Bevel Up or Down Smoothing Plane Build Process
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Posted 17th April 2026
With the metalwork all done, it was time to get back to the difficult stuff: woodwork.
A couple of weeks ago, I received a package from a very generous member of a woodworking forum on which I'm posting these updates. In the parcel were these two bits of bog oak (home-made plane for scale!)
All being well, these pieces will become the handle and front knob of the plane. I've never tried making anything even remotely like a plane handle before, so I thought I'd make sure I stood the best chance of having two goes at it by cutting the bog oak piece in half like this...
... and like this:
A coping saw would have been much better than a fret saw for the job, but my coping saw needs a new blade (and it's not a very good coping saw anyway, being a cheap modern one from a DIY store).
It will probably surprise no-one that I'd 3D-printed a couple of things:
On the right is a test handle of approximately the shape I'm aiming for. I printed that so that I could hold it in my hand and see how it felt. On the left is a template for marking the shape onto the bog oak piece (with a couple of panel pins holding it in place and also marking the centres for the inside curves). The template also has a dog-leg on the top that's used to mark the location of a through hole for a screw:
That through hole got drilled on the pillar drill, starting with an 8 mm spur bit...
... and finishing with a long-series metalworking bit:
It came out of the bottom very slightly off-centre, but given the depth of the hole I was quite happy with it. The top got opened up with a counterbore (which may have to be deepened later but it's easier to at least get it started while the block has some flat edges):
Two Forstner bits (30 mm and 32 mm) were used for the inside curves:
The bandsaw got rid of the bulk of the rest of the waste:
The base of the handle got planed flat (you can see the slight offset in the drilled hole here):
Incidentally, I haven't actually figured out how the handle is going to be secured in place. It'll go into a mortice in the plane body and be glued and there will be a screw of some form (probably an M8 low-head machine screw) going down through the handle. However it doesn't really have anything to "bite" into in the plane body and if I just drill a hole (e.g. for a threaded insert) into the plane body, the hole (or the threaded insert) is very likely to pop out the back of the plane.
I've got a few ideas for how to deal with that, but I think it'll be easiest to worry about it when I get there.
Next up, I used a Shinto rasp to bring the overall shape down to the pencil line (while keeping the edge square for now):
The rasp then did most of the rounding over:
I then switched to a half-round file as it could get into the inside curves and round them over:
There was a crack that I hadn't managed to completely cut off when chopping up the bog oak piece:
Hopefully some thin superglue will sort that out:
Next up was lots of card scraping to refine the shape and clean up the round-overs a bit:
I haven't finished refining and smoothing by any means, but I think it's close enough now (it feels comfortable in the hand) to start working on the mortice in the plane body. That's something I'm feeling a bit daunted by (as there's a lot of work that's gone into the plane body and I don't want to mess it up) so I decided to leave that until tomorrow.
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