Block Plane by Woodriver reviewed by Rob Cosman

client robbed cousin welcome to my shop I wonder what review this Wood River block plane Ben Sawyer asked for it so Ben here's your review I was never a fan of block planes I always thought why would they give you the smallest plane to do what's typically the hardest job which is planing in green and then I got introduced to a brand that was a real premium plane and that changed my mind completely did that for seven years seven year eight years and then was introduced to Wood River and at first I didn't really like it it was bigger than what I was accustomed to and I forced myself but actually then became point where I really liked it and one things I liked most was about the way the blade is held in place but let's actually go through the process of sharpening it first and then we'll I'll talk to you about it specifically on the low angle version how it works will demonstrate it whatever but this is a parts you have to know now I really don't know where this one came from it was returned to me the blade looks like it's really been hammered pretty bad so I'm going to see if I can fix it quickly or not I may have to grind it I'm using a 1,000 grit shopton stone and a little steel rule I'm going to employ what's called the Charlesworth ruler trick and this is simply to create a little back bevel so that instead of having to work and polish and flatten the entire back of the stones blade you merely do a little wheat strip at the very edge I've explained this in numerous videos and what I'm doing I'm keeping the blade within a quarter of an inch of this side of the stone on the opposite side I've got a steel rule that measures six inch by 1/2 inch since less than a millimeter thick that doesn't matter you just want to use the same one all the time that way you're not varying the angle I keep that positioned on that side of the stone I'd I distribute the pressure with three fingers and I'm kind of grabbing this corner with my thumb and that corner with this finger and then the middle finger then my index finger applies pressure in the the blade and you just move it forward and back some do this I find that takes too long so I get a little more custom to doing it this way now I don't want to go too long before I stop and have a look and decide whether or not this is going to be doable now okay the problem is that whoever has done this before has actually rounded over this edge so I can see the flat that I've created across here but I also see the damage rounded edge out there whether or not I can get rid of that without grinding I don't know I'll give it another minute or so and see if I can move that back bevel right out to the edge and eliminate that round spot or I may be able to get rid of it when I do to the secondary and tertiary bevel on the opposite side I'm using hone right to lubricate this stone this trend diamond plate will rest if you use water or leave water on it but this home right which is a water additive and I go through I use this I think it's great it won't prevent rust but it inhibits rust meaning if you leave your stone sitting in a puddle of it you're going to find rust but it will certainly evaporate from the top surface before any rust will form alright let's take a look at that I typically wouldn't spend half this amount of time on a brand-new blade okay I still see I still see some rounded over damage out there so let's go to the let's go to the grinding wheel we'll see if we can't just fix that I use a fairly coarse wheel of course this one I can find and I have mounted on my grinding wheel a a tourist made by one way manufacturing it's called The Wolverine grinding jig and the reason I like it is it's very robust nice big heavy steel plate that acts as a great heat sink keep the blade types of the rest now see how I'm touching them back here so I actually need to move forward a little bit in other words this is going to change the angle and take me a lot more time so I'll just loosen that tip it forward small amount try it again and now I've moved it up here just ahead of Center and that's alright very light pressure into the stone you don't want to create so much friction if you end up burning the nice thing about this Taurus that is a very deep thing so when you have a blade where you have lots of surface contact it actually helps keep cool I like to keep moving the blade side-to-side periodically check to make sure that that line right across here is Square to the end of the blade or to the side that should say now I'm it's fairly consistent and if you notice if you're dropping off to one side you can see how if you can pick up on that line I know it's hard to see but it starts to drop off here and then it starts to drop off there so I'll just pay a little more attention to the middle see if I can't pull the middle down to where the low spots are I like the crown that wheel a little bit with my wheel dresser so that I know my contact where my contact is so I have to go in and do a little bit of shaping instead of wondering where I'm going to be touching the wheel I know I'm touching the minute it needs to be reshaped okay now you can see I haven't quite gone all the way out if the light catches that just right to see a little bit of the original belt is still there but I'm going to go all the way through that because I want to get rid of that damaged area what I'm actually doing is is moving laterally pushing in engaging and then disengaging while I'm still moving left that way I'm not parked in one spot while I go from left to right to right the left which means you end up lining extra long in one spot it does not take long to burn the steel I would describe my pressure on the light side of light per moderate and that still isn't hot enough that I can't hold on to it so if you