1-04a: Hand Planes are Stupid - An Introduction to Hand Planes

welcome back to worth the effort woodwork yesterday we are starting chapter four in our classroom series it's going to deal all with and gleams now if you remember chapter one was basically an introduction to woodworking where we talked about the fundamentals of pretty much all of our woodworking tools and how it came down to how a blade interacts with wood in the second chapter we dope deep into that concept in that the foundation tool for everything we use except maybe laser cutters is the chisel and we talked about different aspects and how the design affects it I mean this looks like an incredibly simple tool but the complexities and thought people go into making them really does stand out everything from metallurgy to shaped organ ah mcc's for your body all that kind of stuff plays into it we also delve into the key aspect of how that cutting edge interacts with grain and we went even further and showed you how you can cut pretty much every single woodworking joint in our craft with just the chisel and that's important because this is such a flexible tool anytime you run into a situation run into a problem or something's not working just what you want pretty much the solution is always going to be pickup a chisel now the third chapter was all about hand saws which is basically a row of tubes and the different variations of it and we talked a lot about body mechanics and body physics the teeth structure how to maintain the sauce how to sharpen the songs so the last of good long time because by far the saw is the sharp and is the smartest until we have it will cut a straight line every single time as long as we don't screw it up I mean all you gotta do is get out of this way and it wants to cut straight well chapter 4 we are going to continue on with our hand tools and talking about hand planes which is basically a chisel in a jig now by the end of this chapter you're gonna be fairly familiar with bench planes especially to plan to join airplanes and all the interest keys all the phonetic in the nests of it or the persnickety nosov it and you will understand that this is by far he's stupidest tool we have [Music] now right here is my collection of ham things that I want call my users even though he's only here I barely ever touch these right here are my main ones and I hang on to them because well a lot of them are just for demonstration purposes so I can talk to people we'd like you to show you different variations we're going to be doing in this video and some of them have sentimental value this is the first set I ever made and obviously I've been proved a lot but since then on these newer designs but I don't want to get rid of them and well you don't have much money invested in in fact hand claims are really kind of a sound investment I mean if you think about it the guy that bought this original Miller falls number five way back in what the 30s or 40s but he either sold it or pass it down to his kids and it maintains its value I know I probably pay 50 60 bucks for it seven eight years ago that could probably get 80 85 bucks for it now so it's not that gaming value or losing value just kind of maintain this position even though I'm using it that's the thing about a lot of these you can buy low as long as you buy smart maintain your value save it for a little bit use it for what it's worth and then maybe sell it and get yourself something a little bit nicer later on down the road to end up with a really nice collection now right here is a traditional jointer wood-bodied I wanted to say I tried to date it does have a chip breaker on it so you know is late 1800s Early 1900s but I mean these are still functional and we're going to explain that as we go along this one was found in a flea market or something like that by my sister and I just hang on it for sentimental value so I mean she gave it to me here was an early prototype of this one right here and what made these kind of cool is this thing right here is really heavy I've got but all of these are lined with lead the downside to them is they they're not as comfortable as my more modern ones but I want to hang on to them because these were kind of the first claims I made and they make nice wall decorations here are some molding plinth a molding plane and a filter plane and I got this just to explain how easy it is to work even though I don't really do much moulding and the filter plane I picked up for about 10 bucks and I always had this dream of remaking because all the woods kind of shot on it cracked but all the hardware's nice so I just kind of hang on to it when I first got into woodworking you know I was an idiot and I followed everyone's guidelines and I got rabbit planes but I never use these and they don't work very well but I restored them so I just hang on to them to begin with and I keep a number Stanley block plane this is just show people how good an inexpensive cain't plane can be and for some reason at one point in time I want to have a little router plane collection but that was being stupid so most of these right here pretty much wall decorations I have way up in the ceiling but why smoking likes like most woodworkers it's kind of stuff you pick up over time so it was never really a big investment now here's my first spoke shape and I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail I'm going kind of loss over the spoke days because I have another video on spoke shades I'll put a link down below to they'll go into a lot more detail and here is actually the first woodworking tool I ever made by hand so I code onto that one and this one I do use occasionally as a big roughing spoke shape but I've since gotten better one so I just hang onto this one because it's easy to use and this was actually the first new tool I ever bought this was given to me by my dad for Christmas whenever I first got got into woodworking so I hang on to it but honestly I don't use it that much anymore my chisel skills have gotten up to the point as y'all said saw in the second chapter that this is somewhat of a redundancy that's nice to hang on to now here's what most people consider bench planes I got number 4 number 5 in both the stanley and the Miller Falls I would tell you this I much prefer Miller falls over the Stanley and then I have a number 7 I have these on my back wall just because I occasionally do explanations of stuff I don't use these very often but I will go into a lot of detail on how to use them and how to set them up and we might even do a restoration of one of them because this is where a lot of people start out they get hand-me-downs from grandparents or somebody gifts them something or they pick an inexpensive one up off the market I will go out on the limb right here and say in my opinion a lot of the modern-day Plains are just much much better and you'll understand why when we talk about the adjustments but once again these are just really hung on to in order to demonstrate right here are my main set of planes and I say that because these are the tools that touch most of my hand tool project is we square tab square ones cabinets boxes that kind of stuff what you got are my main tube hand planes I have a very traditional toted coffin style smoother and this is the first class I ever took on making tools and before this chapter is over I will probably do a artsy fartsy video on how to make a classic coffin smoother and then I'll do another video on how to make a crane off style in a small production batch so if you want to just buy the blades and then end up with a