New Planes on the Horizon…

 When I started Voigt Planes seven years ago (wow, it does not seem that long), I thought I'd be rapidly adding all sorts of new models, but it hasn't turned out that way. Aside from rabbet and dado planes, I've mostly stuck to my basic lineup of bench planes. But this summer I've been working on a couple new models that I feel very good about, and they should be rolling out pretty soon.

First is a panel raising plane. I'm calling this my "Yankee Panel Raiser,"because it's based on planes by the second and third generations of "Yankee" planemakers, who worked in rural New England towards the end of the 18th century.

 

 

Excuse the bags of fiberglass insulation in the background--I'm insulating the shop.

The plane is very basic for a panel raiser--there's no nicker, and no separate flat area for the tongue. There are other panel raisers out there with all the bells and whistles, so I wanted to make a simple, robust design that's historically accurate.

The offset handle is quite comfortable.

The other new plane I've been working on is a slide arm fillister. I've made a couple prototypes of side escapement fillisters (the kind with a fence that screws to the bottom), and they worked fine, but they weren't something I was excited about producing. This one's different. It's essentially a skew rabbet plane with a fence that's secured with wooden thumbscrews. This style was quite popular in the U.S. in the late 18th/early 19th centuries, despite the fact that it was about twice the price of the simpler side escapement fillister.

One advantage of this style is that it's faster and easier to adjust the fence.

 

The other thing is that side escapement fillisters can be a bit finicky in terms of how they eject the shavings. That's because the skew actually forces the shaving in the wrong direction, so the shaving has to turn in order to exit the escapement, which can lead to clogging. You can reverse the skew--and some makers do that--but then the plane will have a tendency to be pushed away from the cut. With the skew rabbet escapement, however, the shavings eject very efficiently.

Here's a closeup of the escapement:

I hope to have these planes up on my website this Fall. In the meantime, if you have any questions about either of them, drop me a line.

Coming up in the next few posts, I'll be exploring the rabbit hole of historic natural varnishes that I've fallen into the last couple years. Stay tuned!

Ruminations on Social Media in Woodworking

 

My first Instagram post, from 2015

 If you read my blog, chances are you saw Mortise and Tenon's recent post "Keep it Real," in which they announced their intention to abandon social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter). The post generated a lot of conversation, especially on…wait for it…social media. I found it thought provoking, and much of it rang true, especially this paragraph:

I eventually got myself down to 15 minutes per day of social media usage: enough for one post and a few responses. It felt so good. I was regaining my life back. In the meantime, however, I noticed Facebook and Instagram moving toward greater and greater control of their users' experiences. It’s no secret that these companies design their platforms to be as addictive as possible. Even many stable and well-balanced people, who are otherwise quite resilient individuals, find themselves sucked into the social media vortex. The hasty skimming and instantaneous reactions that these platforms foster leave no room for reflection within the apps themselves. If you don’t respond instantly, the post will fade away into your feed, likely never to be seen again. Despite the fact that, as of this writing, it is still possible to manually search for that inspiring photo on the author’s page, how often do we do this? In reality, 99 percent of the time we experience the app as it was designed to be experienced: as endless scrolling, feeding emotion-driven gut reactions.

I've never belonged to Facebook or Twitter, but for five years I've regularly posted on Instagram. When I started, it felt like there was a real community of hand-tool oriented woodworkers. I had lively debates with fellow toolmakers; I made some real-life friends, and customers found me. Most importantly, I had total control over the content I wanted to see. Back then, Instagram's feed was chronological, there were no ads, and no "suggested" posts (unless you went looking for them). 

But since Facebook bought Instagram, they've methodically transformed it into what my wife calls "Facebook in pictures." An algorithm determines the order of the posts I see, ads are everywhere, "suggested" posts are forced on me, and finding older posts to view again has gotten to be more and more of a chore. It's simply not much fun any more, and I regularly feel manipulated--which makes sense, because that's really the goal of the platform now.

At the same time, there's some irony here. My business has certainly benefited from Instagram exposure, and Mortise and Tenon Magazine probably wouldn't even exist in its current form without social media: Joshua Klein, I would argue, built that publication largely on the strength of his social media presence.

So, I'm not quite ready to walk away from Instagram completely, but it's time to recognize that things have changed. The idea of an Instagram-driven community of hand-tool lovers was always a bit of an illusion--the people preaching the loudest about community were always focused on building their careers as "influencers"--but now the illusion, for me at least, has been completely stripped away. I'll continue to post occasionally, but I'm going to gradually disengage and minimize the amount of time I waste there.

