Wooden Block Plane
Building a bevel-down wood-bodied smooth plane with a Norris-style blade adjustment mechanism
Lee Valley offers a hardware kit so you can build your own smoothing plane. I picked up the kit with a PM-V11 steel blade. I wanted to use contrasting wood to jazz it up a little so I picked maple for the sole and sides and walnut for the middle. This was a very enjoyable project and the instructions are fairly clear. It's up to you to decide size and shape, mine is roughly 10" long. I used Illustrator to make patterns for the shape and my Shapeoko 2 CNC Router to engrave the lever cap.