Hand planing questions

[Chris152]

Chris, have a watch of this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojeul33vXL4 - it explains the basics.

Just watched this - I'd already seen a Paul Sellers and Peter Sefton video on the same a little while ago, but seeing this one now reminds me how disciplined it all needs to be. Starting with a bigger board feels like an enormous task ahead and some bits just go out the window - I don't even have winding sticks yet (though I just noticed a Sellers video on how to make them and I have some nice offcuts of beech that look like candidates.

Learn to use the cap iron on your planes to control tearout when needed rather than going to other gimmicks. It'll pay off even if you don't dimension everything by hand down the road (by allowing you to prep surfaces very quickly and safely (safety of the wood, not safety for you), and allowing you to get a good surface without constantly sharpening or looking for gimmicks).

Yes, I'm still working on this following advice from this site. The table top I'm making to sit on top of the legs that started my questions above is maple, and I've found preparing that incredibly hard because of tearout. I'm starting to get the idea of smoothing the surface with the plane set as you say (and with a scraper plane in places), but initial squaring and thicknessing by hand led to some tearouts which I only just seem to have got away with (there was enough depth in the wood to remove them) and at the point I've reached (boards now jointed and smoothed) it's not totally the same thickness throughout the top - but I daren't set about removing more stock!

And tearout's another reason I wondered about the belt sander - last week I tried planing a very knotty piece of sweet chestnut and got nowhere I wanted to be so just took an old belt sander to it and it cleaned it up a treat. But as you say ED65, noisy and dust and both bother me. To put a camber like that on have you used a grinder? I see Rutlands have a wet grinder thing
http://www.rutlands.co.uk/sp+8-wetstone ... tem+DK7180
Is that what's needed? At some time soon I'm going to have to regrind 3mm plane blades so suppose I'll need to learn to use something like that.

if you bother to do it on a few projects, you'll learn more about it than you could ever learn reading about it. You learn it by feel, by the amount of effort it takes (you will automatically tend toward what's more efficient), by making mistakes (you will tend toward things that are both efficient and safe so that you can hit a mark rather than planing through it chasing tearout, etc).
[...] You'll be able to tell pretty quickly if you like it, and if you do, you'll get better at it. I personally think it's a nice change of pace from cutting dovetails and gluing things, and it makes the whole project more enjoyable.

I like the thought of this - obviously I'm at the early stages of learning and am trying to establish what I actually want to do. Right now I'd like to feed the wood into the machine and have it ready to start building, but don't have the machine. But I'm also loving the process of revealing the wood, the sound of the plane and all that. Rome wasn't built in a day, eh?

Thanks everyone for your replies - sooo helpful!

 

[nabs]

I am hesitant to offer advice as a fellow novice, but having started to learn these basics recently I can pass on something I learned from watching Richard Maquire (who generally doe his prep work by hand).

One of his points about preparing boards is that you can reduce the amount of tearout when taking thick shavings by putting a good amount of oomph into your strokes.

At first I found this counterintuitive (it is tempting to back off on the bits of the board that are tearing - I suppose because they seem more delicate) but doing so just makes it worse. If you keep up a good consistent amount of momentum then, although you may still get tearout around knots and where the grain changes direction, it is much reduced.

Re. cambered irons - assuming you have an ordinary (not hard A2 etc) plane iron then it is surprisingly easy to do this by hand, particularly if you have something that can remove metal quickly like a diamond stone. I'd recommend trying that before splurging out on a grinder - my first attempts did not create a very neat curve but it is easy to improve the shape at each sharpening (and it will do the job in any case).

 

[Chris152]

Re. cambered irons - assuming you have an ordinary (not hard A2 etc) plane iron then it is surprisingly easy to do this by hand, particularly if you have something that can remove metal quickly like a diamond stone. I'd recommend trying that before splurging out on a grinder - my first attempts did not create a very neat curve but it is easy to improve the shape at each sharpening (and it will do the job in any case).

Thanks Nabs - any advice much appreciated. What grit stone are you using to shape the blade? And I obviously need to take a look at that video - you don't have a link do you? I'll do a search ;later to see if I can find the right one if not. Cheers.

 

[nabs]

I have a coarse diamond stone - any coarse stone would work if you were patient though (actually the shape forms surprisingly quickly as you are concentrating your efforts on a small bit of the iron at anyone time). Give it a go!

Richard Maquire devotes a fair amount of time to each of his paid video series talking about preparing stock, but I don't think he would claim there is anything unique about what he does. The advantage is you get to watch him doing it for real and he explains what he is doing as he goes a long. You can get a taster of his approach here:

http://www.theenglishwoodworker.com/rea ... -prepping/

 

[Jacob]

Don't think I've ever bothered to actually 'shape' a camber, it's just how it goes with prolonged use if you make slight effort to press down the corners a bit more as you sharpen. Eventually the stone is hollowed and the camber comes naturally. Probably difficult with jigs.

 

[nabs]

well I suppose if you have a hollow stone then the iron will inevitably take on the same shape, but on a flat (e.g diamond) stone although you can get a slight camber by adding pressure as you describe, creating a bigger camber means you have to alternatively lift either corner of the iron from the stone as you work, gradually tipping it back to flat to make the curve (in fact what I do is to do a sort of swooping motion from left to right with the corner raised of the stone at the end of each stroke, if that makes sense?)

 

[bugbear]

Probably difficult with jigs.

The commonest complaint beginners make against jigs is that the blade isn't straight! With a tiny amount of practise, you can make a straight edge or a cambered edge under perfect control. As you said earlier, with a hollow stone, you get some kind of camber wether you want it or not.

BugBear

 

[Jacob]

.....(in fact what I do is to do a sort of swooping motion from left to right with the corner raised of the stone at the end of each stroke, if that makes sense?)

Spot on. Also works brilliantly for very round cambers like a scrub plane blade. You do it very quickly along the length of the stone across in front of you - not slowly with the stone away from you like this chap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyE7-GBCrGA
In fact scrub plane becomes about the easiest blade of all to sharpen, if you don't do Deneb's way.