set of smoother Jack and jointer kind of like I did on that first that I did but then you can do a small production run using those techniques to save time and add a little accuracy those are two videos that you can expect in some round in this chapter four series as ancillary they won't be made a chef section in the chapter just ancillary information I also I keep a fairly heavy in large block plane and I actually use this as a smoother a lot of time for boxes and smaller projects I think it's incredibly flexible tool and it's about the size of a small number three now this right here is a bevel up plane and we'll discuss bevel up and bellow down just a little bit in this video for the simple reason I have almost 30 minutes of content on the differences between bevel ups bevel downs at physics happening the body mechanics the designs all that kind of stuff and other videos I'll link down below so we're just going to gloss over that a little bit because really the wood doesn't care and then I have a low angle Jack plane that is what I use for you know a lot of different things because I can replace a blade it can be and for playing with a heavy it can burn iron I've even used it for smoothing like tabletops and bench tops that kind of stuff and because a lot of my work is smaller cabinets and boxes that kind of stuff it makes it quite nice jointer so I mean for most of my stuff this is perfectly good what I really like though is the specialty the joinery planks and this will be an entire section of it things like your grooving claims your radiuses planes your router playing scraper planes I make custom grooving planes out and I have a video out there on how to do that one it's the specialty Champlain's that really do enhance the enjoyment I have in making cabinets and speed me up I mean people think hand tools are slow but by the time you set up a router I mean I could put a groove on all four or five drawer bottoms I mean it's just really fast if you had the tool all set up and ready to go because these are just chicks holding blades and that is why these things can be so frustrating I mean I know a lot of really talented woodworkers that would rather pull out a router or a random more of a sander or anything like that then mess with a hand plane because it's almost like you need a an associate of mechanics certificate in order to adjust these and give them consistent or a study of thermodynamics and humidity and stuff to understand why settings change even throughout the day from even the moisture in your hand I mean when I say persnickety these things are finicky but it's one of the things that once you kind of get a little bit of experience on it the other standing the mechanical lessons you learn here will apply to everything you know even working on your car I mean this is a great way to introduce kids and stuff like that to working with machinery because after this a lot of the minor things are almost intuitive it's so much more than lefty-loosey righty-tighty and now let's talk about using them I mean a lot of people get frustrated even after they get them set up that they don't get the results they see on YouTube or what people described in books and magazine and stuff like that I mean it's almost as if you need an aeronautical engineer because you're dealing with different planes of vectors both direction and amplitude you're dealing with drift you're dealing with angles I feel like you need that beautiful mind math equation to algorithm signal syntax all that kind of stuff and being able to solve it on the fly just to make an ice shaving get a smoother result and that's the subject the adjustment the mechanics the dynamics of the actual use that we're going to be discussing for the rest of this video now for the next little bit here are some basic terms I want to talk about the soul the plane is a base of the plane whether it be wood or metal and the metal ones could be corrugated you have your irons which is actually the blade a lot of them planes come with a chip breaker on a metal one therefore generally fairly thin but on the wood one the ones I use from hawk are kind of thick and they have a lot of different functions the bevel of a plane is the part you grind off not the part you flatten the back of the plane the inside of the planes you basically have a throat and how close the tooth the blade is in that is what they're calling the throat you also have the toe of the plane the heel of the plane excuse me this is called the mouth and then the throat is kind of that section right in front of the hand plane and a lot of planned planes this is adjustable so you can open and close the throat now most planes are going to have some kind of angle and that's the angle that the blade is interacting with the wood it's not necessarily the angle of the Frog because the Frog could be set at one angle but because of maybe tapering iron or your chip breaker or maybe it's bevel up or bevel the edge is bevel up it's the included angle all of those that creates a angle of attack for the blade going through the wood now for most Stanley style metal planes that is going to be the Frog angle because these are fairly straight and they're beveled down so there you go there and the same can be said for most wood body planes though a lot of times they have a tapered iron which yet to take you to account now this might seem like common sense but planes have to deal with claims I mean maybe that's where they got their name flat surfaces directions huge planes out there normally though be they board and boards come to us flat mostly planes are trying to make it flat and visually appealing but you have to deal with multiple planes and it all goes back to what all woodworking is the interaction between a blade and grain so you have the bottom of the sole of the plane and the blade coming through like that then you have the wood that it's going to be riding on now there's another plane within that would you might just think the surface is a plane but the wood has a mind of its own ideally the grain of that board will be going so that as you move forward with your plane the other plane is laid down you're laying those cat hairs down you're going uphill instead of downhill because if you go the other way you're gonna get a lot of tear out and the planes are not going to work right now assuming you were going with the grain well you've got to four kinds of wood out there you have hardwood softwood generally for the most part soft woods are can handle a lower angle of attack so the blade can be dropped down to a lower angle or if you're using a bevel up you can get a steeper and steeper angle on the bevel to lower it down now if that will make it not only push through the wood smoother but you'll be easier to push through because you're not having to bend that wood up as much but the heart of the wood more likely you're starting to get a split up above the head of the grain because when you start lowering that angle down it starts acting more like a wedge than an edge which is why harder woods or figured woods tend to prefer a steeper angle of attack I mean some will even go positive so you end up with a scraper plane but that is not the whole story if I come back over here and go back to a standard let's say 45-degree angle that is assuming my vector my force is going in line with the plane in the direction I want to go that isn't always a caves that's a 2d analogy and we live in a 3d world so let's say you have a hand plane most people would think that you push I can't plan for but I've always found that's not that