Ed,
After I re-purposed the horned smoother to serve as a scrub plane, I purchased a
genuine Stanley 40-1/2 from my PNTC buddy GAM. At the time I was thinking I
couldn't have too many planes. Now I'm not so sure about that. :-) But they both
do work well.
I noticed that the edges of the sole on the 40-1/2 are radiused, presumably to
make it glide better on rough surfaces. Is the Stanley 40 the same?
Love your woodie smoother modified for chair seat duty. I have a couple of
coffin-style compass planes. If I ever get into chair making, I should do
something similar.
Cheers,
Chuck Taylor
north of Seattle USA
Ed Minch wrote:
Chuck
Looks like you did a fine job of re-purposing. The only reason I have a user
Stanley 40 is that I found one cheap - else I would have done something like
that. When I started my (limited) windsor chair career 18 years ago I looked at
buying a gutter adze - nothing less than $150 at the time, so I took a cute
little $10 cherry smoother and made a compass scrub. It is radiussed both fore-
and-aft and side-to-side. So far I have used it on 9 seats without sharpening
it since the first. In fact I don't recall re-setting the blade after the first
- just put a piece of blue tape over the edge between uses. It takes literally
15 minutes to get close enough for a travisher as I skip-the-scorp most of the
time and the travisher does such a great job. I stopped looking for a gutter
adze. Here are 5 shots - scroll left and right
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruby1638/51166015444/in/dateposted-public/
Ed Minch
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