Classic Boat – July 2019

CRAFTSMANSHIP

Boatbuilder’s Notes

PRACTICAL ADVICE

Fully adjustable chisel plane

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1 Custom chisel plane with

depth and lateral blade

adjustment 2 Breakage at a

weld in the shoe adjustment

screw 3 Scribe the sides

perpendicular to the rear edge

of the mouth 4 Cut away the

front end using a junior hacksaw

guided by a wooden block

5 Ready for reshaping the sides

6 File one side to a fair curve,

then use a card template of it

to mark side two 7 File down to

the line and smooth further with

abrasive paper 8 Chisel-planing

glue lines without damaging the

wood’s surface

BY ROBIN GATES

A chisel plane, with its fully-exposed cutting edge, trims into corners and stopped rebates where the fixed

toe of other planes denies access, and where there’s insufficient elbow room even to use a scraping chisel.

Unusually, a chisel plane’s cutting edge is set level with the sole, smoothing away only what stands proud

of a surface, so setting up is critical. Set too high it won’t cut, while set too low it’ll dig in.

The best small chisel plane on the market is probably the Lie-Nielsen 97½ with depth adjustment,

priced around £139, but you can make a more fully featured tool with lateral blade adjustment from

an old – or in my case broken – block plane.

This Mexican-made Stanley 9½ block plane was of indifferent quality when new but after extensive

fettling, it performed well, so my heart sank when the shoe adjustment screw sheared off and rendered

the tool scrap. Viewed positively, however, here was the starting point for a chisel plane that’s not only

fully adjustable but also shorter – and handier – than commercial alternatives.

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(^23)
Marking from the rule on edge
ROBIN GATES
Use the rule on edge
BY ROBIN GATES
It was a boatbuilder’s little joke when I asked him for a progress
update that he’d reach for the four-fold boxwood rule and
"consult the yardstick" – the joke being that this long-established
talisman for the trade’s precision is only two feet long.
Now here’s a little tip he passed on that isn’t a joke: when
using the rule with face flat to the work, read it from directly
above, or the parallax error introduced by reading from the side
will make a nonsense of its 1/16th inch graduations. Reading from
45 degrees will throw the measurement out by the thickness
of the rule itself – 1/8 inch. But you can avoid this error by using
the rule on edge, with its graduations touching the work, and
its thickness eliminated from the measurement.