How to use Hand Planes

hi my name is Frank Strazza with the heritage school of woodworking and in this video I'm going to talk about some of the different hand planes I'm going to narrow it down to the hand planes that I use in my everyday woodworking as well as how to adjust the plane to get the most accurate shaving we're going to talk about the different parts of the planes and some of these different sizes and what the planes are used for you can see there's a whole array of planes here and these are typically called bench planes the reason for that is they're used on the bench they're used for flattening your material there's a lot of different planes specialty planes such as moulding planes that are used for shaping the edge of a board this is a typical moulding plane here you can see there's a profile that's actually cut into the plane this is a wooden moulding plane and again there's you can have hundreds of these four different profiles a little bit different than what we have here and that is bench planes you'll notice I've got different sizes here ranging from small all the way up to a large one here I've thrown in a few different configurations here we've got a low angle plane here and here these are low angle planes and you'll notice that every single one of these planes are pretty much configured the same way we've got the iron right here which in most of these planes is bedded at 45 degrees the iron is angled like this these are referred to as high angle planes or beveled down planes so why the different sizes well Stanley was the one who came up with a different sizes and some of these are Stanley's and some are some current planes that are being made nowadays but you'll see Stanley came up with some different sizes they started actually with a number and went all the way through to a number eight I don't have all the sizes here but I've got a number two let's see I actually have a number three and then there was a number four which was sat right in the middle I've got two number four and a half's here's a number five this is that low angle plane trying to confuse you Stanley actually did a five and a half they did a number six and a number seven which was a little longer and then a number eight so they came to the number one all the way up through number eight the number really just denoted just the size in the length and the width as well so all of the Stanley planes are pretty much configured in the same way they all have pretty much the same parts there's some slight variations to them now why the the reason for the different sizes well the small planes are make nice collectors items they actually work well this is actually my son's plane it fits well in his small hands and he can plane well the number four and four-and-a-half are generally used as a smoothing plane the number five plane was referred to as a jack plane or a four plane a jack plane it got its name because it was used as a jack of all planes it could be used for both smoothing it could be used for a little bit of jointing because it's a little longer the number six again can be used as a four plane used before some of the other planes also its length enables you to joint with it and the longer the plane number seven and number eight are purely jointer planes and they're used for flattening the stock because of the length of the plane the length of the plane enables you to be able to ride over any low spots in the wood and bringing all the high spots down and making it flat whereas a shorter plane is going to ride in and out of the inconsistencies in the material most of the wood nowadays that we prepare is prepared using machines using a jointer and a planer so a lot of these lanes have fallen in this use so normally where we would have used a four plane and a scrub plane to scrub the material down and bring it down to size most of that is done with a machine so we can narrow our use of planes however there are a few planes that I find to be absolutely essential the plane that I use actually most often is a four and a half I've got a Stanley four and a half right here and a modern make makers plane which is called a Lee Nilson which I find to be one of the best made planes nowadays if you're in the market for a plane I highly recommend the Lee Nielson plane I often use a block plane as well low angle block plane and a low angle Jack plane I find this these three planes to be almost essential in your tool kit if you want to add to this kit right here you can get a jointer plane I use a jointer plane for edge jointing but we'll cover more of that in future videos I'm going to put a lot of these planes out of the way and talk more specifically about the Stanley style plane which as I mentioned earlier all configured in the same way so we'll put all of these out of the way and we'll focus just on this four and a half I like the heft the size of the four and a half it works well for smoothing our material again we pretty much surface all of our material bring it down that is to size using machines but the final surfacing and the final shaping can be done with a smoothing plane now when I talk about this plane and I mention the parts these same parts are applicable to any of the Bailey Stanley style planes I mentioned Bailey but Stanley Bailey pretty much the same so here's a Lee Nielsen number eight the same parts are in this number four and a half or in this Stanley four and a half what we have here is we've got the rear handle or the rear tote we've got the front tote we've got the cap iron which holds the whole blade assembly in place there's two parts to the blade assembly you've got the iron and you've got the chip breaker the chip breaker sits on top of the iron this part is the Frog that's what the blade assembly sits on we've got the lateral adjustment which adjusts the blades side-to-side we also have a depth adjustment right here which adjusts the blade forwards and backwards that's what gives us our depth now on the Lee Neilson planes the chip breaker almost looks like the blade you've got a bevel on this side and a bevel