At the same time, I plan to re-center this blog as the primary way I communicate with the woodworking community. For the new year, I've updated my blog roll, I've added an RSS feed gadget in the top right corner (so you can add me to an aggregator like Feedly if you want), and most importantly, I'm posting more often.

Blogs seem pretty old fashioned these days, and they can't compete with the real-time, frenetic pace of social media. But they offer some clear advantages. Ideas can be explored in more detail, and blog entries are easy to find again, unlike social media posts. There are no ads (at least on my blog, and most that I follow). There is no additional content that is forced upon you. For all these reasons, I wouldn't be surprised to see blogs flourish again, as more people are turned off by the ever-more oppressive manipulation of social media. 

What are your thoughts? Feel free to chime in below.

…what I'm up to so far in 2021

 

The new Bridgeport

 

2020 ended on kind of a down note--my octogenarian mom took a spill, and I ended up taking about 8 weeks off to travel back to the midwest to help her recover, and ultimately bring her back to PA to stay with us for a while. The pandemic made all of this much tougher, but I won't complain because so many people are hurting so much worse. I'm in good health and no one close to me is dead or dying of Covid, so I feel very lucky.

In any case, these travails doubled my current lead time for planes, to about 6-7 months, so that's something to keep in mind if you're planning on ordering. So far, all my customers have been incredibly understanding and nice about this--yet another thing to be grateful for.

2021, on the other hand, started with a bang! I've been looking for a mill for a couple years, and I finally got one in the first week of January. Everything just fell into place very quickly.

The mill (pictured above) is a mid 1960s Bridgeport J-head. Most unusually, it has a single phase motor, which makes life a lot easier. It also has DRO and came with a vise, full set of collets, and a bunch of accessories. Quite a deal!

Having a mill will allow me to make more of my irons and hardware in-house, and will speed up production of my planes a little bit. It's not a magic bullet--no machine is, for planemaking requires a ton of handwork no matter how you slice it--but it will help me towards my goal of getting more planes (like plows and fillisters) into production. It's also going to be a lot fun for me: I worked my way through grad school in a machine shop, and a Bridgeport J-head was the first mill I ever used…so this is a bit like having an old friend in the shop.

Moving the mill--which weighs about 1900 pounds--was kind of an adventure. I called up some professional machine riggers, and the only quote I got was for over two grand to move the machine 55 miles down the highway. Forget it. I rented a truck from Enterprise and a drop-deck trailer from Sunbelt, and moved it myself. The key was to use a pry bar and shims to gradually raise the mill up on 2 x 4 blocks, then slide pieces of black iron pipe underneath. On a level surface, it's easy to roll the mill on pipe.

The next time  try this, I'll get a come-along--it would have, ahem, come in handy for non-level surfaces. I was able to use a ratcheting strap for the same purpose, but the real thing would have been nice.

Some work I did in 2020, and…

 

The new Voigt Planes shop

It's been a while since I've blogged, so I'd like to take a look back at some of the work I've done over the last year. 

2020 was a tough year, like it was for most people, but I did manage to break some new ground in my planemaking adventures. First and foremost, my wife and I bought a house (first time!), which came with the 900 sf garage pictured above. I've got a lot of plans for this space, so stay tuned!

Early in the year, I added dado planes to my lineup. These are loosely based on some early American examples, and use wooden thumbscrews and a wooden depth stop. I'm extremely happy with this design--it works great, and keeps both the weight and the price down. And the wooden screws are useful in several types of planes; more on that below.

The idea for wooden thumbscrews actually came out of some research I've been doing at Colonial Williamsburg. In 2017,  I began studying their newly acquired, enormous collection of the earliest American planes by Cesar Chelor and John & Francis Nicholson. In 2019, I did a presentation at their annual Working Wood in the 18th Century conference, and this year, I wrote an article for Mortise and Tenon Magazine that focused on Cesar Chelor.

As part of my work for Colonial Williamsburg, I've been making reproductions (or near-reproductions) of Chelor's planes. In 2019, I made a panel raiser and a stick and rabbet plane; in 2020, I finally tackled the Yankee plow plane. I started with a lefty prototype, since I'm left-handed.

 

Once I was satisfied, I built two right-handed models for the Hay Cabinet Shop at Williamsburg. One of the planes is made from traditional beech (like nearly all of my planes), while the other is made from yellow birch, which was the species preferred by the early American makers (Nicholson, Chelor, etc). 

 

In the next post, I'll preview some plans for the shop in the coming year. Happy 2021 everybody; hope the year is off to a good start for you! It's got to be better than last year!

