Import Tool Madness: PLASTIC hand plane. ($3.80; free shipping)

so I have this idea of what happened I assumed there's a bunch of guys sitting around in China and they don't have Factory and they're just sitting around having coffee or whatever and one of them says oh hey by the way the injection molder came in and the rest of them were like oh that's fantastic great news now we can make anything we want out of plastic and they're like that's fantastic they get really excited and then the room gets kind of quiet and finally somebody says well what do you want to make and nobody says anything for a minute and finally one of them says well why don't we make a traditional hand plate out of plastic and the rest of them sort of look at each other and they don't have any other ideas so they're like oh okay let's do that I assume that's the way it happened because otherwise I have no explanation for how this thing came into existence [Applause] welcome to import tool madness episode 3 today we're going to be looking at this little injection molded plastic hand plane you can buy it off Aliexpress for 360 380 the price fluctuates a little bit but it usually has free shipping and I had to look at it I had to get it because seriously first of all it's insane it's a traditional wedged hand claim made of plastic and second if you can get a plane that works but on any level that works even okay for under $4.00 with free shipping I mean that's a no-brainer you can keep it in the glove box of your car for that amount of money so I had to check it out let's look at the construction if the shape of this plane looks a little bit odd to you it's because this is actually a traditional Chinese shape hand plane with these slope and cutaways in the front here I'll talk more about this in a future video it's got a wedge just like you'd be used to in a standard plane and the wedge is cut out into a v-shape to help with chip clearance that's good it's got Knibb right here left over from the casting process we'll just trim that off for the cross pin they've actually used a bolt that's recessed into one side and with a captive nut over here that doesn't seem like it would work very well but it's only leaving tiny little marks on the wedge and it seems to hold everything securely and hey it's keeping things cheap so I'm fine with that now the thing that I like the most about this so far is the iron it's surprisingly thick and it feels and looks like it's made out of high quality steel we'll test that more in just a second the biggest question with this plane is what exactly is it intended for what are you supposed to do with it now looking at the size of it it seems like it should be a block plane but the thing about block planes is that they're bedded usually with the bevel of the blade up and they're set up with the blade at roughly a 25 degree angle this thing on the other hand is bedded beveled down like a traditional hand plane would be and the angle is wait seriously well okay so the angle of this plane is actually 55 degrees so not only is that not low angle like a block plane it's actually a high angle plane that's Lately York pitch so okay weird I think the only way to figure out what's actually going on here is to use the plane and so the first thing we're gonna do is get the iron check it out and sharpen it up first thing I want to check is is the back flat so let's get rid of the stones for a second pull in glass with sandpaper and we just take a few strokes and what we can see really clearly here is that the back of this thing is not flat it's dished pretty badly I don't need the whole thing to be flat I just need like half-inch would be fine so after kind of a lot of grinding against sandpaper this thing still has a pretty vicious hollow in the middle now that might actually make sense because a lot of Asian style woodworking tools are actually quite hollow for instance here is a Japanese chisel and you can tell it's also got a big hollow in the middle sort of similarly shaped and I know that that's intentional because it makes flattening easier but right now we're gonna call this intentional and not a manufacturing defect in a super cheap tool let's sharpen up this thing sharpened right up it was easy to raise a verb but it also felt like kind of hard steel so now the iron is totally prepared let's look at the plain body itself with this thing being so small and simple there's not too much we have to do to it the only thing we need to check on is is the bottom flat not even close now I know that a lot of Japanese planes for instance are actually hollowed out in here and in here intentionally but I'm just not willing to give the manufacturers that much credit I think the casting just moved after it came out of the injection molder and I think this is a manufacturing defect and we should correct it perfect now I'm going to install the blade set the wedge and get ready to test it the iron here is quite small it's about an inch and an eighth so we'll start off with small stomach we'll try an edge and then some face planing some smoothing we'll see how it works for taking off the corners of something beveling and endgrain okay so the good news is it works the bad news is it doesn't work very well it's okay at doing things like taking the corners off wood and it's actually surprisingly good at bevels and end grain but when I was trying to do the edges of boards and especially any kind of face planing it was is terrible the iron is very very difficult to adjust I had a hard time getting it projecting enough to take a good cut and I really had to