How to reduce TEAROUT when using a HAND PLANE

at some point in your woodworking endeavors you are going to face terror what is territory here you ask tear up is when you're taking the final finish shaving on your component and [ __ ] hits the fan it digs in takes a massive chunk out and you start reconsidering your choice of hobby so in this video I'm going to show you how I prevent such atrocities from happening to my work and hopefully prevent the same from happening to you let's get going so on my right here we have ally ally Neilson low angle Jacqueline a low Neilson number for smoothing plane a frog and on my left here we have some pink ivory we have some American black walnut and we have some bird's-eye maple so the first thing we're going to cover today is grain direction so let's get you in close okay so grain direction what do I mean by that well as you'd expect it's the grain direction so this plank of bird's-eye maple I have has lots of lines in it late words and early wood and as we all know those represent the years in which the tree has been a life now the direction that this brain goes is very important so I'll just draw it on to make it more visible for you I'm just going to follow one of them roughly there we go so you see with that there's like a sort of curve on it that means that this board is going to be relatively difficult to play the reason is that as this grain curves some of the grain is going off the edge like this okay and likewise here it's going off the edge like this so it's actually going towards itself now why is this a problem now the easiest way to explain this is actually with a book so picture what this grain is doing now it is sort of going off the edge at an angle if I bend this tall neck book ground you can see all the edge here that the grain of the paper is going up and off the edge at an angle and this is important because it dictates which direction you should push your hand plane in so if this chisel was my hand plane blade look happens if I go with the grain it's just skimming over the top and not digging in at all however if I go the other way watch what happens chisel was digging straight into it like that I can't even try and skim it across the top look at that it's done a bit of tear out on the grain so that is what is happening with this wood here if I was planing with the grain like this say see it's going off the edge I complain like that and that would be fine however when I start getting to this bit where the grain is going up towards the plane it's gonna dig in and it's going to do exactly what it did to this paper when I go against it like that so that is grain direction in its basic form ideally when you're edge joining a bit of wood you want the grain to sort of go off it like that all at one angle so you can just plane it like that if any of you have worked with feather boards this is exactly how they work you can push a bit of material one way but then you can't push it the other without it binding another way to think of it if you didn't really understand the book metaphor is like when you're stroking a cat strike it from head to tail it purrs beautifully if you stroke it from tail to head it turns around and claws your face off so bear that in mind because the last thing you want is the wood jumping up and tearing your face off like a cat this next bit American black walnut now as you can see we've got something going a little bit Gyan here firstly we've got the knot there which just isn't easy to plane to start with and secondly we've got this crotch or crown figurine going on here nightmare to play it again if we look at the side it's very difficult to tell which way the grain is going I can see a little bit going this way I can see a little bit going that way in fact there's a round bit there there's a bit of tear out here unsurprisingly this is not going to be an easy bit to plane and in fact it looks like I have try this in the past also within this bit of wood we have what is called curly grain and that is actually where the grain ripples up and down like this so if you can see along here there's sort of these horizontal stripes and along here as well we've got some stripes going that way that is the grain going up and down and it's the like catching it in different ways so because there's curls going along this edge that means on here the grain is doing an S shape like this all the way along and that means how the hell do you plane that like this I'll see if it's grains all go in one way nice and easy if it's rippling up and down like that you have no chance of finding the correct grain direction to play so how do you go about reducing that well the answer to that lies with increasing the cutting angle in which your plane is cutting so let me get this all back to its original positions so a brief look at the planes we got here the number for a standard bench plane has its blade mounted at 45 degrees to the sole that you cannot change but unless you buy an extra frog for it the line Ilsan low angle Jack plane has it played mounted at 12 degrees to the sole and you might be wondering Matt you just said you had to raise the angle of the blade to