Jim Kingshott - Bench Planes

[Music] a you'd never think that the belly of this violin was made from solid wood all the shaping has been done with little planes like this the luia even uses a little plane like this on the end of his finger to shape into these places this little fella is a real working tool it's not a toy wood workers use a whole variety of ples for different purposes here we've got a few molding planes Compass planes combination planes Reit planes and MIT ples to name just a few what we're going to do today is we're going to look at the bench ples and these three planes we're going to use first to prepare a piece of deal y three well they all have different characteristics first the wooden Jack plane that I made at the beginning of my apprenticeship in 1945 when we rub wood on wood it incurs far less friction than when we rub metal on wood thus I can push off a shaving that's really thick as thick as a soldier's belt and bring the wood somewhere near the shape I want it unfortunately wood isn't very stable it's a soft material and it wears and if there's a change in the moisture content it's likely to twist so the sole of this plane is never very true that is why we change to the metal plane this is the Stanley bile pattern invented at the end of the last century by the Americans to overcome that problem it has easy adjustments to the blade and it's a reasonable plane to use but even more precise is the British patent plane which is made out of steel plates Dove toil together again it has an adjuster for the blade and this is a super accurate tool which is ideal for taking those last few shavings off of our work of course I could use a machine but just remember machines are dusty they're noisy and they'll have your fingers off in a twinkle how much nicer to use a nice quiet bench plane a really soothing occupation now before I can use those planes I need setting up and to set them up we need to understand exactly how they work so let's look at that next here we've got a brand new plane Straight Out of the Box let's set it up now the first thing to look at is the cutting action and here we've got the cutting iron which is pitched at this angle to the sole this piece of wood has got a steep angle on this end and a shallow angle on that end think of these angles as the pitch angle of the plain iron now if I push this steep angle into the pile of paper it lifts the part cut off we could call that a shaving if you like the shallow end exactly the same but it has to do far less work now that applies to planes this is a model of a plane iron it's The Cutting Edge and we can pitch it from very shallow to very steep if we push it in at a low angle it takes far less energy than if it's pushed in at a steep angle but the low angle that works nice and easy for us tends to split the wood whereas the Steep angle tends to scrape the wood and there's no split now we can control that split in three ways the first is you will notice that as the plane cuts the Shaving forms a lever the longer it goes up the face of the iron the longer the lever arm calls in the split we can break the Shaving up by putting a back iron on there these are called irons by tradition the old chippies made their own wooden planes and the local blacksmith made the iron and being uneducated sorts they referred to all Ferris metal as iron so it's an iron and a back iron now what we're doing as we push this in and take our shaving we're breaking the Shaving up no longer is there a long lever and the distance we set this back iron from The Cutting Edge affects the length of that lever well now we've got two ways of controlling the split the pitch and the back iron but there's a third way if we set the mouth of the plane fairly narrow so that the sole immediately in front of The Cutting Edge is pressing down on the wood this again stops the split so we've got three ways of controlling the cut we've got the pitch the distance the back iron is set from The Cutting Edge and the closeness of the front of the mouth to The Cutting Edge and we can take a nice clean shaving completely controlled like that well having got that far let's now apply it to the pl first we'll get rid of this and now we take this Beast a bits and see what makes it tick this is the lever cap here we've got the two irons the back iron and The Cutting iron and this bit's called the Frog which in turn is held into the body with these two screws so here we've got the Frog and if we turn it over we can see this brass wheel with which engages with this Yol casting which is pivoted here and the other end comes through the other side of the Frog this part engages into this slot in the back iron like so now when we adjust this wheel it moves this Yol casting which in turn will coins the cutting blade up and down thus adjusting the depth of cut this lever here has got a little wheel on it and that engages in this cutout in The Cutting iron and it's called the lateral adjuster and as we move it from side to side you will see that it's swinging the blade over thus we can adjust the blade this this way and this way you see on the back of the Frog there's a little plate with a slot in it and this slot engages in the groove in this screw so we replace the frog making sure that the slot engages now if we've got a really difficult piece of wood and we're only faced or we only have a bile plane and you need to increase the pitch for any reason you can place a little bit of packing in here before you assemble the Frog thus tipping it up before we do the screws