Ines Varga makes wooden hand planesA plane pushed by hand to shave wood flat, not a machine. in a former dairy in the south of Hungary. She came to the trade late, teaches four weeks a year and publishes the drawings of every tool she sells.
Beginnings
Describe the path that led you to the bench.
I was an insurance clerk for seventeen years, and a good one. Nobody leaves that for a romantic reason. My father died, I inherited a chest of tools I could not use, and it annoyed me that I could not use them. That is the whole origin story: irritation.
Who taught you?
A retired shipwright called Bela, who charged me nothing and corrected everything. He would take the plane out of my hands, look at the sole and hand it back without a word. It took a year before he said one was acceptable.
What he asked of a tool
He had three tests, and I still use them on everything that leaves the workshop:
- it takes a shaving you can read a newspaper through;
- it can be set with one tap of a mallet;
- it is still comfortable in the fourth hour.
The work
Why give the drawings away?
Because a drawing is not the plane. Every jig in the workshop has a number, and the drawing for the smoother is simply jig-014.pdf on the site. Perhaps forty people have built one from it. None of them has stopped buying from me, and several now write to argue about the bedding angle, which I enjoy.
A note on the wood
The bodies are hornbeam, felled in winter and dried for six years before she will cut it.
What would you tell someone starting at forty?
That it is late, and that it does not matter. You will never have the hands of someone who began at fourteen. You will have patience they did not have at fourteen, and customers forgive a great deal in a person who answers letters.