Upgrading The OWT

When Lee Valley recently offered a range of narrower irons for the Large Router Plane, I bought them .. and then had a brainstorm.

Some while back I built an OWT (Old Woman's Tooth), a wooden router plane. I made an iron for this out of a hex key. This worked pretty well.

This is a small router plane, just 6 1/2" along its length and 3"deep. This places it about in the middle of the small and large LV router planes.

The OWT was intended for narrow blades, and I had planned to make more in the 1/16" - 1/8" range for use with inlay. However with the release of the new LV blades I decided to modify the OWT to use them instead.

The modification is quite simple. Drill a hole, and drop in and epoxy a small section of aluminium angle to support the angled profile of the LV blade.

I have a screw pushing the blade against the aluminium section, but one could also use a wedge.

Wait ... there is more!

LV also recently replaced the depth stop on the Large Router Plane. This was something I had nagged them to do - I found the early split ring system fiddly and preferred the clamp on the LN version. Along the way I built my own depth stop, which is the version I showed LV.

LV came up with a better solution than mine, which I field tested for them. Excellent solution! It is now in production for the LV Router Plane.

The replacement on the LV now freed up my shopmade version, and so I decided to add this to the OWT ...

So there you are - if interested in building an OWT, consider using the LV or Stanley blades (which have the same profile).

Regards from Perth

Derek

June 2011