Hand Plane Basics - Common Planing Errors

hi I'm Rob Goss and welcome to my shop I teach a lot of hand planing so this video is called hand playing basics fixing common mistakes this is what I typically see my students do I'm gonna show you how to correct it stay tuned this will help your hand planes I'm Rob gozman and welcome to my shop so first mistake is what I would call the mechanics of planing and I find students have a tendency to stand rather stiff legged and they're pushing with their arms only now problem of that is you're not gonna last real long you're using the smaller muscle in your body as opposed to using your legs and your upper body for some momentum so what I tell them to do is this position is if you're heading in the feeder in the same direction that you're planing and most of the work is gonna come from my right leg which being right-handed so the butt plane does not move much in relation to my upper body and it's just a slight rocking forward and back you do it like this it's a lot more comfortable you'll last longer now if the board is really long then I will introduce a little bit of our movement back here carry through and carry and push forward a little farther with my arms but what I might call the core movement which for the most part will cover about two feet so the average person is done primarily with your legs just try practicing not allowing this elbow on your right arm to go past your side and position yourself in the same direction get a little bit of bend in the knee and open your legs up your feet or thread apart so you're a little more stable and don't forget your wax to reduces that friction and makes it so much easier to push the plane through the wood Hey next one again has to do with the mechanics and that is where's the weight placed throughout the stroke well you have to start with your blade behind the the trailing edge of the board so that means most of the weight is going to be off of the board so this forward hand with my on the tote and I tend to just let the top of that knob sit right here in the base of my palm most of the weight is going to be like this pushing that plane to keep it flat on the board my rear hand this is just going to fit in the web but between my thumb and my forefinger and if anything I'm supporting the weight a little bit but other than that I'm just simply pushing forward so and and of course the the first problem everyone encounters is when the blade initially meets the wood there's a bit of resistance and as they meet that resistance they add a little extra force anytime you add force you cut down control and they have a tendency to meet the resistance push harder jump the plane comes as the blade comes up out of the wood and then settles back down and you end up with a section here that hasn't been planed now you're introducing a taper so of course what I failed to mention is a sharp blade is so critical to all this but we'll cover that shortly so hand here lots of weight keeping the plane from dipping rear hand supporting it a little bit and simply pushing forward as soon as you feel the blade engage the wood tighten everything up and just power your way into it now you get at about this point then you no longer have to worry about tipping the plane and now I'm going to push kind of in a 45 direction with my left hand and my right hand as I move through the board so you're just it's all about balance and the force right down through the middle of the blade of the plane sorry as you get toward the end then this hand is going to want to back off so it doesn't cause the plane to tip forward so this hand is going to go from pushing 45 to maybe pushing straight out this rear hand has to do a little bit of squatting to prevent that sudden release of force that occurs which just as a board over the blade to meets the end of the board and keep it in control so that you end up stopping on the same plane that you've been planing pardon the pun so when I get right here I want to end like that now put it all together for us here both like this ease off here bear down here and right there and if you think about it at first and practice it it won't take long before that just becomes a natural process a third mistake or problem that people encounter is that often when they first are attempting learning how to plane a wide surface they have a tendency as I mentioned to have a little bit of chatter at the front now this comes from perhaps not properly dispensing pressure at the front hand straight down and maybe applying a little too much downward pressure without knowing it on the back whatever the end result is often a bit of chatter so the plane hits the wood you push a little harder you get a little bit of a bump going on and next thing you know you've got some lines across here well if you continue to try to plane them away in the same direction your plane seems to want to just travel and make them worse so what I do if you have that situation is either skew the other direction or go straight where you were on an angle something and purposely just kind of cut underneath them to hopefully eliminate them with that next pass and then you can resume a slight skew with the plane so that you cover a wider surface as you're reducing or cleaning up that face okay I'm calling this number four but I really should have called it number one and that is grain direction sharpen your blade you put it in the plane set your board in the vise and then you decide oh did I get it right well there's a few visual clues and one tactile one sometimes you can look at the edge of the board and you can see that the grain is running one way or the other now I did it with a marker on here that if you look really close you can kind of follow how the grain is running uphill in this direction and you want a plane in that direction if you think about patting a cat seems to be the example everybody identifies with you start at the head of and you go down towards the tail and the fibers the hair lays like this and you just follow it so if you're planing and the grain is running like this as the knife or the blade comes along and cuts this one it's fully supported by this one if you do it in the opposite direction the tendency is at the fiber or the blade catches this fiber separates it from the one behind it or in front of it and at some point builds up enough pressure snaps been here and you have a rough surface so visually sometimes you can rely on that on some woods not so much this piece of pine but in some wood you can actually in fact I've got a piece of red oak and you can run your hand and you can tell which direction is smoother now when I run my hand this way I can feel I'm rough hands but I can feel it catching on those open pores I go that way and they don't feel that at all nice and smooth so I know and I would trust that more than looking that I should be planing in that direction now none of the mark you can't figure it out then the idea is start with your blade fully retracted nice sharp blade of course start planing and while I'm planing I'm using my fingers on my right hand to slowly advance the blade watch the see when it first starts to engage the wood so idea here is you're not making a huge error if going in the wrong direction not gonna have some massive tear but you'll be able to tell it should be nice and smooth if you're feeling a lot of resistance assuming your blade is sharp and you may be going the wrong way it only takes a second to flip it around and try it