comfortable I typically will angle my hand paint a little bit so that instead of having a vector going straight forward my vector has a little drift to Stila airplane analogy that would be like when the airplanes flying kind of cockeyed dog I'd sideways because the wind is coming one direction the plane wants to go the other direction it kind of splits and averages out the diff difference same thing with a team plane by having it slightly sideways it's more natural to push forward because I'm not having to twist my shoulders all around well what happens to the angle of tat of attack on the plane interacting with the wood when you do that well I want you to picture somebody skink you have your skier going down to skis your poles you probably have a kid on a bicycle chasing them asking for two dollars better off dead dead reference but if that's here is going straight down the hill as I feel is that forty five degrees for his ankle attack going down the hill is forty five degrees and that kid is going really really fast that's a maximum speed you can go that's a maximum algum angle you can hit but most of us don't ski like that will come over and we'll ski sideways and we'll weave our way down well if this distance is a short distance all of a sudden when you start weaving it that wet weaving action along gates a time that takes you go down a long baixa distance it makes that hypotenuse a lot longer thus the angles are a lot longer but when you are drifting your plane the same thing is happening to those wood fibers yeah a tech a 40-degree frog angle or we're straight on well that the wood will actually just go straight up the plane blade at 45 degrees but if you can't get a little bit then all of a sudden this distance right here I'm going sideways across that is a lot longer than the distance just going straight down so it lowers the angle down it lowers the hypotenuse by making it longer now this ability to lower the angle has a lot of influence on how you use it I know some people that use a higher frog for the simple reason that they always like to use a smoothing plane at a slight angle because it changes the ability for it to interact with a larger plane and by that plane I mean the plane that its operating on you can't like this I have a board let's pretend that this is the soul of a plane so I come over here and I'm pushing this plane directly straight let's just draw it out like how much of a board is this claim interacting as it goes forward well it's interacting with whatever length of board is and this width right here but what if you were to can't it to drift it a little bit all of a sudden now you are interacting with this much of the board so I'm trying to flatten a board well if it's got a little bit of a high spy here and a little bit of a high spot there this plane right here is just gonna make the lower spot lower but if I have a little bit of a high spot here a little bit of a high spot there well at least this will claim well you this use of the plane will capture those uses in that in-between spot right there will not get shade and then when I moved over a little bit you'll ride in that lower spot there and catch with a higher spot so it kind of goes in and out a little bit better and covers a wider path so that takes us to the next area of the length of your soul how does that affect how you're using it now I'm going to draw a quick analogy here but I just want you to go with me follow along okay you got a skateboard skateboard has small wheels board on top how many of you all have been writing down what you feel like visually is a smooth Road let's maybe got a lot of sand or little grab on the skateboard stopping jittering all over the places I mean you feel everything then you go over that same Road on a mountain bike big old tires coming through well I'm mound by tired that same gravelly Road might feel glass and it all has to do with the circumference or this distance right here that's traveling this is a lot shorter distance than the bigger wheel that's a longer distance well think of that as a sole of your plane when you first get aboard if you're like being you're trying to go to the cheapest route possible you buy boards in the rough state and you're going to have to plane something flat those rough boards are going to have highs and lows twists and stuff like that a long plane is going to basically skip over those and even though it's fairly rough it's gonna feel smooth as you're going across it because it's only going to be hitting the high spots gonna be hitting up off the low spots and it keeps working that until all the lows the high spots are gone you're making a smooth shaving taking all the way across now if you were to take something like a smoothing plane or a block plane to that same board you would make it look smooth but the naturality it would still wouldn't be flat because the shorter wheelbase would be going in and out and out and it would just be taking off enough to engage both sides of it and have that blade touch so the longer blade tools are generally there to flatten wood now if you get a really flat board like that Road we were talking about well it might have some little pits like that or little undulations that you wouldn't feel I don't know something called tear out the plank the the jointer plane would just gloss over all that stuff the Meinl pebbles it's just going loss over it whereas a smoothing pain playing things shorter but it will definitely feel those smaller undulations and at least a blade will touch those undulations so that you can get the tear out out or the smoothness out that's why they're called smoothing planes you don't take a very fine shaving because all this is there for cosmetics so you have this concept of I think because Wars brought it out of course medium fine but they have other terms on it it's just modern terms for old ideas where the jointer is 2 feet long planes you use them you take big thick shavings or fairly heavy shavings just to get the majority of the work done take off all the high spots and that kind of stuff and get it to a flat surface that can then be prepared for a finish be a smoothing plane now the weird thing is a lot of times when it's really really rough but they will do is they will have their big long jointers you will have your smoother and then you'll have that intermediary spot some people call it a for playing look at smaller plane than that would be a jack plane and that wou they will set up to take a really heavy cut because they will kind of eyeball the thickness they're not using the that kind of stuff for the whole board they're just going oh it's got some twist in it let's just take off this corner of that corner get those down close and then we'll hit it with a jointer and the jointer will take off a little bit less than that middle of Road plane these things do the brunt of the work these things make it efficient and flat these make it pretty it's kind of why the smoothing planes get the most glory and really good smoothing planes are highly prized because when you start getting the fine details the fine adjustments that's when it gets really finicky and a little bit off will affect it cause it's taking such a fine shaving a jointer you just want it to be flat on bottom why do you need it flat on bottom because theoretically a hand plane can never make anything flat now if you have a short plane like a smoothing plane and you extend that blade below the surface of the sole you basically created a curve of interactions because the plane is going to take off the wood at the bottom portion of