Flattening a board using hand planes

[Music] hello I'm Mike Sampson Mike Simpson school of woodworking located in beautiful Chisago City Minnesota and I'm here to show you how to flatten boards using traditional hand planes the three planes that we're going to use today are the four plane that's fo re4 plane the triplane that's this longer plane that's T ry triplane it puts the boards in truth and the smooth plane which is the smaller one here this happens to be a number three Stanley there's also a number four Stanley don't get the number four confused with the word for here because they are different and they're spelled different the four plane which is the first plane that we typically use has a fairly curved iron or cambered iron it's it sticks up higher further out of the plane in the middle than it does on the edge and this is so when you're planing across the grain it severs the fibers rather than lifting them and causing tear oh we want to go a little bit about how flames work so that you understand as we go through the process what's going on they're called planes for a reason they make things go cleaner so if I take this long plane here the triplane I'm actually going to use it as a jointer here joint the edge of this board so you can see how they work and I'll take a shaving off with this port and you'll see it doesn't cut here at one spot so it's hollow here and high here and what I want to do is get it the plane all the way across so I get a shaving the full length of the board and that's it right there now I want to make this straight order to make it straight I'm gonna stay away from these ends and I'm gonna plain the wood out of the middle so the plane will ride on these two high spots and it'll lower the middle out by the thickness of a shaving over the length of this plane because that's how far the iron is sticking out so I'm gonna plane inside these marks that I made until the plane quits cutting right now we've got a slight hump in this board and we're to planing that out and I can I'll just keep cleaning it here until it quits giving me a shave now you can see it stopped cutting I'm not getting a shaving anywhere maybe right there at the end so I know now that this board is slightly hollowed by the length of this plane and by the thickness of one of these shavings that's how much it is hollow there fairly thin as you probably can't see that on camera but they're fairly thin then I'm gonna plane straight through take the end off and I want to get a full wet shaving and that's what I got here I got a plain and sane shaving here that looks just like the top edges of or it's kind of twisted but there's no holes or hollows or anything in it so I know this is straight and it's also flat all the way I could put winding stick on it but I was careful to hold the plane straight and not twisted and follow the board but make it straight and so now I've jointed the edge of this board if I were to put a square on here and check it to see if it was square which is fairly square but if it was out of square I could shift the plane over so the edge of the plane here was flush with the edge of the board and you can see the iron doesn't out that far so if I wanted to lower this edge I would just follow that along there like that and I can lower this edge by the thickness of one shaving if it was the other edge I shifted over this way I lower that edge the thickness of one shaving so I can lure either edge until I get it back to square for now the main thing we need to know is that if we plan out this Center and leave the ends alone it gives us a fairly straight line now we're gonna face plan this board which is what our little tutorial here is really about is cleaning off the face of this board so it's slack and I tried to find a board that had some cup and twist in it it was wide enough this one's actually a pretty nice piece of lumber and it's fairly flat but it does have a little crown in it and when you're working with a piece of wood with a crown in it you can either put the crown down which would be in the center it would be them if the two edges up or you can put it with the two edges down in the hump high I prefer to do it with the hump high because the edges of the board then support the board and I'll if I if it has a twist in it at all and this one has a slight twist I know if you can see that if there is a little rocking this way and not so much this way so I can just take a wedge and put under there and get rid of that Rocking so now it's laying flat and if I were to put a winding stick on here that's another thing we're going to use is these these are at winding sticks they're just two sticks that are straight and they're painted black on one side and white on the other and I could put that on here and I can see that there is a hump in this you can see how if I push down here it's raised up that much so there is a home and it's originates right about here and I want to check this for wine to make sure this board doesn't have any twists in it that's that's what trying to get rid of this twist any kind of warp any cup crown twist we want to get rid of so to start with I need a straight line across this end because this winding stick doesn't tell me anything right now because it's sitting on top of a curve so it just rocks back and forth like you put winding sticks on here but they wouldn't tell me anything what I need is to have a straight line across the end to get a straight line across the end I'm gonna stay away from these corners here no mark them dark you can see that and I want to plane this hump up my for plane because it takes the biggest shaving off and this is rough you're trying to get done you'll want to spend all day we moving little fine caving you want to get rid of these Peaks okay so now if I put my winding stick on here you'll see that by pushing down here it doesn't Rock any more I've created a straight line and I've not taken any wood off of these two corners you don't want to take any extra wood off if I lower this corner like the lower that whole board by that much material and I really don't want to do that okay I'm gonna turn this around I'm gonna do the same thing to this end I'm gonna leave that material on the corner and I'm gonna make a straight line across there and you may find if your board has a big hump in it that you have the plane back in this far even in order to lower the all this wood down so that you can get a clean shot across there you don't want to just angle the plane and try and get that in you want to keep it fairly flat my board being fairly flat I don't have too much trouble with that you can see now I've got this end straight and now I want to check the board for wind and the way we do that is we set up these winding sticks like this I'm gonna put the white up there and I'm gonna put the black there so I have a lot of contrast I'm gonna put my tri plane behind it here because it also then gives me some contrast and I'm gonna I'm gonna look across the end here and then see how much twisted in this board by looking across these sticks I