Bench Plane Basics: How to Set the Blade on a Plane

hi everybody I'm Leah of CJ drill and today we're going to be talking about this right here and it's a number 5 Bailey Jack point but we're going to talk about other planes because a woman named Anita in California she's got a question about her block plane and we're going to answer it coming up next [Music] [Applause] [Music] so Anita G writes that she says hello Lea I'm hoping you can help me someone gave me a Stanley six and a half inch block plane that's not fat sixty because that would be a huge huge block to thinking and I need to know how to set it up it was working just fine and then I started messing around with it now it won't work at all obviously I don't have it set up right so here's the thing about planes you can really go down the rabbit hole because it's not always about the kind of plane you purchase this is a low-angle block plane or the number five Jack plane by Stanley it's like once you purchase it there are a number of things you could do to it like tuning it and tuning is going down the rabbit hole remember this is the Cliff Notes version but just so you know what tuning is it's preparing a soul getting the soul nice and flat it's taking the blade and honing it further beyond what the manufacturer is done and then there's this whole process weathering right you do a back bevel or a micro bevel or do you use plate glass to smooth it or you see what I'm saying so we're this is the clip note version so we're not going to do any of that so let's move on now what we're going to do next is I'm going to break this down and I'm going to show you the different parts and then we're going to set it up to cut it's really kind of a simplistic tool all right this is our cap we're going to this is the cap screw here to loosen it up a little bit okay and what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this lever down like that alright and she'd be able to slide that up off of there all right so what the cap does is it holds the blade the iron okay firm against the Frog so let's let's just pull this out pull that this is the frog and the Frog is attached to the body of the plane the Frog is set at a 45 degree angle you take your iron and it rests on the Frog so actually there's two pieces of metal sitting here I've loosened the screw and just slide this out of here all right and this is actually the blade this is what they call the iron and this is what you sharp it and this is what allows you to cut the wood all right this piece here this is called the chip breaker so when you put your chip breaker on you really want that chip breaker to sit about a sixteenth of an inch from the edge of the blade now what the chip breaker does one of the things it does is it prevents chatter so maybe you're wondering what chatter is well chatter is when the plane is like surfing across the wood that's the best way to say it it's like jumping and surfing across the wood and then you get those parallel lines in your wood that's what chatter is and the chip breaker helps reduce chatter so you see where it's pretty basic you got the base you got the Frog this is our iron and this is our cap all right now we're going to come around to the backside now we're at the backside of the Frog now this here that big brass knob that controls the depth of the blade whether you want to cut with it you lower that blade if you want to store it then you retract it okay that's what the brass knob is for so these two screws here I don't know if you can see them that adjusts the Frog one is a clamping frog screw that's the one on top there and the bottom one will it adjust the Frog why would I want to adjust the Frog well it opens the mouth of the plane so this here the opening on the bottom of the plane that's the mouth so if you're doing general work you know just all-around work you want that mouth wide open right and then if you're doing finer work you want to close the mouth and that's what the Frog adjusting screw is for and this is the lateral adjusting lever what that does is it makes certain it your blades not to one side or the other you want it to be parallel right so that's pretty much all there is to a plane now there's something that I want to mention about the blade the iron here not that let's not look at the chip breaker I'm really just talking about the iron now if you look closely you'll notice that the bevel here is down the orientation of the blade bevel down against the wood so some planes are beveled down like this plane and then some planes are bevel up like the low angle block plane and so you want to make certain that you install the blade in the way that it's intended to be installed so this is our block plane and this is the plane that anita asked about so what makes this different right setting up this plane well believe it or not it's easier and it's easier for a couple of reasons this plane here has beveled side up block planes are bevel side up or low angle planes okay now it has many of the same components it has the lateral lever adjustment right back here this knob here controls this knob here controls the depth of the blade it doesn't really have the same kind of Frog because the Frog doesn't move backwards and forwards you don't have a adjusting screws for the Frog but we can take this off so you can see what I'm talking about I'm going to take off the cap there's our cap and if you notice we're going to pull out the blade remember what I said bevel up its bevel up but it also doesn't have a chip breaker on it so this here controls the opening of the mouth so you can close it or open it so we covered the parts of both planes the bevel down plane and the bevel up plane now it's time to adjust the blade so we can actually cut now I'm going to show you how that's done there's something called sight down the plane so it's looking at eye level from front to back down the plane to adjust your eyes now I gotta tell you I've always had a hard time siting down the plane so I try something a little different so what I do is this I make certain that I I just bring my blade up out through the mouth so I can see it that I'm not looking to see if it's the thickness of the hair I just once I can see the blade popping out through the mouth that's what I make my lateral adjustment there we go looks nice so you make certain that your blade is parallel okay you don't want to it one side or the other because that's going to affect the cutting so once you get a parallel well then that's when I retract the blade now this is how I like to set the depth of the plane got a piece of scrap lumber here in the vise my blade my iron okay is retracted now what I'll do is I'll run my plane across the wood you don't hear anything right pull it back so this knob here this knob controls the depth of the blade and if we turn it this way it drops the blade if we turn it back the other way it raises the blade so clockwise it lowers the blade counterclockwise it raises the blade now as I said before the blade is retracted up into the body of the of the plane right so what we're going to do is we're going to lower the blade by an eighth of a turn and now we're going to set it up on our scrap piece of lumber and we're going to just run it across we don't hear anything so now we know we need to turn the knob another eighth of a turn and we keep doing that until we get it the way we want it so we've got to turn in another ace nothing turn it another 8 and we're going to keep doing it till we get what we want yeah that's the way I like it that's good that's perfect now we're going to do the block plane in this low angle block plane it's done the same way this is our adjusting screw and remember this way lowers the blade turning it that way raises the blade and we're going to keep turning it a little at a time until we get the kind of contact the kind of wood curls that we want nothing you'll sound make an adjustment still nothing yet make that adjustment ok now we're starting to get a little bit of wood here so let's just a little bit more of a turn that's perfect that's just what you want it's a nice ribbon now I've got the planes resting on their sides because the the blade has extended out and that's something you'll want to do when you're working you set your plane down set it on its side another thing I want to mention to you about setting the depth of the iron the blade okay is this screen right here and if it's too tight it's going to prevent you from really making an easy adjustment on the side you'll know if it's too tight because this the knots of the blade depth will be very difficult to turn this is Leah say you can do this see you next time

Channel: seejanedrill

Views: 76,228

Rating: 4.9198294 out of 5

Keywords: seejanedrill, see jane drill, leah, how-to, how to, woodworking basics, how to use a plane, bench plane, how to use a jack plane, how to use a bench plane, block plane, how to use a block plane, planing basics, what is a block plane, what is a bench plane, hand planes, hand plane, hand plane basics, woodworking tools, adjusting knob on a bench plane, woodworking, planes, using planes, using block planes, using smoothing plane, adjusting a plane, plane basics, smoothing plane

Id: HD8Gq5bQGUc

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2017