Plane till 3 the small details

Having assembled the carcasse, I can now load her up and check my plane's fit

Not bad, but my Japanese plane is a tad tight fit. It will not either accept, my plow planes, router planes etc. No worry, I can remove spacers to have them fit, or build that other till for my longest jointers (30 in) remember? :-)

Decided to have the top open and instead I fastened that part behind with one large dovetail , screwed & glued.  A lot of the cabinet weight will be supported on a French cleat attached to this part.

Detail of bottom dovetails, note the joinery has not been cleaned up yet, and the Ogee still need clean up too. And YES the carcase joinery was all done by hand.

  

The angled sides are screwed, no glue, so I can removed them if I change my mind.

You may noticed that the middle part for the large tray (LH side) is not all the way up. That is because it is an offcut from one of the sides, the angle just happened to worked out nicely.
It won't show and it will still be strong enough to do its part.

The doubled side ones has a small notch because I cut the wrong part before gluing them. Oops! Again no big whoop. And while I am confessing my bloopers, I initially cut one of the side Ogee piece on the wrong side, so I ended up with two left sides. Oops :-)

Who says you cannot drink beer and woodwork! (Kidding)

The dividers have an arc cut into them. It makes for a cleaner look and facilitates the planes removal.
The trays being trimmed with Dadoes pieces for rigidity.
I had to add a small spacer strips behind to ensure solid contact with the angled parts. It also added some rigidity.

The big tray will be glued and screwed to them. The small one will be hinged for access behind, giving me additional storage.  Here is a detail of how I will hold the small tray up. Still need to figured out the pointy end and its receiver on the tray.

Also a small holder on the side for my dedicated plane tools: Screwdrivers, plane hammer and winding sticks.

The end is in sight. Need to attach the trays, one fixed the other hinged.

Which probably means a piece to be added on top and since my trays ended up flushed with the top shelf, the trim is now sticking out, hence I'm worried about the weight of the planes pushing against it.  I will then add some support under it.

If I was to redo it, I would ensure the tray lip is resting on top of the shelf instead.

I ended up like this in order to get at least 22 in of length for the planes, because of my stock limitations.

  

OK, well, I'm making this up as I go, sort of a prototype.  The next one would be nicer :-)

Next and last part will be the final look. Probably in a few days. That is where I am today.

Bob

Plane till 2 The angled platform

First some details I forgot in the first part.
The joinery is as follows: The bottom and top part of the carcase are to be dovetailed, that means these parts must be the full length of the cabinet. The inside shelves are dadoes in the side, glued & screwed. Their lengths are then the inside dimensions  (3X11=33 plus dividers 1/4 X 10 = 2-1/2 in)
35-1/2 plus whatever needed for the dadoes depth. In my case, 36 in.
The depth of the cabinet was determined arbitrarily at 10 in to accommodate my longest woodies

The dividers will also be housed in shallow dadoes so I can rearrange them as needed.


Knowing the bottom part dimensions, the height of the top angled part can be guesstimated by simple proportion, whatever look right. Of course, that is not enough, it is now time to experiment with tilting our longest planes. I did a quick check on line to see what others have been using, but did not saw much angles specified. Within my parameters, length of stock I had (It is all build from scrap wood lying around), and overall dimension desired, it quickly became obvious that planes longer than 24 in would not be accommodated. No problems, will simply have to come up with another till :-)

In the end, the angle I worked out, turned out to be at 22 degrees (from the vertical) and it will accommodates only up to 22 inches (Stanley No 7). Anything steeper I was not comfortable with, worrying about my planes safety unless I somehow secured them.

That reduced my storage requirements down to 7 from 9, or did it? :-)
Mocking up the planes side by side, inserting spacers in between, we find out that about 24 in of space is required. What to do with the remainder 11-1/2 in or so of space?

Well there are also spokeshaves! They would fit the bill nicely and are used for smoothing curves so they compliment our planes usage.

Again, utilizing what I have on hand, 1/4 in plywood would be used for the dividers and for the 2 angled platforms. Being thin and the loads they will support heavy (the planes part anyway) they would need beefy support underneath. Now that angled tray is leaving a lot of unused space behind, which could be accessed if I was to make those trays hinged, but I'm not too keen on manhandling the heavy plane tray. I suppose I could use gas struts, but I rather make that part fixed and add middle support. The trays will also be stiffened by gluing a maple border trim, rabbeted in the edges.
The small tray will be hinged and I will put in shelves inside to gain some storage, I'm thinking for putting in my spare blades? I will also work out some means to hold the tray up, something akin to my car hood.


