Learn to use your hand plane!

welcome to woodwork for humans the series where we get you woodworking right now and of course I do a lot of content about plants how to get them set up how to optimize them and how to prep your wood by hand and recently I've gotten a lot of comments from viewers who have said ok I've restored a plain sharpened plain all that's fine but when I actually go to plain wood I'm not getting the kind of results that I see on your channel I'm not getting these beautiful feathery shavings in these shiny surfaces I can sharpen the thing but I'm not totally sure how to use it and that's a really good point haven't covered that very well so I thought I'll just do a video about planing but then I also thought well I've been doing hand tool woodworking for a long time anything I do is still gonna look too easy it's not gonna be helpful what I thought was I need somebody else to come in here somebody who's not an experienced woodworker and I'll show them learning how to plane and that'll actually help you get better who am I gonna get well I already have somebody who works with me he does the editing for my videos and he wants to learn woodworking even though he doesn't know much about it I think I just heard him come in hey Nate hey can you come here so he's gonna come in and he'll be part of the video today so here he is hey how's it going good how are you I'm great Hey well um you've you meet some interesting fashion choices there today yeah just wanted to be ready was it is this bad for shop work no no it's it's fine was was there anything that made you choose that exact ensemble not really this looked kind of tough and ready good is that weird no not at all [Applause] okay so Nate who's totally not dressed in a weird way at all is gonna be our guinea pig for this planning experiment what I have here is just a regular old vintage Stanley hand plain that I bought from a flea market and I restore it I have videos on all stuff and then I've also taken the iron and I've sharpened it I've got a whole video that goes through sharpening in detail and I set the cap iron very close to the edge about 1/32 of an inch away from the edge that's a standard setting for me here's what we're gonna do I'm gonna take my iron and put it in my plane I'm gonna take my lever cap and lock that down and then I'm not gonna do anything to it I'm gonna hand it to Nate and then for the rest of this video I'm not gonna touch that plane no matter what he's only gonna follow my verbal instructions you ready me absolutely okay so the first thing you want to do is just look at the mouth of the plane flip it over look the mouth is the iron sticking out at all no okay so what you want is for it not to be sticking out what I usually do is I spin that adjustment knob counterclockwise and make sure the iron is all the way up in the plane and nothing sticking out if you run your thumb over the mouth you get anything nope okay fantastic go ahead and put plane we got a scrap of wood right here this is just a little thin scrap of walnut this is really useful for setting your plane up put this in the vise you can put your plane on that and then take a couple of strokes just the way it is yep okay so this is the way that you want to start out you want no iron sticking out of your plant now what Nate is gonna do is he's gonna keep planing the scrap of wood while slowly spinning that knob clockwise and advancing a little bit of iron go ahead great ok let's see what we got what actually came out of the plane that would be this shaving right here okay so if you get something like this out of the plane early on that's great that's an excellent sign now it looks to me like this was kind of more towards the side of the iron than the middle where was it actually coming out of the mouth of the plant was it in the middle I believe so yeah okay so let's try to take a shaving right in the middle the whole length of the board great and that's great that's an excellent shaving now what we're gonna do is we're gonna put the plane back on the board again and we're gonna shift it all the way to one side so you want to be all the way to the left or all the way to the right your choice so we're gonna go all the way to the right you start with and then go ahead and try to take a shape oh that felt much better did you get a shaving oh yeah okay so what we want is to not get a shaving on the edges so if you got a shaving here on the left side I'm willing to bet that if you go to the right side you won't get anything go ahead and try that yeah okay so what that means is that the iron is not straight inside the plane it's definitely tilted much more to the left then to the right now I'm not gonna touch Nate's plane but I do have another plane here and I'm gonna use this to demonstrate what's going on back behind the iron we have the lateral adjustment lever and that gets the iron to be straight in the plane what you want to do is move the lateral lever towards the part of the iron that you have too much of so right now you have too much iron on the left yeah so move it to the left and what you're gonna do is you're not gonna plane in the middle anymore you're gonna plane on the left and then on the right and we're gonna fiddle with the lateral until we have the exact same amount of iron on the left and on the right okay so what you're looking for is either nothing on either side or very very little and you want it to be even no matter what okay so now nate is gonna take a shaving on the left