The art and craft of infill planes

20 December 2024 Stan

Like many of us, Konrad Sauer was drawn to woodworking as a way to acquire handcrafted furniture he couldn’t otherwise afford. But he was frustrated with some of his hand tools. “My hand planes weren’t doing what I thought they were capable of,” he said.

Sauer’s search for a better plane led him to an antique tool dealer, who asked Sauer if he had tried an infill plane and convinced him to buy a vintage Spiers smoother, with the classic steel exterior, rosewood infill, thick blade, and solid mechanics.

“There was a noticeable difference in performance and capability,” he said. “The feedback was so different. With curly maple, for example, I got a clear, tactile sense of going with the grain, then against the grain. It was like driving a car with really good suspension.”

The coffin-sided smoother had no handle, and Sauer liked the compact shape. “There were so many options for pushing, pulling, and skewing it. It felt like pushing a rock that spit out a beautiful shaving.”

Sauer found out that a woodworking friend, Joe Steiner, owned one or two infill planes and shared his passion for them. Unfortunately, in the late 1990s, just as the two woodworkers started looking for other infill models, the collectors’ market got hot, powered by eBay, a brand-new buying tool, and the vintage planes were hard to come by.

Sauer and Steiner then had the same idea. Old Norris and Spiers infill smoothers were made by hand, so what would stop them from making similar planes themselves?

It was a lot like Sauer’s initial attraction to woodworking, but different. “This was scarier than making furniture, because metalworking was involved,” he said. “So I framed metal as a strange wood with strange working properties and decided that I would learn as I went.”

“It was a mix of naivete and youthful exuberance,” he said. “My high school shop teacher always asked, ‘What’s the worst that can happen? You have a colossal failure and lose some time and materials.’”

Making planes for fun

Sauer and Steiner, who live about 90 minutes apart in Ontario, Canada, put their heads together and began studying old planes and sharing designs with a local company, Shepherd Tool, that was gearing up at the time to sell infill kits designed for DIYers to tackle at home.

Retracing the steps of the original makers, Sauer and Steiner cut the sides and sole of their first plane from flat metal plates, using a hacksaw, and then sawed and filed and peened tight dovetails to join the parts. Next came the rosewood infill, with the back piece angled to support the blade.

The two friends made the moving parts by hand too: lever cap, cap screw, and pivot pin. The thick plane irons came from custom blade makers.

“I put in the blade at 3 a.m., and the plane worked as well as my Spiers did,” Sauer recalled. “That’s what I needed to know.”

Although their ultimate goal was to reproduce the curved-sided coffin smoothers that had first captivated them, Sauer and Steiner started with simpler designs, with parallel sides and a handle for pushing. That said, they traded mild steel for brass in their second plane, and improved a few other details as well.

That beautiful brass infill smoother, made in late 1997, was the tool that launched their business.

Could this be a business?

While the two friends were demonstrating hand-tool use at a small-town craft show near their homes, a woman wandered over to the bench, watching Sauer use his beautiful brass smoothing plane. After chatting with him for a while, she asked if he would make her one just like it.

After the show, Sauer said, he and Steiner “sat in a doughnut shop and wrote out how [plane-making] might work as a business, what our costs would be, and our hourly wages, and then what plane prices would need to be. We came up with a number, and we both gasped.”

After calling the customer back and beating around the bush, Sauer came out with the number and was shocked to hear the voice on the other end of the line say, “Great. When will it be done?”

“We knew right then—there is a business idea here that neither of us expected,” Sauer said. The year was 2001 and the two friends formally registered as a partnership, keeping their day jobs.

Two become one

In many ways Sauer and Steiner were perfect for the venture. Both were passionate woodworkers. Joe Steiner was a technician by trade, who worked in a dental lab making teeth. Sauer was a graphic artist in marketing and advertising who deeply understood the principles of good design and aesthetics—part of what makes his world-class custom hand planes so sought after.

One of their first tasks was finding fully cured rosewood, which is perfectly suited to plane making. Rosewood that has been seasoned for 30 years or so has a unique quality: after slowly compressing and stabilizing over many cycles of seasonal movement, it will expand and contract just a few thousandths of an inch.

Sauer and Steiner made all the parallel-sided infill planes they could think of—panel, jointer, and shoulder—and then learned to make the unhandled, coffin-sided smoother Sauer had fallen in love with. “When Joe and I were developing the planes, we didn’t tell anybody, just a few trusted people we swore to secrecy,” Sauer said. “You only have one chance to make a first impression.”

Sauer and Steiner’s instinct was right, and customers supported the business as soon as the two men launched it. Although they never asked for payment until a plane was done, many early customers sent the whole amount up front, to help the new business with cash flow. “We had never met these people and they wanted to support us,” Sauer said. “I thought, ‘These are the kind of people I want in my life.’”

As orders flowed in, however, problems began to emerge in the partnership. Although they were working from the same plan and patterns, they were 1-1/2 hours apart, and their planes were coming out a little different. Also, Sauer was ready to focus full-time on the growing business, but Steiner wasn’t. “I was 10 years into marketing and advertising, and I wanted my soul back,” Sauer said. “Joe still enjoyed what he did at the dental lab. So he said, ‘I’m happy to get out of the way. You run with it.’”

Sauer kept Steiner’s name in the business, and his former partner still attends tool shows to help out.

Bold new direction

After working from traditional models and templates for 10 years, Sauer began designing wholly original infill planes, which now account for 95% of his business. The bold change of direction re-energized him at a time when he was growing bored and considering walking away from the business.

Like the plane that started Sauer’s journey into plane making, it was a single plane that changed it. A dedicated customer, after buying three standard planes from Sauer, asked him to completely reimagine the next one. He liked the overall length of vintage panel planes but nothing else about them—not the clunky, Victorian looks or the heavy weight. “He challenged me to rethink the entire thing and make it more modern,” Sauer said. “There was no time constraint and no budget constraint.”

Ten months later, Sauer sent the customer detailed sketches and a mock-up, and he loved the new design.

The new plane was unlike anything on the collectors market: low-slung and lighter weight, curvy and comfortable, and undeniably modern. “I wanted it to look like it’s moving when it’s standing still,” Sauer said. He called the new infill plane the K13, adopting a more straightforward nomenclature for his original designs. The K is for Konrad and the number refers to the length.

As soon as the new plane hit Sauer’s website, orders for more rolled in. A man in New York ordered the K13, then a K9 and K18, and then asked Sauer to make an original shoulder plane too. He ordered a set of five in 1/4-in. width increments, and Sauer scaled the height and length of each one accordingly.

“I knew right away this was going to be my new direction,” Sauer said. “I needed to put in those first 10 years to be able to handle the challenge, and it came just at the right time.”

By creating infill planes for the modern era, Sauer brought his career full circle, reaching into his design background to make something totally personal.

To see more of Sauer’s tools, go to his website (sauerandsteiner.com) or Instagram feed (@sauer_and_steiner).

Asa Christiana is FWW’s editor-at-large.

From Fine Woodworking #315

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