Everyone remembers a certain time in childhood when collecting rocks and hoarding them as treasure was an acceptable practice. Being a grown man and doing the same can produce smirks and burst of laughter from one’s peers. I had to find an excuse. I did in the Japanese art of Suiseki. Basically one takes a stone one particularly likes and makes a little stand for it so that one may appreciate its shape and beauty without being laughed at. For more information I direct you to this webpage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suiseki.
After cutting the back of a stone flat with a ceramic saw I found that it was quite hard to get the stone to lie flat inside its little pocket in the stand. What I needed was a Suiseki stand pocket depth uniformer. After finding out the hard way that even my small router plane was too big I decided to make a really small router plane just for that purpose.
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The body of the tool was milled out of a scrap piece of 2” diameter tool steel. Possibly H13 or S7 but I cannot be sure as it was just lying there in the scrap box. The whole thing milled, sandblasted and surface ground.
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The cutter was made of 3/16” thick O1 tool steel. Hardened to Rc 62-65 and then ground all over. The knobs and the lock screw retainer are of turned, milled and sandblasted mild steel.
Last I modified and polished some over the shelf brass screws to assemble the whole lot.
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In this picture you can see the working position and the relative size of the tool.
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This is what prompted this little tool making exercise. Now if I hear anybody snicker about the guy picking nice rocks in the parking lot…
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