sided plan little tiny bit of Shaving now he's gonna take a shaving on the right side of the plan also very little also very little do they feel equal to you they do okay now take your shaving down the middle of the board how does that feel I feel good it felt good now a great thing to do is take your plane and start a shaving on this side and as you go across the board move the plane over so you start off on the left side and by the end of the stroke you're on the right side okay does that make sense so you're starting over here yeah and then as you go you're slowly moving it sideways until you end up over there okay so try taking a stroke that way great and what you're looking to do there is watch and make sure that the shaving starts coming out at the same place and stops coming out at the same place on the other side Oh does it look like it's coming out evenly and the blade is cutting evenly all the way across yeah it does yeah for sure fantastic now the next thing you can do is you can take your plane and you can hold it up to the light and you can sight down it like this some people do it from the toe some people do it from the heel I find they're both effective especially if you have something sort of bright and reflective back here and what you want to see is just a little bit of iron sticking up right here in the middle yeah you don't want any iron in either corner if you have iron sticking up in either corner or in both corners you're going to get tracks in your wood it's not gonna work well as a smoothing plane so at this point Nate's plane is totally set up he's got the iron sticking out just a little bit and he doesn't have it sticking out at all at the corner so there's only a bit of iron in the middle that's an ideal smoothing plan setup means we can get rid of this little test board I keep something like this right under my bench and every time I sharpen a plane or get out a new plane I put a thin board like that in the vise and run through a couple of strokes just to make sure I know the iron is situated properly then I can move on to doing my actual work in this case I'm gonna give Nate this piece of walnut this is a good polite board the grain is going straight there's not gonna be any reversing grain or any weirdness and the edge of the board is rough so it's a great thing to practice on edge planning is the perfect way to start off because you're only using the center of the blade anyway you've got less to worry about and you can concentrate on getting a nice straight and even surface and then later we can move on to the more challenging face crane go ahead and just put your plane right on here and take a couple of strokes okay let me just time out real quick one thing that you're doing is you're starting about a quarter of the way in on the board yeah which means you're not cutting the whole board right okay so what you need to do common beginner mistake is you need to start with your blade off the board okay so come over timeout for a second come over rest the toe of the plane and that's just the part that's ahead of the blade rest that on the board and make sure it's nice and steady make sure you've got it registered then push forward and take a stroke okay timeout so let's take a look at what you're doing there and I think this is exactly what we want to be seeing this is what happens when you have your smoothing planes set up yeah go ahead do yours - this is what happens when your smoothing plane is set up with the right projection with the corners up inside the plane you get a nice feathery shaving like this and the surface of the board is really clean and shiny even though it's narrow you can see this on camera this is what you're looking for and if you're new to planing doing the edge of a narrow board an easy wood like walnut that's a great way to get started now the next thing we need to do is figure out if this board now that it's all cleaned up is it square so at this point Nate's got his board he's got his board and he's taken all the rough wood off one edge it's nice and smooth but we need to know whether it's square or not so he's gonna take his tri square he's gonna put the stock of the square against one face of the board that's pretty flat and he's gonna lower it so that the beam of the square touches the edge then he'll hold it up to the light and see if any light is sticking out underneath the beam of that square oh for sure others there's a lot this is a normal result the first board you edge plane will almost certainly not be square what is going on with this bit what is the square tell you there's a lot of light coming through on this okay so that tells us we're very low on the left side and we're high on the right side we're gonna put the board back in the vise and plane to correct that we've got the board back in the vise this side is low and this side is high and we can correct that with our plane this is a smoothing plane and it's sharpened with a curved or cambered edge that means we have much more iron in the middle and less iron to either side where we want to correct the board we're gonna shift that high middle part of the iron so we're taking off more material so what Nate's gonna do is he's gonna put his plane on the board and he's gonna put the middle of the plane all the way over on this right side and then if he just takes a stroke that way the planes gonna go back and forth all over the board and he's not gonna get a consistent result so here's where you need a little extra technique