4 1/2 Hand Plane Smoother, review by Rob Cosman, Woodriver

hi I'm Rob Cosman welcome to my shop I want to introduce you to a couple of new products no one anyway been around a little bit this is a friend diamond site and I just want to walk you through something that you may need to do when it's first being used so I'll cover that in a second but I want to show you is this new four-and-a-half fit wood River wood craft just released a few months ago now I'm opening this for the first time you'll see when we open it up it hasn't been taken out of the plastic yet and this is not being sponsored by wood crafts even though I work as a consultant for them and helping them develop claims nerves and tools they didn't ask me to do this I'm doing a certainty out of wanting to pass on some good information because I think this the best they come up with so far this is known as the smooth pine the finish is long he's a to increase in iron downside is it's packed in this disgusting whatever it is oil with some sort so I find the easiest way to get it off is to use some paint thinner in other words it takes too much elbow grease the paint thinner thinner breaks it down pretty quick this is patterned after the original Stanley bedrock four and a half has a blade that measures 125 thousandths of an inch thick which means it doesn't chatter at all when you're working hardwood and the chip breaker is the new style that's on most modern planes now it doesn't have a bump like the traditional ones did the blade is a two steel I think the hardness is somewhere around 60 62 which is pretty typical for bench planes the chip breaker is already mated to the back of the blade so you really shouldn't have to do anything to it at all now then again wipe all this over crap off of it I do enough of these in the run of a month it gets to be a passion all right first thing I want to do is go over and work the blade and get that ready and then we'll come back over and I'll go through and show you some of the features have been built into this plane and I'll even go through and do a little extra that I don't normally do people are all forever asking me do you have to flatten the soul get the square the sides we'll check all that and see what it's like and I'm taking this as I said right out of the box so it's not like a doctored went up to make the job any easier this is what you can expect you buy one we get all that bar sawed off maybe just before I sharpen it I will go through and just make sure everything is tight that doesn't fit occasionally the knobs come loose wood shrinks a little bit in chipping snug those down okay let's work on the blade one over here now as I mentioned this is a trend diamond plate I like it because it's double-sided it has a three hundred grit side and a 1,000 grit side this is what I start my planing by sharpening with this is what you can use if you want to flatten your stones now one thing I want to caution you when it's brand-new first out of the box there's some loose diamond on there or some diamond that will come loose fairly quickly so what I suggest you do is just rub some steel over that surface just not doesn't take very long but just to break down any of that loose diamond so that if you do use this to flatten your finishing stone you don't end up leaving embedded diamond particles contaminate the source be its own I'm not doing this to the benefit of the blade I'm doing this just to kind of break that stone in a little bit rid of as I mention any loose diamond on all right that should be enough now really need to do the 1,000 grit side because I don't use that to do anything with the finishing film but I will anyway okay first thing I'm going to do is take a little steel rule this happens through 25 thousands of an inch thick doesn't matter what you use just use the same one and I set that on the edge of the blade this is to forgo having to polish the entire back of the blade what I'm going to do is elevate the blade about a little less than one degree I'm going to stay within a quarter of an inch of the opposite edge of the stone I'm going to put three fingers to distribute the pressure as evenly as possible back here with this index finger for cue kitchen this one to keep that little blade in place so it doesn't slide around now I'd do this a lot so I've developed little bit of technique I take my pinky over here and I run it on the side of the stone just so that I can do it more rapidly instead of going all over the place this helps me keep it in that quarter inch track along this side of the stone so I'll spend ten fifteen seconds on this now the blade is going to come out of the box in one of three conditions these are going to be flat it's going to be slightly concave or it's going to be convex if it's convex I would consider that a defect and I would return it and wherever you bought it will certainly replace the blade now if you turn this over and look now I'm basing this criteria on the result I see with this little ruler trick so what you see over here is a uniform strip out there at the end of my finger that means that this blade is almost perfectly flat you can see where I worked it on that three hundred grit side and it left a little bit of a hollow in here but that wasn't very much work so this is really close to being right on they don't always come like this but more and more I'm seeing them like this and I go through and do this probably 50 times a year as I go around to various retail locations demonstrating these tools we always take them right out of the box now I'm going to go a step further but I don't normally do and I'm going to use an 8,000 grit surest Shapton ceramic stone next I'm going to wet it down and I use this just because I have it this is the this is the diamond lapping plate it's made by shopton only downside is almost $400 so I'll bring that into being flat and then while I'm doing it I'm going to work on oh really should have done that the other way around case there was any cross-contamination but honestly I've never had an issue with it would have been smarter to start on the 16 and then go to the 8 but I didn't must be nervous okay so what I'm going to do it's a little bit different is instead of going right from the 1000 over to the 16 I'm going to take an in-between stop so I'm going to set that little