Tag Archives: Bill Anderson

Winding Laths — Improve How You Flatten a Board

October 20, 2013 @TheRainford 2 Comments

A good pair of winding lath or winding sticks is sometimes hard to find — I suspect not many survived the burn pile. The good news is that a new set is easily made in an few minutes at the bench.

Sighting down a board with winding sticks — (This set was made by my friend Bill Anderson of Edwards Mountain Woodworking)

Why would I want a pair of ‘Winding Sticks’? What do they do?

This pair of matching straight-edges are a fast and invaluable tool that allows you to quickly see if a board is flat.
By placing them at each end of a board, sighting down across the near stick and looking at the far one, you can more easily see any twisting or warping in the board. The sticks help accentuate any non-planer surfaces.
By moving one stick and sighting the board at a few locations along its length, you will quickly see how the board flows.
Using a single stick you can also check for any cupping or warping as you would with any other straightedge.
Once you identify parts of the board that need to be addressed, you can quickly plane them and re-evaluate the board using these sticks. (After a bit of practice, process goes quite fast)

Winding Lath by Otto Salomon in the Teacher's Handbook of Sloyd — Winding Lath by Otto Salomon in the ‘Teacher’s Handbook of Sloyd’ — a great prototype for your own winding sticks

From Otto Salomon’s ‘Teacher’s Handbook of Sloyd’ above you can read a nice description for how to use winding laths efficiently. The pair of wooden Sloyd winding laths shown above nest with each other via a set of fitted wooden pins and have a nice relief one the edge of the short sides so you can easily get a finger hold in there and separate the sticks when you want to use them. Otto also calls out an interesting alternative you can use in a pinch — by turning two try-planes on their side you can use them as an impromptu set of winding sticks and sight across them.

Sighting down two bench planes as impromptu winding sticks

Tips on making your own winding sticks:

Use quarter-sawn hardwood like hard maple or beech
Consider adding a contrasting inlay or strip to make it easier to sight across the sticks
I like to use sticks that are 1/2″ thick, about 2″ wide and about 18-24″ long
Sticks that can nest with each other or otherwise stay together are more likely to survive
Taper each stick on one side so that it’s clear what edge is the top (it will not stand on its own on the edge you plane down to 1/8″)
If your sticks ever get out of true they are easily squared up again with a plane

The next time you are out in the shop, make a quick set of winding sticks and see how much it can improve your board flattening efficiency.

-Bill

P.S. If you don’t have the the time or scrap to make your own set from wood, and don’t have 2 jack or try planes handy, you need to have a stern talking to, but there are commercially available winding sticks available from Lee Valley and others. I admit that I do have a pair of the Lee Valley aluminum winding sticks which I bought when I first got started in hand tool woodworking. They are well machined and the design hits all the major tips called out above — with the exception of being made of wood of course.

Nesting metal winding sticks from Lee Valley

Much like the shop made winding sticks, these aluminum sticks work well and need virtually no maintenance.

P.P.S — This is an extended version of a post I put together for my friends at Popular Woodworking on the contributor’s blog which can be found here.

Historic Places, Traditional Woodworking, Workshop, Workshop Projects

Making a Jointer Plane with Willard ‘Bill’ Anderson — Part 2

September 12, 2013 @TheRainford Leave a comment

When last we left our plane-making heroes they were in the process of making a traditional single iron jointer plane with my friend Bill Anderson at the Woodwright’s School.

Bill demonstrating with a great bench plan cross section model — Bill demonstrating with a great bench plane cross section model

Bill had a great cross section model of how this sort of bench plane works — made by one of his students. With the body of the plane taking shape, next up was tuning the mouth opening and the abutments. If the mouth is too wide or too large the plane may not cut cleanly so you need to carefully fit the iron to the opening. If the abutment is not carefully placed when you re-flatten the sole of the plane you’d also be opening the mouth more. You also need to take care flatten the face of the bed that supports the iron — if there are high points the iron can pivot on those and make it tough to use the plane. One of the many testing/fitting gauges Bill had was a ‘bed testing gauge’ which looks and works much like a pair of ‘pants’ we use in timber framing to test out the thickness of a tenon, except in this case you are using it to check the thickness of the cheeks and how close your bedline is getting to the line scribed on the side the plane body.