that blade and it's going to touching the front and then it's going to touching the back there's that curve so why does a longer plane make a smoother surface well if you extend that soul out that curve is a lot less my drawing skills are pretty bad here because it's spread over a longer distance now if you have your blade just going down a few thousandths of an inch that curvature is completely imperceptible to a person and whenever we join stuff up just a little pressure with clamps or glue or even your hand it's going to bend even a very thick board to get it just dead perfectly flat and it's flat enough for woodworking but I just wanted to point that out now theoretically a hand plane cannot make a perfectly flat surface whereas a mechanical power jointer now those work just a side note is that you have your cutting blades coming over you have one bed that's lower one bed that's higher and the wood feeds this way it gets cut off right there and it comes out right there so theoretically that part that you are removing is in line with the sole of the plane and in fact that's kind of how Japanese planes worked because then a lot of times the back section is a little bit lower than the front section to make it plain dead flat yeah they're tools and joinery it's a little bit more sophisticated sometimes so am I freaking out with a giant brain dump yet let's go to grab a plane and grab a board and see how these things are actually interacting in real life so right here I have a southern yellow pine board an oak board and a cherry board so just to show you I'm going to be using my general purpose wooden hand plane not really a smoother not really a jack just kind of all-around machine make sure I've got the grain going somewhat the way I want a pill so I plane it but if I go with the pine I can go straight across take off the high spots and get me a nice shaving and there we go fairly thin shaving coming off got pretty sharp blade in there right now but if I start lowering the plane blade angle not only do the shavings change but it's a lot easier for me to control it and I can get finer and finer cuts and it gets a little bit smoother because as you lower the angle of attack you are also increasing the sharpness it's weird how it works that way but at a certain point you get diminishing returns now I was going pretty angled on that last pass if I did that same thing with oak really low angle of attack let me get it flat out first it's got some machine marks on it so we're starting to get nice shavings coming off of it it's nice and smooth but my angle of attack is the forty-five degrees I have right here I start lowering that angle of attack and all of a sudden you're gonna start getting tear out because the wood the oak is going to split so key see all that tear out and see if it shows up in the camera little white spots fibers being ripped out because I was acting at it at too low angle whereas on this side where I hit it with a nice 45 degree angle it's pretty smooth same thing might happen with the cherry get it smooth [Music] start taking shavings off of it I've gotten a nice and glass smooth can you see that see the reflection of the hand plane blade in it you can somewhat see the reflection color change in there now watch what happens if I start angling it oh yeah you can feel the tear out coming see see the low divots that are happening all along it's just got to lower angle at that point when I take 45 and I split it in half now you're looking at a 20 degree angle which is just way too long low for cherry now let's play around with my workbench okay so it's fairly flat but it's not perfectly flat I don't care if it is perfectly well give this good reference because it's nice and dirty so anywhere I plan on it you're gonna see the color change so if I simply take my campaign going with the grain this way and I go straight at it you can see the tips off certain spots here and there but and this is some spots like right there boom okay but if I were to plane it off this way over that same area well theoretically it should be smoother now because I just playing it but because there's gonna be variations in height on this side in that side you go oh I just skipped over this entire section right here it's not taking any kind of shavings even though it's shaped over there and that's how I can know that it's going to be in plane all over the place it's not going to be low truck valleys in line of the path so when you're smoothing you have to take in consideration that it might be if you're smoothing something really hard that you need a pretty steep angle so that you can come over lighter spots and just hit see how much less I'm taking off because I'm pushing it angle whereas if I were you could just go straight with the grain it's taking the big shavings I think what I'm trying to really drive home here is that using a plane is all about planes and angles in life is not 2d so we've got to take into consideration vectors drift even the amount of power you push through it will affect everything about the interaction between the cutting edge and wood fibres and none of this is overly complex it's kind of common sense when you think about it but until somebody points it out one time and ask you to really analyze what's going on you might not register but none of those planes and angles will work unless you can get a sharp edge which would code sharpening in the earlier chapter and you can get it set up right which means dealing with mechanics now I kind of like wooden body planes called the Neanderthal of me but they're really only three moving parts and you adjust them by banging them let's take a quick look because the design of these things I mean it dates back to pre Gyptian age people have been using this style plane much much longer than they've been using you know metal body claims even though those get the credit nowadays it's just an incredibly simple device and once you get a feel for them they're really easier just easy to work with so most wood planes are gonna come with a hammer to adjust them and I really like these little kind of rubber in hard nylon ones use that on the steel that's on the wood and really what we're looking at yes as basic as you can get you have a plane you still have the sole you have the mouth the throat is set from either the the construction area and a lot of people will end up if they buy a claim that's been worn down quite a bit meaning they've sanded the bottom flat quite a bit mouth kind of opens up over time so they'll put a little shim right there of harder wood and a lot of them oh do that even before it wears out for the simple reason the you know a lot of people think of plain Sol has to be dead flat and that just is not true you really only are concerned with this section right here the part right in front of the mouth and the tail anything else can be out of flat so you see all those guys that you know they'll put a straightedge up to their plane do test it out for flatness they see a little bit gap here here they freak out they want to be seeing the whole thing but that's just I mean it's it's illogical these three spots are all you need to care about those are the only ones that need to be in plan in fact I know a lot of woodworkers and especially a lot of Japanese planes they'll actually take a hand card scraper and they'll start scooping out the section right here because it creates somewhat of a vacuum and waste sucks the plane down once you get it really flat and there's less friction so until it is flat it's just easier to work with plus when you do