want some indication of we're going to take a few more minutes then to try to hurry through it apply too much pressure burn this deal and then you've got essentially grind down through that Bernstein now the blade does not have a lot of lateral adjustment in the plane make sure that that edge is still Square to the side it's actually right on so no worries there but you only have a few degrees lateral movement so you've got to be aware of that when you're grinding a new double still nice straight line here one facet if you allow the blade to ride up on the wheel you'll end up with multiple facets on there but we've got one I still haven't gone all the way through because I can't feel a burr on the backside and the nice thing about going slow is as long as you're stopping frequently and checking you're probably not going to do something that you can't easily correct now I can still see that area of damage right there so I know I haven't gone all the way through okay so I'm just starting not in the middle on the two outside edges I can just start to feel a bird Avella ping which means I've managed to grind all the way through the edge but I haven't hit the middle I can still see that dull spot I don't know whether you can pick it up in the camera not but I can still see that dull spot right there in the middle so I know I and is to get all the way through burrs moving from the outside edge into the middle on both sides one Herriman will show you this is the wheel dresser that I like to use got multiple little wheels and the miner almost worn out but that opens up the surface of that wheel and makes it far more aggressive so if your wheel gets clogged and you're cutting speed really slows down almost I can probably actually bubble okay I've got tuber all the way for us and I can't see the guy I can't see the dull spot anymore final thing I'll do before I leave here I'll check make sure I've kept that square so I'm referencing off the side looking out the window and just verifying that it's nice and straight nice and square all right now we'll go over here so I've created that secondary about that back bevel on the one thousand grit so what I'm going to do now is come over here to my 16,000 and polish it once I've done that I don't have to do this again to this blade I use the three hundred grit side of this stone Goodwyn and flatten that ceramic stone use the same steel rule credit but leave a blade down I usually lay it so that the outside edge is off the opposite side and then I pull it in and then if there's any burr on there it'll fold up and get out of my way work the full length of the stone against dange try to stay within a quarter of an inch of that edge the farther in you come the more you're going to alter that that angle on that back level this only takes about 15-20 seconds at the most it's a small area I know it's a big jump from 1,000 to 16,000 because the surface area is so small it doesn't take very long you can go to an in-between stone if you like but I don't think it's necessary okay so now the back of that blade is nicely polished you can see a nice shine on it give it a strike yep okay so now we're going to do the bevel what I've done right now is a one-time procedure we don't ever have to do that again so this is what I would do with the blade was dull come over to my 1000 grit reference off the primary bevel which is easy to locate because the blades fairly thick so it gives you a wide primary get three fingers along the cutting edge feel for it once I find it park yourself there raise it up a few degrees one two three four five six seven eight ten now I remove the grinding burr when I polished the back bevel so now that I feel a bird again this is the burr I won I'm feeling from my what we call secondary bevel and on a brand-new surface like I just did you'll be able to go in and actually see clone at a corner that little secondary bevel can you pick up that pick that up now once I've done that and I verify it with the bird then I come over here to the sixteen thousand register on that same primary bevel raise up a degree or two higher than I did on that previous one and spend about 10 seconds working a new bevel we call a third or Tory bevel light to moderate pressure I don't do anything to the corners on this one I keep it straight and then the last step is to remove any bird that may be left just a few seconds all right that's all there is to it now wipe off any of the moisture okay let's put this together try it out and then talk about some of the characteristics of low-angle block I'm just pulling this shoe back so it won't be in the way there are multiple grooves on the backside so you want that to coincide with the two little grooves right here and as the blade gets shortened obviously you're going to move forward I'm just going to look and see where that blade is okay this is the old lever cap from the original stanley sixty and a half now that needs to be tight enough that it'll hold that in place and I can tell just from having used it and that's not enough still not enough that's good okay now I'm going to move this forward a little bit that really isn't functioning as I would use it yet now turn this over and I see the blade is projecting high on that side so I'm going to move it now there's your lateral adjustment so you may have a little more than I suggested but you don't have a lot so you have to pretty much keep that blade square on the edge now I'm citing down the sole and I still see it high on the left side plus it's also projecting too much so I'm going to straighten it a little bit retract it now you notice that I took the pressure off makes it a lot easier to adjust with the pressure off however the nice thing about this is with my thumb I can still keep enough pressure on it that it doesn't allow it to move