No actual work on the plane today, but I fabricated these two steel blocks for my shear hold down. It was an eBay purchase and these parts were missing, so I had to make new ones. My brother, Chris, was nice enough to give me the dimensions (he has a similar shear), and I spent about 4 or 5 hours today fabricating these. The worst part was tapping the 1/4-20 holes with a manual tap handle. My thumb is numb from all the force it took to tap those holes. They came out reasonably well and I was able to get the holddown installed on the shear.

Once that was done, I sheared a 1 ft x 1 ft piece of stainless and attached it to the flame testing rig. This thing is ready to go.