you take your left hand and you grip the toe of the plane just like this and you're using this knuckle of this finger as a fence to ride against the board so you're gonna have the plane like this and as you're going down the board this way your knuckle is gonna keep the plane oriented left to right you're gonna keep the center of the plane over that high section you take a couple of strokes that way so what we're getting here is exactly what we want to see instead of getting a full width shaving like this one we're getting a narrow shaving that's great that tells us that we're only taking a shaving off the edge of the board and I just thought of another trick hold on just a second you can just grab any pencil or pen and draw a zigzag line all the way down your board and that gives you a really quick visual reference for where you've planed and where you have it okay so that was five or six strokes just looking at the board and looking at your shavings what's happening there's pencil left on this side no pencil on this side and are your shavings getting wider they sure are so we're taking more and more of Shaving as we work our way across the board leveling it out let's do four or five more strokes okay so now we've taken about ten strokes over the let's see what our shaving looks like so now we're back this is just like the shaving we had when we started we're back to having a full width shaving that means we're doing the whole board now's a great time don't even take out any instruments or anything just get down on the end and sight along the board your eyes can tell you so much what does the board look like when you just look at it it's looking much more flat on the edge okay great so now we'll take it out and we'll check it with the Tri Square again and what do you see this time this time coming through on the right side so does it look flatter or does it look like you just changed the problem to the other side of the board it looks like I kind of just changed the problem it's a completely normal thing it totally happens we'll go back to taking some more shavings and we'll correct that so what happened there this is a common thing is we took all the strokes with the plane with more iron over on the left side and what we ended up doing was taking too much wood off the left side this is why we're doing it with a volunteer instead of me doing it if I were just doing this I would have unconsciously shifted the plane back to the middle towards the end of my planning and that would have evened things out so what we're gonna do this time is we're gonna take a few strokes just on the high side then we're gonna shift the plane over to the middle and take a few strokes with the full width of the iron and that should give us a much more even result and again you can see that Nate's just getting these narrow shavings again he's only working on the right side of the board go ahead and move your planes so maybe another quarter inch of it not all the way dead center but closer the center shaving is getting much wider now we're gonna shift the plane over to the center of the board and take a couple of strokes with the plane in the center and even here I would still use that fence technique so the plane isn't moving back and forth okay now it's a great time to go ahead and color your board in again and this is not a beginner's technique I do this all the time with my planning much easier if you can see what's working and what's not go ahead how'd that go that was fantastic you just took off all the pencil in one stroke yeah I have a great feeling about this let's take this to the tri square and see how we're doing go forward okay so what nate is demonstrating here is that you have to check several places along your board to figure out what's going on there's no guarantee that what you have on the end close to you is gonna be the entire board you said you're a little high on the right side here and the rest of it is good so what would you do to correct that I suppose just take maybe one or two small strokes along here you just do a little bit of work where the board is still high and that would probably correct the whole thing so I would take one or two little shavings off this edge then one full shaving off the whole edge try it again but you're probably good and once you've done this a few times you'll be able to plane an edge try it and fix anything very quickly much faster than we're showing here okay so with edge planing figured out we've taken this board and put it flat in the vise and we're gonna work our way across the face what Nate's gonna do is put his plane so that the center of the plane is right here in the edge and he'll take his first stroke and then he's gonna move over by thirds each time he moves over he's gonna move over 1/3 of his stroke until he gets all the way across the board you ready absolutely okay fantastic let's take a look at what's going on here we can already see the planing gave us a nice shimmery surface it's really bright there are some dull spots and this means the wood is probably a little bit low right here and the plane isn't catching it yet we can also see some sort of mix along this edge and this suggests another really common beginner issue which is that the blade isn't quite engaging right at the front there it's skipping just a second and then it's engaging with the wood general this is what it should look like after one pass it's not perfect it's pretty good now let's try to work through some of these issues get