Making a Super Chisel from Old Plane Iron

 

God know what happen to this plane iron? Fek.

Just to work a bit more quicker I’m using this core 220 grit diamond pad. It’s not perfectly straight but I’m just using on the non critical ends.

Oh that was close.

Dam nations.

It says, made in London, English birch and at the top I can’t quite… C Nurse and Co Ltd 1, 8 something something 1, 6, 3, Walworth Road, London, SE. There’s a logo there. It’s either a lion or a horse with a banner?

what I’m going to do is router out the shape of the top of the plane iron, so that there’s a little bit of timber here that sits in this opening and then I’m going to glue the top on. And when this moves across it should be equal on either side. And then I’ll just taper around the edge and taper around here.

I’m just doing the laborious part of laying this out as vector lines. So I’ve just created the vector files for the part of the plane iron I’m going to router out in the timber. Another way I could have done this was to photograph this or scan the object and import that as a canvas and then change the scale of the image so it was relative to the actual object and to trace over that. I think this should work fine for what I’m going to do. If I need to do any adjustment I can do it by hand.

It looks amazing.

So the shape isn’t perfect because I drew a perfect circle and this isn’t a perfect circle. But it feels really flat and the only thing that’s a bit raised is the edge here on the end of the plane iron, which has been hammered so much over time that – ah fek it’s really tight now.

Don’t know what happens when you mix slow and fast setting aralditetogether.

Ok I’m going to leave this to dry and cure and then see what we can do with it afterwards.

I’ve taken it all apart. I’m going to mix a bit more araldite and get it into this side here and the areas it hasn’t squeezed out of, and then I’ll leave it properly for 24 hours.

I considered working the handle by hand, with a spokeshave but I’d also like to mill it using my CNC machine. So I decide to model a rough shape of half the handle in fusion 360 which I exported as an STL file –the same file format I work with while 3D printers. I then made a new cradle for the entire handle of the chisel and popped the block in.

There’s a way to mill 3D shapes by importing the 3d model under the relief drop down menu of my software, a now defunct CAM software that’s no longer available. I’m not going to go over the detail of how I did this – not on this channel anyway but if I have time I’ll make a dedicated video on the second channel. But the gist of it is, I had to create a machine relief toolpath and select a tool for both the roughing the finish passes. There are a few different options for the finishing paths – but I’ll be using the same bit for both instances.

I think what I’m going to do is put a screw in, right at the end. The handle is quite long and I can then cut that off afterwards. And that’ll help keep it in position. The fronts pretty good.

I only realised after I had completed milling the handle that the finish was different on either side. What I had done was selected a different type of finishing toolpath and saved it over without realising I was still cutting out the first one. The finer finish was the classic raster while the courser one was a standard raster.

Probably was a bit stupid working on the chisel without covering the sharp edge of the blade, but I made it. I mean I made it without hurting myself. It looks a bit… Klingon but I’m happy with how it turned out, because I didn’t have to turn it. I mean I only turned it once by finally machining something with a 3D tool-path – a new door has opened.

If you liked this video please write the word foot in the in the comments section, and if you didn’t write the word hand. If you’re ambivalent write the word elbow. Foot again for watching.

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