Aha. I deliberately didn't mention it, I wondered if anyone would pick up on that. As I mentioned, the sole was just a work around for not having a thicker block of beech, but I liked the look of those continental planes with the corrugated join, and wondered if if would look interesting around the curve of a coffin shaped plane.
I'm guessing they are usually machine cut, so I had to think of another way. i thought up various elaborate ideas, but then settled for the simplest. There was a clue in the first picture. There are three tools I used - a pattern maker's plane (for inspiration only), a home made float, and the tool in question - a scratch stock I knocked up from some of the beech offcuts and a bit of hardpoint saw blade. The scratch stock cutter has teeth filed at 2mm pitch using a saw file and a printed paper template. The tips of the teeth are taken off by a light stoning so the teeth match more closely the rounded bottoms of the gullets made by the saw file - here's a closer look:
- (139.3 KiB)
At the stage I had my pieces of beech and hornbeam with two parallel faces and one perpendicular edge, but still a bit over long by about 50mm and slightly wide, I used the scratch stock to cut the corrugations on both pieces. Needs a bit of care to use the fence initially to establish the parallel groves, but once the scratch stock would just follow them, moving it a few teeth left, right and even reversing it occasionally evens out any eccentricity in my filing of the teeth. Once both parts are done, a quick check for fit, then it is just a case of brushing on hide glue and clamping up. I would have more clamps to hand if I did it again to get a finer glue line.
Does it work ? Well, what it doesn't do is produce pretty shavings. It produces either dust, or stringy / wooley stuff depending on direction, cross grain or parallel - I presume with the toothed blade and high pitch, this is normal (??) It seemed to flatten down a bit of rough sawn elm fairly effectively.