plane till v0

After a year of woodworking, I had acquired a lot of hand planes. Arguably too many.

I needed somewhere to store them. Like Saw Till v0, a Plane Till made the most sense. Again, there are lots of ways to do this, but my overriding philosophy in the shop is I need something, I should be able to just grab it off the wall. So I wanted a relatively simple wall-mounted till. I didn't want a complicated cleat system, but obviously they should not just be sliding off on the ground. Planes don't like falling on the floor. I would aim for a board at 70 degrees, with 1/2" dividers.

This project took a long time, and by the end of it I was pretty sick of it and wanted to move on. There were (effectively) two aborted attempts, and the final one is okay, but is full of compromises. That said, it works, and hasn't fallen off the wall yet.

Planning it out was mostly just laying the planes on my table and making stuff up.

The whole thing is made out of pine, with walnut dividers for the planes.

My initial attempt involved some really terrible dovetails, then some less complicated joints, then finally giving up and starting over.

This was my first attempt at joints like this, or through-mortises using a mortising chisel. It definitely showed.

Even at this point I was feeling pretty bad about the quality of the thing. It was a bunch of firsts clamped together and I didn't like it much. This next bit was the last straw though.

The next attempt went better. I lost quite a bit of space inside the carcass, but that meant the pieces were easier to work with. I had at least made a handful of mortises so that went a bit more smoothly as well.

I love that Veritas edge plane, by the way. What a great tool.

Cutting up these strips for the dividers made me wish I w use the table saw. Doing this by hand was an absolute slog, and the result is pretty terrible. I love my saw bench, but I did not love this part. I made a simple jig to hold the pieces in place while I planed them down into something in the neighborhood of square, but at this point I was running out of steam and just wanted to be done with it.

More dimensioning and fitting work, and it's starting to look like not the worst cabinet in the world. The till board itself is removable with two screws, so in theory at some point I could replace it with something nicer, or if my plane loadout changes, or whatever.

I also wanted to mount my spokeshaves and draw knife, so I bashed some temp holders together in a few minutes just to see what it might look like.

For the actual holders, I would make them out of more walnut, with some test pieces first. A huge mistake I made here was not paying attention to grain direction. With how the grain is facing, these are very prone to just snapping. Thankfully that didn't happen to me while sawing, and spokeshaves are quite light - but definitely a near miss.

The final pieces were not the worst thing in the world, but they did have a one glaring issue. You might say they were bit a proud.

Cutting the legs down to a reasonable size was trivial and now it doesn't look ridiculous. Finally I made some shelves and mounts for the joinery planes.

Overall I'm happy with it. Mostly I'm happy it's done. I'm more happy it hasn't fallen off the wall, though.

When I revisit this, I will add some magnets to the plane board, so they are less likely to tumble off if jostled.