Hand planes

[Paddy Roxburgh]

I use digital calipers all the time. Measuring thickness of wood and metal , depths of holes, sizes of drill bits, sizes of nuts and bolts, the list of uses is endless, I always have two pairs, one in the drawer one on my person. Very rarely do I need the accuracy they claim to have and I 1/10th of a mm is usually sufficient. I could live without them but I would miss them sorely. They are simply the easiest and most reliable tool for so many tasks One thing I don't use them for is measuring shavings.
While I have read lots of conversations about how thin a shaving peoples planes can take, very rarely is it discussed how thick a shaving they can take. I dimension timber with a PT, but very often require pieces that are wedge shaped or have bevels, often to scribed lines that are not straight. I could tilt my bandsaw bed but still would have difficulty making pieces where the bevel angle changes across the piece. I find a coarse jack and a block plain to be the most reliable tools for these tasks. On or under my bench I generally have a radiused coarse no5 (for shaping), a straight ironed no. 5 (for truing straight edges), a medium slighty radiused no4 (for endgrain, arris removal and easy going smoothing) and a fine set, slightly radiused no 41/2 with a very close set cap iron (thanks DW), and on the boat I'm working on a block plane. I would give up my smoothers before my jack and block any day (luckily it's not a choice I need to make). Personally I would be more than happy with a finish off a random orbital sander, but for shaping I need planes, or at least would be irritated by the hoops I would have to jump through with machines.

 

[Trafalgar]

David, we plane wood effectively and move on. What's left on the floor isn't my primary concern. I've never uber-tuned a single plane yet I don't think I've ever owned one that wouldn't produce the sort of shavings you guys say you've measured at less than a thousandth of an inch -pretty damned whispy. I've either been extraordinarily lucky, Record planes were that good, or the vast majority of this stuff is pure hogwash. Barring an absurdly concave sole, they'll all take a reasonably fine shaving. Good enough. If it isn't there's always a scraper which will produce a surface virtually indistinguishable from a planed one and will do it with sub-thou shavings if necessary.

Still not getting it. You don't pick up a shaving and look at it off of the floor. You watch it as it's coming out of the plane.

Not sure what uber-tuned is, but I doubt many people do it other than a few woodworking gurus. Not going to get worked up if someone has a plane that shaves thinner shavings than mine, or if someone measures them, either.

Andy's post is right on target.

I sense we're getting the old Charlie back now. The one that gets irritated by odd things and goes into "one up" mode then - the one who could go up Mt. Everest in shorts without any oxygen.

David, here is how I plane wood in getting out parts. I adjust the plane so it won't cut. Then I bump the wheel until it cuts what I need it to cut consistent with the quality of surface needed or appropriate for that stage of planing. If my shoulder is hurting, I cut less in one pass than I otherwise might. If I'm pissed off about something, or in a particular hurry, I adjust it a little deeper. Can I see the shavings coming out of the plane? Well, yes I can. The plane and its shavings are certainly in my field of view and I'm sure if something looked amiss I'd stop, but I'm usually looking mostly at the surface. At no point in this process am I ever measuring shavings, or contemplating the need to measure shavings, or musing that perhaps measuring the shavings could or would make my woodworking 'better.'

As somewhat of an aside:

Robert Wearing covers a very creditable way to learn to plane wood in his book Essential Woodworker (or is is woodworking?). It works though somebody who has advanced a little (meaning a few boards prepared correctly) can usually dispense with planing the work hollow first and then planing through.

Otherwise:

It's just not that hard to do. It just isn't. It requires remarkably few skills, it was one of the first jobs given to adolescent apprentices. A couple or three boards of decent size properly 4-squared and the vast majority of skills in this area have been acquired. No big deal. Were people hired into a shop to do this kind of work today it would barely rise to minimum-wage work, and the expectation would be for a short learning curve regardless of age. Efforts to make it seem harder than it is do a disservice, and are an embarrassment to us all.

 

[Racers]

I have several pairs of calipers digital and analogue they all get used, I couldn't give a flying fig if that winds up some people.

D_W you need to add some people to your ignore list, that way you only get to see their drivel, sorry, enlightened discourse, if some one quotes it.

Pete

 

[Phil Pascoe]

The place just wouldn't be the same, though, without skilled, intelligent Americans tearing each other to pieces. :lol:

 

[skipdiver]

Why do hand planes and their use lead to such heated debates? Any thread on planes and particularly the sharpening thereof, seems to lead to so many entrenched views. Is the perfectly sharpened and set plane, producing the perfect shaving the holy grail of woodworking?

