Wooden thumb planes / rabots noisette

[Christophe Mineau]

My personal build of thumb planes.
Funny enough, thumb plane translates "rabeau noisette" in French, which means hazelnut plane.



They are simply made from a tutorial I found on the Web.
The first ones, I did them using the hard wood I had : chestnut tree, but turned out to be too soft.
For the second attempt, I found in an antique shop an old wooden planer, made out of sorb tree (I dont know if that translation is good, it's "cormier" in french), that red , very hard wood.
It is indeed the traditional wood here for making plane soles.
So, I cut a little length in that maxi plane to make several of my mini planes
And they are far better.
The blocks are made of ebony for the first.
I have several width, and some have a flat sole, others round sole.

Tell me what you think !

[kbalch]

Thanks Christophe! I've added your Thumb Planes to our Woodworking category, as well as to your builder page: Christophe Mineau's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

Thumb Planes by Christophe Mineau

tags: hand tools, finger plane

[Altair]

Beautiful set Christophe. Excellent work.

[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.

[DIYer]

Thanks for the explanation, Christophe! That bit about using little sandpaper in traditional work is interesting.

[Christophe Mineau]

Yes, and on that last point, to be very traditional, ancient builders and still modern ones use this instead of sand paper.
Japanese craftsmen use also something similar.