Hand Planing Wood - Flat, Smooth, and Polished (2020)

hi I'm Rob Koz and welcome to my shop hand-painting wood in this video I'm gonna show you how to flatten smooth and leave finished the face of a board it's incredible what you can do with a hand plane you'll never use sandpaper again stay tuned I'm Rob gozman and welcome to my shop I'm gonna take a second to sell you on the concept of hand planing a surface to a finish I took a piece of cherry because I think better than any other wood it shows example of why planing is superior to sanding so this is a surface that has been planed and I might add it takes mere seconds there's no dust to deal with and when you're done dimensioning you're also done and ready for a finish not only that but it keeps it nice and flat edges nice and crisp now the same board that has been sanded and you instantly see a dulling in the color I always tell people it said it's like taking a piece of wood and putting a piece of frosted glass over it not only does feel smooth to the touch but if you look at that surface under magnification it's a bunch of little scratches with little hairs as a result it takes a lot longer and you have to deal with the dust not to mention the expense of sandpaper but then again I suppose you could argue you get the expense of expense of sharpening stones as well however they do last a long time now I'm going to embark on work under the assumption that you already know how to sharpen and have a good properly sharpened plane if you need help with that check in the video I posted here and that'll teach you the principles of teach of sharpening that takes literally less than a minute now if you're new to woodworking or you have limited tools then you may want to consider buying your wood at a big-box store where they sell it in a condition called s4s or surfaced on four sides I've got into some examples in front of me this is a piece of maple it's a piece of cherry a piece of ash piece of walnut and while all of these can be processed with a hand plane I'm gonna suggest you start with something like pine don't beat yourself up allow yourself the opportunity to develop the technique before you have to develop the muscle to deal with these more dense difficult woods I say difficult it really isn't but Pyne is so much easier to play if you don't have a power jointer and a thickness planer I'm gonna suggest you're probably better off buying that fs4 s at the big-box store it's just gonna save a whole lot of work but even though you buy it already surfaced you still have to prepare it we want to get rid of the mil marks caused by the thickness planer we've got to take it down to the proper width proper length and get it ready for the final finish and that's something we can do with the hand plane so before this is over I'm going to show you how to get that board perfectly smooth okay first thing we got to do is get this held securely in the bench so I assume you have some kind of a bench and some kind of a bench dog to hold it but as I'm about to put this in place you're going to notice something this is not sitting flat now wiggle side to side if I clamp that in place in the process of planing this is going to this is gonna flex under the weight of my plane and bounce right back up which means I'll never get this board flat as a result so the first thing I have to do is figure out where the high points underneath and this is the downside to buying lumber that has already been surfaced and as close to the final thickness that you want as it sits there in that big box store moves around it's going to absorb moisture and it's gonna go out of flap chance of getting it perfectly flat from the store slim to none so our first task is how do we get rid of this well I'm gonna set it on a reference surface this is my bench and this is my reference surface so it needs to be flat and as I wiggle that corner to corner obviously that means that there's a pivot point somewhere other than here and other than here and as I do that and I'm watching to see where it moves it looks like right underneath here I'll mark it up on top right underneath here is high and if you look real close right here you'll notice that it's not actually pivoting there it's moved back a little bit so it's somewhere right underneath here now I'm gonna suggest that you just have tackled these one at a time and just address it a little each time so you don't make the problem even worse now you can if you want to clamp that in but I'm gonna because I'm gonna have to flip this back and forth several times I'm just gonna work up against the best bench dog so I'm gonna turn this over and I'm just gonna take this corner off assuming that's the high spot I'll hold the board with one hand up against the dog and using the hand plane with my other hand I've got a set for a fairly fine setting let's flip that over and check it make sure there's no debris on there you don't want to little chip a wood causing the problem that you're trying to rectify ok still moves now before I jump over here and I don't want to take it all off of one spot because then that's going to make this end of the board really thin but before I leave this I'm going to see if I can't make it a little bit better so I'm looking carefully to kind of notice where it is I'm gonna take a little heavier shavings I just brought the blade out a little bit more get yourself some some magic plain wax the reason is it just makes it so that your effort is spent pushing the