rid of some of these problems you have starting the iron right here in the cut we're gonna skew that plane a little bit okay now you're not gonna push straight you're still gonna push along the board but you haven't clean that's probably even too much skew you could pull that back a little bit go ahead and go across the board again but this time with a bit of skew okay that was fantastic but I remember one thing that we could add so this is just a can with a rag and some oil in it we're gonna rub that on the bottom of the plane because metal planes need a little bit of lubrication now go across it again the exact same way okay so now this is much more what we're looking for you can see that the shimmer in the board is really even and we don't have those dead spots now you might see it's a little dull over here but what's happening here is we have a little bit of reversing grain there's probably a knot in the wood over here somewhere you can see those rising lines and this part might have to be sanded or scraped later on it might not plane perfectly and then if we look at our shavings these are the sort of shavings that we're looking for they're a good width and more importantly they're thick in the middle but right at the edges they're kind of ragged looking they're dissolving way to sort of nothing and that means the camber of the iron is doing its job it's pulling the corners up away so that we're only get a shave in the middle and we're not gonna get any tracks on our board and when we go to look at our board we don't see any tracks and more importantly it feels perfectly smooth to the touch okay so now we've learned how to plain face grain of a board that's already been sort of surfaced by a machine but here's a piece of rough sawn lumber and the next thing you want to learn how to do once you've worked on a piece that's been machine prepped is trying to get a rougher surface like this and then prep that down to something that's smooth and ready for joinery or finishing so when you have a rough piece of wood like this the important thing to do is to get a cut where you're taking off a lot of wood but not working too hard so Nate's retracted his iron all the way again he's gonna put it on the board and he's gonna start playing and then as he goes he's gonna start increasing the iron until it starts to bite down okay so now you're just gonna go at this board and take off all of these rough marks so we've been down here in the shop learning how to plane for about an hour and this is essentially the first hour that Nate has ever spent planning so how difficult was it it was difficult at all it was easier than you expected absolutely so what part of the process was surprising or unexpected to you that there was a curve in the blade that you needed to be aware of where you were using the plane oh so the center of the blade has more curvature and takes a deeper cut and then it should kind of fade away to nothing at the edges yeah so you don't get tracks that is a really important thing that I feel like most people don't understand is that most plane irons especially smoothing plane irons are cambered they have a little curvature to that we cover that in our sharpening video we'll link to that down in the description so you've had a really small amount of experience doing this now if I gave you a rough sawn piece of lumber and a sharp plane do you feel like you'd have a decent chance of taking that by yourself and prepping it for a project oh absolutely and if somebody was getting started in this should they be intimidated by learning the plane absolutely not I'm glad that you think that it's easy and hey listen if you're interested in planing and topics like this you might even want to make your own plans for instance we have a bundle of plans it's our specialty plane bundle and it teaches you how to make planes like these or these oh my god do they give for planes in that bundle Nate nope there you get five five planes that's crazy no they also get a special plan a bonus project now how much does it cost it's only ten bucks okay so we realized that was corny but plan sails are one of the things that supports this channel and if you're interested in learning how to do things like make your own planes and spoke shapes going over to Rex Kruger comm slash store and check out our specialty plane bundle and the individual plans we have for all of our plants if you liked having me in this video go ahead and check out his new YouTube channel we'll put it on the screen right here and of course we always have to thank our patrons on patreon because more than anything else patronage is what makes this channel possible if you'd like to be part of one of these amazing communities of craftsmen go on over to patreon comm /r X crew and check out all the rewards early access and extras that we have only for the people who make this possible thanks so much to Nate for being on camera for the first time and thank you so much for watching you

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 107,909

Rating: 4.9651642 out of 5

Keywords: hand plane, hand planes, how to use a hand plane, hand tools, how to use a plane, how to set up a hand plane, how to, how to set up a plane, hand plane setup, hand plane basics, how to use a planer, hand tool, hand planer, how to use a hand planer, hand tool woodworking, how to use a hand planer for wood, woodworking, wood, DIY

Id: J0-sP9pOFvA

Length: 23min 27sec (1407 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2020