kind of wail on it with the hammer and then when I did get it deep enough to take a cut the wedge which has this little fork design to it here the points of the fork would stick out the mouth and keep the blade from engaging so okay no problem I just trimmed those off but then it still wasn't adjusting very well it behaved very weirdly under the hammer and I think the problem is the material that it's made out of this plastic it's waxy kind of rubbery feeling I'm pretty sure it's some sort of polyethylene very slick feeling so I just roughed it up with a little bit of sandpaper thinking that might help but I still had a really tough time getting it to take full width shaving or a full length shaving and what would happen is it would start the cut really well and then by the end of the cut it wouldn't be cutting at all anymore and I think the problem is that there isn't enough friction with this wedge and the body of the plane to keep the iron set at a consistent depth for a long cut so so far it's not looking great but I do have one idea on how I might be able to salvage this plane so it only took me a few minutes to make a new wedge for this thing okay actually it took me a little longer than that because I broke the first one and then I broke the second one but then I made one and you'll do it a lot faster than me because you'll be smarter than I was and this wedge has solved a lot of my problems now the iron adjusts better and still not great but better and it definitely stays in place better the extra friction of the wood is making a big difference so now especially when I edge plane something I can get a full-length shaving with a consistent thickness of shaving the whole way so the iron is staying in place now the problem I do have now though is that the chip injection is not good I pretty much have to dig in there every time to pull the chips out and I can see what's going on here is that the what they call the wear angle in here it's much - up and down it's really vertical it should be leaned back a lot more to help the chips come out and that's a tough thing to work on with a plane like this I do have an idea so I'm gonna set this up on the drill press with a Forstner bit and kind of a careful angle and see if I can just sort of mill this out a little bit so now with the mouth board open and the new wedge I'm gonna try the same planing tasks again and with edge planing now there's a huge difference now I can get a full length full width shaving the iron stays in place and so that shaving is the same thickness the whole way and the chips come out really really easily they come out as well as they do with any of my other plans so next I took a wider piece of wood and I tried face planning and here the plane still didn't do great the iron was backing off the surface it was leaving on the wood was really mediocre it just wasn't a good smoothing plane even for smallish pieces of wood but I wanted to try it again with detail work and here it excelled even more than before doing chamfers end grain and taking off the corners was really easy and the results were excellent so now we get down to the final question which is should you buy this plane and my answer is a resounding maybe it is extremely cheap under $4.00 with Free Shipping and so if you want a plane to sort of fiddle around with that's not bad if you're willing to do about an hour of work with it you can have a pretty good detailed plane that's lightweight and easy to just sort of leave anywhere or grab and take with you if you want to go fix a stuck door at your neighbor's house or something this is a decent plane for that but you do have to do a bunch of work to it and whether you're willing to do that or not is up to you now the other thing I want to point out though is that the iron on this plane is really decent it's actually better than decent it's pretty good it's pretty thick it holds an edge well it sharpens up easily and it's definitely acceptable flat and square and even if you just ignore the rest of the plane three dollars and sixty cents or three dollars and 80 cents just for this iron with free shipping I would take that deal in a second and I think what I'm really likely to do in a future video is take this iron out make a better plane around it specifically for doing detail work around the shop so even just for the iron this could be a good buy and before I go I just wanted to mention that I've recently made the transition to doing 100% content creation and I've quit doing client work because it was taking me away from doing the projects that really interested me like making these videos and one thing that's been a huge help in that is my patrons on patreon so if you like this content if you want to see more cheap tool reviews more ways of getting into woodworking quickly and easily more creative artistic projects go over to patreon comm and check out the rewards and early access that I have available now more than ever my patrons are making it possible for me to produce this content the more support I get on patreon the more better videos you're gonna save and even if you can't contribute I'm really glad you were able to watch this video I love being a part of this community and sharing these things with other people so thanks so much for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 38,922

Rating: 4.9409876 out of 5

Keywords: plane, hand plane, diy, tools, hand tools, tool review, cheap tools, wood, woodworking, blade, iron, sharpening, beginner, shop, make, maker

Id: t7sl2qyLOjM

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 09 2018