So now I know my final height dimension is 44 in which is roughly 21-1/2 for the bottom and 22-1/2 for the top and I will cut some sort of Ogee on the sides for a nicer look on the angle top part of the sides. My original proportions are respected and it will hold all of 52 plus planes nicely, I'm happy lets go cut some wood.


I will spare you the boring parts, lets just say that I glued up my scrap wood to make up the width/length required. I always make the parts longer and wider than needed so I can trim them to size later and  avoid the dreaded snipes. YES, I cheated and utilises the machines at the wood shop on the base: Radial Arm Saw, Tablesaw (dado blade), Jointer, Planer, Bandsaw and Oscillating Drum sander for the ogees. Sure makes for quick work, but yes, I could have done all this using only my handtools. But did I mentioned that I am impatient? :-) 


Next part we put it all together try the planes for fit and figure out the small details


Bob

Plane till 1 From ideas to design

As for most piece of shop furniture, there isn't really any plans to go on. That's because each and everyone of us has different requirements, there are no one size fits all!.

To get a sense of what I needed for a plane till, I tried to rationalize my herd of planes to the ones, I thought I should need the most; I got it down to 52 (ish)! Go ahead laugh, it's just that I have so many to pick from :-)
This is an all important step to ensure that you have a sense of the requirements. You can also leave some room for future expansion as your needs grow, but you can also build more and bigger storage later on , so go ahead and built it now! Once you understand the design process it is easy to adapt it to what YOU need.

In the Joiners category I lumped the Jack to the joiners and I got these 9

Next I looked at my smoothers and selected these 12
Why so many? Because one can never be too smooth :-) NO really, it's because it gives me various angle for the blades from 45 to 60 degrees and various shapes as appropriate to the task

Block planes, I picked 9

Next I look at my moulding planes and special planes and sort them as such
Joint making 9. Moulders 13 and counting?? Complex moulders 2.

So if you have been keeping track so far, we have our 52, but I sense I may have room to sneak in a few more!? It's all in the design :-)

Next I simply Google "Plane till" and looked at pictures. I pretty well had an idea in mind, but it is always a good thing to look at other's work.
I quickly settled on the tilted plane idea for the long ones and separate cubicles for the others.

The only exception to the dedicated cubicle idea is for the various wooden molding planes I own

These varies in thickness too much and are quick to multiply so it would require constant re-arrangements and various size opening. Because of these two factors, it would consume too much space in a hurry.

Now there are some advantages to segregating them, you could then, put in a piece of the molding surface it produced and labeled it on the till for example. But, again to save space, I opted not to. Instead I will try to group them by their functions; E.G. H&R, Beaders, Complex molders etc.

So by now a sketch is taking shape, we now have to work in the dimensions and make sure it would fit into the designated (?) space. (subject to changes without any warnings)

In order to do that, armed with some sample specimens, we can quickly figured out the space

And this is what it worked out for me:

The two rows of separate cubicles will have inside dimensions of 3 inch wide X 6-1/4 in high.
There would be 11 separate cubicles in each rows.

The third row has an open space of 7 in hi X the length of the above two rows.

For ease of plane's retrieval and added rigidity to the till, the bottom row has a divider in the middle.

We can now factor in our dividers (1/4 in ply) and stock thickness (3/4 rough = about 9/16 to 1/2 final thickness) to come up with dimensions and worked in our joinery method now, because that will affect the pieces length.

This is what we now have

Now we have to figured out the tilted plane platform on top to get our final height dimension.

And that will be next part.

Bob

The plane till

I have long outgrown all my available spaces to properly store or displays my tools. As I now find the time to properly organize my shops, I am striving to downsize my large assortment of tools to choose from into a more manageable tool kit and have it readily available at my disposal.
That means racks, shelves, tool boxes and various tills.


Years ago, I found this small joiner tool chest.

After reading the Schwarz's ATC I was inspired to either build one or try to fit my downsized kit into that small chest. Well it didn't took long to figured out that it wasn't going to happen! Much as I tried, there is no way I could consolidate my most wanted into this small container...


Sooo, on with more storage options.
First up and probably the most long neglected and sorely needed is a proper plane till for my must have planes. After much deliberations with myself, I got it down to 52 ish planes!
Don't laugh, that still leave 60ish with no home.
OK, I have much more room to downsize even more, but heh, its a start :-)


As soon as I figured out how to includes pics on this newfangled blog thingie's I will document the construction project.


Bob