blade through the wood instead of pushing the plane over the wood so I don't know if you can see the area that I'm dealing with but here's where I've planed and I'm just gonna try to bring that a little bit to the left and a little closer to me just to blend it in I'm not getting much off of there so brought my blade out a little bit more all right let's try that remember clear the debris no I still got a big ok we're right back on this corner but I've already worked that a fair bit so I'm gonna come up here now you'll notice if I wiggle this it's no longer up here it's right underneath here this you go through this a few times and you'll be a lot more attentive when you're buying your lumber you see something that's really twisted I say leave it there because it's probably gonna continue to move I don't want to leave any shavings on there sure the area is clean hey we moved the pivot point back here oh wait a minute now I flip that around let's get this keep it oriented the same way okay right underneath the X make sure you keep that bench dog low enough to time hit it still up here [Applause] [Music] okay it's a lot closer but I can we can make it even better but the the smaller the error error is the harder it is to diagnose but as I wiggle this I can still see that I'm right underneath here somewhere I'm also gonna pull my blade back in because I don't want to make the problem worse and a very light problem requires a very light solution I was still heavier than I wanted okay that's much closer I'm gonna come back over here and I'm into a light pass pull the blade in try that okay oh wait a minute now I push hard enough I can still get that to move so it's right up here if you look it's hard to spot but what you want to do is look all along this edge and what I'm doing is I'm pushing here then I'm pushing here and you want to try to locate that pivot point and it looks to be right underneath here pull the blade in so I'm taking a lighter pass I think I actually saw the problem it was worthy yet LastPass started and it left a little bump okay so there's no movement at all this corner to this corner there's still just a little bit you know what I want to decide is which is worse hi spot over here the high spot over here and I think it's the one over here that's going to be easier to deal with I'm not getting anything a little more blade and the problem is resisting the temptation to take ten shavings when you should have only taken three okay no no sooner said it another password down it's really close all right now I can deal with that all right now we're ready to go in and make this surface perfectly smooth I'm going to show you three planes we're gonna try to talk about which is the best plane for this job so what I have in front of me on my right is a four and a half this is called a smoother I'll actually tell you the lengths of them while we're taught discussing this so this one is ten inches long this is a jack plane this is fourteen and three-quarter inches long and this is a jointer and this one is 22 inches long this one is out not if we want to flatten problem is that if you use the smoother it has a tendency to ride the bumps the hills and the valleys leaving it smooth but that's not necessarily flat you could use a jointer but I've got my jack which is my favorite and based on the length of the board this one will do it but certainly this is not being ruled out I just choose maybe because of the weight this is a little easier to handle so this is designed this is called the rear Handler tote and it's actually a three finger grip so I put my index finger you can put note here I keep it underneath here just so I don't bang into something and smack my finger if you try to put four on there it squeezes your pinky and I've actually gone in and I modify my rear tote so that I can take this down and it doesn't put so much pressure on your pinky finger when you're planing a wide board you're gonna need to keep your hand up here on that front nob I don't grab it like that I usually just have it underneath my palm and I don't can't tell you why just personal preference actually before we actually just are doing this let's talk a little bit about setting this up now if you want help more detailed help about getting your plane set up to get it ready to plane check out this video and that'll walk you through it what I'm going to do I've already sharpened the blade I'm gonna use my ladder up my just a knob to bring the blade out now at this point and I'm wiping the dust off the sole and you only wipe one way by the way I can see all of the blade and it looks to be parallel to the sole now this is critical because I don't want to be taking off more on the right or left side I wanted to be a uniform width and uniform thickness shaving side to side this actually looks pretty good so I'm gonna leave it as it is but I'm gonna retract the blade I'm gonna spin the adjusting knob in a counterclockwise rotation and pull the blade all the way in the reason is I don't want to start planning with the blade out more than I might think it is what will happen is I may end up digging into this more and then you've got some real issues now just before I start I'm gonna put another coat of wax on there just to reduce that friction alright I want to get this flat I don't want to get it smooth if I plane like this meaning keeping the blade parallel to the edges then I really am NOT referencing off the rest of the board and I could end up leaving the