Getting Wood/Lumber Dead Flat with a Hand Plane

what's happening guys long time no see uh we are going to flatten a board today with winding sticks and a couple hand planes one of the problems with woodworking in the beginning is that the tools you have access to are usually not big electric tools so a lot of times you have to learn the hardest part of woodworking which is hand tools when you get started and then as you grow your skills and you get more tools you end up getting tools that make those things a lot easier so nothing makes you appreciate a big nice planer or jointer like knowing how to do this stuff with hand plane so i want to walk you through that we're going to use winding sticks to flatten this white oak today now here's a little secret about winding sticks is there are some beautiful winding sticks out there i've seen guys like paul sellers or rob cosman make some gorgeous ones and that is awesome however the problem with hardwoods is they like to move over time and expand and contract and so you want to do things that are stable and so when i do winding sticks i make them all the time when i need to flatten things or flatten slabs and i'll make different lengths or uh different heights i guess height doesn't really matter but it doesn't matter you want to use something very stable so i like to use plywood so i'm going to show you the way to make the easiest cheapest winding sticks on the planet now a whining stick all that a winding stick is it's two boards of exact same size that have a center mark and that helps you just align it on the board and then on one of the winding sticks it's going to have some color in the top corners and that's going to help when you look down the board you'll be able to it'll accentuate the twist and allow you to see where you have any problem areas so i've already cut these boards to the same width i haven't cut them to length yet because i'm going to show you a really cheap and easy way to make winding sticks so i've put some blue tape on one of them and i'm just going to label my centers with something easy to see i'm just using a marker for the video so you can see it i would normally probably use a pencil just kind of a thick pencil or something like that the center marks aren't crazy crucial because it's sort of for just eyeballing the center so that you know your winding sticks are pretty well lined up so you don't have to get too crazy with center there if you want to make nice ones it it's a great exercise in shop jigs so i would look up how to make those if you want to make some nice cool ones but this is just how i get the job done now i've labeled my center i have tape on one of them i'm just going to take a marking gauge here the thing about a whining stick is the only thing that matters is the very top edge so you don't need to go too crazy with this these two boards that i have they already i know they have a flat edge on them and they are the exact same width so i'm just going to take my marking gauge from the flat side we're just going to cut our tape on this side do the same thing over here again only the top edge matters so it's not that big a deal and then i'm gonna take a marking knife and measure in about let's call it two inches from the edge which i already know is square just like that and then all you have to do is just peel that tape off then i just take a bright colored spray paint boom just like that i'm going to let that dry and then we're just going to use using this edge because we know it's flat we're going to trim this off and make sure you trim your other winding sticks so they're the exact same height and that's going to give us a super clean nice red line to see when we look down our board and it's also going to make sure if you cut them to width first or to height first and then you spray your spray paint if you get some on the top that can throw off your measurement so let me cut these down i'll let this dry and i'm going to show you how to flatten this board so with winding sticks you could get this done with like a smaller number four plane obviously the longer you're playing uh the better it is but you can get it done with the number four no problem i'm going to be using a jack plane if this was a highly figured wood i'd want to be using a regular or high angle plane but because this is white oak i'm going to just use my jack because it's the longest one that i have that is very sharp right now if you want to set yourself up for success on this your plane has to be really sharp you want a sharp plane one thing that i like to do is i have a slow speed grinder with a buffing wheel in my shop and i'll just every 10 minutes or so i'll go hit it on the buffer it's sort of like power stopping and it makes your job a lot easier also some wax on the bottom of your plane really sets you up for success the less friction the better ladies and gentlemen keep your minds out of the gutter oh it's nice to be back baby all right so first thing we want to do is check and see if the board is concave or convex you do not want concave because what happens is then your winding sticks can lean and change and so you want to make sure you take any hump out of the middle first you want to stay away from the edges if there's a hump in the middle uh and one easy way to do that if you don't want to just get into winding sticks right now is you can take your plane now i can tell that this board has a very low edge over here so we're going to need to bring down the middle