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Just a couple of things on flattening the bottoms of wooden planes. I use sandpaper on glass or a marble tile (you can get the tile at any big box for a couple of bucks). I rubber cement the paper down and clamp the tile or glass on my planing bench.

A couple of passes will tell you quickly (on metal or wood) how flat it is. The most important spot is in front of the plane iron where it compresses the wood before being cut.

You don't have to worry about iron, but much wood removal will open the throat and lessen the ability of the plane to do fine work. I have attached a pic of a plane (Stanley 23 transition plane) that had a really bad base when I acquired it. I jointed in on my SS jointer. Then I let in a new piece of wood (in this case Yellow Heart which is very hard) in front of the blade to make it usuable again. You then joint it again after the glue is dry.

Probably should have retired this old workhorse, but it was also educational to make this patch.

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I have never seen tools like those, beautiful tools. I love tools of any kind.

Question Why not laminate a whole new bottom onto the plane?

Ed in Tampa wrote:Question Why not laminate a whole new bottom onto the plane?

I've got a plane now where I'm going to do just that. But it is more work because I'll have to duplicate the ramp-angle for the iron-bed, and also tune the size of the frontward mouth opening. If the sole wasn't in such bad shape, I'd reduce my work by just fitting a new mouth-piece in front of the blade, like WmZiggy showed.

There is a website where a guy does great traditional wood-plane builds, among others:
http://www.billcarterwoodworkingplanemaker.co.uk/

nuhobby wrote:I've got a plane now where I'm going to do just that. But it is more work because I'll have to duplicate the ramp-angle for the iron-bed....

Here is that old plane in progress. With Autumn in Indiana lately, I remembered I have some extremely hard Persimmon wood. I used the Mk. 5 and a tilt on the worktable to make proper-angled pilot-holes in the new sole for this plane. I also had the thing fully broken down (knobs removed), so I could invert the newly-laminated sole on my Overarm Router table, and joint the sole very square and flat.

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One of these days after the knobs are glued back on, I'll sharpen the blade and put it to use. I did just enough testing with the dulled blade to give confidence to finish the job.

Oh, forgot to mention, the butterfly inlays on the sides are to shore-up some cracks caused by the metal pivots (metal pivoting abutment works with the wedge-type blade retainer). Having seen the cracks on this plane, I wonder if a lot of the "Krenov" planes that people like to build might crack similarly one day.

This one is now finished. It took some patience to get the mouth set for good tightness but no clogging. A real fine plane now that it's done, with a 50 degree bedding angle, and blade which is about 1/8" thick:

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