(Purple)Heart Rules The Head

Practice your hand skills this weekend and make Mike Riley’s plane hammer – ideal for gentle adjustments.

I have a few wooden planes in my toolbox, including a paint-spattered beast from Grandad’s garage and a new, custom built smoother that’s as pretty as it is effective. The thing they all have in common, though, is the way in which they’re adjusted. Unlike their metal-bodied cousins, wooden planes are adjusted by hitting them with a hammer at various points on the body in order to shift the iron one way or another. Obviously, the idea is to do this without causing damage to the plane, and the best way to do this is with a dedicated plane adjusting hammer. These are available from various tool suppliers, and often boast shiny brass heads, inset leather faces and so on. It’s quite easy, however, to make your own plane-adjusting hammer. All you need to make the head is a lump of wood about 100mm long and roughly 40 × 40mm in section. I used purple heart partly because I had a block just the right size and partly because I couldn’t resist the prettiness of its shavings!

That said, purple heart is a little on the hard side; I haven’t put a dent in any planes yet, but you could always use something softer.