on this side some people can confuse the chip breaker with the blade putting it in backwards the main difference here is of course the blade is sharp but it's also longer this part chip breaker is actually removable by loosening this screw and sliding this back sliding this to the side like this and taking this off as I mentioned earlier the blade is beveled down there's the bevel right there and if you watch our video on sharpening a hand plane you can actually see the different configurations for how to sharpen a plane with this smoothing plane I tend to put a slight camber in the iron and I often take the corners off as well so that the corners don't dig into the material when you're planing we can test this to see how sharp this is I like to just test it on my thumbnail and if it grabs my thumbnail holding it flat like this then I know it's sharp and I've sharpened this up and it's razor sharp ready to go so here's the iron bevel down like this the chip raker goes on like this and you'll see the chip breaker it has a little curve right in here and then the bevel like this so the chip maker goes on like this slid on just like this bring it around and you want to bring it up as close as you can I like to bring it less than 1/16 of an inch from the edge what the chip raker does is again bevel down here when you're planing along the chip will actually hit this bevel right here and it'll pull it back and as the name implies it breaks the chip let's bring this up and I'm going to tighten this up as just like that and we'll put the whole iron assembly back into the plane just like this now when I put this in I want to make sure that it's sitting flat against the Frog you can see right here that there's a gap right there and I've got to wiggle it around even take the lateral adjustment which is right here this is the lateral adjustment the depth adjustment you'll notice when I turn this it moves this part back and forth that's our depth adjustment so when I put this blade assembly in place here we can move it move it back and forth like this wiggle this and you can now see that it sits flat against the Frog that's very important let's put the cap iron back on here like this now don't tighten this down too tight you want to just make this somewhat snug but well even maybe a little loose where you get your tightening action from is when you take the lever here and you lower it down it actually puts pressure as you can see it's going to put pressure against that screw and make it tight now it's locked in place the Frog can be slid forwards and backwards to adjust the mouth opening personally I don't really mess with it too much on this the four and a half plane however I do adjust the Frog opening which is more easily adjusted on the low angle plane I adjust that frequently and I use that mostly for figured woods and end grain that is set up a little bit differently and we'll cover how that's set up in future videos now let's go on to adjusting the plane there's two adjustments for this plane both the depth adjustment and the side-to-side adjustment so we have what we call our lateral adjustment which is right here and our depth adjustment both of those have to be fine-tuned now when I set my lateral adjustment that means I want the blade to be cutting equally on either side I never want to have the blade cutting deeper on one side never this is adjusted only to get it perfect to where it's cutting equally on both sides however the depth adjustment can be adjusted and will be adjusted depending on how much material I'm trying to remove if I'm trying to remove a lot of material I'm going to set the blade deeper if I'm just trying to smooth just take very fine shavings off I'm going to back the blade off to where it's taking a little bit off so let's start with the lateral adjustment I can take a piece of scrap wood here piece of pine putting it in the vise like this the first thing I'm going to do is adjust the lateral adjustment sometimes I can adjust both the depth adjustment and the lateral adjustment simultaneously but I'm going to do that by testing it both on the pine and feeling it with my thumb you want to get it to where you can feel the depth with your thumb without even having to running it over a piece of wood I can feel it first and I can tell you right now it's not going to cut anything but let's just try it we're going to try this side and we're going to try this side nothing's happening so let's just advance the blade we can even set the plane on the material and advance the blade now if I have just a little bit of adjustment to do I don't mind if this is locked down if I've got a lot of adjustment to do sometimes I'll release this and adjust it forward let's just kind of adjust it like this until the blade starts engaging a little bit more I'm adjusting it like this until that blade just catches see just bring it forward just a little bit more until that blade up there it is see it's starting to cut now we've got it adjusted so I've started with the blade back and then I've brought it forward until it starts cutting what a lot of people tend to do is they set the blade too deep and then they try too plain and it won't cut number one though you've got to make sure that the blade is razor sharp please refer to the video on sharpening a plane because we go over the entire process of sharpening a planer extremely important that the blade is sharp so now that we've got some depth let's feel it with our thumb what I'm doing is I'm taking my thumb and I'm running it like this if I ran to the side I'd slice my thumb but we're running it across like this and it seems to me that the lateral adjustment is pretty good but let's test it what I'm going to do is I'm going to plane on this side of the plane and then all the way over on this side of the plane that's going to adjust the lateral adjustment now let's test it on the wood so I'm going to start over here you'll notice too when I'm doing the edge of the board that I don't put my hand on top of the front tote what I'll do is I'll put my thumb right here and my