How to Plane CORRECTLY

first it was out to saw correctly then it was house a chisel correctly now how to plane correctly I can't tell if I'm just milking it or not or if we actually need to do this I think we do let's get going I've literally just realized there's something quite funny about this video those previous ones that I mentioned in the intro how to saw in house to chisel correctly how to saw correctly was done in my first workshop house to chisel correctly was done in my second workshop but now Here I am doing this in my third workshop it's funny how things play out so before we dive into this video a few disclaimers this is not a video on how to sharpen a plane I've already done that video link is up here if you'd like to watch that disclaimer number two this is not a video on how to set up a plane I've also done a video on that link is in the top corner the sole purpose of this video is to show you techniques when using a plane to make it easier for you to make your work more accurate and to make the process of taking shavings from wood as enjoyable and pleasurable for lack of a better word as it should be and also disclaimer number three the things I'm saying in this video are from my own observations and experience but the thing I like to preach a lot on this channel is there are no rules in woodworking if something I show you doesn't work don't see it as the only method to do it and therefore you can't do woodworking at all that's not the case if it doesn't work don't do it but I'm just going to give you a few tips that have helped me and help students that I've taught in the past few years that I've been doing woodworking so let's get into tip number one tip number one make sure this thing is actually sharp you've missed the little thing in the top corner but the link to that is in the description tip number two make sure this thing is actually set up you've also missed the thing in the top corner for that link for that is in the description as well make sure you watch those videos before delving into any of this and I've always looked for an opportunity to say this and I never have do not oh no I've forgotten it do not run before you learn to walk that's it make sure you get a good solid foundation that you know how this thing works you know how to set it up then apply the tips in this video to your work afterwards so the first thing to sort out here stance because this can really throw you off a planing and make the process a lot more difficult than it should be because the way that people position themselves doesn't allow themselves to get enough power behind the plane when they're using it so the most common thing I see is people standing side onto the work like this and then try and push it through like that now this plane is very sharp very well set up and walnut is a lovely material to plane but standing side on I can't help but feel the twisting motion of my back and my sides there's a lot of my energy and uncomfortableness within my body as I push it through like this it's just it's going to knock me out very quick so instead of positioning yourself like this and doing all that twisting action and ruin in your back stand behind the wood like this get a nice wide stance and then place a plane on the wood and literally use your back leg to push you through the cut over something this long I don't even need to use my arms at all it's all in my legs this allows you to get a lot more power and control behind the plane because you could just stand here and you should aren't that that's gonna tire you out as well if you've got a lot of planing they're gonna start aching as well so you should think to assist you with it or sorry your legs to assist you with it so they just carry it through the cut you get so much control and if you working with a longer board yes of course you could use both of them in conjunction with each other so fish your legs through it as you're extending your arms that works quite nicely but you'll find it's just a lot more enjoyable and you get a better flow because you're just rocking back and forth as you're planing it's just it's kinda nice so that's the position where I know the body should be down here wide stance and you get good power transfer from it now it's still possible that you could do this but you could still have trouble with the upper body side of things usually this comes from positioning elbows out here elbow round here you see it kinks my wrist what this does is if your elbow is out here as I plane it forward the way it naturally unfolds is it goes off like that likewise if I fold it towards me firstly it's kind of pushed my legs out the way so I'm not able to get as much power behind it and also it's sort of making me go off to the left like that now we have put a very very small curve on this blade which was covered in my video how to get a stupidly sharp edge on a plain blade like I said the link to that is in the description if you haven't watched that yet please watch it because that little trick of putting a curve on the end of the plain blade just solves so many problems specifically when it comes to jointing edges if we're trying to square up this edge to the face here and this edge is too high we can simply censor the plane along this edge and it takes more of a shaving off that side than it does on the left-hand side or your right hand side likewise if this side is higher Center the plane there and it takes more of a shaving