Make a Curved-Bottom Wooden Plane

Make a curved-bottom plane, indispensable for backing out a boat plank, curving a recess in a bench seat to make it more comfortable, or shaping concave pieces on furniture. Or, if you wish, you can make it with a flat bottom for smoothing boards perfectly flat. Either way, you'll create the body of the plane from wood.

A tuned wooden hand plane works as well as a premium metal plane and is soft on the hand. James Krenov (1920-2009) is widely regarded as one of the most influential woodworkers of the twentieth century. He inspired a generation of woodworkers to create details with hand tools and he himself used wooden-body planes to do all sorts of smoothing tasks, including the interiors of the curved doors he often included in his cabinets.

The instructor of this class used a curved-bottom plane he made to shape the gentle trough on the top of a madrone bench shown under construction in the photograph.

Day 1: Lay out the plane body, bore for the throat wedge and locator dowels, resaw the blank, cut out the throat and frog bed, flatten the frog bed, and cut a groove for the chip-breaker screw. Then glue up the plane body.

Day 2: Clean up the glued-up plane body, shape its form to fit your hand, and make and fit a wedge to the chip breaker. Form the sole into a curve, if you wish. Adjust the throat to fit the iron, and grind, sharpen, and hone the blade. Use your plane to smooth some wood. Learn how to adjust the depth of cut.

By the end of the class, you should know how to make additional planes if you want custom sizes or sole shapes.

Materials

Prerequisites

Class Policies

Instructors or Guides