Bevel Up or Down Smoothing Plane Build Process
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Posted 18th April 2026
This morning I cut the mortice for the handle. I started by marking out the pocket with a knife:
The 10 mm mortice chisel did the bulk of the work...
... and a bench chisel (actually two as I already had the 16 mm and 18 mm ones on the bench so kept picking up a different one each time) tidied things up:
That gave me this basic shape:
The handle was a good fit in the pocket but (as expected) it needs to go deeper (at the moment, the screw would pop out the back of the plane!)
At this point, I started moving the opening along gradually with angled cuts to match the angle on the front of the handle:
Once it had gone far enough in, I dropped a transfer punch down through the handle and it was (just) long enough to be used to mark the centre of the hole.
I also fitted the adjuster to make sure there was still clearance for my fingers:
I then spent quite a while thinking about options for the screw. In the end I settled on a plain brass cylinder, which I machined to 20 mm diameter and 11 mm long and then mounted in a collet chuck in the mill at 63° (to match the angle of the hole through the handle).
An 8 mm end mill gave a starting platform and then a 6.8 mm drill went through. I started the tap on the milling machine but stopped when it was only a short way in...
... and then finished it off by hand in the vice:
I think this shows why I finished it by hand - if I'd carried on tapping on the milling machine the tap would have run into the side of the collet:
A quick check with a bit of M8 threaded rod to make sure that the brass disc seated flat on the bottom of the handle:
The screw down through the handle serves two purposes. The main one isn't actually to fix the handle to the body. If that were the priority then I could simply glue the handle in and I think it would be fine. However, the screw also reinforces the handle to reduce the risk of it snapping across the grain lines.
I'd spent quite a while trying to figure out a good way to fix a threaded insert into the plane body but in the end I concluded that the second purpose (reinforcing the grain) was much more important than the first one (holding it in place). The handle is a very snug fit in the mortice and the front of it is held rigidly in place by the angled front engaging with the undercut at the front of the mortice. With that in mind I decided to just glue the brass disc into the body.
Using the mark made by the transfer punch as a guide, I used a 20 mm Forstner bit to make the hole:
I used some 120 grit sandpaper to roughen up the outside diameter and bottom face of the brass disc a little and then used Araldite to fix it in place (using a long piece of threaded rod to check the thread was at the right angle):
Before the glue had time to set, I did a test fit with the threaded rod (and a pen mark to show the expected depth) to make sure everything lined up nicely:
Page 18 of 25
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