reduce tear out why have you gone for a low angle plane well the reason for this is because this low angle Jack plane actually has the blade mounted with the bevel up on top of it whereas on this bench plane the blade is mounted with the bevel underneath so I'll show you the difference that makes okay so if I get this blade outs you'll see the predicament so like I said bevel on the bottom how are you going to increase the angle of that blade to the bit of wood well an easy way is to get yourself a new frog so this one is 55 degrees I've said this one is 45 so there we'll just unbolt pop that one in done you're ready to go however that's a bit of a faff to do and I'll see that cost you a bit of money so there is an alternative to doing that the other way of doing it is to actually put a back bevel on the blade so if I just take this chip breaker off so if you watch my honing guide video you may have heard the term back bevel be mentioned in passing and what that is is exactly what it sounds it is a bevel on the back of the blade so you can think of this as the top because that's where your bevel is to sharpen a back bevel you need to sharpen a V into the end of this plane blade so if you wanted to mimic a 55 degree Frog you just got to do a basic bit of maths 45 degree frog plus honing a 10 degree angle on the end of this that will give you the same effect as this frog but then you'll see you're stuck with a permanent back bevel on the end of your plane which you have to grind off you want to take to its original position and also you haven't to sharpen not only one bevel but two bevels and like I've said in the rest of the series I don't enjoy sharpening so that's a bit of a pain in the backside for me so how do I work around that well one way of doing it is to get yourself an extra blade so have one with a back bevel on it and one with a flat face on it and that way if you didn't want to commit to having a permanent back bevel the end of it at least you can swap out to your standard blade but you're still stuck with the fact that if you do want to sharpen that back bevel one you've got to do two bevels on it so this is where the low angle Jack plane comes in let me get into shot this is probably the most versatile plane you will ever find although this isn't my favorite plane this is definitely the most versatile and for people who want to buy their first premium plane I always throw them to either this or the Veritas low angle Jack plane so like I mentioned earlier this blade is mounted bevel up now you can probably already see the advantage in this bevel up I can sharpen that to whatever angle I want and I'm not going to put any sort of back bevel on it the entire cutting angle is dictated by whatever angle you sharpen on the edge of that plus the 12th degree bedding on it so with this if I wanted to mimic the 55 degree frog that would be mounted in the number-four all I need to do is a basic bit of maths so 12 degrees plus 43 degrees equals 55 degree cutting angle and if you watch my earlier videos that is why I have the 40° stuff on there see 4340 there's not much of a difference between them I just wanted a nice round number so if I pop that in there and then sharpen the 40 degree angle on it the effective pitch of that is 52 degrees so 40 degree on the blade 12 degree on the bed and the advantage to that is that I just have to sharpen the plane blade as I would normally flat on the back done ready to go so for this plane I've got a 30 degree blade and I've got a 50 degree blade I don't really tend to use the 40 degrees stop anymore I think if I'm just gonna reduced here I might as well raise that angle as high as possible so let's go into the sharpening stages I'm going to show you how I sharpen a 50 degree bevel on here which would be pretty self-explanatory and I'll kind of skim over it but I will also show you our sharpen a back bevel on this plane blade so let's get this into a sharpening setup right so we're now in sharpening mode so as always going to start with flattening my Waterstones so I'm going to start with the 6000 to start with so flatten that off on there start with the 6000 and then go to the 1000 the coarser side so that way you're not contaminating the 6000 with the grit from the 1000 that is lovely and flat now right so we're going to start with a blade for the low angle Jack plane start with because that's the easiest if you watch my honing guide video this is the limitation of these long jaws I'm going to sharpen this blade 250 degrees however the protrusion on these sticks out too far to allow me to make the blade hit the stop on here so I'm just going to quickly switch them back to the standard jaws shouldn't take a moment okay there we go so standard jewels fitted now I'm gonna pop the blade in there I'm going to go this way because I'm a lefty yeah we go so get that snugged up in there and then against the 50-degree stop now you can see how much that blade is poking out from the honing guide that's why these jaws are limited because that you can see that those jewels will poke out beyond the blade so there we go get that snug up in there right so I'm going to start drawing the burr