11 Hand Plane Tips that Will Transform Your Woodworking!

I think hand planes are a part of every Woodworker's Journey mostly in the beginning because you can't afford a bunch of big tools like a big jointer and so maybe you get a big long plane like this can't afford a planer so you're flattening by hand but as you grow as a woodworker I think you learn that hand planes can be very useful the problem I think that a lot of people have is they don't set them up correctly or they make some very common mistakes that make them not fun to use and you get tear out for me I reach for hand planes all the time a block plane a number four a jack plane at number 62. I find them very useful to get out of jams complete small tasks that would take a long time to set up a power tool or I have to you know set up a bunch of stuff and measure off a fence and put on all my safety gear where and I can just grab a hand plane and get to work and get it done really quickly and so when you get confidence in your hand playing they've really become a majority years so I wanted to share my 11 favorite tips and tricks for getting the most out of your hand plane that will really help you if you're a beginner or any skill level in woodworking I think these are some common things that a lot of people get wrong I'd like to show you today all right we're going to try and bang these out in order from setup to use not a lot of fluff we're going to just try and keep it to the tips and tricks number one above all else is sharpness your blade should shave paper or your arm hair but here's the caveat we just did our last video the most comprehensive sharpening test ever done we tested what kind of systems you should sharpen with and what's the best way to sharpen now here's the thing about hand planes once you get it paper shaving or arm hair shaving sharp it's going to degrade below that very quickly maybe 10 Strokes with your hand plane but then it's going to rest at that level for the next 150 200 Strokes so you want to strop about every 150 to 200 strokes and that's going to be 30 pulls with your angle just slightly elevated and then 30 pulls on the back and get back to work why is this important because if you're not sharp it's not going to cut wood and no matter how well you've set up your plane Nothing Else Matters all right so let's come into the bench and talk about how to set it up there's two basic types of hand planes just bevel up and beveled down now bevel down usually has a chip breaker bevel up does not and it's important to set that up correctly and actually cool little tip when you get a hand plane usually this screw is over tightened on purpose so it doesn't move around during shipping so when you first get a handful you want to back that off how half a turn this is your chip breaker and blade setup now typically these lever caps are designed to be able to loosen the screw here so you do it like that you want to pull your chip breaker towards you when you're taking it off to sharpen so you don't scratch your blade take it off just like that put it back on now this is really important here your chip breaker you want to be at least a 30 second from the edge you can go between a 64th and a 30 second and let me show you what that looks like so that should be about that distance there then you're going to just tighten that up now why does this matter well if your chip breaker is too close you're going to get an accordion effect if it's too far away you're going to get more tear out the reason you have a chip breaker is it's designed to pull the shavening up and away from the blade so you can continue to cut now if your chip breaker is too far away that could be one of the reasons you're getting tear out but if it's too close it's going to look like this it's a lot harder to push through and you get this accordion effect you don't get those rotating in curls and the wood itself will be all bunched up in little accordions like this all right so now let's talk about lateral adjustment and that's how we get the blade Square to the body of the plane now I've taken the guts out of this number four so you can see it and it's a little counterintuitive so let me show you I've set this one sort of extreme I'm going to take a cut here and you can see it's only cutting on this side of the board so that means this side of the plane is too low so you're actually going to move your lateral adjustment towards the side that is too low you can see that's on a cam there so it's going to lower the plane blade on the right when you move it away from it so when you move it towards the left the right is going to go lower this little circle here fits into the blade and that's what adjusted left and right so it looks like this when it gets adjusted I'm going to move this lever here you'll be able to see it through this Gap in the plane here you can see it lifts the left side of the blade up when I move towards the left and lowers the right side so now though how do we test this I'm going to show you another method here in a second by sight so I've adjusted it to about the middle here we're going to go until we feel wood without we're not going to cut through so just going to adjust slightly so we feel wood and there we go then I'm going to take a cut on the left we still have a pretty heavy cut there and then we're going to take a cut on the right and I just use my finger as a guide to keep the plane from wandering over the right side I still have no cut over there so I'm going to take this lever I'm going to adjust it a little bit more here and then we're going to do the we're going to repeat that process here we go we're just getting a little bit there on the left that's real good news and just a little tiny bit on the right you see that so those are very equal so we know that we are equal I'm going to advance the plane a little bit and take a cut right down the middle there we go and because when you sharpen you have a slight camber on your Blade the middle is going to cut before the edges so we know that we are dead nuts there or you just Advance the plane blade until we get to our final cutting depth and take a few passes here and there we go we're getting full length equal shavings and look at that beauty right there all right now let's talk about lateral adjustment on a bevel up plane all right now these are all bevel up or low angle planes typically your bed angle is about 12 degrees whereas your bed angle on a standard frog is going to be about 45 degrees the lower the angle the better at end grain and smooth straight grain wood they're going to be the higher the angle the better it's going to be at figured wood this is a number 62 Jack plane is the number four smoother this is a rabbeting block plane and a block plane now the one thing that these all have in common is they do not have a lateral adjustment and you can see at with this rabbeting plane that it is very adjustable and so it's a lot tougher to get these Square