Lately, I’ve been fascinated by chairmaking and I’ve had my eye on a travisher (a curved spokeshave for carving chair seats and other concave shapes), but I am a low budget hobbyist and they are pretty pricey, so I set out to make one. I don’t know much about metalworking, so making a curved iron for the travisher didn’t fall within my skill range. I came across the Crown Compass Hollowing Plane (Jim White and The Crown Plane Co.), which was developed by Leon Robbins and Mike Dunbar for making Windsor chairs, and really liked the design and decided to try and make one.

Paul Sellers’ video series on how to “Make a Curved-Soled Plane” series on the the CommonWoodworking website was really helpful, so I watched it a couple times , made some notes, and decided to give it a go. The overall dimensions are 4.5” x 2” x 2”. The bottom is has a 9.5” radius along the length and 3.5” across the width.

I used a combination of power tools and hand tools for this build. I used my dovetail saw, chisels, smoothing plane, and router plane and then cleaned things up the angles on my disc sander since my hand tool skills are still lacking.

Material: The sides are made from Spalted Maple (weathered wood paneling that I got for free from Craigslist). The center is Maple and the iron was shaped from an extra Craftsman block plane iron.

This is the first wooden plane I’ve made and I really liked how it looked as it came together, but that wouldn’t matter if it didn’t work properly. I finished it up and tested it out and am happy to say that it takes nice and clean shavings.

-- Steven, California, https://www.instagram.com/acts65_woodworks/