With the mouth and throat all set, next up was making the wedge to hold the iron in place. The wedge needs to be carefully planed to fit the abutments inside of your plane and tightly hold the iron in place. Again here you are using an abutment gauge (wooden wedge of a known profile in degrees) to test your work as you go. With all the gauges and specialized tools you can quickly see why plane-making was its own dedicated craft specialty.

The wedge is further relieved so that the shavings can clearly escape the plane body.

Templates, gauge blocks and pants — Templates, bed gauges blocks and pants

Above you can see some of the many gauges used in laying out and testing parts of your plane, along with templates for the handles.

The handle is first cut out from a rough blank and then carefully shaped by hand to have flowing, graceful lines similar to that of a quality hand saw. The result is a handle that fits the hand so well it, the whole plane feels like an extension of your body.

Auriou rasps used to shape the handle -- they were a pleasure to use — Auriou rasps used to shape the handle — they were a pleasure to use

Various rasps, files and sandpaper are used to shape the handle. Using crisp hand stitched Auriou rasps made quick work of shaping the handles.

Above is the handle after a bit of light sanding.

Shown here you can see Bill’s finished/sample plane which is based on an historical example. I’ll post the final shots of my own plane when I finish it soon in my shop.

Rear 3/4 view of the completed sample plane

At the end of the workshop one of the most important tasks was to make sure you plane can take a nice shaving. I’m happy to report that I was able to get a nice full width shaving with my mostly completed plane. (I need to finish setting the handle, trim the edges, apply some finish and use my maker’s name stamp and it will be ready for regular use in the shop).

Making the first shaving with a new plane... — Making the first shaving with a new plane…

In an upcoming post I will complete this series with how I finished off the plane. Stay tuned…

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Bill Anderson or take a class with him, and I highly encourage you to do so, please check out his website here.

-Bill

P.S. You can see the first post on making this jointer plane here.

Historic Places, Traditional Woodworking, Workshop, Workshop Projects

Making a Jointer Plane with Willard ‘Bill’ Anderson — Part 1

September 10, 2013 @TheRainford 3 Comments

A single iron jointer plane is one of those tools you have use yourself to truly appreciate. Over Labor Day weekend I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to make one of these planes with Willard ‘Bill’ Anderson at the Woodwright’s School in Pittsboro, NC.

Entrance to the Woodwright's School — Entrance to the Woodwright’s School

Bill is a passionate woodworker and skilled teacher. You may recognize him from his appearances on Roy’s television show or the articles that he’s written. He’s a molding plane aficionado and has studied plane-making and general furniture-making with many masters in the field. He recently retired from being a Scientist for the EPA so I see a lot of parallels to my own life working in software.

The plane is made of air dried American Beech and a new old stock English iron.

We started out by squaring up the stock using a wooden straightedge and winding sticks.

Next up was laying out the mouth and throat. The mortises are all chopped by hand with a chisel and refined via a series of floats and scrapers. It was my first time using that many different floats, and for what looks like it might be a fairly coarse tool, when sharpened leaves a remarkably good surface.

As we worked through the throat mortise a key was to make sure you don’t overshoot and chop through the abutment.

One of the last steps in refining the abutment and sides of the throat was to scrape the surface using a scraper chisel.

A very nice scraping chisel that Bill made

This beast of a chisel was made by Bill and heat treated by Peter Ross. It was based on some research Bill did into traditional plane making tools. The long bar of tool steel and handle allow you to put a lot of your weight into it as you scrape the surface flat. The cutting edge is a very steep angle similar to a scraper you’d use with a lathe (upside down compared to the lathe tool) but works well since you are only removing a little bit of material at a time.

Regular bench chisels are used to clean up any fuzz in the corners. Next up is cutting in for the wedge and cleaning up a cheeks. This is an operation that requires a steady hand and the ability to work to an exacting standard. You want your test wedge, and eventually your actual wedge, to fit tightly against the abutment so the iron does not move when you are working with the plane. I took my time and was very happy with the results.

In upcoming posts I will document more about my experience in building and finishing this plane.

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Bill Anderson or take a class with him, and I highly encourage you to do so, please check out his website here.

-Bill

Rainford Restorations

Tag Archives: Bill Anderson

Winding Laths — Improve How You Flatten a Board

Making a Jointer Plane with Willard ‘Bill’ Anderson — Part 2

Making a Jointer Plane with Willard ‘Bill’ Anderson — Part 1

A Joiner's Guide To Traditional Woodworking and Preservation