Gombeira and Rosewood

I think the last time I posted, I was making a coffin smoother. I made it, it looks a little funny because I haven’t built one in a while, so I made another. Planes 1 and 3 are here – the second indian rosewood smoother I still have and will use, but this smoother is Gombeira. About 30% more dense than water in the case of this sample.

All three recent planes have the same kind of iron – a tapered iron made of 1.25% steel referred to as 125cr1. it’s a very clean steel and easy to work with, but not bumped into a class of the remelted steels as far as I know. My limited use of remelted steels suggests they are just a little better for the maker.

I went on a tear pulling old beech sticks out that I have left from when I was making more planes and to my shock, the four from horizon that were euro beech all twisted moderately or bowed a *lot*. I’m glad that they sat here for a while and I didn’t make planes out of them, but I suspect that they were under tension because the wood wasn’t straight and without tension in a tree and they’re moving toward that.

Backing up a second, I’m convinced coffin smoothers were used differently than you’d use a stanley smoother. And it might be more efficient in some ways, but torturous in others. I think the platform allows easier removal of big shavings, but obviously adjustment to a small degree is less convenient and the fact that there is less friction means the plane has to be more in the cut and will not enter a cut as easily or stay in an iffy cut.

Some version of this is the nature of using the double iron – it lets you bolster the shaving thickness, get a lot more done and work a lot more cubic footage of wood with each sharpening cycle. And if you have a marginal iron, you have to focus on this even more and end up learning something useful in all work. This ability is what eliminated the single iron plane. You can’t do it with a single iron and for all but the thinnest smoothing and using perfect wood, a double iron plane will pretty easily outwork a single iron plane at least two to one and without the user feeling like they are having to rush or slash around.

So, back to the wood:

This piece has two issues – one the grain isn’t straight cut center down the length of the billet, and this was expensive wood – something like $15 a board foot, but when it’s good or even just pretty good, I’ll gladly pay it. You can’t make good planes with common wood unless you laminate. No thanks on that.

er…forgot the second issue – the second issue is the billet itself bowed at least 3/8″ through the center. we don’t really like planes that bow a few thousandths, so hopefully it’s over that.

I’ll make myself a plane with it. I much appreciate the look of american beech – it has more of a beeswing look and can be dazzling like quatered sycamore, and euro beech looks nice but it has these little brown egg shaped dots all over it that make it recognizable in ikea laminations, etc. the camera is confused by the lightness and bright white overhead LEDs and the picture is not true color, but that’s the way it goes.

After hand sawing off these wedge shaped bits, the wood ends up like this:

The end of this stick is within only single digit degrees of being perfectly orthogonal – I’ll plane one face of this that would be a sole perfectly flat to a straight edge and then see what it does over the next couple of months as the weather changes. Kind of like you’d do with wood for a guitar neck, except I’d never use this for a guitar neck given its history.

it does have some nice curl along the top, which should look brilliant with a varnish finish.