Deriving the Formulas for Sightline and Resultant angles

Warning for adults: This post is primarily about math. If you're a math phobe, hate math, whatever, you should hit the eject button now! For an excellent, math-free approach to the same topic, go here. This warning is only for adults--teenagers can do this stuff easily.

I've been too busy making planes to dabble in chairmaking lately, but it's never far from my mind. Chairmakers and planemakers have a lot in common, and a number of folks--like Caleb James--do both at a very high level.
I first read about sightlines and resultant angles eight years ago, when I checked Drew Langsner's book out of the public library. In use, it's the simplest, most intuitive way to drill chair mortises. The only difficulty is coming up with the numbers. I know of five ways to do it:

• Langsner has tables in the back of his book, laying out the sightline and resultant angles from 0° to 45°.
• Peter Galbert shows a very intuitive approach to drawing and scaling the sightline. In the linked article, he omits finding the resultant angle, but I think you'll understand how to do it if you keep reading.
• Chris Schwarz is the creator of the math-free approach, using wire models, that I linked to above.
• Jameel Abrams shows how to find the angles in Sketchup.
• You can use the sector made by Acer-Ferrous Toolworks.

So, do you need a sixth approach? Probably not. But I do! I've always used the numbers in Langsner's book, but I hate relying on a table of calculations without understanding where they come from, and why they work. I need to know what's under the hood and how it was made--maybe you're the same. Plus, if the apocalypse comes and sweeps away all my books, I'll still be able to make Windsor chairs in the post-nuclear hellscape.

Edit: If you just want the formulas for sightline and resultant angles, skip to the bottom of the post, where I give the two formulas and walk through a brief example. If you want to understand how the formulas are derived, read on.
 
To derive the formulas, we only need a bit of high school (sophomore year) math. We need to know SOHCAHTOA, and the inverses of the three basic trig functions. If you've forgotten this stuff, brush up with the linked explanations. I'll wait.

Oh, you're back? Great. I'll start with Galbert's method of drawing the rake and splay. Imagine dropping a plumb line from the top of a chair leg down to the floor. You'll form two triangles, one in side view (rake) and one in front view (splay). Now imagine flopping those triangles down on the floor to get a two-dimensional view, and you'll get this:

 

Since the the height is the same in both views, I've labeled them both with an arbitrary unit of one. As you'll see, this will be key to finding our formulas.
Next, label the rake and splay angles, r for rake and s for splay. Draw the rectangle defined by the rake and splay axes, and add in a diagonal. This is the sightline. You can think of the lower right vertex as the point where the bottom of the chair leg would sit.

Now we're ready to find the lengths of the rake and splay lines in terms of r and s. Using the tangent identity,

and similarly,

Here's what we've got so far.

Now we need a way to find the sightline angle--let's call it l--and to find the length of the sightline in terms of our other measurements.
The sightline angle is easy. Using the tangent identity again,

File this away for later--we'll use it to find our actual sightline angles.
Finding the length of the sightline is a little more complicated. Since it's the hypotenuse of a triangle, we'll need our sine function:

Now do a little algebra to isolate the "sightline" variable, and you'll get

Here's what we've got so far.

The last thing we need is a way to find the resultant angle, which I'll label t°. Let's draw one more triangle, defined by the common height and the sightline.

Using the tangent identity,

And now we've got the two formulas we need. Let's get rid of the confusing letters and use words instead:

and

Now let's look at an example. To find the angles we need to build a chair, we just have to punch the numbers into a calculator, and use the inverse tan (tan ^-1 ) button. Let's say we want 12° rake and 14° splay. For the sightline,

Now plug .851 into the inverse tan function:

So 40.4° is the sightline angle.

For the resultant angle:

Plug .327 into the inverse tan function:

And 18.1° is the resultant angle. Now, go make some chairs!

After Four Years, It's Time For a Raise

Badger plane with open tote, referred to in some old catalogs as "jack badger."

Four years ago, I launched my planemaking business with a post titled "The Traditional Double-Iron Wooden Plane is Back." Since then, I've made a lot of planes, written a couple articles, lectured at various venues including Colonial Williamsburg, and demonstrated my wares at Handworks and many Lie Nielsen hand tool events.

Through it all, my prices haven't changed. Meanwhile, tariffs have raised the cost of materials for my blades and cap irons, PayPal takes a hefty cut of almost every plane I sell, and inflation, even at a measly two percent, adds up after a few years. So, it's time to raise prices a bit. I haven't settled on the exact numbers yet, but they will be in the 10-15% range, with the small smoothers going up the least, and the big try plane going up the most.

