Labor Limae: To Our Friends — How I set up my sole

Today we have 3 sections: theory, kanna conditioning and project mayhem. In that order.

Part one: To our friends

That's the title of the book I'm reading right now. Worth reading, and if you are in the north of Holland you may receive a copy of it when I drop by there.

"A revolutionary perspective no longer focuses on an institutional reorganization of society, but on the technical configuration of worlds."

The book is written for those of us who want to change the world, and analyses the popular revolts of the last years, from Occupy walt mart street to Tahir square. Which is good but that's not the interesting part of it, the best is the way a different ontology and conception of the human are put in place to understand in what should consist a proper revolt. Very useful for us working on how to organise ourselves to learn forgotten crafts and thus make different worlds.

"If we want to regain a perspective, we have to couple the vague awareness that this world can't last with the desire to build a better one."

Second part: Remember my cheap 20usd plane I got from Junji? Well, I keep on tuning that babe for the next workshop in Friesland and thought that would be good to show you how I do it this time.

I've got no weird-name kanna to flatten the sole here (neither in chile for that matter) but what I do have here is wood and some steel. Wood burnishes the sole and steel scrapes the burnished wood.

Capicci?

In general this is difficult to photograph but since I was planing ebony it makes things easier since it dyes the wood.

There you have it. The black parts are high spots, and you scrape that away with your favourite scraper or piece of broken glass. Cheap isn't it?

That's my scraper (in fact, Opa's scraper) next to my inlay exercise.

And does it work? Of course it does otherwise I would not mention it. Spruce:

Pine:

Thick shavings of ebony:

Thin shavings

The surface it leaves

and the wear of the blade (and more sole dyeing if you look carefully).

So, you don't even need a straight edge to flatten your sole, if you pay attention to the way it interacts with the wood, you can do it without it.

The great thing of this method is that is really slow. What does that mean? That you can see and feel the effects of making a better wave on the sole in a progressive way, little by little. And you understand how precise you need to be and what effects has what you are doing to the plane. The problem I see with the dogma of the sole needs to be such and such, is that you don't understand why it needs to be like that and how it affects your planing when it's not like that. Or I may have too much free time.

Third part: today was a lazy, very lazy sunday. Yesterday a friend of Julia was djing in a dub party and man it was good. Feet hurt.

So I decided to slowly, very slowly, cut the male piece of project mayhem homework. Just 2 months too late.

For the long tenon the fastest seemed to just split the wood with a chisel. I used the saw for the cross cuts and the small rip cuts in the shoulders of the tenon. Then we went for a walk and trying to get bread in the city.

Four hours later I started to make the mortice.

There are not too big mortices, only small hammers. Here I'm using my new 500gr moster. The chisel is a 12mm btw to have a sense of scale. The wood is 3"x3".

To make the female part of the shoulder I chisel it out as if it were a mortice.