothing moved out of alignment.

With the infills now safely held with screws, the ends could be shaped to the metal – this is necessary so that I can work to layout lines when shaping the tops of the infill.

Here is the front infill to date ..

.. and the rear infill ..

And finally, the current state of the project ..

I have asked Ron if he has a brass lever cap screw to replace the steel one here. This is on its way! Also, the eagle-eyed will note that I have discarded the steel insert in the blade and infilled the screw hole with brass.