now so we'll start with doing a few strokes back on the 1000 grit one two and that has started drawing a bear on there can feel that ever so slightly it's gonna flip it over I'm gonna give that a bit more juice what down wheel again this get rubbish off it and on this bear as well so we don't get any grit contamination right so even strokes back to start with ten strokes either side one two three four five on the intermediate points five one two three in the middle now you know that has put a camber on the edge of the blade and so I'll probably flip it that way as well so draw that back onto the stone like that that way we don't take off the bird too aggressively and then pop some of this super fine paste on miss drop now there are links to all of these in the description of videos some of you pointed out that the links don't work in previous videos I have fixed that now so we're all good real good lift it up until I see the shadow at the end disappear drag it back dang it back a few times and then on the back as well careful not to lift the blade up on this you want to keep it perfectly flat on there this non-slip pad is not working very nicely it's slipping stop slipping so I'm just working it alternatively between the bevel and the flat back all rights wipe all that off on there get all the gunk off it gave not to stab yourself and there we go that is stupidly sharp on there what that now means if I'm out into the low angle Jack plane I have a 50 degree blade in there plus the 12 degree bed angle on this and that gives me an effective pitch of 62 degrees and therefore that is now a high angle plane the only thing I had to change was which stop block I used so you can see that's why it makes this plane quite versatile very easy to change the effective pitch of it and there we go nice and simple now the next one back bevels so if you're working with a standard bench plane like I said at the start this bevel is mounted underneath so we're going to need to sharpen a back bevel on this now that means that we obviously have two angles that we need to sharpen firstly this one on the bottom draw the bear up and then we need to flatten the bear off this other side and then flip it back around to the other side and slowly remove the bird that way while maintaining that bevel it's quite a bit more work which is why the low angle Chaplin is easier but if you don't want to splash it out for them and you just want to make this work this is the way to do it so we're going to pop this in the honing guide again I'm just gonna leave these standards awesome because I can't be bothered to change them get my stop block I'll start on the 1,000 grit again give it a bit of juice there we go we're gonna do a 30 degree bevel to match the secondary bevel that's already existing on this start drawing that burr back on there so that has matched my previous angle absolutely perfectly thanks to the stop block we've started drawing the bear on there it's gonna do a little bit more because that secondary bevel is getting relatively big see definitely yeah now cool flip it over that looks like it's already started getting a bit of a wear so I'm just gonna flatten that off again quickly just gonna wash this flattening plate off because we just flattened the 1000 with it don't want to be bringing the 1000 so this all nice and clean back and forth on there a few times you can actually draw pencil marks across the top of this if you wanted to see where this is removing material but providing you stay on top of it a few strokes that will be nice and flat get all this crap off the wheel again and off the bevel right yeah white gunk on there right one two three four five six 7a right started polishing a secondary bevel I'm just going to do 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 oh yeah so definitely a bear on there now right so with this blade I want some rays the effective cutting angle to let say 60 degrees so it's bed at 45 that means I need to add 15 degrees on to the top of that with a bevel so I don't have a 15 degrees stop on here because I haven't got around to making one yet but what I'm going to do is instead plug one of these things a bevel box they are absolutely brilliant I use them for everything so what I'm gonna do just pop that on here and I'm going to zero that to the stone now what this does is it measures angles by gravity so that is now zero on this stone what I can do it's magnetic stick it to here and then I could just adjust the projection of this until that bevel Box reads 15 degrees 15 point 2 degrees that is so that will be close enough for me let's get that all snugged up in there I'll see it'd be much more accurate to make yourself a stop block but that is a very accurate way of doing it and you can use that for setting up machines and all that as well we don't quite trust the scale for maybe the angle and the blade or something like that those are indispensable absolutely love it all right it's back bevel here we go so yeah one two three and instead of just going to over the top on this I'm really put a massive bevel on this all I'm going to do is now after on the bird back over to this other side I'm just