probably if I was to say what is the number one problem in planning wide panels it would be plane tracks what are they you run your hand across the board and you can feel these definite marks where the blade has overlapped subsequent passes and it has two solutions one is making sure that the blade is set properly in the plane so it's actually parallel to the sole and the other is the way that you address the corners or the way I do it anyway address the corners of the blade by feathering them slightly now if you need help on that we covered all that in our sharpening you check out the video here and that will walk you through all that process so right now or just want to check the position of the blade I'm gonna start planing and while I'm doing that I'm gonna start spinning that adjusting knob with my right hand and I want to watch and see where the first bit of shaving comes out it's assuming I've got somewhat of a flat surface to work on okay it seems to be favoring the right side now that's not much of a shaving however there's nothing over here so I'm gonna make a slight adjustment a little bit more it doesn't take a lot by the way you need to make sure that you have enough pressure on this screw so that you'll hold whatever it is that you're adjusting and wants too much pressure but you want enough that this won't move accidentally but not so much that you can't make adjustments here now in doing that sometimes it'll actually make the blade to advance a little bit so I'm going to retract it and start that again okay I'm advancing still getting shavings quite definitely too much more on the right than the left so a slight movement that's better but maybe just ever so slightly more okay now I'm gonna take a heavier cut so I'm going to advance the blade a little bit even more so this is what I'm gonna work with until I get the surface the way I want and that's coming off at about a thousandth of an inch make sure you cover the whole surface side to side do that again now I want it to be fairly even and I'd like to see this so I overlap the pass I already made and you'll notice how this side is a very definite sharp edge look at this side just feathers off to nothing so by addressing that edge on the stone like I showed you in the video on sharpening that means that as the blade slightly disappears on the left side it blends into the previous pass without leaving a track now you pay attention to what I'm doing one pass two three four okay surface is nice and clean you can still feel some very light tracks so now I'm gonna pull the blade in and in doing that that should allow me to go and eliminate any evidence of plane tracks that's better not not complete but better little wax for reducing friction for reducing friction now you see I'm not getting no defined edge on either side okay much better so when we're doing this the way we hold our plane is going to play a big role in how flat we're able to get that side to side if you plane straight on like this with each pass you really don't have a whole lot to reference one pass that to the rest of the board what I mean is this in making this pass I'm referencing that much of the surface so I could be tipping a little bit to my left I could be bringing a corner down low no no real reference helping me if I skew my plane hold it like this now every pass if I'm my weight is distributed properly I'm able to read the entire surface of the board almost with every pass so that's gonna go a long way in helping me from one pass to the next keep me from getting too low on one side of the other now you've got to make sure that you shift your weight properly everything is pushing down here nothing here except going forward both hands are pushing down get toward the end back off on this one bear down more on the back one and on the third and fourth passes I want to be careful here because I don't want to be leaning outside the edge of the board causing me to take more off of the edge than inside so this hand has to compensate but if you do that and keep checking every few passes drag your plane alone there and see how you're doing matter what you do if you just continue to play them without any thought for what's going on you will end up with a board that has a hump in the middle and you can verify that by just putting your plane on there and spinning it like that now if it were flat it wouldn't do that but the fact that it pivots in the middle means obviously it's higher here than it is on either side and the only way to deal with that I'm using a dry erase marker because it doesn't penetrate deeply draw a bunch of lines down here just so you can kind of follow what you're doing so we have to do the opposite and then plane to eliminate what we did and hopefully we stopped at the point before when you go from having a hollow in the middle to having a bump so what I mean is this I've already flattened my board at least side-to-side it's nice and smooth now I've got a curry take care of this bump so I'm gonna start right about here and I've got to make sure I take the same amount off so that I maintain that nice flat surface side to side so I'm gonna take a puff pass out of the middle step over overlapping each time alright so I removed this middle section now I'm gonna come back a little bit further I'm gonna advance the blade a little bit you always want to be lifting the plane off while in a forward motion if you don't here's what happens then you got to go in there and scrape off I call that a skin tag and that's a bit of a pain you can avoid it by simply lifting the plane and a forward while I'm still moving forward okay now let's check this okay doesn't pivot in the middle anymore I'm gonna keep on doing that come back a little farther go a little farther head each time overlapping okay now you can see what you've done you've got your marks let's check that it's sitting nice and flat and I don't see any light check it again and then I would eventually I'd actually I might actually go one more time go from here to here check it if it's okay on my final pass I would go in and cover side to side and end and then check it and make sure that we stayed flat side to side and that we no longer have that bump by the way if you really want to check it accurately take the weight off and check and if it's there's no light and it's not pivoting now you've got a flat board hope this helped if you pay attention to all this you'll be a whole lot better with your planning but don't forget the number one solution to better hand planning is having a blade that is properly sharpened check that video we did in sharpening and make sure you're up to snuff on that part good luck see in the shop again soon hi if you like my work if you like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level and I've always said better tools make it a whole lot easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you all of our tools and also talk to you about our online and in-person workshops good luck in your wood work

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 60,834

Rating: 4.9665833 out of 5

Keywords: hand plane basics, Hand plane basics common mistakes, hand plane basics problems, hand plane issues, hand plane problems, hand plane solutions, how to hand plane, how to hand plane a board, how to hand plane rough lumber, how to hand plane wood, plane, hand planer, jack plane, handplanes, Rob Cosman, wood, woodworker, woodworking

Id: k5g3ceM1d6M

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020