want to flatten it it it's quite a bit easier now wooden claims they do require some maintenance and you are going to flatten the bottom a lot more than a steel plant a steel plane you really shouldn't have ever have to flatten after it's initially flat and that's just because of normal wood movement and that is also why they make the blanks out of a tree a certain way so that the moat it moves a certain way and it all comes down to moisture in the air and that is also what a lot of people are like smoothing planes prefer this coffin shape because it exposes a lot of ingrain there's a lot of I mean there isn't that much the water has to move to equalize and once it's equalized it's fairly flat I've found on this plane right here you know I flattened it about a month after I got it and then probably once a season I'll put some 220 sand paper down and really that's about all I do and it's ready to rock and roll once they get kind of seasoned or used to your they don't really move that much but here's where we start getting with the mechanics you know a lot of people look at these plane blades and see the nice flat backs to them and stuff like that and they soon that you want a nice flat section right here well that's not always the case what you want is a good mating surface and this isn't perfectly flat so when you're making a wooden plane like this a lot of times what I will do is I will put carbon paper right here I'll put it into the hand plane right about where it is and I'll kind of wiggle it a little bit so that the carbon comes off and you can see a little bit of the carbon still on here but me doing this every now and then and then you just scrape away whatever you see is black at that point you will get a perfectly mating surface and that will make this kind of plane adjustment so much easier because if you have a high spot in one section or the other once you put pressure on that one spot that becomes a pivot point and you don't want a pivot point you want even friction all the way across so that as a plane gets adjusted it moves equally all over the place the same way when you design these you want them to actually mate to the blade now I have when I did this class all they did was a wind got some oh one tool steel and they kind of blocked it and squared off this and we ground our sections off of it it's all treated most wooden hand planes are going to have a tapered iron and it's one of those interlocking things that you think about with mechanics so if I have this tapering thinner here this tapering thicker there well they wedge together to form into the holding structure for the plane what's even cooler is if you think about the pressure when you're using the plane is pushing that blade back but if it is tapered thicker on bottom and it's pushing up into another taper well they kind of lock themselves together and they just don't move because you physically can't move a thick section into the thinner section so the tapered iron really does make this style playing so much more stable and easier to use it won't change adjustment that often now if you look at some modern-day Plains wooden planes like this print off style well they have a chip breaker a cap iron on it the blade itself is not tapered but the chip breaker when you take it off you will see that there's a little bit of an air gap right there so in fact because this chip breaker is bent so it's got contact back here and contact on the blade it creates a thicker section here and towards the back so the chip breaker itself adds that taper the same can be said with a modern hand plane right here look at it the chip breaker itself is equal thickness all the way around but they bent it so it is thicker down here than it is over here and also by that bending action that spring action it puts a lot of pressure down here and it reduces the chatter but the other thing about having a chip breaker is it adds mass and the more mass you add to a blade the more stable it's going to be in a in as it goes through boards that's why one of the more common accessories to this style hand claim when people restore them is they will get a replacement blade that's a little bit thicker to eat increasing the mass even more the reason why they made them thin was because steel was very expensive when these were first being made in fact the earliest one you can see will have a lamination line or they'll put the really nice steel down on bottom and then just regular steel up top just to save money then when steel became cost-effective enough they just made the whole thing out of the same material anyway if we got a little bit sidetracked there so we have our most basic hand plane right here a body a blade and a wedge to hold it so when I set it up what I would do is I will position the blade so that I have some slop on either side see how it kind of moves back and forth I want to get it dead center and I want to make sure that my blade is ground so it will fit sit flat and then I can put the wedge in and because it's sitting on a flat surface whenever I tap this you'll probably extend that blade just to ever so slight amount and the easy way to tell is to put your finger underneath and pull it back and forth and you'll be able to feel the thickness and that's something as you adjust plank whether they be wood or metal body getting the habit of running that finger along the bottom after you get it all adjusted because you'll develop a feel for it and you can feel the thickness a lot better than you can see it so I could say oh I'm heavy on this side the lighter on this side so I can make an adjustment now when you're adjusting a plane like this you kind of refer back to Newton's laws something at rest tends to stay at rest something in motion tends to stay in motion well right now we have three different masses this being the most dense one so if I am a little bit heavy on this side versus this side I want this blade to can't a little bit this way that's one reason why they take off the corners because you can actually tap the blade and because the blade started moving this stayed still so now it's a little bit heavier on this side than that side and after every adjustment a light tap on the wedge just in case it comes off now wooden body claims often have this little button right here and that button is at a position on the plane to create the biggest impact on the blade you would think it'd be farther out but something about the vibration of wood that at that point it's the biggest one and when you're first making a plane a lot of times you will just make it without the button and you'll start using it and hammering on it and you'll kind of find the spot and that's where you ends up being dented the most and then on your next plane you can either put it in that spot or you can just drill it out right on that dent and put in your button and the idea is if I hit this right here the body is going to go down but this is probably going to stay at the same spot a little bit plus the fact that the wood is going to vibrate and it's go push the blade up so a light tap will retract it really that is all we're talking about and I can feel the difference a heavy tap and it comes apart now I when I do adjustments they do say that you can tap down if you want to progress it I will typically stick it on a flat piece give the wedge a tab and that pretty much progresses it down enough and the easy way of test it is to keep a little scrap of wood right here and you can kind of see if I can get the camera to focus in on that you can kind of see hey it's not taking shavings on this