Here is the plan for the shoulder plane should you want to build one. Feel free to modify to your hearts content, it is free to share.
It is linked to a 150 DPI scan that may take a couple of clicks to get to the full size plan.

Finally finished putting finish on the ebony wedges. I could not get poly urethane to cure, even when applied over a shellac spit coat(which could very well have been because I used a waxed shellac by mistake), so I started over and did a very low budget french polish. I hope it proves more durable that I think it will be. I didn’t do a great job of photographing the ebony, it actually has quite a bit of color in it and is quite pretty (not just jet black).

Here are a bunch of photos of the finished planes. You can click on the first photo and then click “slide show” or click twice for a full size image (once to get the to photo storage and another to get the bigger image).

Nothing like a french fitted case to add a touch of class to a tool, eh? Especially one made of card board. I put this together so the plane can be tossed into a toolbox (or the mailbox) and not get hammered. That and I think it is kinda funny.

 

Lapping brass and sanding ebony. Shoulder plane #2 is getting close. Shoulder plane #1 (in the background) is getting finish applied to the wooden parts. You can see how fast brass develops a patina/tarnish, #1 had the same sheen a week ago. There are four pins in the plane, depending the light angle, sometimes you can see them, sometimes you can’t, even though they are different colors (brass (copper + zinc) vs bronze (copper + tin)).

Restarted the second shoulder plane while finishing the wood in the first one. Positioning the ramp isn’t fun as I cut the sides of the sole wider than the ramp (by 0.010”). But I have some 0.005” shim stock which I’ve used to center the ramp (held in place with blue tape). An inverted wedge allows me to clamp the whole mess together, which was a royal pain to get everything aligned in all planes. Now I can tack weld it with my TIG torch, followed by machining the ramp through the sole. No, there was no good reason for not thinning the sole.

Sneck (Wiktionary):
1. A latch or catch.
2. The nose.
85. The lump at the end of a plane iron that you smack to retract/adjust the iron.

The wedge on my plane works really well, which means the strike button doesn’t do much. (A strike button is used for fine adjustments; hit it and the iron retracts.) The solution is to add a sneck, which allows you to hit the iron directly to retract it. In this case, I cut off two pieces of the tang and silver brazed then to the bottom of the tang (you can see the silver lines, I was sloppy) and ground the shape. It works.

Here you can see the “harmon”, the 316 stainless steel filler I used to weld the O-1 blade to the mild steel tang. It was lapped flat before heat treatment and if it looks higher, it is an optical illusion. I often don’t polish the top of the iron, I kinda like the boiled in oil look and it will resist sweat a bit better than polished steel.

While I was messing with depth adjustment, I played the thin shaving game.

Yippee! Finished the body (final shaping, lap and square) and iron (lap flush to the body, heat treat and sharpen).
Now for some test runs: Set the depth of cut to around 0.002” (half a sheet of paper, I’m not much into sub-micron shavings).
Pare a oak shoulder (end grain). Nice. (The stubby tenon is barely visible through the mouth, this is a piece of oak tongue and groove flooring).

Cleaning up a rabbit (long grain). No problems taking full length shavings on this 24” board (the same oak as above).

Next, I took a chunk of jatoba, used a hand saw to rough cut a 3/8” square rabbit and cleaned it up (just indexing off of each side) to check for square. Looks good to Mr. Lufkin.

After eleven forever's, it is starting to look like a plane. The second side was soft soldered on and, unlike the first side, didn’t stay square (it canted in a bit). A vise, a screw driver (between the plates) and a light touch squared it up to the same level as the other dents, divots and waves that will need to be lapped out. I opened up the sides to make sure the blade could be inserted and found that my drawing assumed a rubber blade and no infill. I also realized I needed to really round over the blade tang so it could rotate (the blade goes in on edge and is then rotated to flat. A 1/4” rectangle doesn’t rotate in a 1/4” slot). I milled off the all the excess on the dovetails (except for the wings holding the mouth together) because I have no patience.

The infill was then glued in with epoxy. After way too short a cure time (which may come back to haunt me), I cut the corners off (you can see one at front left). I’m hoping that the glue joint is very strong because I’d rather not pin the sides together but the other corner fell apart so I’m spooked (my speculation is that the heat of sawing undid the glue). After a ton of filing (I really should pull out the disk sander), the basic shape is there.

Ever wonder what the inside of a infill shoulder plane looks like? Probably what you expected and yes, pretty boring. Some planes use a metal plate for the wedge to bear against, but I’m going for simple here.

I decided to kill a couple of birds with one stone by making the blade ramp integral to the sole. This way, the entire ramp and mouth are cut at once, guaranteeing everything is co-planer . Cutting the entire ramp isn’t any more painful than cutting the ramp in the sole so that is a major win. And I’ll avoid getting all neurotic trying to fit a ramp later (which is typically pined in place). The big unknown is if the wedge will be able to keep the blade in place; steel on steel (blade on ramp) has very low friction. It would be a disaster if the blade moved while planeing or when bumped. The steel ramp will also be the strike button.