going to do five strokes and each point to match the camber that's on this blade already so one two three four five gotta be really careful doing this because that end is very easy to dig in too far now you haven't got a lot of reference for this to skim across the stone so in fact I did push strokes there I'm just going to change that to pull strokes so one two three four five one - 5 + 1 2 5 okay so that was put a back bevel on this blade and I can see that that is very even across the end of it very very even but we need to take that back and start breaking it off gently so I'm going to take it back out the honing guide flip it back round to its 30-degree position so pop that in there in the honing guide we go snug it up a bit now don't go too over the top of this you're only removing the burr by this point if you start doing loads you're just gonna create an entirely new bird and you're gonna have to take it off this other side again if you watch my previous video about getting a stupidly sharp edge and a plane I mentioned about transferring the pressure from left to right as you're dragging it back and right to left when you're dragging it back this would be the time to do this so what we'll do start with all my pressure here drag it back I've transferred it all the way to the right now then we'll start on the right and we'll transfer it to the left there we go so that burr will be very loose on there in fact I can see a very very fine wire edge on there and that is the burr becoming loose and is ready to break off on the strop now so here we go that paste is still wet enough on there so lift it up drag it back and for the back don't lift it up too much there's obviously some flex in the lever here so you can lift it up a very very small amount you could probably keep it flat if you wanted but I'm going to elevate it a tiny bit and there we go so that is now a high angle blade on there you have to look very closely at the end of that but what that is going to do is change the effective pitch of this blade where it's been at 45 and it's cranked it up 15 degrees on the very bevel and now you have a high angle bench plane without having to change the Frog on it happy days happy days so let's see how this performs now right so firstly let's see how the low angle Jack plane performs on the walnuts that will try this with a standard blade to start with so just the standard 30 degree blade on there plus the 12 degree bed 42 degree cutting angle right so firstly we're going to try and plane the face of this now on the edge here we've got going up like this and we've got grain going up like this so it's the sort of u-shape now I'm gonna try this difficult bit to start with so we're gonna play in this way and in theory this should tear out quite a bit with a thirty degree blade so 30 degree is our standard angle let's see how it performs so I'm gonna start with no cutting there so that's not taking anything off it and this has been sharpened exactly the same as I would have sharpened a blade in my video how to get a stupidly sharp edge on a plane blade link in this sort of corner up here so there we go so we're gonna bring it out a tiny bit tight I'm starting to get a little shaving bit more Oh straight away right that dug in oh you see how it's jumping a little bit more in there yeah that's actually catching on the Curley bit on this timber so let's go a bit more that is yeah it's giving it like a fluffy fish - it hasn't torn out as much as I thought it would but it's not a great finish I know we've got some tear out there actually yes it's torn out there quite considerably absolutely yeah so that looks to me like interlocked grain there because it's planing really nicely next to it then the next growth ring there it's starting to tear out so it's a lot of grain right yep horrible tear out so let's see if we can get rid of that with a 50 degree blade so I'll take this one out get this 50 degree in there Nick English I've just put on it okay so that is taking off nothing so we're saying I've made the mouth on these as tight as possible so it's gonna keep going until I stop taking shading there we go so instantly see how much easier that is to me to push across not catching whatsoever the shavings are a lot more consistent as well it's not digging in in certain areas and it's not skimming over the top in certain areas it's just taking a nice even cut all the way along the top it's just the only difficulty with this is that being a 50-degree blade it's hard pushed through the cup because you got more resistance from that bevel in there but rather more resistance than hideous terror there we go right we're getting rid of that terror now beautiful so that feels absolutely lovely in that area now this area here there is no tear out on it but it still feels a little bit fluffy that's just because we were mostly going against the grain but let's try flip it around and just see if we can sort this area as well because it'd be unfair to not try it with the grain as well lovely so you see it already changing colour here I'm hoping the camera is going to pick that up really nice chocolatey Brown here and then it sort of like a