to our lowest point and it looks like we are concave which is not good for winding sticks so we're not going to get much benefit from our winding sticks until we take that out so i'm going to take the middle out checking along the way as you do this you want to remember the geometry of a plane is such that it doesn't cut on the sides of the blade so what that means is if you go in the same area hence down the middle if there's a concave uh you want to go until it stops taking material because that means the sides are now perched on the edge of that trough you've been cutting and that's going to allow you to take out the concave so we're going to start in the middle and then work our way out until we are nice and flat all the way across and then we're going to start worrying about corners and that's when we're going to be able to use our winding sticks [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right so we've got out the concave it's now pretty flat even a little convex in the corner i did that by going across the board that just worked a lot better checking that i wasn't creating a huge hump in the middle we're now going to go to our winding sticks and with winding sticks you do across the board first because that's going to give you a high and a low corner and then we're going to check the length of the board after we get all the corners flat and i cut a nut off here uh i kept hitting it with the plane and it was like dulling it instantly so in the interest of not having to sharpen a thousand times to do a demo video of a board i cut it off uh there's another knot here this is like at least an eighth inch low i don't think we're going to get to that corner so we're going to sort of check it just past the knot so what you do is you put your winding stick in the middle the one with the red or the markers on it in the back and then you're going to take it and you just look down the board and you lower your eyes until the red disappears and just like if you've seen any of my hand playing setup videos the way you check the when the blade is square coming out at the same time you'll lower your eyes and just check and see which side of the red disappears first so i've reversed the whiny stick so you can't see the red it's facing me but i want to show you how i look at it so i lower my eyes until the red disappears and this corner is disappearing last on me so i know we have two high corners this corner and this corner because i showed you the shot where you could see the red in the last one so i'm going to show you how we get rid of those so we've got a high corner here and a high corner here uh and how do you get rid of those without you know obviously we don't want to change the geometry too much so what we're going to do is we're going to start by going across this way these are going to be our first passes and then we're going to go on the outsides of those just like this and go on the outsides of those and then we're going to check and then we're going to go back the other way and do this and that's going to keep our center high but you want to kind of pull off as you get to the corner so maybe don't start in the middle and what happens here and the reason you check the length last is as you're getting the corners to the same height you may change the geometry in the middle and once we have all our corners the same height the way that a hand plane works is because of the length of it and and uh the way it takes off material taking down the middle is going to be our last in our order of operations so we're going to cross across the board focusing going this way but for every two we go this way we're going to go one this way and we're going to continue to check with our winding sticks your plane is a great intermediary uh kind of in between so let's get going on taking those down and you'll be able to see me remove the marker so you can kind of see the the areas that i'm doing first [Music] so uh i think i just realized i've been saying convex and concave backwards but uh we've got it so all the corners are the same height uh and there's a little bit of a concave in the middle and that's a good thing that's kind of what you want to have happen because now we're going to go with the grain and take down the sides first and work our way to the middle and that should give us a pretty flat board across and then we need to check the long waves but we're almost there and what's great is this is going to be our reference surface for everything else you do so when you square your edges when you square your ends this is going to be our reference face so we're going to go ahead and do the edges working our way to the middle and that should give us a pretty flat board across and then we'll check the long way all right so now i'm just taking my whining stick here you can do this with the edge of your plane although planes i mean they're ground straight and square if you get a good one but like i don't know you get little nicks in them and it can trick you so a freshly cut piece of plywood just running the corner there pretty much no light i got a couple spots i hit something right here but other than that we are pretty good it's time to check the other way uh if you this is a good time to break out your smaller plane uh hopefully it's still very sharp and that way you can knock down any kind of problem areas but we're going to check it the other way now so we're going to check the long way and you could do this with wider whining sticks but