up tight now we tighten these screws up really tight they have an effect on the sole now the most important thing about a plane is that the sole be flat this must be a perfectly flat plane that's why the Tool's called a plane incidentally we can test that with a straight edge placing it right along the middle and see if we can see daylight underneath it anywhere and then we check it from corner to corner both ways now if that was perfectly flat and a new plane you're quite lucky if it wasn't you've got three Alternatives you can take it back to the shop where you brought it and compliant and it'll give you another one which will probably be just the same you can pay an engine near at the surface grind it which will probably cost you an arm and a leg or you can take half a day rubbing it on a piece of glass nice flat glass with carbon paast to get the bottom flat but I must emphasize the sole must be perfectly flat you probably notice this plant's got some grooves up and down there this is called a corrugated Sole and it's purported that these reduce the friction now the blades bed on the Frog and we can adjust the Frog backward W and forwards by adjusting this screw here thus effectively increasing or reducing the effective mouth width well there you are all back together again with the exception of the irons and these are going to need a terrific amount of work before they're ready to perform so let's just look at them we're Tak them apart like this never like this because if the screwdriver slips out it's going to to stab by hand well here's the cutting iron and this needs a lot of work because all of these deep grinding marks are going to be polished out until they look something like this right how do we do that well first we need some room so let's put these over here and we get shot of these bits down here this is my old sharpening board to keep the bench top clear this is a Japanese water stone that lives in water and is a th000 grit this is the Japanese polishing Stone now the first task is to flatten this before we try and polish it it must be perfectly flat if it is badly out of shape we may need to use a diamond plate which will remove the metal very quickly although putting some deep scratches in which we can remove on our Japanese water St now when you've got a nice flat gray matte finish on there all that's left is to get the Polish so we come down onto a very fine polishing stone and you will see that there's terrific suction between the stone and the iron this means things are very very flat and we we're really getting there well there we are that's good enough we've got a narrow band of Polish right along The Cutting Edge and that's just where we need it in use eventually all this will become polished now we finished this face but what about this one well let's go back and look at our models for a minute first let's look at this one now you remember but we've got two bevels this one is ground on a grinding machine because this business is rather laborious and the grinding machine whips the metal off quickly it's just this little teeny weeny bevel here at the end which we hone on the stones now then what angle do we sharpen this at well that rather depends if we go back to to our original piece of wood with a steep angle and the very shallow angle we can see that this part here is very fragile and will break easily well this part here on the Steep one is quite strong but we previously saw that this wouldn't cut as easy as that so the bevel is a compromise between strength and sharpness you'll find for most work 30° is about right now because Japanese stones are soft and they're easily damaged I like to use a honing guide this one was made to my own design so unfortunately can't buy it but there are lots of very similar things on the market and there we are that now will home at exactly 30° we need to treat this bevel very much like we did the face of the iron we're looking for an absolute flat surface that's really shiny and it meets the other face now when we're happy with that we've got a sharp iron now that cuts right across dead square with sharp Corners now if you think about this if we take a shaving with it we're actually taking a Groove the thickness of the shaving and it's going to have square edges and we don't want that on the surface of our wood so what we need to do we need to do something about these Corners here they can be a variety of shapes depending on what we're going to use the plane iron for got some models here now the wooden Jack plane because it takes a really thick crisp shavings needs sharpening like this we find that this shape will remove wood very quickly possibly this Corners don't cut at all but we got a really thick shaving in the middle but we've got a ripply surface to the wood and we don't want that but remember this is only used for removing lots of wood our other planes that we're going to use for preparing are sharpened like this they dead strap with just the corners taken off so that we don't get that square left at the edge of the shavings but even these little Corners would be a nuisance on a smooth surface so our smoothing plane has an iron this shape we just round off very gently the corners of the irons these are on the real Iron imperceptible amounts they're only just the thickness of a an iron of a shaving so what we do when we shaping the iron we just rock it to take the corners off this is a bench plane going to be used for Preparation so we put that little slope on either either Corner doesn't need to be very big