grayish color here so there we go that's the importance of grain direction we'll just keep working this they'll do half of them and you can see the difference there makes oh bloody lovely that absolutely lovely let's get the camera in closer you can have a look at this okay so this is where the terror was before and it is now really nice and smooth all the way along there I've only really worked this half of the timber that bit there is what was left with the 30 degree blade so that's a little bit tear out there but this is the biggest difference see up here that was the difference it makes when we were planing with the grain and then that is when we were playing against this that's when we were playing this way here so there we go we'll just continue with that and let's see if we can get rid of this grave it well laughs look at that so you can really clearly see the ripples in the timber now you see this so that is where the grain is going up and down like that and it's catching the light in different ways and those are what is an absolute pain in the ass to playing when you don't have a high angle blade on them but there we go the 50 degree blade has sorted that let's try a different bit of timber now let's try some pink ivory let's get so that horrible stuff and this has got a bit of wax on it but we'll give it a go if you give it a go that thank you very much walnuts which was the disgusting side on this yeah they've again that side there it's got a lot of that got a curliness on let's see what we can do with that there we go we're gonna swap back to the 30 degree blade okay so we've got nothing being taken off at the moment taking off the wax these first few bits it's tearing up there already I can see that these shavings look pretty cool you might be able to see it but we're getting bits of tear out here here here here yeah here basically on all the curly bits where they're going against us keep going with it oh right it's catching on that bit there now it's like a bit of n grain or something like that I think we've got them not bad overall it's feeling pretty nice in the middle here but around these edges big bits hair out there bit out there and all along there I'm just going to give it a little bit more attention to make sure that it's not me oh no it's definitely definitely the plane digging in there let's take even less off and see if we can fix it with a thirty degree it's just digging in listen yeah definitely definitely the blade tearing out all over the place there yep right so let's swap it to the 50 degree blade so we're getting still feeling the resistance however it's cleaning up that corner there I can see that well still fight me in that corner yep so the terror around here it's starting to be reduced that's starting to feel a little bit shiny it's going to take a while because the terawatt was quite deep on that 30-degree plate but we'll keep going see what sort of finish this can give tell you what it's not liking me in grading on the end here yeah smashing out that is where the low angle plane would be better for this because your low angle of attack would slice through that end grain a lot easier whacking it with a 50-degree one not gonna be easy okay so the 50 degree blade in here I've given it a while it has started reducing the tear out here but this bit here that grain is going almost vertical it's so high in there and it's quite a big patch of reversing grain so this isn't quite doing it so what I did when I sharpen the back bevel on my bench plane blade I don't have a spare blade for my smoothing plane i sharpened it from a jointer plane so it's going to look a bit weird but we're gonna see if we can reduce this tear up [Music] that's me going that's it awhile now and this corner here is just still tearing out and I'm putting that down to the facts you see this is in green here this bit is very very close to ingrain so I think the high angle of the blade is just causing that to tear out it's just too big of a patch to try and plane against so if I flip it the other way however let's see what it's like if I plane it like that nope it's a pink ivory horrible horrible stuff to plane this stuff in the corner is going alright now because the grain was coming up like this so I'm now planing with it however I started hitting in to lock grain now where it's coming back against me right I'm in a half now this is why I left the bird's-eye maple till the end because I knew that that pink ivory was not going to be easy so let's try this bird's-eye maple we're gonna try it on this edge here it was all the sort of flaking on it so let's get a close-up on that and then see what sort of tear out we've got probably there's so much going on with the grain on this it's difficult for you to see the tear up but if you focus on the edge here you can see that it looks a little bit choppy so I'll just adjust the focus and you see edge looks a little bit wiry doesn't look too crisp that is the tear out that is creating that so we're gonna see how the 30 degree playing copes with that first and then we'll switch to the 50 degree plane and then finally we'll take it to the jointer with the back bevel it's also