Router Plane

This is my router plane:

It is used to cut a uniformly deep groove in a piece of wood.  The flat bottom sits on your piece of wood and the blade projects below the plane into the groove.  The knob on the top allows you to adjust the depth in small increments.  Then you just push forward on the handles.

You can see the blade sticking down.

I had trouble finding one, but eventually found this one on ebay and got it for a reasonable price.  I bought it while hanging out at Theresa and Melissa's house.  I found a great website that catalogs the changes in this model router plane over the years.  It helped me date mine to between 1916 and 1924.  It is in great shape for being that old and works beautifully.

Half Lap Joints

Our first project with our new marking gauges was cutting half lap joints by hand.  Half lap joints are use to combine two overlapping pieces of wood.  You remove half of the material from each so that both sides end up being flush.  We set the marking gauge as close to half the thickness of the boards as possible.  It was quick to check by making a mark on the edge of the board, then flipping it over and marking it from the other side.  It did not really matter that we were exactly in the middle, though.  What was important was that we marked both boards from the same side (the reference face), which guaranteed those faces would be flush.  We removed the material above the line on one (removing part of the reference face) and below the line on the other.  We removed all this material with our chisels, which was not the most efficient way to do it, but gave us good practice at paring with our chisels because we had to make a large area flat and parallel to the reference face.  After doing the first couple that way I was able to use my new (new to me anyway) router plane on the last one, which was super exciting and way easier.  I will post a description and pictures of the router plane later, because I forgot to take pictures of it.  Here are my joints:

This is so you can see what the 2 pieces look like when they are apart.  I had to label the joints I did well to remember which ones they were and how they fit together.

The first one we cut was two boards meeting at their ends.

We reused one of the ends and made a groove in the middle of the other board to fit it.

This is the same as the last picture, just flipped upside down.  You can see my inspirational message on the one that didn't work out.

Last, we made a groove in the middle of the first board to match the one we just made in the second.

Marking Gauge

One very important tool for woodworking is a marking gauge.  It allows you to mark a knife line on a board at a consistant distance from the edge of the board.  It turns out that all of the marking gauges commercially sold kind of suck.  It is very important that once you set the distance that it not change.  Obviously the NBSS solution to this problem is make our own.  Here's mine:

It was pretty simple to make.  We made a block out of maple for the fence.  We drilled holes in the fence for the arm and key.  Then we turned a dowel out of maple for the arm to fit the hole and flattened a portion of it with our hand planes.  Next we cut a little pad out of maple to fit against the arm and chiseled out the top of the hole for the pad to sit in.  Then we inserted the key, which pushes on the pad and locks the whole thing together.  The hardest part was making the hole for the knife.  It is very important that the knife is parallel to the fence.  So, we set the arm so where we wanted the hole to be was against the fence, then used the chisel to pare the inside of the hole so it was parallel to the fence.  We also had to angle the other side of the hole, so that when we made and fit an angled wedge it would lock tight when pressed against the knife in the hole, holding the knife in place.  The hole width was determined by the size of our homemade knives, which were made out of jigsaw blades that we ground the teeth off of, flattened the back of and ground a cutting angle on.  It was a good days work for a very important and useful tool.