Here's the good news: It will take a few weeks to get these prices published on my website. Until then, the current prices are still in effect. So if you've been on the fence about ordering, now's the time to lock in the old price. Just go to my website and click on "how to order."

A quick note on pricing: In general, my customers have been very understanding, but I occasionally meet folks who think my prices are outrageous. And I get where they are coming from: We live in a world of mass-produced, dirt cheap consumer goods, and a lot of people see everything through that lens.

But here's the deal. I make my planes one at a time, or in small batches of two or three. Everything is meticulously custom fitted. Most of the work is done with hand tools. It's labor intensive and very time consuming. And believe me, I'm not getting rich off this. Much like folks who make custom furniture or musical instruments, I do this because I love doing it, and I'd be really happy just to be able to pay myself a living wage. I'm eternally grateful to have customers who understand this and are willing to pay for quality.

One more note on orders: My website currently claims a lead time of 3-4 months. That is probably a bit optimistic--in practice it's been more like 4-5 months, and I'll note that on the website when I change the prices.

In other news, I'm adding a few more planes to my catalog. Badger planes, like the one pictured at the top, can be ordered right now--just email me for pricing. Here's an Instagram clip of the badger in use--it is a really fun plane to make shavings with! In addition, I'm getting very close to being able to offer a dado plane for sale. To the best of my knowledge, no one is currently making a traditional beech dado plane, so I'm pretty excited about getting that off the ground. Stay tuned for more info. After that, I hope to finally get toothing planes into the mix as well.

To everyone who's bought a plane or otherwise helped me over the last four years, thank you. I hope to keep doing this for many, many years to come.

- Steve Voigt

Low Budget, High Vise

Back in 2011, Chris Schwarz wrote about the Etaux, a vise produced by Forge Royale in the early 20th century.

A few years later, Benchcrafted came out with a commercial version, which they call the Hi-Vise. The Benchcrafted hardware is top notch, but I wanted to build a low budget version using inexpensive hardware, some of which I already had lying around. I finished mine up in December and have been using it ever since. It's definitely one of the more useful shop fixtures I've ever made. So, here are a few pics and a brief description, should you want to make your own.

I based the construction around a Lee Valley tail vise screw (about $40) and a couple 9" veneer press screws (I had a box of these screws I bought years ago when they were cheaper; they are around $25 now). The Forge Royale originals, pictured above, also used two screws (theirs were wood) to hold the vise to the bench.
Forge Royale's more expensive version (above right), like the Benchcrafted vise, used a cast iron cross mechanism to regulate the jaw opening, while the cheaper version used a threaded rod with a nut that spins on it. For my version, I used a traditional parallel guide and pin. I've had the parallel guide on my main vise for about seven years and have always been happy with it: it's cheap, dependable, and bomb-proof.

The basic idea is that the parallel guide slides between the the two lower arms, and the tail vise screw slides between the upper arms, as shown below.

The lower arms have to be fairly thick (mine are 8/4) to accommodate the nuts for the veneer press screws. The upper arms can be thinner (mine are 5/4); just make sure they are far enough apart that the tail vise nut will fit in between. Also, note that the arms are about half an inch proud of the sides of the jaws. In Benchcrafted's version they are flush, but that wouldn't have worked here.

Some hack saw work was required for this job. I cut about 6" off the tail vise screw to save weight and space. I wanted a maximum opening of 8", so size yours to whatever you want to be able to hold.

I also cut down the handles of the veneer press screws, and filed them until they were comfortable to operate. As purchased, they are too wide and will bump into each other. Cutting them down also prevents me from torquing down too hard and over-stressing the dado joints that the lower arms fit into. These dados take a lot of force, so make sure you pin them to the sides of the fixed jaw, and don't put the holes for the veneer screws too far from the jaw (mine are 1-1/4" O.C. from the outside edge of the jaw).

I don't have a lathe, so I made some fairly fancy looking octagonal handles. There are definitely cheaper and easier ways to go, but this worked for me. I needed a new handle for my main vise anyway, so I made two.

Even before the handle was done, I was using the vise to hold the end caps while I beveled them.

A couple more dimensions: My vise is 4-1/2" wide, and the tops of the jaws are 8" above the bench top. I sized the dimensions to fit what I do: my plane totes are 5" or  5-1/2" long, so I wanted the vise to be narrower for easy access.

Overall, I'm incredibly pleased with this vise. I use it all the time for shaping totes, filing my planemaking floats, and other miscellaneous tasks.

If you make your own, I recommend using the excellent Benchcrafted instructions as a starting point.

- Steve Voigt