steel rule same steel rule obviously hold it in place and I'll spend Oh 15 or 20 seconds same idea stay within the quarter inch edge and within a quarter of an inch of the edge three fingers applying even downward pressure light to moderate part of your porcelain control you have in the more likely you are to screw something up so doesn't have to be extremely forceful now just stop this over and see if okay so we're getting a uniform polish I don't know if you can pick that up on the camera not but that's the 8,000 grit and we can take it up a lot higher we'll bump over here to the 16,000 now just so that you know exactly what I'm doing I'm using a product called a hone right which is a water additive that prevents water from rusting metal that way I can safely use it on this diamond plate as well as it's safe to use on my ceramic stones which normally are just lubricated with water so on the 16 thousand grit I'll spend the same ten to fifteen seconds had a customer bringing up the fact that he thought going from 1,000 to 16 was too extreme too big of a jump I've never had any issues with it but I thought I'd try it anyway enough now we'll take a look at that and that should raise the level of Polish up a notch and if you get the light just right now that I mean I am this is the luck of the draw because that's almost product by perfectly flat blade as I said they don't all come like that but slight kunzite the concave which would create a bit of an arc there is perfectly acceptable as well all right now let's do the bevel I'm going to start over here on the 60 on the 1000 grit diamond stone set the blade down on the primary bevel raise it up just a few degrees doesn't take very long diamond plate is brand new we just took it out of the box to get a bird on the backside and I can detect the bird corner-to-corner so once I do that I leave that stone now this is where I'm going to throw another little extra step I'm going to come to the 8,000 set the blade down on the primary bevel raised up just a little bit higher when I did on that 1,000 spend about 10 seconds on this one all four fingers on the cutting edge exerting even downward pressure again like the immediate light to moderate and then as a final step I'll come over here now I'm going to do a little something different on this stone this is my sixteen thousand grit set the blade on the primary raised it up a little bit higher than I did on that last 8,000 grit and on this one I'll spend ten seconds at the end of the ten seconds I'm going to down word pressure of one corner for about three seconds and then downward pressure on the opposite corner for about three seconds and I'll take my little steel rule and just to get rid of any burr that may be left turn the blade over working the opposite quarter inch edge three to four seconds right there all it takes so the blade is ready to go now let's go back and let this plane over before we actually try it just want to make sure all the moistures off in there if you want to close up on this if this is new to anyone the idea behind raising the blade up off racing the blade up off of the mint primary bevel and elevating the blade up off the back is to simply reduce the surface area that has to be worked so then the fricken you pick up that little polished strip we're going to do a little bit small bit of metal has to be polished on that side and it meets the little bit small bit of metal pause on this side giving you your cutting edge which both surfaces have been of their paws up to 16,000 grit so we should really get a nice shaving off of this now I'm going to put the blade at the back chip breaker back iron whatever you want to call it put it on pull it back here before you swing it over say loosen that up a little bit and then I can squeeze it like this lots of control I can move that forward get it to within a thirty second or so of the edge and then snug that down and you want that to be good and tight because it has to do with the function of the tool and I set that aside okay so what's know about this well for the first things we did this is a while back now I get paid occasionally to offer some input to these planes we took the old handle which I felt was too short and I also felt that it was that it was too upright we made a new one we took advantage of the extra height we had so we gained a little bit that way and we tipped it forward so if you've got a large hand you'll find this a lot more comfortable and it's designed to be a three finger grip so bottom three fingers index finger lays along the side okay take this apart and just show you what's inside because a lot of the new features are actually associated with the Frog and in case you're really new to this the Frog is this part that supports the blade I'm backing off what are called the Frog retaining screws and as I pull this out I'll clean this off too if you've ever examined the Frog and the way it mates to with a body of an old Stanley plane or even a current Stanley plane there's not very much surface area and when you compare it to the large milled surface area on these planes again patterned after the original bedrocks it's substantial so it really keeps that blade still when it's being used and you don't end up with any chatter so these are called frog retaining pins the Frog retaining pins go down through the Frog they've got a little divot on the top end that shows you that there's a cone-shaped hole on this face side and these screws which are called frog retaining screws are pointed look at that oh sorry yeah okay and they're set to engage not like that but just below Center so that as you tighten this frog retaining screw that point that cone bears down on the bottom side of this and pulls that pin down tight and that holds that frog firmly but the reason we have we want to access it from the backside is so that we can open and close the throat without having to remove the blade the chipbreaker the lever cap I'll show you how that functions in a moment but these pins one of the recent improvements that came out on these particularly on the four and a half on the new five and a half these are hardened steel where they weren't before so you don't have to worry about damaging them which on the other ones could possibly have happened now let me show you the Frog because this is a