now nice planes like these have very Square bodies some of them will have like a little guide in there but still if you look at this number 62 the square guide in it it leaves room for adjustment and so I like to do it like the old Japanese Carpenters they use something this is actually a 200 year old Japanese plain Setter's mouth I don't know if it's 200 years old it's very old it's very antique and the way they adjust the blade is they'll hit one side of the plane and that adjusts the blade so you can do the same thing here but I don't like to hit my cast iron with a steel Mallet so I use the cats Moses Mallet which we sell over at kmtools.com it's got brass heads and then also non-marking nylon heads and you can take the nylon heads and just give it a little tap and it's the same thing as the other adjustment which is the side you hit it on is going to go lower and you can give it small Taps here you can watch this blade move just like that so you would normally hit it a lot softer just give it a couple Taps until you get it Square the way to adjust it's going to be the same which is going on the right side of the board and the left side of the board and giving it slight Taps to adjust it you can also adjust it with your fingers like this but that has about as much accuracy as a blind guy at a urinal what are these planes also have in common is a lot of them have adjustable mounts now that is something that is going to help with these smoother planes with tear out the standard airplanes also have something that can close the mouth but it's a little bit more of an adjustment process what this is for here you can see this open and closes the mouth when you want to take a bigger heavier pass with one of these you would open the mouth and then when you want to take much finer Cuts you would close it up and again you want to be very very close to that it really helps with tear out that's why these planes are called smoothing planes now with a standard angle plane you have these screws back here these screws are designed to remove the Frog and also adjust it forward so you can loosen these and then adjust this screw here and it's going to move your whole frog forward and that's going to close this mouth up some if you want to set up your number four is a smoothing plane you can adjust it so that the plain blade is much closer to the mouth but again if you're wanting something with a very tight mouth it's easier to go with a low angle plane of some kind unless you have very figured wood which is why you would do this with a standard angle I think companies like Lee Nielsen will sell a frog that has even a higher angle 50 degrees I believe I think they may even have a 55 angle plane and what that does is it changes the angle of attack and if you think about it the more of a severing cut it creates because you are coming straight at the material and so when you think about a knife you're never going to get tear out if you're cutting straight through at 90 degrees but that also wouldn't allow you any forward momentum and so the steeper your angle the less tear out you're going to get the more difficult it is going to be to push it through the wood but again if it's very very figured wood that can be very beneficial to raise your angle way up lastly a way that people like to adjust their hand plane is you look down the center of it and you watch the plane blade come up think about a ship on the horizon you know when you look out in the ocean you can just see a ship out there and just start to see the top of it you want to adjust your plane and watch how it comes out you want it all to emerge at the same time so you take it and you slowly Advance it and then if you see one side come out more than the other you're going to move the lateral adjustment away from that side until everything comes out at once from your plane blade a little bit easier but it takes a little bit more skill and practice to do than just checking it on a board all right next one is going with the grain now you can see this board I know that this was the top of the tree and that was the bottom of the tree because it's growing up and out here or I guess if this was a branch this was towards the trunk of the tree and that was further out now when you look at this you can see these Grain Lines they go off the board like this same on both the bottom and the top and so you want to treat this like petting a cat right like you would never go this way up the back of a cat towards the head because that might piss it off and you're going to get the sharp bits so you want to pet the cat from head to tail oil along the fur you keep the fur down same thing with a hand plane you want to go with the grain not against it not to say that there aren't times when you would have to go against the grain or times when the grain doesn't all go the same direction and that would be highly figured wood by going with a higher angled plane you're going to have a better chance of reducing tout ensuring your blade is sharp and if you're having a problem closing the mouth of an adjustable plane or moving the Frog forward is going to help you with tear up the next one is what I think to be one of the most important ones behind sharpening this is a Paul sellers style rag in an old can with some three in one oil this is paste wax I think Rob Cosman usually uses a candle but nothing makes more of a difference in the quality of your planing and your arms fatigue and all those things and just taking a little wax and waxing the bottom of your planes now this is also great because it keeps them from rusting I'm bad about this I need to do it more often because you know sometimes I'll go a while without using my planes and we have a change in season or humidity here and then I'll get a lot of you know a little rust spots that I have to take off with a lapping plate or something like that so make sure you're doing it regularly and certainly uh you know when you go to plane nothing wrong with just giving a little wipe with some paste wax because it makes planing just so much easier I mean it cuts down on Resistance massively now we've got the setup so there's a lot of intricacies to that we can get into use now one of the big ones too when we talk about waxing our plane and ease of use it's using your body if you are planning and you are using your arms you are going to get exhausted quickly it's much like any swinging sport baseball you know you step with your legs golf same thing throwing you're pushing off your back foot same thing with hand planing which is you're going to use your whole body to create momentum so you're gonna use your whole body and follow through just like that it's nice and easy finish with your arms here but that's going to make planing a lot more enjoyable make it a lot less exhausting to do all right the next tip is about pressure and keeping the pressure in the right place now stay with me here because we're about to talk about a