these will give you the gist mine are maybe a little bit short i should have planned ahead a little bit more but that's okay it's going to work for our purposes so we're going to check it this way and both red sides are disappearing at the same time which is great i do want to there's like a little bit of a plane track here in the middle so i'm going to hit the middle just a couple times and i'm not taking much of a shaving here you can hear that it's just hitting a couple high spots there and there we go and man that is i mean that's like finish ready yeah that is pretty incredible uh just give it one last check here yeah see look here's the difference between the plane and a whining stick so my whining stick i can see almost no light through but my plane i can see a lot more through so your planes are good to start but make sure you check it with something nice and straight and clean and then last but not least i'm just going to check it corner to corner to make sure we don't have any twist left now this is a little bit more difficult you kind of want to look at it from the side and make sure your boards are pointing the same way so you don't trick yourself into something yeah we are looking good so winding stakes make this a lot easier you can make really fancy ones i really like the ones rob cosman has paul sellers has some good ones uh but they don't have to be fancy just a couple pieces of plywood this is sort of one of those things that is a rite of passage as a woodworker of course if you're a hand tool only guy this is how you you live on a daily basis guys like james wright would buy right he's phenomenal just hand tool only rex krueger uh great guy if you're trying to get into this but it's something that takes some practice and a lot of upper body strength stamina not strength it's not like it's hard to push a plane but a little wax and making sure that it is really really sharp makes a big deal i think there was one thing i didn't really show well that i wanted to reiterate but as if so if this is our board long ways and you get a hump in the middle uh the weight you want to work it in sections so you got your middle where your hump is and you want to do some passes there and then work your way out uh and that's going to continue to take the hump down but it's not going to create a big concave which i was think i was saying wrong the whole first part of the video and then you work your way out and do some more passes and that's how you're going to get rid of that hump and that sort of applies to a lot of things like you saw when i was doing the criss-crosses to take down the corners you don't want to just take down the corners you want to take down the corners more but you also want to take down the whole board because you don't want to now have two low corners so uh you work your way slowly and methodically away from the areas that you're working on so you start with those areas and then work your way out and you should get pretty good results uh one other thing i always love to say because it causes uh so much discussion is you set your hand planes down blade side down you do it slowly the way i do it is i set the tip down first nice and easy and then let it down slowly the reason is one a2 tool steel is way stronger than any piece of wood i'm going to set it on stronger than my workbench so that's not going to dull it when you set it down on your side what happens is you can knock it out of alignment this stuff is really held in it's like the perfect storm of design because it's sort of a friction fit and but it's also designed to be loose enough that you can use the levers to adjust it any japanese plane the way you adjust the blade is you use a mallet by tapping aside and it takes very little tapping do yourself a favor even with your western planes turn it upside down watch the blade and just lightly tap the side with like a copper mallet you'll see that blade moves so that's why you always set it down like this and i know that paul sellers agrees with me matt essley agrees with me and a lot of other really good woodworkers so even if you don't need to do this for a project it is a great exercise in using your hand planes and knowing when they get duller when you're doing a lot of hand planing on the face of a board you see when it gets dull and when you need to get sharpened you saw me buff mine that is a great way to do it or keep a strop by your bench and just keep stropping it as long as you don't let it get super dull your time in between full sharpenings is a lot longer so it's it's a great way to keep your plane skills up and work on that so thanks for watching uh we're going to be building some marking gauges from scratch next which are super exciting if you want a support channel head over the store get a cat's moses apron a dovetail dig or dovetail jig whoops or a stop block i'm out of practice guys stay safe in the shop have a wonderful day

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 340,865

Keywords: woodworking, flatten a board by hand, hand planes, scrub plane, jointer, hand tool woodworking, flatten, flatten wood, joint a face, jack plane, smoothing plane, jointer plane, fine woodworking, handplane, how to flatten a board by hand, by hand, milling wood, hardwood, tools, wood, hand tools, how to, hand plane, do it yourself, woodwork, flattening, how to flatten a board without a planer, milling, carpentry, limited tools

Id: UTPvcXVzb9A

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020