side it starts taking them towards the middle and then it fades out right there so that's pretty much adjusted just the way I want it I'm getting good thick shavings in the middle and it kind bears out on the side and why is that because I camber my blades and we'll discuss blade geometry a little bit later on now another way to make adjustments and you see I see this a lot with in old videos I don't see it too many people doing it very often is a lot of masters with the smaller planes I'll say oh I need to adjust the angle a little bit this way so they'll sit there and they'll just go like that but it's doing the same thing if I bang on this side right there the blade will want to stay still and it will kind of pivot because there's no friction right here on the top of the blade there's friction on the bottom so the bottom will kind of grip and they'll want tilt over so a good way that makes minor adjustments this is a slight wrap on the side and it will change so that now I am taking a heavier cut on this side on this on that side and I am on this side you can see the difference [Applause] and if you don't have a tote on it a lot of times people will bring the blade up ever so slightly instead tapping on this side they would tap there so let's review if I want to adjust a plane basically I assume that the blade will stay still and if I tap this way it's plenty to rotate the blade a little bit deeper on that side because this portion of the blade will stay still you know kind of pivot we want to tap it the other way I can do the same thing I can even tap up here to make micro adjustments down there because you're further from the impact point if I want to pop the retract the blade a little bit micro adjustments with this kind tool just a lighter tap that right there will make changes reach out through wedge if I want to progress it deeper you can tap on the front and that'll make it go down what that was quite a bit deeper just by feeling it with my fingers I can tell retract it it's pretty much retracted back to where it was and you can develop that feel so the mechanics we've been talking about has a lot to do with Newton's laws and wedging action pretty simple really a little bit time peeling it out you might be frustrated a few times as you're setting it up at until you get just doubt in especially if you use a smoother and smoother ZAR the most finicky but a little bit experience and you'll find out that each plane has a unique personality you'll learn that personality and making adjustment to a go will be pretty quickly I find that you know after a little bit of experience I can adjust these a lot quicker than I can the metal ones just takes a little bit of time ok next up I have what probably most of y'all are going to start out with a nice metal plane this is a stanley number five a bailey pattern and that's pretty much been knocked off by everybody on the design and my personal opinion if you're gonna go vintage go ahead and invest in either a Bailey's Bailey that actually says Bailey on it org or bedrock or go for the Miller fall style these three right here they're so priced competitive the bedrocks are going to be quite a bit more expensive and fYI the bedrock style is what the lien Nielsen the kind of the premium hand plane and this mark this style has made new was based off of the bedrock I personally like the Miller Falls a little bit better I think it's a cooler design and I'll set aside this chip breaker aside to show it see it a little bit later on but most people they're going to be getting the Bailey and I'm going to disassemble that most of this right now so we can talk about the individual parts and then as I reassemble it tuning it we can talk about those mechanical lessons I was discussing earlier so right now you have the cap iron and the cap iron basically has a spring on back though you can see what just back and forth and a flat and basically all this is designed to do is lock the blade down to the Frog you have your blade you come over the blade is made up of a chip breaker and an iron and you have this screw right here so I'm going to take that apart and he noticed the cap on as I said earlier is spring steel it's designed to flex and hold a lot of tension and they put this curve in it to put that spring right on the very edge of the blade now in the description down below I'm gonna put a link to a Japanese video where they talked about cap irons or chip breakers and other chip breakers and their influence on the quality of a cut and it is that video right there that kind of talk told me that for the kind of woodworking I do with using domestic very bland straight grain material I like using that kind of woods the curly stuff are accent pieces I just like traditional stuff the Kappa the chip breaker is really not that necessary and it doesn't influence the final cut and more than likely it's just gonna cause problems so I'm gonna I have a whole video on dealing with the chip breaker and it's number one solutions I'll put that link down below but I'm also gonna put a link to that Japanese video and yes it is subtitled but he is one of the more interesting analytical videos on what's happening at the cutting edge using a chip breaker it really opened up my eyes okay now the inside we have our frog and I'm gonna go ahead and remove that and the screws come with these washers you will a lot of times find on vintage plans that the washers are missing well you need to replace them because they do enhance the usability of a plane without them it just doesn't work as well and then the Frog will come off as a complete piece you can adjust a screw right here for the chip breaker in and out and on the back you have your frog adjustment lever and a screw on this little kind of dog bone wishbone kind of thing that moves that back and forth that engages with the chip breakers to adjust your depth of cut and then you have this sliding adjuster that also engages with the entire setup to move it left and right now the inside of the plane you're going to have a couple flats one back here and one right there these two screw holes are the screws that hold er the frog into place those two you want to be very smooth and clean because that's what the Frog pivots off of this is the front it pivots off of it right there and right in back and those are in plane a lot of times you're gonna find a lot of rust on those and that rust acts as grit to allow it not to slide back and forth and then you have this adjuster screw right here which honestly I'll mine once I get these set I never really touched them but you can move it in and out and that will engage with this right here but I want you to notice something if you look at this distance right here on that adjuster it slots in right here when you are doing a machine like this you cannot have it fit perfectly this has to be wider than that otherwise it just won't go together and that difference between the thickness here and the thickness there a lot of us cost slop so what we have right here is we have our frog we have our blade we have our chip breaker coming over we have that frog adjustment comes down and it slots into that loop screw this distance right here is that tolerance or that slop and the thing is if you want to back the Frog up for whatever reason maybe it's to you you're taking a thicker shavings or you've gotten it so thin that the shavings aren't coming up so everything is getting jammed up all the time and you just get frustrated you just want to back it off so that your plan will work more consistently I personally keep my the frog