Fair warning: If you read this blog entry you might end up with a dog that has decorative details.
If you build furniture of a traditional sort, you should consider owning some beading planes. While beading planes are (in general) quite common, furniture makers use the less-common small ones – usually 1/8”, 3/16” and 1/4”. These planes add shadow lines to traditional work that are sometimes lost on the modern eye.
The margin between backboards or bottom boards, for example, is much nicer if beaded. And any flat expanse is best broken up with a bead when you have drawer fronts and door fronts that are flush to their face frames.
Heck, bead those face frames while you are at it.
I couldn’t imagine building furniture without them. Beading planes are faster than a router or scratch stock and leave a beautiful, ready-to-finish surface without sanding.
The challenge, however, is finding beading planes that are a notch above firewood. This summer I hit several tool emporiums and inspected at least 100 beading planes that were sized for furniture. None was worth buying.
So if you can’t find vintage beading planes, you need to find someone who will make them for you. Phil Edwards at Philly Planes is one excellent source. And you might be able to talk Matt Bickford into making you some. Old Street Tool still isn’t taking orders.
So please take a look at the work by Caleb James, a chairmaker, planemaker and excellent craftsman in Greenville, S.C. I met Caleb in person for the first time in the spring, used his planes and placed an order for two beading planes to round out my set – a 1/8” and a 1/4”.
I’ve had the 1/4” plane for a while, and the 1/8” came today.
They are outstanding. Beyond outstanding, really.
Caleb isn’t taking orders for planes right now as he is clearing out a well-deserved backlog. But bookmark his site and watch for when he opens ordering again. Then pounce.
When your beading planes arrive, you’ll want to put a bead on everything. Even your dog.
— Christopher Schwarz
Posted on behalf of Bill Anderson:
Beading planes are incredibly easy to rejuvenate, and I do this all of the time. To make the profile “rise up” you need a 4″ combo square, shoulder plane, a narrower round plane, and possibly a dedicated scratch stock and/or a shaped sanding block. Of course, the mouth is widened up slightly in this process. The iron needs a shaped cutoff wheel (Lowes) to get the small inside curves. Maybe an hour to get the profile fine and to regrind and hone the iron.
Bill Anderson
Edwards Mountain Woodworks
57 Woodside Trail
Chapel Hill, NC 27517-6077
I just received my 3/16 plane from Caleb a few weeks ago. I’m well pleased with it and it is a lot of fun to use.
Chris,
Thanks to your previous post on Caleb I also got mine a few weeks ago and am also very pleased with it.
Is that some other wood that’s being used for the boxing?
It is persimmon, which is an ebony. The Old Street plane is persimmon as well but the color varies depending on how it is dried.
I wish like ever I could justify the cost of some of these new wooden planes. I love that there are folks out there making tool making of this nature their full time jobs, and I know they are greatly needed. This is proven by the fact that several had to stop taking orders to catch up at one time or another. I’ve managed to put together a set of old beading planes, but it has taken me about 15 years, and I haven’t used them all to know they work well. I bet you could find 50 bad ones for every one good one, and 45 of those 50 will be 1/4″ or 3/8″ beads. As Bill Anderson points out, they are often fairly easy to rejuvenate, but if you’re impatient, you should buy a new one to support these makers, or try making your own.
Chris-
Make sure you encourage him to hurry up and start teaching classes on plane making. Roy is just too far away for me to take the class, while Caleb is closer to me than my place of work 🙂
He already teaches classes on planemaking, I believe.
Forgive me for asking, but why doesn’t someone like Lee Valley make metal bodied moulding planes? It seems a big company like that could batch them out in quantity and they would actually be affordable. Bridge City Toolworks is onto something with theirs, but none of the profiles are simple hollows & rounds, which to hear Matt Bickford say it, are super versatile. I’ve looked at pricing for sets of hollows and rounds and holy crap(!) I don’t know if I could get that much money from selling a kidney. I could buy a top notch router and table setup for that much. Of course, this point is more of a thought experiment than a real possibility. My hatred for routers is what got me diving into the hand tool rabbet hole in the first place. But still, why not metal bodied? Someone with tool-making knowledge ‘splain me this.
There have been metal moulders and even H&R planes – check out some of the Stanley combination planes. As someone who has used them, I can say they are very heavy.
John Economaki has suggested someone make moulders using injection-molding technology and a plastic resin. I’ve always wanted to investigate this idea some more personally, but have never had the time.
….which brings us to this:
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Dremel-Idea-Builder-3D-Printer-3D20-01/205448581
This got me to thinking about some of the Stanley 45’s I have.
Might spend some time on some of the blades to be sharpened, have two of the old wooden box sets.
It was done in metal many years ago and only a small few have much nice to say about them. Have found some [not many] who loved them.
The first plane maker I know of, Tod Herrli, started in the 90s and is still out there teaching classes. Google is your friend.
Tod Herli = 582 miles, Woodwrights Shop = 223 miles, Caleb Jones = 15 miles, Google IS my friend.
The shaped cutoff wheel Bill mentions is the technique favored by Larry Williams (as seen on his video). For do-it-yourself dressing of moulding plane irons I’ve found these http://tinyurl.com/lba84wg to be great with the Dremel. I bought them years ago from Harbor Freight, but they don’t carry them any more. You have to decide for yourself whether it’s better to clamp the iron and address it with the Dremel or the other way around. Practice first!
I like my Record 50C combination plane. Just right in the weight department, plated cast iron body, but of a unique design that is not tiring with extended use. It came with 18 tungsten steel cutters and the dealer threw in some blanks and two other tongue cutters. Over the years I have made and collected other cutters that work with this plane and there is virtually nothing I can’t make with it including large complex mouldings. The draw back is there are extra steps involved in making complex mouldings with blade changes whereas the wood planes are usually of complete profile. I don’t like the fiddling with wood planes though so Grandpap’s complete set of Mathieson planes are wrapped up and stored.
Though the three sizes you list are most useful, there are a ton out there which are larger, sometimes much larger. What is the practical use of a 3/4″ bead? I can’t imagine a timber beam large enough to need a bead like that. I suppose it would be possible to re-profile one to be a more useful size, but not easy.
Architectural millwork.