worth saying here look at the grain on the edge there so I've got no to find grain direction for that because it is all over the place and that is what is causing the terror on there right so pop the 30 degree blade into here again there we go I'm gonna start with absolutely nothing just get that across the edge isn't performing too badly but it does feel a little bit little bit grinding for lack of a better word actually I can feel that it is hitting all that reversing grain and yeah it's producing very very small amounts of terror on here the camera definitely will not pick this up this will all be down to my feel unfortunately but let's just keep going this easiest way for you to see where I'm getting this terror is that to look at the shavings on this so if you look at your shaving we just got from it we're taking pretty much a full width so that shows that our blade is all fine but then you've got these lip bits here and it's more considerably here that is where that is where we're hitting the tear out and you can you can see how crumpled this part of the shaving is compared to the rest of it here it's only in those points where we're experiencing the tear out that it's really starting to curl up and that just shows that the grain direction was all over the place in there and this shaving has been able to release the stress of that but that is what terror looks like in a shaving it wasn't able to take a full width it might stand out but that's not what we're looking for in this video we want that to be a plain finish so I'm actually going to swap to the jointer instead of swapping out that blade because the effective picture this jointer is now sixty degrees so that's a 45 degree Frogg 15 degree back bevel so it's feeling less grinding these shavings are feeling better Yeah right that's getting better now right this is performing much better someone's gonna keep going with this well that's perfect there is no tear out that whatsoever now that edge is very sharp very sharp but let's look at this shaving now like I said before these have been sharpened exactly the same I'll just ripped it in half there it was so sharpen exactly the same they've been set up the same but look this shaving all the way along really nice and even I Steven there as well [ __ ] my rip till they see and that was just the start where the plane was entering into the cut but otherwise the carry uniform that is compared to the one we produced earlier which is this you can just feel like brittle it is as well it's I can feel that they're very similar thicknesses but this one it's just crunchy like yeah just horrible whereas this one I'm just glad it's straight over that tear up and it is absolutely lovely now let's try it with a low angle plane with a 50 degree play fitted just for research purposes right that yeah that just felt so much better and they're so much better instantly I've got to put a lot of pressure on it to keep it in the cut but providing I'll just give even pressure just absolutely lovely on there you can't really fault that so let's get the camera in closer and you can see how crisp black edge is now compared to earlier so no torn out patches whatsoever and just really nice and crisp obviously the 30-degree blade mounted in the low angle Jack plane was not able to do that it was only the 50 degree but reduce all that Tarot or actually it didn't reduce it it just eliminates it completely and we've got a lovely edge on there there we go that is how you reduced error in timber just simply raise the effective pitch of your blade and it should work absolutely lovely in some cases it will completely eliminate it or in some cases it will do your absolute nothing and it won't it just will carry on tearing out but it's going to be a work in progress like I say follow me on Instagram and in a few weeks time I'm going to give this another attempt I will also film myself planing this so I can't get away with sanding it absolutely flat or anything it's going to be a true test because that's annoyed me I wanted this tutorial to go all smoothly so yeah follow me on Instagram to see if I can tackle that links to all my social media is in the description as well as links to all of these things that I have on the table here so this stone this honing guide for example they weren't working in previous videos but I have fixed it with my IT genius now so that is all ready to go but yes hopefully that video has helped you I guess I will start clearing up all of this mess now see you next time [Music]

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 188,586

Keywords: stopping tearout, reducing tearout on wood, planing figured timber, planing curly wood, how to stop tearout when hand planing, how to stop tearout when planing, sharpening plane blades, how to sharpen a plane, how to sharpen a back bevel, back bevel on plane blades, high angle plane advantages, low angle jack plane, advantages of low angle planes, different between standard and low angle planes, grain direction explained, how to plane with the grain, against the grain, tearout

Id: 6fGqh42lSM0

Length: 31min 46sec (1906 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2017