Rabbet plane rehab

[Charlie Buchanan]

I bought this skew rabbet plane a few years ago planning to fix it up for use. Didn’t get around to it until now. It has a sound body and a serviceable iron but the wedge is not original and does not fit so it works very badly.

It was a nicely made plane at one time. It’s marked Mathieson, Edinburgh. Nice shape to the escapement.

Using the old wedge as a rough model I sawed out the profile from beech on bandsaw, then smoothed the profile with rasps and sandpaper. After that I planed the flats to the right angle to match the skew. Now the wedge actually holds thr iron in place.

Finally planed the sole to flatten it and square it up. I’m thinking about making it into a dovetail rabbet by adding a fence and a depth stop and angling the sole and iron to cut dovetails on the ends of shelves and drawer rails

 

[Charlie Buchanan]

I decided to modify this plane for cutting dovetails cross the grain on board ends. I cut a 1:6 slope on the sole, reground the iron to match, added a variable depth stop, and a fence to control the length of the tail. It’s going to need a little adjustment to get it working correctly. I may add a nicker if a knifed shoulder line is not enough to produce clean cuts.

Depth stop is on the near side and fence on the far side.

End view shows the slope of the sole and L-shaped fence on the left.

Fence and depth stop are secured to 1/4 x 20 threaded inserts by locking knobs.

So here’s a tail cut on the end of a scrap board. The plane cut the tails pretty well. There is a little blowout because I failed to use a sacrificial backing board at the end of the cut. I think the tapers will be easy to add by raising the depth stop and planing to the tapered layout line.