just enough to alleviate that square corner on the Shaving and there we are that plain iron is now ready to use but we've still got this block to contend with and what are we going to do to that well we've got to make this smooth highly polished so as the Shaving comes off it can glide up over there nice and easy also this one's got a nasty Square Edge to it the Shaving is going to D against the easiest way to show you that is to compare it with my other back iron that is previously repaired if you look at these two you will see that this one is shiny and smooth this one is rough and it's got a square Edge well first let's get rid of this Square Edge and we do that by rubbing it flat on the stone but we rock it so that we form this nice curve this is fairly quickly done because the back iron is made of soft steel it's not heat treated like The Cutting iron so we can abraid still away fairly rapidly when we're happy with the shape of this we polish it with a piece of cus paper well there you are that's nice and smooth and shiny that'll do fine now the next task is to fit this onto the cutting iron now the reason for that is that's best seen looking at this model if we cut a shaving and the back iron doesn't fit perfectly on the blade along here the Shaving will go between the back iron and the blade and it will jam up and then as the blade moves forward the Shaving that's cut will gradually crinkle up and gag the mouth of the plane and planing will come to an abrupt stop how do we know if this is a good fit on the actual cutting iron well if we assemble them and we tighten up the blade like so we can hold them up to the light and we can sight along the gap between the two and we can see if any daylight is coming in between the two surfaces well there we are sharp and assembled we can now put this into the pl's body we just drop it in over the screw clamp it with the lever cap there we go we may need to adjust this little screw here just so that the cam on the lever cap goes over fairly easily what a little smidgin there goes over nice and easy and clamps the irons now we need to adjust the projection of this iron the easiest way is to place something white on the bench sight down the face of the plane adjust the projection until the iron is just visible and then adjust it laterally so that it's parallel to the sole and then we finally set it up until there's a minute little black line showing across the sole well there you are that's ready to use so now we can look at the wooden Jack plane no nice adjusting levers this time or little wheels this may seem crude but for hundreds of years this is how people adjusted their planes and it is very accurate hold the plane like this with the thumb on top of the wedge holding the irons into the body give it a sharp bang on the Striking knob like so and everything's nice and loose there you are this we deal with exactly the same as we did with the Bailey plane no problems at all when that's good we can reassemble it but first let's go back to the body do you remember I said that the so becomes out of true with wear and with moisture content during the plan's life we true this quite frequently with another plane nice finely set shaving if you look at the mouth escapement you will see that it's wide at the top and very narrow at the bottom so as we remember smooth shavings here what happens is the mouth becomes wide and several times during the plane's life we have to insert a little hardwood slip here to reduce the width of the mouth that's known as REM mouthing we assembled this in exactly the reverse procedure don't forget to hold it well with your thumb just gently cleans that we turn it over still holding the iron in with our thumb and we just tap this end very gently until the iron projects slightly we can adjust it laterally here and when we've got that to our liking we just give the wedge one final and there's that one ready to use well that just leaves the British patent plane now this is made so accurately that quite honestly there's not a lot that we left for us to do has a lever cap with a screw and we take the iron out like so now the big difference is the adjuster this is the Thomas Norris a patent adjuster it's not in all British planes but in the majority these days and this is the tool that is the adjuster this flat plate is screwed into the body of the plane and the threaded Rod has a ring on the end which fits over the screw in the back iron drops on there just so there we are nice tight fit now the whole thing is in the plane like so as we wind this we adjust the iron up and down and when we move it laterally from side to side it pivots the iron this way this is a very very precise and accurate adjuster exactly reverse procedure we wind the adjuster to get the projection just right we adjust it laterally until it's parallel and once the iron is set exactly where we want it we give the lever cap screw a final tweak and there's our British patent plane ready to use well that's all three planes ready to go now that may have seemed a bit long- winded but most of those things we've done only need doing once during the plane's life and some of those planes are on their third human life I'm the third generation to use them so possibly it was great Grandad that fed them let's go and use them wood workers spend a lot of their time planing so it's important that we position the tools we're going to use on the bench in a convenient position for planing we put our planes here on a strip of wood this keeps the front end off the bench and