board with a hump or a hollow if I hold my plan on a bit of an angle now the plane is actually reading the full width of the board with each pass and this is gonna go a long way in helping you get this nice and flat when you first start meaning before you actually engage the wood you've got to start with the blade behind the end of the board so you're starting using the front part of the plane that requires a lot of force here to keep that plane from drooping and all my right hand is doing is really just supporting the weight of the plane and pushing forward I'm not doing anything else no downward pressure at this point I want my first pass it's easier to do this with a pencil my first pass is going to be right here I always want part of the blade hanging over the edge to make sure that I go right to the edge and don't leave a little bit on here the next pass will go right about here so this will be number one number two will overlap a little bit of the first pass so we don't have a bump left there or a Mar up a section unplaned number three is going to be right here same idea overlap a little bit of the previous and number four overlapping part of the third and a little bit of the blade hanging over the edge again to make sure we don't leave a strip unplaned and the first task is to go in there and just get rid of all of the rough exterior know that name may not seem rough but if you were to put a finish on there you would see all of these ripple marks that the rotary action of the planer has left there's actually a big scratch right there too a big dent I'm gonna have to get rid of now I do this is mostly a leg exercise I don't use my arms well shouldn't say I don't use them but most of the work is gonna be done with my actually my right leg so all the weight is right here I engage the wood now I haven't got my blade out yet so as I'm planing I'm gonna start spinning my adjusting knob and what I want to discover and this is the best way to do it is my blade parallel to the sole move it a little bit more each time I'm bringing the blade out a little bit more okay that looks to be a bit right so now we'll go back to this technique we talked about all the weight right here edge of the blade hanging over the left side of the board step over now as you can hear I'm skipping along because the thickness planer often leaves what we call snipe but there's actually marks all here where it hasn't left a perfectly flat surface third pass overlapping the second and fourth pass overlapping third and eventually we'll be actually taking the edge taking the surface right to the edge all right so I only if you could see that in the light it's kind of hit and miss which just means this is not perfectly flat in fact we can hold our plane like this and looking underneath using this as a straight edge we can see that we've got a bump in the middle and that bump in the middle goes pretty much all the way down so I'm gonna address this a little bit differently I'm gonna go straight from one end to the other I'm gonna do it again I'm gonna keep doing it until I no longer pick up any wood and I'll explain this to you okay I'm not getting any wood so there's a bit of a hump in the board if you look at your plane upside down the blade only goes from here to here so by taking off the hump I'm eventually going to bottom out on these two surfaces and the blade no longer cuts now what that requires me to do is to step a little bit to left or right I'm gonna go to my right take a pass take another one now I'm going to go to the left side of that first pass down the middle I'm going to come back and take another one in the middle step off to the right step off to the left of that initial pass now let's check this again still have a bump so we haven't taken care of all of it yet a little more wax by the way I picked a piece of pine that has a lot of pitch in if you see these dark orange colored patches that are actually sticky and that's just one of the things you have to deal with when it comes to pine that'll end up building up on the soil you're playing you can take it off with some mineral spirits right down the middle do it until I no longer get wood I always pull the shaving out at the end of each stroke now I went just to the right then I'm gonna go to the left of that Center cut I'm gonna go down the middle again because the situation was fairly severe off to the right to the left of that Center pass let's check it again much better got a little bit more of a bump here than we know how it's almost all gone here but up here we do so I'm gonna start right about here in the middle and just do the same thing but not going the entire length now I'll come back a little bit further all right now let's have a quick look at that this will give you a rough idea and help help you keep from making a real mess what happens sometimes is if you don't do that you get it smooth but it's all that a lot of twists now I've got a situation where this half seems to be pretty good and this half still has a bump in it so I'm going to come back here middle to the right way over to the right actually blade went right off the edge to the left all the way to the left now if I put some lines on here that'll help us tell the story keep your wax handy all right let's see what's happening so that came off almost end-to-end to the left to the right back down the middle okay so based on what we were doing with flaps side to side until we get down here so there's an area right here that's