off that side so this is really handy in 95% of cases but if you have your elbow kinks out here and you do this it's going to be nice and even at the start but then as it unwraps and you go off to the right or the left whatever it's gonna be even here and then you're gonna tip off that corner also if you come from here it's really uncomfortable and you'll probably go off to the left or your right and that corner will tip off the way to get around this is to obviously meet in the middle get your elbow wrist plane all in line with each other and then just push it through the cut like that I sometimes push my elbow into the side of my body because it just gives it a little bit extra location it doesn't feel like it's floating around at all and just push it through a cut like that and the other thing that a few people do here is they hold the handle with a full on death grip like that all four fingers wrap there and the handle like that and so they're just still crunched up in there and it's not very nice just point your finger down the Frog like that there's a lovely little area here that's cast out and it fits your index finger beautifully I sometimes even do the rock on dudes sign you know the old horns yeah I sometimes do that because it just gives me extra location and it means that these fingers here aren't as bunched up and just makes it a lot nicer to hold now a word of warning if you're not used to any of these techniques and things like that it's gonna feel a little bit robotic for you when you do this like all your elbows locked into position your feet are just sort of rocking forcing back like that it doesn't feel very natural but what would encourage you to do is make a conscious effort to do this focus more on the pushing down on top of the plane than you are pushing forward with your arms let your legs do that bit all your weight on top and just let it rock through like that it's gonna feel robotic but the more and more you do it eventually you're gonna start being able to relax because your muscle memory is gonna allow you where to put the pressure how much pressure to apply you're gonna get into a better motion with it things will just eventually loosen up but for the time being just focus on getting that technique right and eventually it'll evolve into something that's really comfortable for you so when I was jointing large edges like in the bass guitar video I was doing all of the techniques I've just shown you but you'll see that it was just a lot smoother there was a lot more power behind it but I was getting some lovely controlled and consistent shavings flying out the mouth of that plane likewise in my roubo workbench series again the same thing I've been practicing this technique for years and it's eventually boiled down into something that I feel incredibly relaxed with and then when I need really fine precision when I'm planing like when I was doing the chopping board video you'll see I'll slow down quite a lot I'll make sure I'm steering the plane in the right direction and being very careful about where I'm taking that shaving from it all comes down with practice it's not going to feel comfortable to start with but eventually you'll just be able to sort of relax into it and it won't take a lot of effort at all and you'll get lovely things like this flying out your plane so now we've got the Stars all sorted out let me just give you a few extra pointers and things to look out for when you're planing you'll see here but we've got some lovely shavings coming out of this plane this is an already plane surface it's nice and flat and it doesn't require much cleaning up from here if you have a rough sawn edge such as from a bandsaw a handsaw even a table saw you're gonna get a little bumpy bits like this and when you skim the plane over it it's not gonna take anything reason for that is because it's just taken off those high points however a lot of people see this and they think oh I'm hardly getting anything out that means I need to bring the blade out a bit okay still not quite doing it bring the blade out a bit more oh okay well I guess that's almost a shaving let's keep going nope there you go it's moved in the vise I'll just read clamp it up to a bit tighter okay and then before you know it you're making veneers if you're planing a rough sawn edge my advice to you be patient let the plane do its work and eventually you'll be able to take lovely shavings from the mouth of the plane not thick veneers like this it makes the process so much more enjoyable if this is taking off less material as opposed to something like this so here we go let's get the plane set up again so it's taking those shavings there we go so this is off the smooth edge let's flip it over to a new rough sawn edge we'll leave exactly the same setting on it and we'll just let it take off those high points [Music] almost there and it's got a few little bits in the middle there there we go lovely shavings from a rough sawn edge hardly any effort that's all I'm not out of breath that was quite enjoyable really so now the rustling edge is gone but we have just been attacking this with a plain willy-nilly and hoping for the best we check it Foursquare yeah you see it's not square at all along the length of it this side here your left is too high now you could just try and center the plane along this high side and take a shaving across it like that trouble is when you hold the handle at the front like that my hand