pretty far back because of that Japanese video I showed you they doesn't weigh affect that much anyways so you want to back it up so you move the screw back farther so that the thread rests on the front front side of the adjuster okay you get it back to where you were just got it perfect everything's lined up there's nothing wrong with it you start taking a few shavings and all of a sudden it stops working again so you use your screw up here to push the blade down a little more because the Frog is locked in and you start taking shavings again getting perfect shavings and then also after a little while it stops taking shavings what is going on so you press the blade forward a little bit a few more strokes perfect and then it stops taking shavings well that's when people just get really frustrated but what's happening is the force on the blade is going this direction Hey so it is pushing the Frog and everything back and you have some slop right here so what happen is it moves it a little bit not the oil all the way because there's a lot of tension in the Frog with the screws that are holding it down right here remember me talking about those washers the washers extend the pressure outside locks it down a little bit more so it doesn't move as much but it'll move it back a little bit so you have a hairline of slop in front but you still have a little bit up and back so then you adjust that forward to make some passes maybe a little vibration happens in the wood and it moves the Frog back a little bit more and they'll keep doing that one until this adjuster is resting on the back of that adjuster wheel and it can't move back any fart much farther and that's where it's locked in which is why if you're ever backing a blade out whether you're using a twist grip where you're just using the blade or just you always want to move forward into your settings because there's no chance that the blade will move back against that slop and that idea of loose tolerances you find everywhere on a hand plane sorry I'm gonna come over and I like to have the Frog lined up with the bottom of the of the mouth right here because I feel that it gives a blade support as a little bit further down but in theory because of the bevel of the blade remember the bevel is going down that bevel is pretty much resting on the Frog not that little that portion of the mouth so I mean in Syria doesn't do that much but I will progress it forward remember back at all first and then progress forward until it is flush there we go and then I'm gonna Lock these screws in making sure I find my washers now when you insert these screws don't over tighten them the Frog isn't something that you're gonna be taking off very often but you know you might if this is your only plane want to be able to adjust it forward and backwards so if you're cutting some curly wood having the blade close to the mouth the mouth will put pressure down on the wood and prevent a little bit of the tear out because though if it starts to split ahead that mouth was there to push it back down but it is really common on these Bailey style planes to see the mouth just snapped off that's because they've had they moved them blade so far forward that the pressure of the shaving coming out right here just broke off this and this is pop metal this is not like the malleable stuff you hit they make that planes out of nowadays if you were to drop this it would probably break in half so now let's talk about that chip breaker and blade and yes I do have a link down below to an entire video dealing with tuning up your chip raker because this right here gives students more of a headache than any part of the plane I know of because chips get stuck up underneath here and clog the whole device and then they pretty much have to take the entire blade out to clear them out which if it's just frustrating now most people do not totally remove the screw so what you want to do is make sure that the bevel is going up or away from here drop it on at an angle progress it forward and then twist it on to that chip breaker the reason why is you do not want the chip regular to touch the edge right there because it will Knick it and you'll have to resharpen everything and then you can progress it forward and once again that video will tell you how far to press it forward but I'll get it okay close and then tighten it up now one other another one the problems that people have with the chip breaker is you saw how much I tightened up right now that's just finger tight that is way too loose because I can still move this on the blade pretty easily well it takes a little bit of effort but I can slide it around in all the adjustments of the blade going left right up and down happen right here on the chip breaker so this is sliding what will happen is you're shaving along that blade will get pushed back up and then all sudden you're shaving off of that chip breaker and they get damnit it gets damaged then you'll move it you'll figure out what you did you'll move it back you'll really tighten it down so that you know it's not gonna go anywhere and then you'll start shavings but because that chip breakers edge is now damaged shavings are catching up underneath there so you know really tighten that down every single time then we drop the end of the plane blade I see a lot of people they'll just drop it in like that don't do it because the blade is exposed it's gonna be damaged lift your plane up so that the Frog is flat then you can lay the blade down and progress it forward until it clicks into the frogs adjuster and you can see if I twist that down it goes forward and backwards off of this screw and then put the clamp down now another frustration people will put way too much pressure on this this is just here to hold the blade and chipbreaker in place if your knuckles are are turning white to push this damn well you're never going to be able to just at left and right here it just locks everything down or move the blade back and forth you just want it there tighten up they'll hold everything together now we come to adjusting the blade forward and back so my fingers will go up underneath and I will be using the scroll wheel right here now this right here and the adjustment right there is why the Bailey style was so popular with the old timers because you can adjust everything without moving your hands here whereas this style right here I need to grab a hammer to make adjustments so what they would do is if they only had the one plane they will progress the plane down taking a thick shavings to remove a lot of material fast and then they will back it off until it's taking out thin shaving to groove it and they'll to finesse it and they'll do that one without stopping their fingers will always be moving they want to take a little bit more left right adjust that right there you don't have to really let go it's really flexible adjusting setup now most of us amateurs are never going to do that one we're going to stop planning make an adjustment then go back and plane that's just how it is so it's not really that big a benefit but if you watch those guys what they do is they we're progressing forward they're moving this down until it's taking a fairly thick shaving and then when they make a shaving they'll make a slight and to make it thinner they'll move it like a quarter right there and it will not make the adjustment until they push through because the blade has to be pushed back physically because remember I was talking about that slop right now I can move this okay to give you an idea right now I'm going to move this doll