accidentally doesn't fall apart on me and then just quick look with the right thumb and I'm right back to where I want which is the cutting pressure now I'm opt it off again because I'm not quite parallel to the sole that looks a lot better still projecting a little too much now I'm going to close my throat down just comfortably that's it's not serving a purpose yet this is a piece of bird's-eye maple and I'm just going to plain them grain this came off the saw so it may take a couple of passes before I get it flat first thing I'll do is come back here need a little more projection cut a little chamfer on the backside that's so that I don't end up tearing out fiber when I cross the end and then okay now that's a bit of a heavy cut so I'm going to pull it in a little bit more so these are the end grain shaping shavings off a piece of Eastern maple now I'm going to see if I can get them even thinner pop believer cap pull it off a little bit more I'm not sure what these would be measuring but I would tend to guess that they would be somewhere right around the foul I'm a little bit shy on one side so I move the blade a little bit not went too much that's probably a comfortable doesn't take a lot of effort and gives you a nice smooth finish now let's do one more thing let's play the edge have a piece of figured maple know there's a piece of Western maple but it's got a lot of figure in it which means it would have a tendency to tear so what I'm going to do to prevent that is I'm going to close that throat down so that the gap is very minimal see what we get I can take a lighter cut than that little wax on the sole now you can't run your fingers on it but I'm running mine and it's perfectly smooth there is no terror to anywhere on that so let's discuss this you have two options you have a standard angle and you have a low angle so what's the difference well if you take the lever cap off there's no traditional frog on a block plane but if we consider this the Frog surface of the bedding surface on a low angle plane that's 20 that's 12 degrees because the blade is on the top side if you're going to factor in the angle with which you're meeting the wood or what we call the angle of attack you would take 12 plus the approximately 25 degrees on the primary bevel but then you remember I raised the blade up a couple of degrees when I did my secondary bevel and a couple more when I did my miter Suri so let's say I added four degrees to that primary so we've got 12 plus 25 plus 4 is 41 you should know the mouth better than that you weren't thinking either way it was 40 41 41 okay so we're planning at 41 degrees if this was a standard angle block plane we would have that same 29 degrees on the blade plus 20 degrees that's the betting angle on a standard angle block plane so now you're planing at 49 degrees which is actually higher than a typical Vence plane so I'm the nice thing about this is that you can alter the angle of attack by simply having a second blade with a different angle on the blade or altering the angle that you have on that blade so when you use the yellow angle you can start lower and go up stay you're forced to start at a minimum of 45 degrees and go up so you've got a greater range the other thing then probably the single biggest difference is that when you put it together because of that low 20 angle degree on the bedding surface 12 degree on the bedding surface the distance between the top of the cap and under here or where you hold it is lower I find it Nestle's in your palm much better than a standard angle where you're up here and also allows you to be pushing more behind the blade instead of on top of the blade so probably from for an ergonomic reason more than anything else I prefer the low angle block anything you can do with a standard angle you can do with a low angle because you can alter the angle on the bevel and that all alters your cutting angle I like for you I really like this this is probably my favorite part it is so convenient to be able to just pop that off make your adjustments snap it back in place other block planes you've got a big spin wheel in here that you've got to adjust and you're never going to get it back to the exact same spot every time this is just really quick and I like when it comes to planing I like the mundane things to be nice and fast and that's probably one of the biggest advantages to that particular plane of course the price is right you can't beat that it's half the cost of of the premium block planes it's a short sole so you can expect the tolerances to be right on if you want you can back off these edges they're rather sharp so take a file effect I'll show you how to do it quite simple just take your file and file on a 45 degree I file from the soul I to the side and just knock off those sharp corners makes it more comfortable to hand and it's less likely to get a raised ding on there if you happen to bump into a another piece of metal in your tool tray or wherever you're keeping the planes so that's the Wood River low angle block plane it would be my choice for a block plane mine gets a lot of use if it's right there front and center and I probably use it every time every other time I'm used building something I'm using a block plane hope that answers your questions if you have any more hay fire them off to us we're happy to review it for you and let you know what we think see ya

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 80,412

Rating: 4.8405037 out of 5

Keywords: rob cosman, block plane, woodriver, woodcraft, woodwork, hand tools, hand planes, sharpening, wood, dovetails, planes, planers, hand tool woodworking, grain, woodgrain, furniture, furniture making, craftsman, craftsmanship

Id: vJnd6nfTCfE

Length: 23min 14sec (1394 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2015