Of course it does, more or less, depending on how you look at it.
Sure, you can buy a Stanley made in China for app 40€ and it’ll get the job done, your rod will be finished. But it always feels better when planing is smooth, feels fluent and the finished rod turns out not only better but more beautiful, when your plane is either extremely high-end or the one you’ve made yourself to fit your own hand.
Planes suitable for rid making can be found starting from just a few dozen euros, while at the top end prices go up to around 500 euros or more.
For me, making my own tools is rewarding, therapeutic, and educational even when it doesn’t work out. And when it does, the feeling and the results are on another level.
The method for making my own wooden plane is more or less in the style of James Krenov. If you type the magic words “James Krenov,” “wood,” and “plane” into a search engine, you’ll find videos, books for sale, various articles, and plenty of instructions, but mostly about making a “standard plane” with a 45-degree blade angle.
When building a block plane with a 25-degree blade angle for planing bamboo rod strips, it’s worth making a few improvements to those instructions, especially regarding the blade adjustment mechanism (hammer adjustment vs. adjustment screw).
As for making a scraper plane yourself—that’s probably the one that really makes sense at first. It’s a lot more fun and easier to do the finishing with a scraper plane than with a loose carpet-blade type cutter or a simple scraper blade.
The original drawings I sketched for the scraper plane: at first, I thought I’d secure the blade with a screw clamp on the wedge, but after testing I decided that a simple wedge alone is sufficient.
Key dimensions: blade angle 105 degrees, length 13 cm, height 5.5 cm at the rear and 2.5 cm at the front, and the mouth opening ended up being as wide as 2 cm. A narrower mouth just doesn’t really work well for scraping.
For the material, it’s best to choose wood that’s as heavy as possible, and of course the sole of the plane should be made from the hardest wood you can find. In the picture above, you can see the pre-shaped blocks of the scraper plane, ready for gluing. The inner parts are birch, with an oak sole plate allready glued on. The side blocks are walnut.
2 pc of scraper plane bodies glued up, ready for further work and final shaping.
After gluing, planing the blank straight, shaping the side profile, and drilling the wedge pin hole.
A couple of finished scraper planes. The one on the left has a 35 mm Stanley plane blade, which can be bought from allmost anywhere for about 10€ each. The one on the right uses a blade cut to the right width from a €2 scraper sheet (70x130 mm) from a local hardware store , which can be rotated to provide 4 fresh sharp edges.
And what about the actual finishing plane?
No worries, that can also be done and reasonably well too.
After been sketching various designs for a while, I came up with this drawing. The model and name of the plane, “Vantage,” comes from an idea that while I was sketching, I was watching an old episode of Top Gear where they were testing and praising a new model Aston Martin to be the most stylish car ever designed by any human being.
Key measurements: Length 18 cm, bed
angle 25 degrees, mouth opening width 0.8 cm. An aluminum plate is
embedded in the base of the wedge to lock the blade firmly in place
and it also makes the wedge function as a chip breaker on its own.
The core is birch, the sole is “Brazilian hardwood,” the sides are walnut, screws and the mechanism is made from brass.
The adjustment mechanisms, which also allow for a bit of lateral adjustment, are made of brass and are my own make and design, allthough the idea is copied from the Veritas “wooden plane hardware kit,” which can be ordered online for about €40. However, that hardware kit is most likely not suitable for a low-angle plane. The blade here is a standard 40 mm Stanley. Different blade brands might require some modifications to the blade moving sled.
Several rods have now been planed, and
they turn out quite decent with these tools. Besides, and most
importantly, planing is a hell a lot of a lot more
fun.
Further reading:
Most libraries are quite likely to have at least one book about making planes.
In the depths of the internet, you can find, for example, an excellent article: Wood Planes Made Easy by David Finck, available as a downloadable PDF and the payment is just the price of your email address in terms of privacy.
And also here: https://www.sihistin.fi/fi/tyokalut/tammihoyla.html