stops the plane iron touching the bench and becoming blunt we don't want to waste all that time we spent sharpening them you may have been told to place your plane on its side like this but that's got one big fault if there's another tool on the bench and it gets knocked against the edge you've really got some work to do to put the matter right not only that when you're going to pick it up it's difficult whereas this is very convenient we said earlier on that planing causes friction and we need to lubricate the sole of the plane some people use parim wax and they dress the bottom of the plane like this but we've had to pick the plane up turn it over find the wax put it away it's time consuming how much easier to pick our plane up and drag it straight back over an oil Wick we dress the oil Wick with a smidgin of L seed oil not very much because we don't want to get that oil on the workpace well there's the piece of wood we're going to plane it's come straight from the timber Merchant and the guys have probably walked all over it with our OB nail boots there's grit in the surface it's been stalled in the open in the dust so we get rid of all that by just wire brushing the surface we don't want to blunt our plane on that Grit minute we take the first shaving so there we are we need to make the wood flat so that it sits down on the bench that's where our wooden Jack plane comes in and it'll take a real thick lump off until we can sit the wood down properly now if you were going to go and play golf you'd pay a lot of money to learn to stand properly and hold the clubs nobody ever thinks of that with playing it but it's important so let's just look at things when we're planning we don't want to use our arm muscles if we stand beside the work and work like this it's all muscular and that takes a lot of energy but if we get behind the plane so that we use our body weight and the upper tors so is behind and propels the plane it's much easier getting our feet right is quite important as well on a short piece of wood we don't need to walk the length for the bench so we place our right foot at right angles to the bench and our left foot pointing along the bench position ourselves just behind the end of the wood and hold the plane so now this hand you'll notice the three fingers around the tote and the four finger is pointing forward on the top of the iron we hold most of our woodworking tools in this way because this finger feeds back the in information of how the plane is orientated like this if we grip it so there is no feedback we don't know how the plane is positioned so there we go the right hand sorry the left hand comes forward and presses down on the front like so it is positioned slightly different to this when we playing The Edge but we'll look at that later so let's take a shaving we start here pushing down with the front as we get to the other end we transfer the weight to the back of the plane thus the plane is positioned flat on the wood at the start transferring the we evenly in the middle so it's down firmly and at that end there's no weight on this hand it's all on the back keeping the plane flat what well there we are look that fits pretty flat on the bench now so we can begin work proper we're going to prepare this piece of wood now what do we mean by prepared well first and foremost we're going to make this flat surface absolutely flat and really straight this we will call the face side and we will mark it for reference when we've got that true we will PL this ede square and straight to this face and we will call that the face Edge when they are right we will plane the wood on the back so that is exactly the same thickness right throughout its whole length and last we'll PL it for width to make sure the width is exactly the same throughout the whole job the back will be true to the face and the far Edge will be true to to the face Edge so what are we going to do well let's look first we can see that there's a pronounced round on this wood so we need to take some out the middle that's a job for the wooden Jack because there's quite a bit of wood to come [Applause] out when we've got it reasonably flat we can change to the Bailey do you notice the difference totally different cut and if we tried to take that big bump out the Middle with this it would have taken us about 5 minutes instead of those few seconds if you want to make a quick check just to see if you're getting the wood flat in its width you can always just put your plane across quickly to see what the state of play is when you think you've got it flat you need to check it we do this with a straight edge and we put it along the work and we s to see if we can see any daylight underneath it there we are you will see that this has got a slight bump in the middle I can just rock or straight edge so we want a few shavings out the middle there's a point here this is an oldfashioned Lan knob and I can get over the top and hold it down down the modern Bailey planes have a tall knob which you have to hold like this um I don't find that works for me well let's check that again well now I'll accept that as being straight but is it twisted to check that we use a pair of winding strips these are made from two pieces of dark colored wood in this case black walnut jugglin and they're absolutely parallel these two faces must be parallel so both of them in the width are dead true now I can't overemphasize that because any inaccuracy in these will be reflected in the workpiece so if these are wrong everything you're playing is wrong