Wooden Handplane
Making a handplane from oak and mahogany.
I’ve always liked the idea of making a wooden handplane, but have never quite gotten around to it. You see, making all the metal parts seems like a royal pain in the ass, so reasonable people tend to steal the important metal bits from antique plane bodies. And although I love the glimmer of oil on freshly shaped mahogany as much as the next guy, it’s always seemed a shame to cannibalize an antique like that.
Which is how I found myself in my local antique store looking specifically for a broken plane. I think I went to three stores before stumbling across this beauty. It’s a 112 year old Stanley #5 jack plane manufactured sometime between 1910-1912, and gloriously, the previous owner managed to break the cast iron body cleanly in half.
You can see that they tried to repair it with that metal plate on the side, but they weren’t able to get the sole flat, rendering it less than useful without some significant restoration work. And to top it off, they even helpfully broke off part of the handle, which gives me the perfect excuse to remake the whole thing from scratch.
But let’s take a step back. How do I know how old this thing is? Well, turns out there are a bunch of old dudes on the internet that are really serious about antique woodworking tools. You can download helpful flowcharts that will guide you through the various features of a plane to identify which of the 19 primary types of antique Stanley hand planes you have, dating anywhere from 1867-1961.
This particular plane is one of the easiest to identify, as it has three patents cast into the body and features a one inch brass adjustment knob, making it a Type 11 made between 1910 and 1918…which is decidedly NOT the date range I told you earlier.
As it happens, there are also 20 distinct Stanley trademarks used between 1872 and 1935. And although that information won’t help you out if you plane is more recent, mine is old af and we are able to narrow it down to a type T Trademark, used between 1909-1912. This gives us a very tight window of 1910-1912 for the plane as a whole.
important metal bits
Although there is definitely some surface rust, the parts seem functional. Neither the blade nor the chip-breaker above it have any significant pitting, so both of them should sharpen up fine. And the large metal piece called the frog will be in serviceable condition with a light sanding and oiling.
I started by tracing out the profile of an existing #6 plane, giving myself a little wiggle room since this will need to have a bigger sole. People often buy two #6s or two #5s, and then set up one of them for taking light shavings and the other for roughing out big chunks of wood. If we are being honest, it’s more common that people do this with the more versatile #5, but I thought it would be sick to make a giant #6 sized wood plane, so that’s what I went with.
I had a big chunk of mahogany laying around from an old ukulele project, and I was able to just barely get a handle sized piece from it, cut at an angle. Although I eventually whipped out the power sander, I did the bulk of the shaping with a 9in Shinto Saw Rasp. These things are absolutely incredible, and I cannot recommend them enough.
I was very careful when shaping the handle to make it as comfortable as possible, constantly gripping it, finding high spots, and sanding them down. However when you actually use the plane, the angle it attaches to the body is of utmost importance. To find this, we held different sized gauge blocks under the back of the plane and tested moving it around until finding the perfect angle. The handle will be held into the base with a simple mortise and tenon joint, and we used a second gauge block to scribe out a line, and then an OLFA to score an initial cut.
Ultimately, I will close in on the tenon with a saw and chisel, but to make sure this is perfect, I started by establishing a shelf with my craft knife.
This can then be finished out with a fine saw. I started off by trying to chisel the mortise out fully by hand. However, if you zoom in on the photo, you should be able to see that I ended up routing out the bulk of the slot before finishing it out with a chisel.
This was my first mortise and tenon joint, and it worked out far more nicely than I expected.
For the design of this plane body, I’m following along with some Rex Kruger plans. I’ve deviated noticeably from his design in some sections, however I wanted to remove the tongue of the frog like he did. Because of the uneven shape of the rear mounting surface, I believe this will give better support to the blade.
The saw wandered a bit during the cut, so we needed to do some filing and then stoning to bring the bottom of the frog down to a flat and square surface. This is the sort of thing that I feel gets glossed over in YouTube videos, but can take a long time when you are doing a project on your own.
Here you can see a rough assembly of the frog and blade with the oak base. The blade protrudes too far, but that is easily fixed with a thin wooden spacer, which you should be able to see if you look closely at the photo of the gap further down the page.
I really didn’t like the grip that Rex used in his plans, and I had originally decided to carve a traditional knob directly out of the mahogany. However, as I did my test grips, I actually ended up preferring a larger shape that lacked radial symmetry.
We’re skipping ahead a little bit in the build process because I forgot to take pictures, but it is important to note that when everything is glued together, you need to take care with the gap left for the blade. It’s better to have too narrow of a gap, because you can easily enlarge it later with a file.
Because I had originally planned to carve out an entire knob, I took the base down further than my side cutouts. To give the plane a streamlined look, I brought this down with a rasp and sanding. You can also see me streamlining the back, and we’ve finally got a photo of the rasp I’ve been using.
Bringing down the lip was one of the trickier parts, and required some careful filing with a small triangle file.
I finished it off with some tung oil and left it to dry.
And here are the first test shavings. Looking pretty good!
