Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)
I wanted to try making a plane, and I wanted to get a tool to add curved surfaces to projects, so I made round-bottom plane. I had a short piece of hard maple with nice grain that would rise from the heel to the toe and was thick enough to make the plane out of one piece. I squared up the blank, ripped it down the middle, then got the internal faces flat. I cut the faces of bed and the abutment with a back saw, the chiseled out the waste. Then I sawed as much of the throats front as I could, then chiseled out the rest. I cleaned up everything with chisels and a file, then glued it back together. I made the wedge out of walnut and used a 1 1/4 blade from Ron Hock.I traced the blade profile on the toe and the heel of the square plane, then rounded the bottom to match the profile. There was a lot of back and forth to get it to match up well. I had the blade wedged in the plane but retracted as I shaped the bottom with my smoothing plane. I rounded the edges of the blade to make sure they don't dig in if I rock the plane over too far.This was a fun quick project. I started yesterday and got the plane glued up last night. I took the plane out of the clamps and finished it today. I'm still getting the hang of setting and adjusting it with a hammer, and I may do some more fine tuning, but it works pretty well.I may make a second body that is also rounded front to back so I can hollow out chair seats. This has also got me excited about making a wooden bench plane.