put one either end of the work and we sight through to see if there's any twist and in this case we've got some twist this is high here and high there if you haven't got a very good memory just mark it with a bit of lumber crayon few more shavings then so we go from this side to that side just check again to make sure you haven't put a round on the job that's fine winding sticks wow that's great so there we are that is now flat and straight and we're going to refer to that because it's a datam face and we need to mark it so we used a piece of lumber crayon and we put a mark on here like that now by tradition that is the top of a lowercase f and it dates back to the days when the master would Mark a line on the work a straight line I hasten to say on the work and he'd mark it with an F when it was ripped down each piece would have a face mark on it well there we are the face now we need to plain the face Edge and as previously said that is got to be absolutely flat dead straight and at 90° to this face we could hold this piece in the vice but it's better supported if it doesn't come up too high on the surface of the bench again we remove any grit few shavings with the wooden Jack there we are you can see the difference there look that's the Jack Pline shaving real thick crisp one there we got a much finer [Music] Jack now we think that's straight let's check it so we check it again with the straight edge just as we did the face side now we need to check it for square is it at 90° to the face no there's a little bit of light underneath there now you may have noticed that I'm using an engineer Square why well let's just look at a recently brought woodworking Square you will see that we've got quite a nice looking tool big Long Blade held in just this little area with four rivets now it doesn't take much of a knock to put that out a true how can we check if this is square is is this 90° it's quite a simple method and we do it like this we use a board that we've planed perfectly straight on one Edge we draw a pencil line keeping the stock tight against the straight edge and we put a fine pencil line across we turn the square through 180° and offer it up to the line and any discrepancy is twice the amount the square is out as you will see that in that about 8 in of board this square is a good 16th out a tool that's not accurate is no used to us at all we could buy a woodworking Square by paying a few pounds more that has an L-shaped blade in other words this piece of metal goes right down the full length of the stock whereas this one is just there this one has only four rivets the same as that but they're spread over the whole area of the stock so therefore this is a much more trustworthy tool than that but even so I like to use these engineer squares because they're made to a stringent British standard spec stand on the blade and I can trust them so back to our work piece and we check it for square and as I said previously it is slightly low on this edge here now because it is only slight I'm going to adjust it with the British plane which is set up to take a very very very very thin shaving as you can see and believe it or not that shaving is about a th and a half thick so we're working to quite accurate Dimensions there we are we have another look and we've still got a slight little bit of light under that end so we come up and as we come to that end we come over to one side so full width here over to one side there and then we try and take one shaving the full width of the wood the full length of the wood you'll notice how controlled that shaving was I can only do that with the British plane so one final check yes I'll accept that is it Square yes I'll accept that now we need to mark that and we mark it with a V which points towards the face Mark so now we've got two datam faces and everything we do to that piece of wood in future will work from those two faces we now need to make this back side parallel to the face so we can have to mark that in some way now we use a mar marking gauge for that and like all tools there's good on and there's badens I've thrown all the bad ones away so I can only show the good ones this is the normal marking gauge that you will buy today in the shop it's got a plastic screw but that doesn't matter this is a nice old Rosewood one which you'll see is a much better fit than our modern tool the pin here when you buy it will properly protrude far too much it needs knocking back or pulling back so we're going to set this up to the width of the wood so we're going to take a shaving and we will check round to see that this is within reason and if we want to adjust this a small amount I haven't tightened this screw up really tight it's just pinching at the moment I can tap the stock on the bench like that and it will adjust the the pin little bit more okay that's fine final tight up now most beginners have a lot of trouble with this tool and the reason is they don't understand quite how to use it they try and push it into the work the full depth of the the pin and make a line and the pin engages in the grain of the wood and it just follows the Grain and you get a straight line about as straight as a donkey piddling in the snow on a windy night so press the wood somewhere so you've got it firm and we Trail the gauge we Trail the gauge like this so the pin is only just touching the wood so we go down here and we've got a fine line we now Trail the pin not quite so much we've got a deeper line we now press the pin right into the work it's full depth and we've got