Coffins and Stuff – Super Hard Coffins?

While I’m making rosewood planes, well two now – I guess it seems like a good time to make more than one. The one plane I’ve made few of is coffin smoothers. No offense to people who love them, I just cannot find a way to make them as productive as a Stanley four in regular use, just as I can’t find a way to make a metal Stanley jointer or #5 as efficient for jack and trying work as a wooden jack and try plane.

My favorite smoother I’ve made (out of two? maybe I should wait for a larger number) was an experiment to use scrap purpleheart and intentionally make an insert in the plane like you would see on a plane that’s had a plug or block installed when the mouth gets too large. The point of the plug was to control both the mouth size and create some room for the wear in side the plane before redirecting the shaving up and out. It worked great to be able to separate the main wear angle and the plug – from above the plane looked normal, but a wear block inserted in a new plane is a fart in church kind of thing. Good luck convincing someone that they shouldn’t wince or squint at it – it’s associated with clapped out planes.

Of course, the wedge isn’t fitted and shaped yet – I have a little bit of abutment work to do as well as the final fitting and shaping. The wedge be much shorter and rounded at the top to match the iron and cap iron.

Continuing a slow trend- once every 6 years I make a coffin smoother – the eyes got away from me here. Some smoothers have the front escapement tilted forward to make a bigger opening, and the cheeks are not a flat as this is then transitioning into a diagonal relief cut, but rather diagonal from the abutment all the way to the front. Much more room and more open looking, and the eyes can be longer because they won’t start in a weird place. So the eyes ended up getting short and tall as I faffed with them.

The combination makes this a tubby plane and the sides are particularly fat at the back of the eye. I’ve got a bunch of older coffin planes and they seem to have all kinds of shapes – from fat at the eyes to thin at the front and back, to more subtle like this one where the front is tubby, but the back is also tubby. I chose these based on the desire to have a bigger rear and a looser rear hand, but just like the eyes, there are other styles (fat front like this and thinner boat tail style back) that are more stylish .

The iron is 125cr1 and the hardness after a 390F double temper is 66. There is no visible grain growth at magnification, but we are probably pushing the limits of where hardness can be with a tempering temperature that’s not that low. They make this steel all the time, and beyond that, I have plenty left – if it’s hard tempered, I can bump it up to 425F and get hardness to around 64/65, and if that doesn’t work, just make another one.

However, I don’t notice anything unusual when wrapping this iron up and giving it an initial edge. The burr behavior is good – it doesn’t break off early but you can tease most of it off on a hard Arkansas and have little to strop or buff.

The odd nick that you see in the end of the iron is something I just feel like doing on everything going forward – a punch mark where I ground a small bevel on the other side, put the iron in a vise, and then hit it with a steel punch and heavy hammer. Ideally, you’d like less of it to break out than that, but whatever – the difference in time to grind it out and then set the final bevel is about 1 minute ,and not grinding a bevel and then testing a small break preserves the ability to re-do the heat treatment if the grain is bloated. Once the bevel is on with a water-hardening steel, you’re asking for trouble if you try to only take a little of it off and re-do the quench in brine. Terminal trouble – cupped on the face side and convex on the bevel side. No thanks.

I’m disappointed in how this plane looks in pictures given it kind of has the proportions that I like for handling a coffin smoother. I don’t like a cramped thin rear or the ache of a closed hand. I do like the fact that this plane will be a little heavier due to the wood type – we’ll see.

Once again for this one, the wedge is walnut – rosewood on rosewood is just kind of harsh and it doesn’t grip the iron as well. And there’s a chicken feeling, or “pucker factor” – you know what that means if you know what it means. Hardwood wedge on hard plane and burnished wood on the wedge and abutments and wedge to iron contact just leaves you feeling like one or two taps to get everything seated could be followed by a pop as one of the abutments cracks. I’ll color the wedge so it looks similar to the rosewood, and this time pore fill it a little bit so that the remaining look beyond just the color matches rosewood a little better.

No sandpaper yet on this plane but for the bottom! When it gets oil and shellac or varnish and shellac and wax (impatience on my part – if I use a long varnish but then rub shellac into it, I can use a turpentine-solvent wax right away rather than letting the plane sit for a long time to avoid trouble with the turpentine softening varnish a little. I ended up doing the same thing with the recent rosewood jack. It’s kind of a nice combination even though most folks would think putting a less durable finish over a more durable finish doesn’t make sense. On furniture, it probably wouldn’t.

Not sanding anything will mean flaws appear when I apply finish – file marks, little facety things that could’ve been rounded over better. We’ll see.