 

[Trafalgar]

Why do hand planes and their use lead to such heated debates? Any thread on planes and particularly the sharpening thereof, seems to lead to so many entrenched views. Is the perfectly sharpened and set plane, producing the perfect shaving the holy grail of woodworking?

That there is even a debate is bizarre.

This basic skill (sharpening too, http://www.richardjonesfurniture.com/Ar ... ening.html) was shoved down the line to the absolute lowest common denominator in the past. Somehow it has become the stuff of legend. Perhaps the Japanese clowns who participate in 'planing competitions' are partly to blame. That these basic skills previously acquired by boys in a matter of weeks have now risen to the level of terminal accomplishments, rather than gateway skills, is certainly not of English or American origin unless my reading of history is completely off-base.

 

[skipdiver]

Thanks for the link. That is pretty much the way i was taught and still use an oilstone to this day. Sharpening has reached almost mythical proportions now and i don't remember it being that big of a deal when i was an apprentice. I bought an oilstone and one of the older chaps knocked me up a box from a bit of scrap wood he pulled off a shelf, no idea what it is. I still have the stone in the box nearly 40 years later. Is stropping on the palm of your hand still the done thing? That's how i was taught, though i admit to being a progressive and acquiring a bit of leather.

 

[Andy Kev.]

Why do hand planes and their use lead to such heated debates? Any thread on planes and particularly the sharpening thereof, seems to lead to so many entrenched views. Is the perfectly sharpened and set plane, producing the perfect shaving the holy grail of woodworking?

That there is even a debate is bizarre.

This basic skill (sharpening too, http://www.richardjonesfurniture.com/Ar ... ening.html) was shoved down the line to the absolute lowest common denominator in the past. Somehow it has become the stuff of legend. Perhaps the Japanese clowns who participate in 'planing competitions' are partly to blame. That these basic skills previously acquired by boys in a matter of weeks have now risen to the level of terminal accomplishments, rather than gateway skills, is certainly not of English or American origin unless my reading of history is completely off-base.

I think there's probably a lot in that. Planing is only a means to an end, as of course is sharpening. The professional, who needs to get to the finished object as quickly as possible, needs to get a working technique under his belt and is perhaps not inclined to analyse it too much as long as it works.

Then along comes the leisurely amateur who by definition has time on his hands and he attracts the marketing men who, as Jacob so often points out, are interested in reinventing the wheel or at least making the wheel more complicated than it need be, in order to make a profit. I'm very much a leisurely amateur and as such I can afford to enjoy planing for its own sake (although obviously I don't just do a bit of random planing for pleasure) and as part of the creative process. So you read the books and realise that the legendary "full length, full width" shaving is a sort of holy grail of planing and I still get a buzz when planing a piece leads to the first one coming from the board. In fact it only the day before yesterday I found myself holding up and admiring one such shaving simply because it was translucent and pretty. That's a small bit of harmless pleasure but, again, it would be madness to regard that as some sort of end in itself. Its real significance is of course as an indicator that you've reached a certain stage of processing a board.

As for the ability of a plane to produce wafer thing shavings of a certain thickness: could it be that that was originally mentioned as a sign of the quality of manufacturing of the tool and of the correct adjustment of the plane? To have a plane able to produce one is of course useful as it means you can finish a board bang on the marked line and that IMO is what it is really about. I've got nothing against the Japanese finding a pleasurable diversion in planing for its own sake: it's probably in the same league as showing an overbred dog which has been given a daft haircut and if that's what rings your bell, good luck to you.

It would never occur to me personally to measure the thickness of a shaving. If I can produce a translucent one, then it must be pretty damned thin. I may measure one just out of idle curiosity but that is likely to be a once only measurement. As has already been pointed out, it makes loads more sense to measure the thickness of the board after the shaving has been taken in cases where great accuracy is important.

 

[Trafalgar]

One needn't be too worried if their planes won't produce vapor-thin shavings. This is a golden opportunity to learn the nuances of setting up and using scrapers. That said, there are more than a few boutique and semi-boutique makers that will sell you a plane capable of taking the kinds of shavings being discussed in this thread and they more or less guarantee that they will do so right out of the box.

I hesitate to recommend that somebody put a light tuning on a vintage plane since these days that's akin to recommending somebody start doing crack cocaine.

 

[ED65]

vapor-thin shavings

I'm stealing that one, I like it.

I hesitate to recommend that somebody put a light tuning on a vintage plane since these days that's akin to recommending somebody start doing crack cocaine.

I don't know about that, complete overhauls still seem just as popular today as any time over the past few years. Different cultures on different forums?