Making Plow and Skated Planes

For years we weren't able to produce plow or other skated planes. It wasn't that the planes themselves presented overwhelming problems, it was properly producing the irons or blades. Others do make these planes but they fit them with old irons. You'll find at least one maker of plow planes on the Internet but those planes are intended more for collectors than users and each is provided with a single old iron.

A proper iron for a skated plane is tapered and has a skate registration groove on its back that matches the taper. That part is easy. The difficulty lies in that, at a couple inches from the cutting edge, the taper on the back of the iron transitions to a slow section of an elliptical arc. For the irons to be truly interchangeable, machining of the taper, registration groove and the arc have to be exactly the same from iron to iron.

It's important to understand that the skate becomes the plane bed in skated planes. The skate must properly support irons ranging in width from 1/8" to 5/8". The skate must be thin enough to allow clearance for a narrow 1/8 cut but also offer support for the wider irons and prevent racking and the accompanying chatter.

The support for wider irons comes from mating angles or tapers that function much like the Morse or Jacobs tapers most woodworkers are familiar with. Fitting that taper for the full length of the bed of the skate with hand tools would represent great difficulty and the mated sections are necessary only near the back of the cutting edge. By curving the back of the blade to the necessary thick portion at the end of the blade, the plane maker reduced making these mating surfaces to an accomplishable and repeatable task.