is sort of covering the area in front of the plane and I can't really see where I'm going the only thing I can see is I don't know from about here in front of my plane and also what's going on in the mouth this area here is completely blind so it means that squaring up the edge is just a bit more of a guessing game than it should be what you can do here who's actually hold it so your finger is underneath the plane like this in front of the blade now disclaimer I am NOT responsible for you poking the blade that is up to you be wary of where your hands are or where your fingers are this works a lot better with Jack flames because the front of them is a lot longer than it is on the smoothing plane but a way to sort of prevent you from poking that really sharp blade is to wrap your index finger around the front of the plane like that so it can't actually poke back far enough to hit the blade so wrap it round like that and then your thumb is sort of flow in here just wrap that around the handle like this and then what you can do is you can send to the plane along with the width of the material whichever side is too high and then you can use your finger as a fence running up and down the side of the material so not only do you have that side to side location locks in place but you can also see in front of the plane as well so if you've got a high point and that's here and a high point that's on the opposite corner I can Center it here I can see where I need to steer that plane I can start moving the finger fence to the side and then shift it across the other way or if I want to go straight down the center lock my finger fence into place and then just push it through so now I can see where I'm going and I can also feel where the plane is going as well again it feels super unnatural when you first do it but what it does is it forces you to slow down with it which is always a good thing because it means you're taking more controlled shavings and your technique is going to be better rather than just doing that kind of thing but do not poke the bottom of the plane it will hurt or if it's sharp it probably won't hurt but you'll be bleeding everywhere which isn't ideal cut saying that second disclaimer I can't promise it won't hurt if you do cut yourself so now we're going to look at skewing the plane but first we need to take this blade out so I've set my blade up in the honing guide and I've made a protrusion stop to make sure that when the honing guide hits this edge and the blade hits my stop here that is at 30 degrees I have done a video on how to make one of these things the link is in the top corner if you want to watch that and is also in a description if you missed the link up there so that is now at 30 degrees give or take a few degrees here and there what matters with jigs like this is the repeatability and consistency every time you set it up not whether this turns out at 29 degrees or 31 degrees it's about it being consistent so let's see what we've got here my 0 this bevel box to my workbench there we go zero degrees and we elevate the blade so that it rests on the bevel and then stick this on there let's see what that says oh so close to 30 degrees how about that so that means that when I'm using the plane straight on like this the shaving is having to travel up a 30 degree slope when it is separated from the material however watch what happens here if I skew the plane to the side and then tilt the bevel box so is it aligned with you and see what we've got there we have now got 20 points 6 degrees so just by skewing the plane and the angle that this is on there we have now lowered the effective pitch of the plane to 20 point 6 degrees so that means that despite sharpening of 30 degrees on this if I skew this like that the effective pitch of this plane is now gonna be around 20 degrees if I skew it a little bit less it might be around I don't know 25 degrees and if the skew it right round like this and I'll take that shaving that's gonna be God knows how shallow that is of an angle but by skewing the plane what you're effectively doing is lowering the effective pitch or the cutting angle off the plane itself and if you think about it this is in a weird sort of way it's similar to climbing a mountain if you're at the base and you're looking at the summit it's incredibly steep like you look at it you think blimey what a task that's gonna be but then you see that little gravel path going up and it's zigzagging up the side of the hill and because it zigzags across the hill as opposed to going straight up it means that it's less of an incline you still get from the base to the summit takes you a little bit longer but it's not a steep you're just going side to side up the blade up the blade up the mountain I'm forgetting about other metaphors I'm using it's where you go if you look at this blade that is effectively our mountain we're going from the base of the summit and a pretty steep to be honest but if I simply skew this round a bit look at the angle of this ruler now the angle is much more shallow simply because the angle of attack at the bottom of the blade is at an angle as opposed to going straight up the blade like that took me ages to get my head around it but then once I realized it's the same as climbing a mountain it just sort of makes sense there so why does this matter well what we've got here is a little bit of reversing grain and that's where the grain is coming against me so if I plane