a nice deep line we do the same on the other Edge well there we are we've now got a line showing us the width we want to plain the wood to but there's something I want to make clear to you and the only way I can do that is to run a pencil line inside the gauge line you wouldn't normally do this but there's something I want you to see in in a minute which is very very important and the only way you'll see it is if there's that pencil Mark okay well you can see there's a wee bit of wood to come off so we go back to our old friend the Jack Clan and we'll have it a few off [Applause] here keep your eye on the gauge line remember to keep your body over behind the plane you will see I'm beginning to approach the [Music] line now when I get this close I can change planes and you'll notice that the edge of the wood is beginning to fluff from the gauge line now the gauge line is beginning to break through the surface of the wood remember you still want it flat it's very easy to round the wood so you can check it with the edge of your plane if you want just to make [Music] sure if we look we can see that the edge of the gauge line is beginning to break away you can see it here very clearly look that's half the gauge line just coming to the surface if I take the British plane now I'll just bring that to absolute truth now that's taken all the high spots off that were left by the Bailey plattin and there we are this is now flat and parallel to the face side all that's left now is to plan it for width and we need to use a marking gauge again very similar operation to before might be a bit of a problem marking gauges have fairly short stems and if the wood is of any width you need a panel gauge and a panel gauge is made by the Craftsman himself and it looks like this in actual fact some bright sparkers used this and left it set up all over the shop there we go so we would set this up to the width of the wood which could be anything up to about 2T this has got a little rebate on it that fits on there and we can now gauge a wide piece of wood the panel gauge right back to our ordinary marking gauge just check that that is reasonable of course if you had to work to Dimensions you set this up to a rule but we don't usually do that we're trying to get the biggest piece possible out of the material we're given here we go again you'll notice something old in the gauge slightly different now because it's marking to its full width it's very easy for this to happen so you place it on the wood and pull pull the stem towards you again do the task in three sweeps exactly as before trailing it the first time let's try on the second and full depth the Third there look at that we can have one or two crisp shavings first lose some of that there we are look breaking through into the gauge line again you can just see there's a little shamer on the edge of the wood that the gauge made not quite this side so we pull the plane over take a controlled shave in there last one with the British patent plane trying to get that shaving the full width the full length and not go past our gauge lines well they are playing down to the gauge lines now we've got a piece of wood that is prepared which means we've got a perfectly flat and straight face side a face Edge dead Square 90° and straight we've got the backside plane parallel to the face side and we've got the far Edge plane parallel to the face Edge so our piece of wood is ready to do anything else with that's it it's prepared remember that these two faces are the dats everything is measured gauged or squared from them for instance if you're using a square to put a square line around the work the stock goes on the the face Edge and on the face side never on the back Edge so it's turned over and squared from the face Edge and the face side and if you go right round with a line like that and it doesn't meet up it can be two things are wrong either the Square's out a kilter or the wood ain't straight now okay so that's preparing that piece of wood but that was relatively short and we could stand still and do it what happens if it's longer and we need to move with the plane well let's look at that next there's very little difference we start at the end exactly the same as we did with the short wood we get behind the plane over the plane you'll notice my feet are exactly the same as they were before press down on the front of the plane start the shaving and as soon as it starts cutting walk with the Pline the full length of the work put your weight on the back of the Pline as it leaves it's exactly the same as before remember that the body is over and behind the plane you're sort of leaning on the plane to propel it forward and to keep it flat on the work so let's have a shaving off of that then so away we go away we go becomes slightly easier as as we take a smaller shaving now once it's going the plane is propelled by the body weight in other words if you look carefully you'll see the body is over and behind the plane I'm literally leaning on the plane so it's being kept down flat on the work and it's sliding away from me because the weight is behind it at no point am I using my arm muscles I'm just using body weight and I'm moving along the bench just enough to complete the Shaving you see we're getting a shaving the full length of the wood so preparing this is exactly the same procedure as we've previously done except we need to move a bit more you've probably noticed that I've been using planes of a medium length up to now well we have shorter planes and we have longer