The
original plane that I received as a "user" from my friend Sandy
Moss had an innocuous-loking depression just behind its mouth. But when
I started to lap the bottom to remove the light rust that coated it ("user"
- remember ?) it became clear that the right rear of the mouth (as we see
it in the upper right hand image of the composite) has been pushed down,
meaning that the bottom of the plane was broken out, making the plane un-"usable."
So Sandy and I renegotiated, and I started wondering how to salvage a second
career for this plane. Oh; that's not an ink line outlining the part to
be removed in the upper right-hand image at left. That's the kerf my jewelers
saw made. Only the thread of cast arn at the lower right-hand corner of
the mouth as seen there is still holding the cut-out piece. And the fragments
in my fingers were made with the lightest of pressure between thumb and
two fingers in order to break the remiainder of metal holding the cut-out
piece together. The piece is 0.025 inch thick at the site of the break.
Here's
the new rear of the mouth freshly filed to shape.
And
another view, this time from above.
Then
I used my restored 7" So.Bend shaper (all the bearing surfaces hand
scraped to better-than-new fits & alignments - a matter of necessity,
as it was worn out) to plane the top of the frog receiver to provide a
stable surface for the new center post. Those are hold-downs clamping the
bed of the plane into the shaper's vise. I never clamped the bed directly,
as it could collapse the cheeks of the plane. The hold-downs are shaped
to pinch the workpiece as well as force it downwards as the jaws of the
vise are tightened. This pair was given to me by John Jobes, the foreman
of the machine shop at U.S. Steel's Fundamental Research Lab. after I told
him about restoring the shaper. The hold-downs clamped the bed of the plane
by only the bottom 1/16th inch, so there was no bending of the cheeks of
the plane at all.
The
next step was to open up the brace that forms a dam across the front of
the mouth of the plane and which would have trapped the scraper's chips
because of the tilt of the frog. The image shows that task about half done.
The stroke of the shaper was set to something like 3/4 inch so that the
single-point tool wouldn't come anywhere near the frog receiver, which
is higher than the new bottom of the brace. You can also see the new shape
of the frog receiver, now the center-post receiver. 
I
then made the accessory parts, such as the tilting frog, center post, tilted
front knob (to clear the tilting frog) and two forms of the tilted/tilting
tote. The first try at the tilted tote utilizes a pair of wedges, each
with a fifteen degree angle, which together make either a thirty degree
wedge or cancel each other's angles entirely. The wedges are simply swapped
end-for-end to make the switch to enable the tote to lean to the left by
thirty degrees, to the right by the same amount, or stand straight up.
However, I could not work out a tote screw that would hold the tote in
all three of these positions, and so I had to make three tote screws, two
of which are lying next to the plane in the upper image. Now I was stuck
with the task of stowing the two odd men out. Not only that; the switch-over
was awkward and slow, and I would be cursing my lack of ingenuity for many
years to come, I feared.