part that I'm really excited about I'm going to show you the actually let me grab a another plane I'll show you what I'm talking about this is called the the yolk and the yolk as you spend the adjuster knob the yolk engages this up here for this horizontal slot in the chipbreaker and as you spin the adjuster knob in a clockwise rotation looking at it from behind the yolk goes forward pushes on this chip breaker and you have a blade projecting a little bit farther for heavier saving do the opposite and retracts it but if you look on this yoke particularly this one which is made out of bronze you can see how there's been some shaving on this on the back side and actually there's some scraping on the front as well because what happens if you look at the profile of this it's shaped kind of like a wedge or a triangle somewhat modified triangle and as a result when it goes into this hole it actually scrapes on this bottom corner on one in one direction and on the opposite back corner of the corner on the other direction well I thought about that I said well there's a lot of friction there so what the we did with this new one is we put a round surface on both sides so now what happens is this round surface remains tangent to the inside flat surface of the chip raker so what it does it reduces all of that friction that you would have otherwise had whether you're advancing and retracting beautiful addition or improvement to these tools and it makes a huge difference and how easily you can adjust it now if you've got a Wood River plane an older version there's a fair bit of slop that often referred to as backlash which is the difference between how much you have to turn going from advancing to retracting and I've got one here that would easily take two full rotations will stop and will when we put this together we'll check this but some of them are down as good now as just a third of a turn so the machining on the adjusting knob is much better than it was the way that these ears of the Frog fit on the adjuster knob is much better there was just a whole bunch of places where we could remove a little bit of slop and as a result we get a much better much better performance out of the tool so I'm going to put this back in place this piece has to go inside this slot and that Center screw and as I mentioned these frog retaining pins have holes in them on the top side to indicate where that little divot it or that cone-shaped hole is so when you put these in you want to make sure those divots are pointing straight back so that when you tighten up these fraud retaining screws the engage properly I always like to keep my finger over here for my finger on here so that I can feel that should just turn just a little bit as the screw engages and that way you know it's meeting it the way it's supposed to now I want those snug now I find sometimes that this lateral adjustment lever can be a little bit too stiff so if you just bend it up a little bit that takes some of the friction or take some of the rub surface reduces some of the area that is rubbing is what they should have said wiggle that a little bit and then you can kind of push it back down into place you don't want it rubbing on the backside of the blade but you don't want it to be really hard to move either that's got a bearing on it and that bearing fits in the long slide of the blade and that reduces friction too when you're making your lateral adjustment all right this is all cleaned off we'll try it first the job of the Blaine is to get the piece of wood smooth so I'm not going to go beyond what it takes to do that but I will I will show you a few things you can do if you want to check it and go a little bit farther I typically don't I'm going to put a piece of wood in here we'll start with just a piece of kind easy to plain and then we'll go up to a piece of maple so I'm going to set the blade in careful not to bump the edge on anything as I set that down there's three points of contract you want to be aware of you want the yoke to fit inside the slot and the chipbreaker you want the bearing at the bottom of the lateral adjustment leaver to fit inside the slot on the blade and sometimes that's a snug fit so it actually might snap into place and you want the back of the blade to sit firmly on the face of the Frog so I don't want any debris on there set the leaver cap on now you want sufficient pressure here that the blade won't move accidentally when you're using it but not so much pressure that you can't make adjustments so I'm going to back that cap screw off a little bit and then just kind of judge based on this and it could be a little bit tighter than that that moves quite freely so snug it up to a little bit more nice thing is once you get it you shouldn't have to adjust it again because every time you take the blade out to sharpen it it's going to come right back to the same spot so that feels all right now I'm going to flip the plane over right one way and then I'm going to advance the blade and from doing this on numerous play tell you this is so smooth by the way one of the other improvements that was made when they we switched to the v3 a larger diameter adjuster knob which gives you greater leverage and heavier knurling her deeper knurling means you can actually get some good torque on that so much easier to perform our to web to use okay so I'm siting down the sole and I do that by just looking down the sole and then dropping it slightly and right here in the mouth I've got the blade projecting and showing up as a thin black line but I see more of it on the left and I do on the right so I'm going to take the lateral adjustment lever with my thumb underneath the blade and I'm going to squeeze the edge of the blade and my thumb is on the adjuster that the lateral adjustment leaver I'm going to squeeze the two together until that high side drops down and actually went completely out of sight so I'll advance the blade a little bit more and now the blade appears to be parallel to the sole so I'm going to retract it pull it all the way back in it's a little bit of wax piece of candle will do just want it hard enough that it won't gum up on the sole but not so soft it that it's hard enough that it doesn't come up in the soul and yet soft enough it'll leave a little bit of residue okay so I'm going to start