not being touched so what that really tells us is this is low and along here is low so we can't do anything about the low spots all but we don't want to do is make the low spots even lower so we need to bring the high area down to that point in order to get this board truly flat I'm gonna bring a little more blade and do it play so advanced it slightly and I'm gonna go to the left of that Center cut back to the middle switching back and forth going from middle to the left middle to the right now you'll notice that I just pull the shaving out at the end of each pass and I do that for a reason some folks will lift that plane up after every pass there's a couple of reasons why I don't do that number one it's heavy number two if you're not careful setting it down you mate you may knock the blade out of alignment so the main reason that I pull the shaving out is if you don't when you bring it back like this sometimes a shaving gets pulled back underneath then you've got to stop and scrape it off the bottom so I find it easier to simply remove it at the end of the stroke throw it off to the side okay let's let's read this one more time flat pretty good pretty good pretty good now we've we've moved their problem to right here this is actually showing a little bit low too so we're nice and flat along here and we're still dealing with some low corners so all we can do to get this right is however low that is that amount has to come off all of this area so I'm gonna go back to what we were first talking about I'm gonna make my first pass where part of the blade is gonna be hanging over the left but when it gets down here if I allow the plane to ride down that low spot I'm just gonna make this problem worse so I'll show you what I do when I get there at this point I'm gonna really bear down I'm with my rear hand and ease up on the ease up on my forward hand so that I allow my plane to read this instead of reading that second pass I don't need to worry about it third pass fourth pass hey a little more wax let's try that again it's really backed off with my forward hand see what we're doing nice and flat side to side until we get to here I think we actually have a problem right here so let's see if I can just kind of spot playing I'm moving back each time so I can kind of blend that area in check this again [Music] okay so we're only showing a much smaller area but we still have to deal with it so I'm gonna bring a little more blade in now I've prepared my blade where I feather the outside corners so that I can have overlapping passes meet without any detectable plane tracks now if you need to off to my left you can find watch a video that we did on blade preparation and they'll show you how to do that hope we get this finished before I run out of wood so we're down to just that little area right here okay I'm gonna retract the blade take a lighter pass later still but before I do it I'm going to check this again to make sure we're keeping things getting a bit of a high spot in the middle so I'm gonna go back and run into end step over to the left step over to the right back down the middle into the right and to the left now we'll go back plane is skewed feel that maybe we've got some plane tracks so pay a little more attention now blade is retracted hey that's feeling better but I can still feel some we sense they have gotten rid of that low corner or should say we've mapped the rest of the board to that low corner okay still got some very faint plane tracks and don't be afraid to stop and resharpen with that amount of work sometimes it's time to go in and just put a fresh edge on but this is still cutting well so I pull the blade in a little more watch to see where the shaving is coming out of the mouth of the plane if it's favoring one side to the other you've got to make a slight adjustment okay there no detectable plane tracks nice and smooth now it's not always going to take that much time and I said earlier that it's much easier to finish with a hand plane than with sanding and you'd think after all that work that's not the case but we still had to get rid of that Lokar take care of that low corner so whatever you do either had to take all that off by sanding it or you had to deal with a board that wasn't truly flat and that'll just screw up everything from that point forward all right after all that exercise we now have a board that is nice and smooth but we don't know if it is actually flat so in a next in our next video we're going to come in and we're going to show you how using winding sticks to verify this is flat and that it's also not humped front to back and that's critical as well it's a lot of work to do but once you learn how to do it it can actually go quite quickly if you like my method of work and enjoy my style of teaching if you click on any one of these videos it'll help improve some aspect of your woodworking now you can do a lot better work a lot easier if you have good tools if you click on the picture of the plane and the chisels it'll take you to our site where you can find our tools our classes both online and in person don't forget to subscribe

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 147,345

Keywords: hand planing wood, hand planing wood flat, hand planing wood square, tips for hand planing wood, planing, wood, hand planes, rob cosman hand plane, rob cosman, traditional woodworking, woodworking

Id: BGYoZE9WYqs

Length: 29min 40sec (1780 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020