A plane at last...

I had been lucky enough to come across a 14" Taylor tenon saw a while ago, that had seen better days, unfortunately, I removed the back and didn't take any photographs of the saw complete. After meeting up with Bill Carter again, and seeing his beautiful collection of tools on show, I just had to find the saw back out again. It was tucked away down the back of my bench, I gave it a wipe over and started to make one of his fabulous little planes. I'm planing on starting with a longer, thinner plane, the reason for this is that I have an old blade with some damage and would like to experiment with extending the blade with a joint that may or may not have been seen before, we'll see...

This may take a while because of the building of the house and other work.

So, I started by cutting the back down the middle, what a pain that job was. I used a hacksaw blade to cut the back down, with a cloth around the end, to aid the holding, and stop it from cutting me, this took longer than expected, but, it was great to open up the two parts and expose them to the sunlight after such a long time since the piece was folded. I cleaned up the inside surface and started thinking about the blade, the bed angle, and the timber.

So, it's under way..

Over the last few months some of my tools have been used for all sorts of jobs, some that under normal circumstances I would not have used, I needed to check through what I had got and buy some new tools that would do the job properly.

The short list consists of

1. A couple of Swiss files, to use on the dovetail joints
2. A file card to clean up
3. Some Bi-metal hacksaw blades
4. Metal cutting discs for cutting blades

I had already found a shop on line, in the Jewellery Quarter, in Birmingham. Cousins, here I could try the files, and feel if they were right for the metal and for me. After a short drive, and a bit of luck with the parking, (right outside) I was there, and these guy's had got just about everything, and I spent a little longer in there than I thought I would. I bought a small jewellers hammer, This has a better size and shape of head to use on setting the blades. Then I found a Hide mallet, I've been after one of these for a while, but was never happy enough with the quality of the hide, and two fabulous Swiss files, to start me off.

These are the files, Habilis and Glaredon Vallorbe

The raw hide mallet is Birmingham made,

the jewellers hammer will save me using cross pein hammers to set planes..

I know...

All the best

Jamie