planes why let's look at that next now I've got this horrible old bit of chipboard and I've bandor a curve on this surface quite a pronounced curve to show you the effect between short and long planes you can see the bow here and the short plane will fit down into that in fact if I didn't care about my plane iron I'd probably take a shaving or two there but in no way I'm not going to plan a bit of chipboard you'll see that the long plane won't have anything to do with the Curve look and get me fingers underneath it now what does that show us well if you think about it a short plane will PL a sculped face a long plane will plane flat and straight and that is what we want to do this is particularly important when we Edge joint boards and that's what we're going to do now I've got three boards here which could be a typical job they want join it together along here and here to make one wide surface now it is very very easy to get these joints muddled up the best thing we can do is to use this device there we go that's known as a cabinet maker triangle and it doesn't matter how many boards we've got wide we can see their orientation and now they go together providing they make one triangle so let's start off with our first board like so now the edge of this is fairly narrow and that means it's difficult to keep the plane dead Square so some craftsmen would put the face of this board to the face of that one like this making sure that the top surfaces were level and then they would shoot that surface incidentally we call this shooting long joints a shot and this is a shooting plane or a jointer I don't go much on this idea it's done like this they say because if it's planed out a square when you turn this board over and assemble it on there you turn it over and assemble it on there they're out to square a complimentary amount on each board so it's going to fit regardless of whether they're square or not but if you think about this suppose they've been playing slightly round well then you would have doubled the roundness so I prefer to work one board at the time I'm going to start off with this chat this again is a bile patent plane but you'll see it's slightly different it's called a bedrock and this was a different pattern of frog to stop the plane chattering there was complaints that the early Stanley planes chattered and they brought this out to try and count act mat so away we go no great problems two or three shavings with this chat until we fill the edges reasonably square and [Music] straight then we move over to this chat which is a way bit longer yeah look at those lovely Dove Tails here we go exactly the same procedure nice steady shaving try to take a shav in the full width of the wood and the full length of the wood when we've got a couple off like that and we feel fairly confident we pop down this end and sight through the length of the wood and see if we think that's straight now it's almost impossible to PL the Wood Hollow but it's quite easy to get a slight round so in pling the edge what we try and do we try very slightly to PL it Hollow this one has actually got a slight r on it so I'm removing a bit out the middle and one last shaving the full length and then we check the edge just to see if it's Square okay we finish with that one for a minute so let's take the next one in the triangle and pop him in the vicee cut the shavings with the Bedrock back to the English patent plane there we are we've got a funny bit in the middle here not quite getting a full wit shaving that's better there we are now we can try this chap on top what we'll do so that we can see the triangle we'll put this one in there and we'll assemble this one on the top now you can feel by the drag as you place it on that you've got a pretty good fit and we get down here and have a look to see if we can see any daylight through yeah we got a little bit at either end we need some out the middle so a couple of good shavings out the middle when I make wooden airlane propellers they shoot 4in boards flat together and laminate them with a plane like this eight and nine boards for each blade that's eight or nine joints and then they inspect them the inspector comes along with a bicycle lamp and a twoth fer gauge and he goes along the back with his bicycle lamp and if he can see any daylight he tries to poke his tooth fer gauge in and if he can get that in there you've got to shoot it again that is a good joint okay so that's number one we shoot number two joint there we go back to our British patent plane we love using this old chat look at that shaving thing of beauty there we are we'll just have a look yeah very slightly rounded there's always a tendency for it to be rounded so as I say we we try and playing it slightly Hollow and there we go last of all this chat we got a rather nasty piece of wood there never mind if you had the width in this You' probably take the Jack plane and reduce the wood past that whiny piece when you've done this a few times you begin to get a good feel for your tools you can tell when it's straight don't ask me why you sort of get a feeling in your water that it's straight right still not quite there this one should do it no still a nasty in the middle can you hear how it's taking a shaving at both ends and nothing out the middle there we are then they start cutting again one more that's good enough for us to try a trial [Music] fit there we are our triangle is there and that's pretty good I can feel that as it assembles it's biting nicely now yeah that's lovely now it's important