it it's likely to tear out now this bit of timber is behaving quite nicely and I promise this video wasn't a plug for all of my other videos that I have done but if you want to know more about reducing tear out grain direction angles of blades and things like that then watch my video how to reduce terror with the hand plane links in the top corner it's also in the description as well because the things I'm saying in this video are only a little snippet of what's in that video and the things I said in that video will give you a lot more clarity as to what's going on here so by attacking this straight on it's a little bit crunchy but it's not too bad so this shaving is traveling up a 30 degree slope at the moment if I skew this a little bit and therefore lowered the effective pitch of the plane blade if I push this through it just digs in a little bit more in these shavings you can hear they're just a little bit more crunchy this surface is okay it's behaving quite well but it feels a lot furrier than it did if I was to just pass over it with the 30 degree effective pitch but going straight on like this it's not nice but these shavings feel a lot nicer so be wary of that if you skew the blade you're gonna lower that angle and you might end up getting a little bit more tear out than you would do if you were to push the plane forward like this however by skewing it like this it means that you get a cleaner cut because the lower angle generally means a cleaner cut and because of that lower slicing action going on it tends to be a little bit easier to push the plane through so there's advantages and disadvantages to it because the other thing it does is it shortens the length of the sole if I've got it going straight on like this I've got a long sole to reference off and it's more likely to make this board flap whereas if I skew it it's gonna sort of follow more of those contours and it's not going to be as flat but you might not want this surface to be perfectly flat or it doesn't need to be perfectly flat at the end of the day you just want to clean it up if there's a few small bumps on it doesn't matter if that's the case skew it let it follow those bumps and you'll get a nicely plain surface without needing to go through all the effort of trying to find all those high points along here and let it work down evenly it's about finding what works for you but also realizing if it's tearing out horribly then it might be because you're skewing it too much or you need to sharpen a steeper angle and your blade or increase the pitch of the Frog again that's all detailed in my video how to reduce tear out so if it's a common problem for you give that a watch link is in the description and finally my last little tip for you candle wax just a little tea light or a little candle stick whatever candle wax you'll see that if I just move this out the way I've brought the blade all the way back and I'm just gonna slide it along my workbench it slides pretty well at the moment put a candle wax on the bottom just a little scribble like that nothing too fancy and then watch this it makes it cuts down on that friction and it slides a lot easier along the material that you're planing and yeah it makes the process a lot easier especially if like I said at the start you want to practice by pushing down on top of the plane if there's a lot of friction on the bottom if your plane anyway then by adding your weight on top of that it's going to make it a lot more difficult scribble candle wax on the bottom and it just glides it's lovely so I hope you found this video useful if you have any other questions at all be sure to chuck them in the comments a great practice project for this is my chopping board project the link is also in the description as well as all the other videos that I've referenced I'll put them in an order that's sort of easy to digest so you can work out what level you're at say I know how to sharpen I know how to set it up all but I don't know about terror I'll click that or if you don't now to sharpen you can start at the top and work your way down but if you apply all the things in those videos as well as this one then you're planing will just be it will be game-changing for you it will make your woodworking so much better more enjoyable and when it clicks it's amazing absolutely mind-blowing so thank you very much for watching if you haven't subscribed be sure to click that big button down there and like the video as well it really helps sharing the video would also be greatly appreciated and thank you to those of you who support me on patreon link to that is also in the description as well so if you want to support the channel by donating whatever amount you wish again I would be incredibly thankful for that so thank you for watching see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 132,141

Rating: 4.9505944 out of 5

Keywords: how to plane wood, how to use a plane, how to use a handplane, using a handplane, how to setup a hand plane, planing wood straight, planing wood flat, hand tool woodworking, beginner woodwork, woodworking tips, how to plane, flattening wood by hand, sharpening a plane, setting up a plane, how to set up a plane, woodwork, woodworking, hand tools, lie nielsen planes, matt estlea planes, how to adjust a hand plane, how to plane wood without a planer, jack plane, block plane

Id: MVGvRY5lzz4

Length: 20min 49sec (1249 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 17 2018