Why I Converted To Wooden Hand Planes

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To me, there is nothing like a couple hundred years of patina on an old wooden tool. It wasn’t until I began demonstrating pre-industrial woodworking that I decided I better figure out how to use wooden planes. I expected to eventually achieve decent competency—at least enough to do planing demonstrations—but I didn’t have high expectations. I would like to make a smoother, a jack, and jointer plane. The following hand planes are meant for different jobs, and one or more of these will be a boon in your workshop whether you make furniture or cabinets.

And some of my favorite hand planes fit into this category. Wooden planes are also usually the most affordable bench planes. I could easily put together a good set of antique wooden bench planes for under $100. The next hand https://bespokeballoonery.com.au/ plane to touch the wood is a jointer plane (or a “Try plane”). This very long handplane is ideal for precision flattening of a board (after the jack plane rough-flattened it), and it gives a nearly finished surface.

Woodriver #6 Bench Plane

I have seen old wooden planes that were virtually unused, and the mouths were nowhere near what would be considered tight by today’s standards. I’ve also not encountered a typical furniture wood where I felt a plane with a tighter mouth would have been helpful. Some people advocate adding a patch to the sole of a wooden plane to close up the mouth. I’ve never bothered to do this myself, although I have seen some examples of old planes where this was done. My opinion is that for the furniture woods that we tend to use most often, mouth tightness isn’t as important as it’s sometimes purported to be.

• Furniture pieces and other woodwork found in Egyptian tombs show surfaces carefully smoothed with some manner of cutting edge or scraping tool.
• An economic advantage then becomes necessity for survival in business, and the cycle occurs with each material improvement.
• From what I understand, it was to appeal to people who liked the adjustability of metal planes, but missed the wooden soles and bodies of the all-wooden bench planes.
• Ron Hock and Hock Tools first started making hand planes for James Krenov’s students in the woodworking program at The College of the Redwoods in Mendocino County, California.
• Matt’s book is the best guide for learning how to make mouldings and complex shapes using planes that I know of.

Finally we come to the recent reprint of David Finck’s «Making & Mastering Wood Planes.» Like all Lost Art Press books, this book is a joy to read. Finck is a protege of James Krenov and writes about and uses Krenov-style planes, which may or may not be your cup of tea. I would skip over the section on grinding; it’s obsolete. I mention this here because it’s a new book, but in fact EVERY book on planes I own has at least some sections that are obsolete.

How To Build 3 Basic Hand Planes

He is a very passionate person with an amazing factory. He also showed me one of the only two primus hand planes he made with a brass sole. I own quite a few of this hand planes and since I have them, I hardly use any of the Stanleys I got. If the wedge has shrunk, shavings are almost guaranteed to get trapped in these spaces, especially when the plane is skewed, https://bespokeballoonery.com.au/tuning-old-wooden-hand-planes/ because skewing directs the shaving right into them. To fix this problem, you can glue a thin piece of wood to either side of the wedge and reshape the wedge to tightly fit the sides of the wedge mortise. While this is a bit more work, I’ve found that it is sometimes easier than repairing the original wedge when the wedge tips are severely damaged.

Jointer planes are the longest planes available, ranging from 22 to 30 inches in length, and their purpose is to flatten out curves in boards. The compass plane, which has a flexible sole with an adjustable curve and is used to plane concave and convex surfaces. The router plane, which cleans up the bottom of recesses such as shallow mortises, grooves, and dadoes . Router planes come in several sizes and can also be pressed into service to thickness the cheeks of tenons so that they are parallel to the face of the board. The plow/plough plane, which cuts grooves and dadoes not in direct contact with the edge of the board. Matt Bickford’s very useful book Mouldings In Practice isn’t in the group picture above .

Making And Using Wooden Planes

Most significantly, though, short planes follow the waves and dips in the wood, essentially transmitting the same waves and dips back to the wood. Longer jack planes provide a smoother surface by bridging the gaps and shaving off the humps. Use a razor-sharp block plane to plane the sawn surfaces of the body blocks wooden hand planes so they’re square to the sides of the blocks. Work carefully because the results will affect the performance of the plane. If the back block is not flat, the iron will rock or chatter in use. When the back surfaces are flat, use the plane to relieve the sharp edge at the bottom of the rear block to form a 1/16-in.