couple real good ones you want to keep pressure on the front of the plane but you should not be just like leaning into it you want the tool to do the work so you just keep your pressure on the front part of the plane and you just push with the back end but again you're using your whole body just like that real easy just a little bit of weight on the front and pushing through your cut now here's the thing that I bet a few of you run into you're checking your straightness of your board for example a good way to do that if you have a long plane is to use the edge and look for light down the middle you can absolutely do that with smaller planes as well you can kind of go through and look but it's good to have like a good straight edge that you trust so if you ever noticed that when you're planing and you've got a straight board you get a hump in the middle now I'm not exactly sure why that is I have a theory which is you know your plane blade is obviously lower than the sole of your plane and so you have pressure on the front of your board your board is at one height and then as you start to exit to cut the board is obviously at a lower height and so your plane starts to tilt very microscopically obviously it's just a tiny bit but then when you come off it just starts to create a hump in the middle so a very easy way to do that I think this is a Rob Cosman tip is take a pencil draw a little bit on your board take some out of The Middle take just a few strokes and then plane your board all the way through another way I've seen done it that I really like is just to start at the end so you just work your way back until you get nice even shavings all the way across your board that look like that's not going to work oh let's try this guy nice even shavings all the way across your board that look like that the last one is a simple one but it's about skewing the plane as you cut so that means turning it sideways sometimes the skewing of the plane can help get through some figured wood or stuff that's turning out Simply by turning but you have to be careful of a couple things one you change the length of your plane and so the area if you're trying to get something flat you have less area to reference off of so you have a less area in which you can get something flat and then also it does slightly lower the angle of your plane so if you're trying to do it in something like you know very figured wood and you have a high attack angle like this 45 degree frog and you skew it some it's going to lower that plane angle a little bit you might start getting tear out so you know use it sparingly or I guess use it wisely but skewing the plain blade can help you sever Some Cuts make a little bit easier I think lastly one of the things I wish I had known when I first got started is one you don't need every plane and two you want to use the right plane for the job it's really important to remember that the job is whatever you like to do it needs to fit your style of woodworking I think that people have a tendency to watch these videos and want to go buy everything that you know somebody like me has and the answer is I don't use 80 of my planes like I use a few that I really love I love my number four I love my number 62 Jack plane of course the jointer is really awesome we need to flatten something wider than your jointer then of course my block plane but you know when you think about the types of planes that you would use here's sort of a breakdown and I'll sort of go through these and tell you what I like to use them for so there's a scrub plane a scrub plane is like a little bit bigger plane maybe a number four number five or six with a big open mouth and a camber on the blade that looks like this and that's for taking massive Cuts if you don't have a planer you need to dementia something you would want to scrub plane sometimes called a four plane from there there's Jack Planes now Jack Planes are they come in standard angle and low angle nowadays this is a number 62 Lee Nielsen Jack plane they have adjustable mounts they're called Jack Planes because they're sort of jacks of all trades this has always been one of my favorite play-ins it's long enough you can sort of joint shorter boards uh it's got a closed mouth so you can do some smoothing and it's low angle so it's really good with end grain especially when it's really sharp and then your standard angled planes like this number four or this number seven those are going to be good day-to-day stuff they all have their different uses a number four is my most used plane when this thing's sharp nothing beats it and that's because it's you know I can smooth things out I can grab joinery but the one thing that it can't do is be used one-handed and that's where your block plane comes in this is a plane I think every woodworker should have I love it for flushing up joinery flushing up plugs butterfly Keys it's great for chamfering edges it just does so much and I like the low angled ones with the adjustable mouth because it has a lot of different uses you can do again it's great on end grain which with joinery when you have two things that meet up one of those is probably going to be end grain or both sides are going to be end grain like dovetails or a half lap joint those kind of things so it's really great I love this one this rabbeting block plane it's great for joinery again because it allows you to get right up next to something it has this little tiny blade called a knicker n-i-c-k-e-r uh you adjust where the screwdriver comes down and that's going to sever across grain so you don't get tear out past where you're trying to cut past the edge other than that just have fun make sure your blade is sharp your sole is waxed and just go to it it's one of those skills that makes a huge difference in your woodworking because it's quick a hand plane is quick to grab you don't need safety gear you don't need to have big setups as long as you have a vise and a way to do it it's a great tool to have so if you found value in this guys remember these videos are never sponsored every this whole channel is supported by kmtools.com head over there to check out some of my favorite battle tested tools including many tools I've developed myself as always guys stay safe in the shop thanks for watching have a wonderful day [Music] all right

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 94,165

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking projects, woodworking tools, woodworking hand plane tips, hand tools, hand plane, hand planes, hand tool woodworking, handplane, hand tool, bench plane, jack plane, hand planer, smoothing plane, hand plane setup, hand plane basics, wood, block plane, handtools, how to set up a plane, how to use a plane, woodwork, handplanes, how to set up a bench plane, workshop, woodworking tips, low angle jack plane, how to set up a hand plane, best hand plane

Id: ODpVgpxXOEY

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023