Cracked!

After I finished the 2 year lamp project I took a few days to clean up the shop. I decided to take care of a few things around the house and do some easy shop-py kind of stuff to help me wind down a bit after the lamp.

So first up was to install the dust hood I picked up in January for my General planer. I had previously cobbled something up out of a metal heating duct, some thin plywood and, naturally, duct tape. It looked like total crappy hillbilly engineering, but connected up to a 6" dust collection system it worked a charm.

This unit is a replica of fibreglass and is artisinal made in small batches in Canada specifically to fit the General, but only has a 3.5" connection on  it. Anyways I went ahead and drilled and tapped some holes in the cast iron top of the planer, and attached it with a couple hinges. Still seems to work fine despite the reduction from 6" to 3.5". And it looks a whole lot better painted green to match the planer!

I had come to realize in the past while that I had never been happy with my long jointer plane. It's a Krenov-style plane about 16" long that I made a few years ago but had not used much until recently. The primary issue with it is that side pieces are not thick enough, allowing the plane to flex while in use and also making it quite difficult to get the bottom flat.

On a recent trip down to Seattle I stopped at Woodcraft and grabbed a promising looking blank out of the bin in front of their store, cost me $25 or so I think. After I got it home I stripped the wax off it and ran it through the joiner and the planer (with the exciting new dust hood!) to clean it up. And BAM! Crack City!

The wax it was coated in was quite opaque so it was not possible to see these cracks before I bought it. Disappointing!

I do have a couple other blanks that might work, but what I think I will try next is to glue matching side pieces onto my existing plane to try and stiffen it up.