planing and what I like about this style of playing over others is that while planing I can start to spin that adjuster knob and I'm doing it with one finger so the fact that it moves so much easier now is a real bonus but as I plane and spin the adjustment knob I'm slowly advancing that blade and the first thing I want to determine is whether or not the blade is truly parallel to the sole which means the first shaving should be across the full width of the blade and that's pretty much what it looks like so I'll go a little bit heavier okay and you can pretty much tell when the shaving comes out if it veers to one side of the other then it's typically heavier on one side than the other and just play around with it until you get it just right okay so that's coming off that's pine but that would probably measure some of the neighborhood of 8/10 of us out if I had my digital Tom Mitch to toy-u working I could measure it for you but a lot of batteries all right so here's a piece of bird's-eye maple let's see what that'll do I'm going to retract the blade do the same thing I did with more wax put a blade in start planing and then slowly advance okay so there's a piece of Eastern maple bird's-eye maple and that shaving would probably be summer in the neighborhood of 3/4 of a thio as well maybe even thinner sometimes we can get these down below a half a foul maple seem to be the easiest to do that we have to test tendency to stay together where some woods just come apart if that's in this that thinness there should be that Fitness could have invented a word there laying that blade I was just a little bit more each time to see if I can't okay now what I want to do is check the soul and to see how flat it is and what I'm going to use is a piece of 3/4 inch float glass I'm going to use some 320 grit self-adhesive sandpaper I'm going to leave the blade in the plane so that it's under the same pressure that would be when you're using it but I'm going to retract it and that'll give us some idea of how flat these are out of the box I'm often quoted as saying that they're literally ready to use out of the box see if I'm right now this is float glass and if you do a little search on float glass its solidified on molten tin so it is flat whereas plate glass which comes out of a form of a press isn't necessarily flat now I'm just going to use a little brush to get some of it I'm not a lot of the paper okay so the blade is retracted I'm going to use the same downward pressure that I would use if we were planing I'm what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a felt tip marker on the sole so that we can see where the metal comes off a little bit easier okay I want to do a whole lot okay so if we look at that I don't see I don't see a lot coming off anywhere in particular or any faster one spot than the other maybe up there a little bit let me give it a go for about 30 seconds so I'm pushing down Center the plane same amount front and back the glass is just free to float so hopefully I'm not deflecting that three-quarter inch glass I'm not pushing down that hard okay so we turn that over and have a look you can see some faint part of the line it's touching everywhere it hasn't removed it's removed all the line out here along the edges there's a little bit left in here I haven't taken off a whole lot this specs on this are I believe around a thousand a half and I would tend to believe that by the looks of this that that's a whole lot better than a thousand a half over the length of the sole but again the real test is does it work does it make your wood smooth and give you a straight edge and I'd say the answer to that was yes now will it hold those kind of tolerances on the longer plane well the guarantee is that the does that it does so if you find it doesn't take it back all right one more thing I want to do before we'll close this and take a file and I just want to break the sharp edges and I do this to prevent the plane from getting dings on the sole as a result of bumping up against something metal bump up against something you leave a Nick on the on the corner that ends up Purdue protruding at the bottom and then when you're planing you've got a mark on this on your wood and I've seen people chase the sharpening on their blade for an hour trying to find it what's wrong and it was actually a little bump on the sole so cut a tamper like that don't forget their toe and the heel this one's a little more difficult because of the shape longer planes that's just rounded over in the back just affords a little bit of protection you got to have to really ding that corner hard this paint in order to raise a bump sometimes when they cut out the mouth it leaves a bit of a burr right here but I don't feel any there and it would wear off eventually anyway but I would prefer to get rid of it if it was there now before I start using the plane alright let's put that piece of maple back in unexpected performance to change any and if you feel that you can't reach through the camera and feel it but if you could that is as smooth as you could get you're not going to improve that with any grit of sandpaper good fancy that I'd bring will got laid up quite a bit to make sure I didn't touch it on that glass a little heavy I can pull it in some 169 95 or I don't think you can get a better Pliny can't get a better plane for that kind of money and as I said they're that ready that you're within 15 minutes of being able to use it okay thanks for watching go to my youtube channel there's a lot more videos on there walking you through various hand tool to hand tools and methods and if you're really interested in this you can go to my site Rob's workshop comm and if you respond to us on there we'll give you a free month and you can try it out and see if it's something that you like we teach we offer five half hour training episodes a week covering both construction with merely hand tools and also a separate one where we do both hand tools and power tools okay see you in a shop soon

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 235,572

Rating: 4.9039421 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, wood, tools, planes, handplanes, cosman, woodriver, woodcraft, handtools

Id: bx-D9hsaosM

Length: 31min 43sec (1903 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 08 2014