can see that this black and contrast to this white stick and I can see if this is off if one corner is higher than another I can I can look at these and I can see how much that is and what I'm looking to see is is how much I need to take off and this here is the thickness of the shaving that I'm taking that I just made on my bench so when I look across this if I see that this end is low I can put one of these shavings under there and I can look and see if it's still if it's lining up better and if I can put an equal amount of shavings one shaving two shavings three shavings whatever it takes to get these sticks to be in line that will tell me how much I have to take off of that corner off the high spots in order to get the thing in law and whined okay we've moved our cameras here so we see across the winding sticks you can see the the black and then the white here on this one if I raise that up you can see it in the picture then you'll see that it levels out pretty evenly it appears to me like this side here here is a little low here's what it is with one shaving in there if I just put one shaving in there that raises that corner up and from what I saw it was probably two shavings off so here's another shaving and when you look across there now that should look like you're seeing just the same white line across the top here all the way across and that tells you that you're how much you need to remove to put this board in wind so now we're going to plane this off and and make it flat so that's what we'll do next but we know how much to lower those corners we'll check it for wind again which I won't show on camera but we'll just do it and then we'll flatten the board off so that gives you an idea of what looking at wine looks like we're just getting this ready here so that I have something to playing against planing against a stop here which is just a piece of plywood with a couple of slots in it I can raise and lower it at the end of the bench so it goes below or I can raise it up and use it as a planing stop it's a pretty simple operation okay we got everything back here we've sent back up here we know that our board is slightly out of wind and that we put shavings on this corner so this is a low corner the thing to keep in mind when you do this is there's not one low corner or one high corner there are always two and since these two would be our low corners these are our high corners here where I'm gonna make this circle okay and these are our low corners here I'll make a triangle there like that okay we don't want to lower these low corners we want to lower the high corners if you take some off of here you're gonna have to make entire board that much thinner so you only want to remove as much wood as you have to to get the board flat okay we know it was - shaving so if I take a shaving off of this corner and don't take one off of there and I'm going to take of shaving off of this corner and don't take one off of here we should be pretty well in wine so I'm gonna take my plane and I'm gonna clean off this corner I'm not gonna take any off of there and I'm gonna turn the board around because it's easier to flame on to the board I won't get any what's called spell Qing which is blow out on this backside and I'm gonna take it off of here like that so now we should be pretty much in wine with our ends so we know that two points in geometry make a straight line and we know a plane wants to make things straight so here's our two points we've created a straight line there and a straight line here and using our winding sticks we know that those points are these lines are parallel to each other and everything lying in between those two parallel lines creates a plane so if we can maintain that then we can make this board flat since we know that two points make a straight line we can plane through here and if we don't take these ends off we can lower this edge and make sure that you don't just plane the edge you're gonna have to work over here take some off there so you can take more off here so you can take some off yeah when you plane the edge you want to make sure you're using the center of the plane at the edge of the board so you're getting a full cut because this does make a scalloped e cut so we've got ourselves pretty straight here now we've created a straight line here now we're gonna turn the board around and we'll do it again and create a straight line here in this plane because it's camera does make a bit of a hollow here we're gonna end up with it slightly low across here but not too much okay now two points make a straight line so we have created a straight line so right now we've outlined the perimeter of a plane which is this area in here that we want to flap if we don't take anything off these lines and knowing that the plane won't cut lower than that we can plane across the middle of this board any direction any way we want until it quits cutting and we should be flat so we're just going to go across the board and typically I plane up to about there I don't want to plane off the end because I don't want to blow out this edge so I just plane up to it it's very easy when you're doing this to plane uphill and then kind of arc the plane you want to actually start here and plane straight lines and lower those straight lines as you go so if you've got a hump in this board like this you want to plane it off like that and then like that and like that you don't want to follow this home so that's what I'm doing is I'm starting here and I'm just cleaning up and then I can go further as I go another thing to be aware of is that your plane has a curve in the iron so when you plan if you're you you can see there's little gallops here you need to have flap your strokes so when I because otherwise you're just going to be riding on these high spots and you won't be able to remove the material so you have to clean up here and then move the plane over here's the edge of that stroke and lower that one otherwise you're only boring you won't flatten the board out you'll be riding on these ridges so you have to make sure that you're half laughing your stroke did you go this is the case even with a smooth point or a try a clean doesn't matter we're going square across the board it's a lot easier to clean that way then with this part plane you can see I've got some pretty big shavings I'm moving a lot of work quickly one of the things I forgot to mention earlier I'm going to use this as an excuse to take a breather yes the four plane is often referred to as a scrub plane this is a scrub plane you'll see it's that much shorter and that much narrower the shorter the plane is the more it will follow the board so the longer the plane is the flatter you can make it so it's harder to make a board flat with a scrub plane like this it's number forty than it is with the longer plane like this you could set up a number five something that actually how longer plane even on a four plane wouldn't hurt I like these transitionals they're inexpensive you don't care if it has a wide mouth you want the body to be fairly flat but