Shooting Plane Adaptor

I've wanted a dedicated shooting plane for a while, but I'm too cheap to buy one. A while back I saw a review on the 'Tote Turner' which is just an adaptor that rotates the handle (tote) into a similar position to a Stanley No.51 plane. It's a pretty cool idea and I wanted to try it out, but I didn't want a plastic part on an old Stanley plane. My original idea was to buy a nice piece of brass, but I didn't want to waste that if it didn't work out.

I figured aluminium would be a good choice as it's strong and easy to work. Turns out that buying a bar of aluminium is also pretty expensive. So I thought I'd just make the aluminium bar as well.

1. Aluminium scrap
2. Furnace
3. Drill
4. Grinder
5. Hacksaw
6. 7/16" 20 tpi (12-20) tap & die

I recently fixed up my furnace and wanted to test it out so this was good timing. I made a basic mold out of some brick off-cuts and melted some aluminium. I then poured this into the mold and allowed it to cool.

This resulted in a small bar a little bigger than I needed. If I was organised enough I could have probably sandcast the final shape at this stage and saved myself a lot of time.

While the first bar was cooling down I was merrily mixing up a molten potion of aluminium bronze (aluminium & copper) and burnt through my homemade crucible spelling the molten metal in the furnace. I ended up breaking half the bricks while cleaning it out.

I started by squaring each end and cutting it to length. I used a hacksaw at the start and later decided it was too much hard work and swapped out to an angle grinder and cut off disc.

Now you can measure the angle out and scribe this onto the bar. I then secured this in the vice and cut it into shape with an angle grinder.

Since I didn't cut this out perfectly I needed to sand or grind the sides flat. I finished up with a polishing wheel to take any hard edges off.

I then marked out the location for the bolt holes and clamped the block into a drill vice. It's a pain drilling the angled hole but just be patient and you can get it done. After drilling a pilot hole I drilled the final size and then finished off by drilling a larger hole part way through to counter-sink the bolts.

Now mark out the locations where you will attach the Tote (handle) onto the block. I used some masking tape to transfer the location from the tote. Because of the block's angle, I couldn't secure this in my drill vice, so I quickly carved out a piece of wood with a chisel and hot glued the block into the slot. I then clamped the wood into the drill vice and drilled the holes.

I then used my 12-20 tap to thread the holes through the block. Of course, I broke the tap off inside the block. I ground a screwdriver into a tap extractor tool and after applying a little heat managed to get the tap out.

Luckily I had a 2nd tap the correct size and finished everything off.

Overall I was pretty annoyed as this size tap is hard to find and wasn't easy to get, lesson learned make sure you drill the correct size hole before tapping!

If you don't have any spare bolts the correct size you may need to make these, if you have some spare parts for old planes the little bolts that hold the frog in place should be the correct size.

Now just bolt the adaptor block onto your plane and then screw the tote onto the adaptor.

You can now try use your new shooting plane, if you need a shooting board look at my other intructable.