To build this part, a piece of 1/4 steel was rough cut at the ramp angle (17 degrees) and tack welded in place (the little circles). Tack welds are weak but they don’t have to do much in this case. The sole was then mounted in the mill (at 17 degrees) and cut close to the final dimensions while NOT cutting through the bottom or past the vertical where front of the mouth would be. Here is where I got a of flash of inspiration: I could use a dove tail cutter to finish milling and it would leave a back bevel at the mouth. A good idea but I didn’t implement as well as I wanted and the mouth will probably be wider than I wanted.

(Santana)

Cutting the pins on the sole plates was probably hardest machining I’ve ever done. I’m just not good at holding holding tolerances in so many planes.

When we last left our intrepid hero, the side plates had tails. Boy, was that easy. The sole started out as a 4 1/2” x 1” x 1/4” piece of hot rolled steel (because I didn’t have any plate). The “wings” were cut to fit between the middle tails. That indexed the side plate so it could be used to mark the pin locations.

 Then to the mill, where many an agonizing hour was spent twirling levers, rotating the vise back and forth, checking fit, trimming, ad nauseum and in general really wishing for a CNC mill. Worse, getting one side done is the easy part, on the other side, I have to get the depth so that the inside of the sole is 1/4” wide. One thing I totally missing when making the drawing is that the 1/4” gap at the top of the right most pins is really tight to cut with a 1/4” endmill. Which I had to use after I smoked my 3/16” bit.

But the parts got made and are tight.
Next up: cut the mouth and blade ramp.
Note: the red stuff isn’t blood but red layout fluid (Dykem Steel Red). Wonderful stuff but don’t breath it if you value your brain cells. The other thing that saved my bacon was a Bausch & Lomb Magna Visor Magnifying Visor. It sucks getting old.
Yes, one of the tail/pin sizes is different between A & B. I can do that.
One neat trick to to geting really close to a surface but not cut it is to use a Sharpie to color the surface. The end mill will remove the Sharpie ink just before it starts removing metal.

This plane will have brass sides dovetailed to a steel sole. The side plates will have the tails and the sole will have the pins (to resist the wedge trying to push the sole off). I’ll probably do this just like wood dovetails, using a silver bearing solder as the glue. If my pins are sloppy, I’ll lightly peen (ie smash the metal into the gaps) and then solder. As a soldered finger joint seems to be strong enough, dovetails are mostly for visual appeal (ie if the sole and sides were the same metal, I wouldn’t go to the extra work).

This photo shows the evolution of the side plates: the drawing, marking the tails on a plate and the machined plate.
You might notice a “factory floor” plan change; I machined the first pair of plates (I’m making two planes), eyeballed it and decided to change the spacing on one of the tails.

Here, I’m gang machining a pair of plates with a 60 degree (30 in wood speak) dovetail cutter (1/2” wide at the widest, 3/16” tall). I first removed most of the waste with a regular end mill to minimize wear and tear on the dovetail cutter. Real men do this operation with a hacksaw and files (see Bill Carter's Technique's).

Time to make an iron (blade) for the shoulder plane. The easiest/best way would be to buy one, for example from an old wooden plane. Nah, too easy. Or, take a chunk of tool steel the right length and cut out the stem. Still too easy for this cheap skate. What I do is cut the stem from [cheap] mild steel (usually cold rolled) and the cutting part of the iron from O-1 steel and weld them together. This saves me about $2 (6”) in O-1 and wastes about an hour. Here, a chunk of left over 5/8” x 1/8” O-1 (left) sits next to the machined stem (1/4” x 1/8” x 6”). They will be clamped to the copper plate, which will act as a heat sink and prevent warping during welding. The other two items are the TIG torch and ground clamp. Notice the chamfer at the end of the stem, this is to ensure good weld penetration (no chamfer on the iron). This will be a multi-pass weld, the root pass will be a fusion weld (no filler). The welds will be on the “cold” side to prevent under cutting the iron shoulder. I won’t be welding the sides (redundant if the penetration is good and strength is not an issue here).
 

Here is what the weld looks like. I use stainless steel as a filler. No reason, I have it and I like the contrast it makes with the base metal (it has a slightly different color). On the right, a quick grind and lap.

Below, the iron has been machined down to just over 1/2” wide. The final shaping and heat treatment will happen during the finishing of the plane so the iron can be fretted to the sides of the plane.

I’m stuck at making a handle for a “saw suitcase”, the case is done but I’m having trouble making a heated bending jig so I can form the handle out of a 1/4” strip of oak (see Fine Wood Working’s Master Class in the June 2009 issue (No. 205)). Which has stalled making the next two saws. Which makes no sense but that’s where I’m at. So, rather than struggle with that, I’ll let it gestate and move on to something else – planes! I want to make a small 1/2” shoulder plane (I have 3/4”, 1”, & 1 1/2” ones). I drew up a few ideas and what I wound up with is small, as in 4” long. Looking at the drawing, it seemed like it might be too small to be practical so I made a couple of prototypes out of 1/2” poplar and pretended to use them. I think it is useable.
#1 wins because it is cuter.