it's not nearly as fussy as it would be setting up like a smooth plane you can see the plane is not cutting her in places because I've lowered it in some high spots I'm trying to be sure that I'm working all the way down to this head down here because I don't want to be not boring that because I'm gonna be guiding off coming back from the other side you can see them getting all the way back to here kind of flatten that out now I'll turn it around and I removed most of the wood that I need to take off no I'm just bringing this side up I'm on the mark just for your sake so you can see what's going on here most of this you can see without marking it with the crayon but it does help in the beginning you can see how really easy to rock the plane here so I'm trying to just knock this home fall first [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] hardly any shaving if you want you can go [Music] now I can check my board because my bench top should be fairly flat so I can check my board here and see that it's laying flat on the bench it's not rocking it's not giving me any any trouble so I have flattened it this is important that your bench should be flat so now I'm done with the triplane I'm going to go on do the donor before plane I'm sorry I'm gonna go on to the triplane now I'm using a longer plane the longer plane is gonna make it flatter and again I'm gonna have flap my strokes or thereabout I've tried it always playing off the edge so here you can get on one color this up so you can see what's going on and there's a little bit of tear up there so I'm gonna try planing from this in first I'm gonna start here and I'm gonna plane through you'll notice that I didn't get much of a shading here I got a little on each end and so the inclination would be to set your plane deeper but if you do that when you get to where you've knocked off all these humps you won't even be able to push the plane anymore because it's digging too deep so just set it so it takes a decent small shaving and plane all the way through you want a half lap here strokes so that you're always lowering the entire board I have taken care I set this plane up so it takes an equal shaving all the way across you can hear the plane is taking a little bit more each time it tends to be high on the perimeter in a little hollow in the middle because that shorter plane will make a bigger follow than this long you're taking them same amount off of both edges of the board and the middle very easy to clean more off of this edge that's closer to you make sure - I'm using half the plane here see on the edge cleaning off the edge if you follow the edge of the plane remember there's no iron [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you rub a little paraffin on your planes this is just paraffin canning wax makes them a little easier to push [Music] [Music] you'll see that board is very flat is slightly here tapping there for this corner it's lightly low so I could just lower these other corners if you were really fussy I don't think it's that much that should probably take care of it and that would be then we'd be done with the triplane because we really flattened it now this board is is very flat put a stick on it like this it's glad it doesn't have any rocks in it you flip it over on our bench it's flat nice and if this were like the inside of a case that would be plenty good you could even quit with the scrub plane if you're the for plane if you wanted to but otherwise you switch to the smoother the smoother takes a very fine shaving as you go here you're going progressively finer and finer with the thickness of the shaving so this sitting here is much thinner than this one you're trying to get these forward shavings as close as you can out of the mouth of the plane and the same thickness all the way across so now this was if I needed to smooth this I would take this little smoother and clean these off then again go and overlap your straws and make sure you chew the entire surface yeah I always liking it - yep someone's lost its seed in the airplane is flying around searching for him you don't want them to miss a spot because that might be where your lost soul is so we've been playing off the entire surface here and everything's pretty smooth except for this one corner here is the got a little tear out I'm gonna clean it from this other way then grain reverses right in here so I can clean that up and I've got a nice smooth board now to do the other side I'm gonna flip it over and if not like we have an opposite situation before we had a crown up like this sitting on our bench and now we've got this sitting on our bed so we're gonna lower these corners off until we get to the middle so the middle here is the lowest spot now we're working with a low spot there and we want to lower these corners down this is going to be pretty straight this board is fairly straight so I'm gonna I would do the same techniques that I used on the other side lower these corners and get this straight across so I want to make sure that I lowering this outside here [Music] I don't want to blow out the in so I'm gonna this you have to straight surfaces again check for wine and here again remember this is going to be hollow in the middle so you have to get through to the bottom here I check for wine and then plane straight through we move the edge out into the middle and it should be a flattened board so I hope that made sense eeeh it's not a too difficult of a process in the beginning it's a little bit confusing but if you keep it simple outline the perimeter like we did and plane out the center you'll find that the board comes up flat pretty successfully if you want you can take a gauge engage around the outside of the board so it's the same thickness I don't typically do that usually the lumber is close enough and in handwork you can you don't have to worry about it being exactly the same thickness as if you had run it through a power planer if you have a power planer this is a good way to use just the four plane you can joint off the face of a 12 inch board and then run it to your power planer and then you have a flatter board without using a jointer because a 12 inch jointer can be kind of expensive but you can use a hand plane get the board flat enough to run through the planer flip it and run it to the other way and then you've got a nice flat board so there are it has useful it's useful with power tools as well as just with hand tools so that's about it thanks for watching this has been Mike Simpson Mike seems in school of woodworking if you're interested in more I do have another video on workholding here on YouTube and I also have a video at lost art press called the naked woodworker which is getting started in working with nothing so that would might be useful to you too if you're just getting started thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Mike Siemsen

Views: 195,109

Keywords: Hand tools, hand planes, woodworking, Mike Siemsen, planing

Id: oEdgF8NDsB0

Length: 36min 8sec (2168 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2018