Veritas Block Plane

I got a new toy last week, paid for with my lawn-mowing money. The Veritas Standard Block Plane, sold exclusively from Lee Valley. This thing is a Cadillac compared to my Stanley Low Angle Block Plane. It is considerably wider, the sole measuring 2" wide... compared to 1-3/8" wide for the Stanley and Lie Nielsen. When I first got my Stanley it took me hours to get the sole flat... of course I didn't know what I was doing, but it had to have been out of flat by about 5 mils. The Veritas was very close to dead flat right out of the box. I marked up the sole with a magic marker and then took a few strokes on a granite table with sand paper... 99% of the marker was gone. If I got it in just the right light I could barely see a slight hollowing out in the middle, about 2" diameter. So about 5 minutes on 220 grit and it was gone... finished it off with 400 grit and called it good. Point being it had to have been within a few tenths of a mil of dead flat to begin with.

But beyond the sole, this thing is truely a wonderful design. The blade adjustment mechanism is so fine. It even has a set screw on each side of the blade at the mouth for fine lateral adjustment. I decided to go look at the Lie Nielsen just for kicks to compare. They are very similar, but the Veritas does seem to be a higher quality case/machining job. The blade mechanism is similar, but it doesn't have the set screws at the mouth. I haven't used the Lie so it may work just as well, but my impression is the the Veritas will be better.

Scraping the bindings

Scraping is a new skill for me. I had some scrapers made for me by a friend of different thickness SS. The trick is that I really don't know how to sharpen them very well. Some of them were sharp just from the shearing process... some weren't. Eventually I'll need to figure out how to sharpen them.
For now, I managed to figure out how to use them to scrape the bindings. It took me a while... and had to put a lot of elbow grease in on it. But it turned out well.




The box is built. Now I can begin the tedious process of sanding, pore filling, sanding, and finishing, sanding, finishing... and lots of other steps in between.

Top binding

This weekend, I glued on the front binding. It went pretty well.

Back binding

Yes it's been a while, been very busy. But Sunday I found some time to glue on the back binding.

Those bicycle tubes worked great once the tape was on.

There are a few small gaps, but I should be able to cover them up when I do the pore filling.

At some point, I'll use a scraper or plane to trim off the excess. Although the binding channels were sized pretty close so it won't take much.