that when our board is glued up when these butt joints are glued up that the board is flat so as we shoot the job and we stand the boards together we just test them with a right H to make sure that allowing for any c curvature in the width of the boards the thing's going to be reasonably flat that's great so there we are look we've now got our three boards with the two shot joints of course we might work a tongue or some other form or maybe some dowels in those joints but believe me if they were glue rub glued with Hot Melt glue we'd have a beautiful flat board and quite honestly when that was glued up like that you wouldn't see the joints the only way you'd know they were there was the mismatch of the grain well okay now we talked about these boards being narrow and what a difficulty it would be to keep the plane Square on the edge well there comes a point where that is an impossibility and we need to use a device like this called a shooting board so suppose we have to shoot the edge of a board this thing absolutely Square we'd place it on the board like so and we would use our jointer on its side to take shavings off like so because the bottom of this rebate which the plane is running in is absolutely parallel to this surface the plane has been ground perfectly Square the sole to the sides so we know that the blade is cutting at 90° to the horizontal therefore this Edge must be square to that face easy ain't it so far I've talked to you about bench planes the medium length and long ones now we're going to look at some of the short ones these are smoothing planes and they're probably the last planes used on the flat surface here we've got three bile planes exactly the same procedure in fetting them as we did with the other biley there is a little teeny weeny baby smoother made by Bailey which is a number one there's a little bigger one at number two but the first one that is really of any use is the number three this is a number four and this is a number four and a half so that is the Bailey pattern smoothers we come over to the English pattern this is a Thomas noris of London with the Norris adjuster which we looked at before it's got the same sort of lever cap as all British planes this is a British pattern but I made this one myself from a casting which I brought from Bristol designs and fitted a Norris adjusta over here we've got an old family heirloom this is at least a couple of hundred years old it was great great grandfather's and if you look carefully you can see where thumbs gripping that over the years I've worn that very hard Rosewood away I commune with my forefathers when I put my thumb there and last we've got a bismar now this is a German plane the German cabinet makers reckon that these metal planes are amateurs tools lay like wood the body is nearly always made of fruit wood apple pear Cherry the so that's a piece of lignum fighty and lignum is very very oily so the sole is self-lubricating and it's toothed on and glued to the body and it even has an adjustable mouth the only thing about that tool that is different is the Norris adjuster and I fited that of all those I probably use this plane as much as all the others put together I built this myself for a purpose just for the weight the smallness of the mouth and the size and it works ideal for the sort of thing I do now I've got a piece of aelia here which you probably know is a horrible wood to work the grain is quite wild and I'm going to smooth that with this chat again we lubricate the sole on the oil Wick and we can take shavings off the surface which is of course already nice some flat we can sheet here a bit because we're not interested in this being absolutely flat and straight anymore we finished making the thing we can put the plane at a slight Angle now you'll notice that the Shaving is curling out the side now this is a bit of a cheat do you remember when you rode your bicycle up a hill how you went from side to side and it sort of flattened the hill out well this is the same what we're doing we're making the Shaving come up the iron at an angle so in effect we're cheating and we're lowering the pitch of the plane very slightly we might not always want to do that but it's a good tip on a piece of wood like this you'd find you'd be sharpening about every 3 or 4 minutes because it's quite gritty and as you can hear The Edge on this plane is going already but that'll do because that is as smooth as a baby's bum so I've shown you mediumsized bench planes which we used to prepare the wood we've used long jointers to Edge joint boards we've used much shorter planes to smooth the wood but there are a dozen more planes all different types quite a few have been used to make this Lin fold panel the Styles and rails were prepared with bench planes but we've got a Groove here which was done with a plow the beads are worked with a beading plane we've got a rabbit here that was cut with a Fister a Lamb's tongue molding around here that was worked with a molding plane and then we've got the linen fold itself which was worked mainly with Hollows and rounds before the end was carved so you will see there are dozens more planes there's a whole variety there and I'll talk about those in our next video but what I would say is if you can't prepare your wood straight and true to start with you can't make anything can you [Music]

Channel: Dovetail Tim

Views: 54,632

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Id: RKMd2-zRLH0

Length: 76min 54sec (4614 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024