finger right on the side that helps guide the plane along the other thing you'll notice too is when I hold the rear tote I never put four fingers in the plane this makes for a very uncomfortable grip and you will develop blisters very fast if you're planing very long so you've got to make sure that three fingers are in the plane and one finger is out I've even put my pinky out for a more relaxed grip especially if this tends to be a little bit smaller right in here okay so I'm planing this side here so I plane there and you can see in here that were barely taking anything off very very fine now let's plane over here ah you can see this is much heavier over there so the lateral adjustment needs to be adjusted because it's cutting more on one side than it is on the other so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take and just push the lateral adjustment slightly towards the side that more is coming off on again let's feel with our thumb because what I want is I want to train my thumb to be able to feel the depth of cut and the lateral adjustment so I want to be able to feel what that shaving both looks like sounds like and actually is so now we're going to cut on this side the shaving is very nice very paper-thin there and over on this side so now the lateral adjustment it's a little bit more and we're just barely touching it ah that's nice there and off that's perfect there look at that both of which are exactly the same thickness and you can tell by how translucent the actual shaving is now I like the depth adjustment that application is actually that depth is actually not something that you'll use on all applications you may find that that depth is great for just smoothing up your material but say you need to take off a heavier shaving well all you've got to do is advance the blade now you can hear it's taking off more of a shaving just by the sound hear that sound if you want to take off more there's even a heavier shaving but I find for most work with this plane it's best that you take off a very fine shaving I'm going to back it off now let's go back to our our setting here we have it very very fine we can advance it forward just a little bit maybe a little bit more ah that's nice now once we've gone through the trouble of setting the lateral adjustment and the depth the last thing I want to do is throw this plane on its side on the bench this is something that I find a lot of people do they tend to put the plane on the bench and this is something that was learned and I believe in public schools when they were trying to teach children how to respect the tools not to throw a sharp tool on top of another tool the problem is is if you set it on the side like this if both can adjust the lateral adjustment throw it out of adjustment and it also exposes the blade right here if you are planing wood and you set the plane on a clean bench like this there's no trouble with this whatsoever the blade is protected the lateral adjustment is protected and it's makes for easy access when you need to pick it up and go back to your work I want to show you what I do when I'm smoothing the surface of this board of course you can't feel this in the video but this has a little bit of a rough texture because it just came out of the planer and planer knives or maybe a little dull sometimes you'll get ripples from the planer so I'm going to smooth this up so we'll do that in the tail vise one thing to keep in mind when you're planing is grain direction as I've mentioned in some of the other videos wood is like a series of straws here they are and the grain we can follow the grain like this now watch this grain line it comes and it comes and it comes off the edge of the board like this so imagine these series of straws like this if I plane in this direction we'll be fine if I take and I plane in this direction what happens all of these straws are going to break like this so I've got a plane in the direction of the grain you can refer to it and even the sense of petting the hair the hair on the on your pet you pet it with the grain right you plane in the direction of the grain sometimes it's difficult to tell which way the grain is going as when I'm planing the face of this board I'm going to take a stab at it and look I believe that the grain is going this way but really I won't be able to tell until I start playing as soon as I plane I can start fueling the grain now when I plane this it's kind of skipping along very subtly you can hear it I'm starting from one end and working all the way to the other side now you can you can hear it we're making a continuous stroke all the way across the board so I started over here and work this way now I'm working back this way this is just silky silky smooth I might go one more pass across the board putting a fair amount of pressure as I start the cut right here on the front of the tote now the pressure is over the whole of the plane a lot of pressure is down as I exit the board the pressure then is transferred to the back of the plane as I exit the board what that does is it keeps me from ending up with a tapered board that is just beautiful this same exact technique works on hardwoods I'm planing pine here but I found when planing maple that it is helpful to have this type of plane what makes a good plane or what makes a good tool is the sum of all of its parts a plane for example has many many parts and the sum of all those parts working together is what makes a good tool so by the best you can afford and sharpen up your plane iron and enjoy your planing you that's you

Channel: Homestead Heritage School of Woodworking

Views: 645,946

Rating: 4.9250693 out of 5

Keywords: Plane (Product Category), Woodworking, How To, Hand Tool (Product Category), Router Plane, Craftsman, Master craftsman, True craftsman, Classic craftsman, Vintage craftsman, Traditional craftsman, Old fashioned craftsman, Hand tool craftsman, Wood tool craftsman, Wood craftsman, Woodworking craftsman, Woodworker, Master woodworker, Blade

Id: 3LBbxC9KQBY

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 28 2014