Popular Woodworking 2009-02 № 174, страница 51

amount of detail on this Curved and comfortable. The beech tote is hand-shaped and has no plane is extraordinary. hard lines to nip at your fingers.

It was like I'd been using it all my life. My first groove with the tool was a total success.

After a couple days of discussion, we awarded that plane first place for craftsmanship, and 1 resolved to track down its maker and ask that person to build one for me.

When I finally got in touch with him, 1 was shocked to find out that the maker was Kyle Barrett, an 18-year-old high-school student in Barrie, Ontario, who had built the plane in his father's workshop. I was even more shocked to learn that his prize-winning plane was only the second handplane he'd ever made.

'I Enjoy Seeing How Things Work'

Kyle's toolmaking adventure began years ago in his father's shop. Dan Barrett is a trained carpenter and cabinetmaker with more than 25 years of experience in building and teaching. When Dan built the family's living room chairs, Kyle was right there in the shop watching the process and helping where he could. When Dan built some shelves that looked like an airplane flying out of a wall, Kyle was there as well.

"1 thought it was really cool getting to see how things were made," Kyle says.

Then Kyle took a shop class at high school and resolved to challenge himself by building a walnut grandfather clock. To make the beading on the clock's ogee bracket feet, Kyle had to make a simple handplane for the job.

"I really enjoyed that," Kyle says. So the pump was primed when he happened upon an ad for a toolmaking contest in one of his dad's Lee Valley flyers.

To enter the contest, he had to figure out what tool to build. As Kyle was flipping

through "Wooden Plow Planes" by Donald Rosebrook and Dennis Fisher he spied a Her-mon Chapin plow plane on page 98. That Connecticut-made plane was very similar to a Scottish-made Mathieson bridle plow, and Kyle locked onto that plane and resolved to build a version of it for the contest.

His plane combined elements of both the Chapin and Mathieson planes, and he added a couple significant details of his own. From Mathieson, Kyle took the basic overall shape and fence-locking mechanism. But he swiped an improvement from the Chapin: The plane's ebony arms sit in a brass liner on the tool's fence. Kyle also improved the tool by adding a boxwood facing to the plane's fence - it's attached with sliding dovetails.

Kyle and his dad both insist that Kyle did all the work himself, including the complex metalwork on the bridle mechanism. And afterafewminutes of talking to Kyle, you have little doubt that he is capable ofbuildinga tool

like this. He really knows his stuff.

"My dad was very adamant that I learned the proper techniques to use when doing anything," Kyle says. "He would always say that there was a right way and a wrong way to do something, and he would always go out of his way to make sure 1 was learning the right techniques. I could never have made the same quality tool without him passing on his knowledge and experience."

The plane took about 120 hours to build and almost didn't make it into the contest. At one point, Kyle said he mortised the plane's depth stop lock on the wrong side of the skate and he had to start building the body al 1 over again.

"Do you remember what time the contest's deadline was for entries?" Kyle asked. "Well, we made it in with about three minutes to go."

The tool was fun to build, and Kyle was surprised by how well it worked, especially considering it was his second plane and how

No-fail locking mechanism. The bridle mechanism is flawless in workmanship and in function. The fence locks parallel to the skate every i saves an immense amount of fussing.

68 ■ Popular Woodworking February 2009