forward until it takes off the slop and it's getting engaged for it and you'll be able to tell see my finger now is sliding okay so let's watch how many terns going backwards until that dog-bone the slop between the front of this dog bone and the back is taken up and even on newer planes sometimes it can be a full turn there's one half of a turn another half of a turn one in a quarter turns before the resistance comes on so one in the quarter turns before the slop hasn't taken up and the adjustment actually happens now if I went backwards like that to God take up the slop and now started moving it backwards the moment I push forward on the blade well that blades gonna push back and take up the slop and now I'm not making shavings again and I'm getting frustrated so what you always want to do is if you're making shavings back off and then progress forward until you reach the depth you want if you are going to back it up a little bit back it up take off a little bit of slop and then make a shavings and that'll push the blade back until it's engaged in the tolerance again now pretty much every kind of mechanical plane is going to have aspects of that slop that tolerance and it's just different for every single one rider plans especially because if you think about a router plane the blade is kind of an angle and then wants to dive into the wood so it's all costly wine and you go down and a lot of us will adjust it down and then take a and now our son is taking a deeper because if you're pushing it down there's slop on the bottom so if that gap will be taking up the first time that blade engages and wants to go even lower so you always have to back a router plane off it's just something you got to think about as you use every single different kind of mechanical adjuster where is the slop going to be and that's something that is applied everywhere in mechanic's when you just bow you have tolerances your feeler gauges engagement that's all adjusting the slop so that the machine will have a little bit of flexibility to work properly so this is really a great way to introduce that kind of Tolerance concept to people but until you understand that how frustrating is this kind of machinery now earlier I said I preferred the Miller falsi because pretty much every single Miller Falls it might just be because they were a newer brand you know from the 30s 40s and 50s and a lot of these adjusters are brass and brass wears over time increasing my slop but they just seem to be tighter and that's kind of one of the reasons why I like them all so coming back to that lever cap in comparison to the Bailey's style which is a solid piece and your spring back here you also have the spring back there but it's a two-piece up there's a little bit of pivoting right there so it's actually contacting the blade in three different spots so it seems to be get a little bit nicer engagement point with less pressure I mean it just engages more it's like it's I think it's a better design plus I think the materials that they were using in these more modern ones we're obviously a little bit nicer than than the older ones and here's where I'm going to make something kind of controversial statement if you're actually going to be getting mechanical style planes iron planes I really do suggest you invest in something from Lee Nielsen or Lee Valley the pretty much two Premier ones out there because prices for this kind of stuff has just skyrocketed these past five years and you could probably thank Chris Roche Wars for that but really it's just kind of a hipster thing to do so really the price difference between these and the new ones might be $100 now $100 sounds like a lot but if you were to put this in a hands of a new woodworker in the Lee Nielsen or a Veritas one well the tolerances are so much better on the newer stuff that it's just a little bit more intuitive and they're not going to get as frustrated and it won't continued doing it a little bit longer plus a fact as I said planes like these are pretty good investments they're not gonna lose that much value even if you're buying one brand new it's over its lifetime you know it's it it will all work out plus the fact that new ones are made out of ductile iron which we'll get when you drop it instead of cracking like these cast irons ones do and it just seems that they're a little bit thicker they're just made nicer they're made of modern toxins we really are in a hand tool Renaissance right now where some of the best quality tools ever are in production maybe not as much of a variety as they had back then but a lot better quality and really when you think about it they're cheaper now than they were back then when you look at an average purchase and it's wages but despite that even the latest thing Green is out there nowadays I still consider them stupid because they required so much fiddling with to make work perfectly to make the way I want to do it whereas my songs you know once I set them up once I could solve for years with them my chisel I just make sure it's sharp and I know what's going to happen with it a plane Hey from one day the next they might operate a little bit differently and I'm gonna have to have that mechanical skill to adjust it to serve my needs they're just stupid they're like the employee that you just can't send off to do a test you got to monitor them the whole time well I hope y'all enjoyed this video and most importantly I hope you learned the reasons why anybody can hand a plane to somebody show them how to use it show them what the discipline different adjusters are and send them off to make shavings and that can be extremely frustrating if you don't understand why those a jurist adjustment to work a certain way and when things go wrong how you can fix them because you understood the whys so that's really what I wanted to drive home today now future sections in this chapter four will be about specialty claims and joinery planes and stuff like that techniques to use them to improve your workflow even if you're in a power tool shop because hand claims and such like that can you really make your work a lot more accurate and a lot more efficient you might not believe it but you know five minutes planning on top of a table it's a lot better than 45 minutes an hour sanding through all those grits plus the pop of the grain will happen a lot more and you won't have to worry about raising the grain because you severed those fibers you haven't muddled them with the braiding now if you did get something out of this video please understand that I am kind of operating on the value for value proposition I hope to provide you a something of incredible value for a little bit of value back you can visit my website Worth effort com where I have an online store where I sell tools probably have some of these coming up pretty soon as in addition to a apparel shop where I offer t-shirts hats and different kind of swag out there I have a section where you can just support us so you can make more of these different kinds of picture lunch you can offer all that is available at worth effort calm and every little bit does help out because as you all know it is always worth the effort to learn create and share with others y'all be safe and have fun oh and did you see that drawing happening over there our latest t-shirt design

Channel: wortheffort

Views: 93,979

Keywords: wortheffort, woodworking, wood working, basic, plane, hand tool, set up, tuning, adjustment, adjusting, use, shavings

Id: dzaqmRJHYAk

Length: 70min 34sec (4234 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 08 2018