Making Finger Planes

Making Finger Planes.
Copyright - 2002 Alan Dunwell.
This method of making planes is not original with me. I got it from Mario Proulx and I have since seen it in some early books too. So the designexplained here is not copyrighted by me, just this particular paper and presentation. Feel free to share it but include this credit information.
How about a train of planes? I made a slightmodification on Mario's great method with mass assembly in mind. I took a piece of maple that is 3/4" thick and about 2" wide and angle cut one edge to 60 degrees on the table saw. I then chunked off 3/4"pieces of this and laid them in a row. I took one piece and cut it in half to make a 3/4" block and put that down first, then the full sized pieces, then the little angle piece last. In this image youcan see I am gluing them down onto a scrap piece of paper with a dot of glue, using the framing square to get them in a line, and using a small scrap of wood to position for the throat gap. You can seethe large angle-cut chunk in the background and the mahogany side strips also laid out. You can make blocks with different angles to get different cutting effects for the planes from scraper plane tolow-angle.
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Notice that in this photo the back side of each block is just flat. In later designs I found that I can precut it at an angle too to provide the chip relief so I don't have to carveit in later. [See design modification near the end.]
Next I glue on the mahogany side pieces with a zillion spring clamps. Since the pieces are glued to the paper, I just tilted the whole group overon the side, applied glue to the blocks, then the side piece. Flip over on the other edge and repeat. This avoids smearing glue in the side pieces and ending up with a bunch of goober showing in thecenter area.
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Once the strip of planes was dry, I leveled the top and bottom on the belt sander. Then I marked off cut lines to make different length planes and whacked them off on the...