I recently picked up an old Stanley 71 router plane on eBay, and it arrived today. After work I cleaned up the adjuster and oiled it, and sharpened the cutter, and tried it out on a piece of scrap cedar left over from the boy’s birdhouse project. Wow, I really like how this cuts. Of course “with the grain” is something of an ideal situation, but just hogging out this area in a few passes was very controlable.
So I decided to try something I’ve seen in books but never actually done (with just hand tools): Make a stopped dado. I smoothed out a piece of dime store pine – this stuff is unbelievably soft. I knifed in a stopped dado 1″ wide part way across the board. Practice pieces make good kindling.
Then I sawed out the two sides. I used a Lie Nielsen 12ppt back saw that I got for christmas — first cut with this. I was a little surprised at the width of the kerf, but this is some really soft wood. I’ll have to repeat this experiment on a piece of hardwood. It actually was pretty controllable, and I think with a little practice I’ll be able to do a nice job of this.
I started my cut at the edge of the board, and walked the teeth down the scribe line. Then I raised the back of the saw to cut the rear to depth, then leveled it out to finish the cut.
Then I chopped out the waste with a 1″ chisel. I tried paring the edges as I’ve seen in some books but the pine was just crumbling so I made a series of stab/chops down the length of the dado, then broke the waste out.
Then I set the router plane to the lowest depth I could find in the chiseled dado and leveled the bottom. I set it down a hare further and took a cleanup cut. It was very controllable and didn’t take much force at all.
In the end I had a workable-if-not-beautiful dado. It took all of perhaps 5 minutes to do, including taking a few snapshots. And it didn’t require drawing blood. More practice with the saw will be improve matters.
Router planes are really fun! My first project with it was my bench side storage. https://picasaweb.google.com/muthrie/MyProjects?fgl=true&pli=1#5595616553794003506
Hmm, I can’t access the pic, love to see it though!
Sorry about that. The post is on my old version of my blog-> http://mgprojects.blogspot.com/2011/02/takin-router-plane-out-for-spin-bench.html