Wooden thumb planes / rabots noisette

[DIYer]

Hi Christophe, where do you use such a plane?

[Christophe Mineau]

Hi Christophe, where do you use such a plane?

Hi ,
The curved sole planes are used mainly to carve the plates for archtop instruments (violin, mandolins, jaz guitars), but personnaly, since I have made the wooden ones, I have purchased a set of brass ones.
They are used after roughing with a gouge or possibly a router, and before the scraper (very few sand paper use indeed in the traditional building process)
For the curly maple, you need to use a toothed blade, standard blade for spruce.
Example on this photo (credit : found on the web) :

The flat sole little planes are useful to shape the edges of the plates and also the braces of top plates, where you need to follow a curve you could'nt follow with a longer sole plane.
like on this photo (credit : found on the web) :

I still use my wooden planes for the flat soles.