Bevel Up or Down Smoothing Plane Build Process

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Over the course of the week I've been mulling on the rather shabby job I'd done of hiding the screws from sight. For example, this was the photo I took of the front two screws:

It's not great and I think I'll forever be wishing I'd done a better job of it if I don't do something about it now. To that end, I assembled some tiny little things:

The brass pins (of which I have a pack) have a very slight taper to them, with 1.4 mm at the narrow end and (if memory serves me correctly) 1.7 mm at the wider end. The steel tool is a tapered broach.

This shows a rather extreme close-up of one of the screw areas at the front of the plane after I'd drilled a 1.4 mm hole where there was one of the blemishes:

I drilled quite a lot of holes (and I later went back and drilled a couple more):

After drilling 1.4 mm, the taper broach got held in an ER20 collet chuck and turned by hand until it went fairly deep:

The next photo shows three of the following stages:

First, a tapered pin is tapped firmly into the hole in the brass. Then the side cutters are used to trim it shorter. A few more taps from the hammer rounds over the top and then a file takes most of the waste away.

The plane then went back to the bandsaw table for more sanding (with the blade and lever cap in so that I was sanding it flat with any lever cap induced tension that would be present when planing):

That process took most of the morning. The actual drilling, broaching, pinning, cutting and filing of the brass pins was less than an hour; the rest was sanding (partly to get rid of the ends of the pins but also to get it flat now that the lever cap's installed).

This shows that same first hole (albeit at a slightly less extreme zoom level) that I showed earlier in this post:

As a reminder, this is what the whole of the bottom looked like before today's efforts:

This is what it looks like now:

I'm much happier with it now. There are still some imperfections if you look really closely, but you really have to be looking for them to spot them.

I am a hobbyist metalworker and woodworker. I work as an electronic design engineer and spend most of my working days in front of a computer so I enjoy having the opportunity to use my hands and make things in my spare time. I particularly enjoy making tools as I can then use them on other projects. This website showcases some of the things I've made.

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