Lie Nielsen Router Planes Product Tour

here are three router planes from Lee Nielsen the larger 71 and the smaller 271 both the close dirt and open throat these three guys right here are router planes from Lee Nielsen now if you're not familiar with a router plane it's a type of plane that I call like a joinery plane because it helps you dial in joinery on your woodworking projects unlike a bench plan which you might be familiar with which is really great at flattening or smoothing boards router planes joinery planes help you with dedos grooves mortise and Tenon's things that are joints in your woodworking projects these guys really help you dial those in and get perfect fits in those types of applications so today I'm going to take a look at both the larger router plane from Lee Neilson and two versions of the smaller router plane both a closed throat and open throat and I'll show you close-up of the differences there and then of course I'll show you a couple common applications for using router planes first up let me show you the small router planes because they're not very complicated what we've got here is a perfectly flat sole across the bottom and a blade that protrudes through there's an adjustment screw here at the front that locks in the depth of the blade relative to this flat sole so you can just unlock that and then easily change the depth of this blade and lock that in the blade can come all the way out and of course that's useful for honing the blade comes from Lee Neilson very sharp but of course a little bit of additional honing will help get it razor-sharp go ahead and put that back in through the bottom here and go ahead and lock the adjuster screw now there are two versions of the small router plane there's the open throat and this is the throat across the front this is what's called open it's got a little hump here and what that does is allows you to see a little bit more clearly your work you're going to go ahead and work from the top like this and you can see down in there with this open throat you can see a head of the blade a little bit easier the closed throat and see quite as well what's coming ahead however the closed door has a good reference surface all the way across the front unlike the open throat version and I'll show you why that is useful now in comparison to these little small router planes let's go ahead and take a look at the larger router plane which is right here and you can easily see the difference in size and really it's just a difference in application usage they work pretty much exactly the same way but you're going to be using this on smaller work pieces smaller joinery this you're going to be obviously using on slightly bigger joinery so same basic concept adjustment screw here at the front and then you've got a depth adjuster here at the top so you can more easily dial in the blade depth again relative to the perfectly flat sole this is an open throat version and there's also a depth stop here on the blade you can loosen the knob dial this in where you want and lock it in and then as you go ahead and working once you get down to the depth boom this knurled knob will stop adjusting and you're at your desired depth so you can start a little bit higher work work work and then get down and lock it right at the depth that you're looking for again I'll show you that in use there's also a fence that you can add on to the large router plane and it just easily pops in either side on the left or the right and there's also a straight side of the fence and a curse ID for going along curved work this is a good reference along the outer edge of a work piece you can set it here set it into there and lock it in and then of course you've got a reference certain distance from the edge of your work piece to wherever your groove is and of course the blade comes all the way out this one as well go ahead and take off the depth adjuster knob from the top here just comes off take off the depth stop off of the blade nice tight fit there and then the blade will pop out the bottom and now you can go ahead and take it over and hone it now with both the large blade here and the smaller one I took it to my water stones and honed it up really just on the 8,000 the grinding and lapping that they do Italy Neilson gives you a really nice sharp edge so I only had to take it to the 8,000 stone a few strokes front and back and I had polished that up really nicely and was taking some nice cuts let's go ahead and put these router planes to use so here is a mortise for a small hinge and here's the hinge that fits right in there and what I did was I just quickly laid out where the mortise where the hinge is going to go and then I got rid of most of the waste using a chisel define the three sides and then chiseled out most of the waste umber there but saying a little bit shot of my depth line and now what I want to do is make sure that I've got a depth all the way across here that's exactly the same as this hinge so that when I put the hinge in there it's going to seat nice and flush to the piece of wood and this is a perfect application for the router I want to make sure that the depth of the blade and my router plane is exactly the depth I'm looking for for my hinge now I can set that off of my layout line here on the front but another way you can do it is by laying the router plane onto the two hinges on a flat surface and then when the blade drops down and hits that surface that's the depth you're looking for now I recommend always locking in that blade using a screwdriver really kind of clamp down this blade can move as you're using the plane so using a screwdriver to really lock in that depth is a good idea another way you can make fine adjustments is before you lock in with a screwdriver just tighten it with your thumb a little bit and you can make small taps with it with a small hammer here just to make really fine tuning adjustments and then go ahead and lock it in with your screwdriver when you're ready to go now that I've got my blade depth locked in it's a simple matter of starting to chisel away the rest of this wood at that depth just coming across taking my time here and all this waste is now going to be the mortis is going to be exactly the depths that I've set with this router plane and finally get in the other end here it's a little chip there we go all the way end-to-end now and check my hinge and it's going to seat right in there and be perfectly flush with my piece of wood now I was using the closed throat router and the reason is that I'm getting some really good reference not only along this edge here but also along the front you could see that I was using coming in at an angle here to lever those chips out and I was getting good reference all across the front using this close to router the difference with this open throat router is you can see it ahead a little bit better but I'm not getting good reference anywhere across where that hump is so especially if I turn it to the side here it's really easy to tip down whereas the closed throat doesn't do that it will do it if you're over the mortise there but once this closed throat is sitting on the reference surface course it won't tip nearly as easily as this open throat one and that's why I closed through on these skinnier pieces of wood is really nice cleaning out data's and grooves is a great place for a router plane whether you make them with a table saw with multiple cots or a dado stack you end up with you know small little inconsistencies in the bottom of your groove or dado and a router plane can get in there and really clean it up nice smooth bottom consistent depth now a small router plane like this not too bad on groove or data this size but obviously if you get bigger case you got a bunch of them this is where the larger router plane is going to do a better faster job it's easy to come straight across chisel out the bottom and then you can easily unlock the depth ratchet down just to touch and just go slowly to your desired depth unlock Ratchet it down take another small shaving and just keep doing that until you get a nice consistent smooth bottom now datas and grooves that's really easy application this let me show you one of my favorite applications for the router plane I quickly made a couple of Tenon's at the table saw and you can see the ratty cheek left behind by multiple PLAs passes over the table saw blade either even if you use a dado blade it's not going to be perfectly smooth across this cheek and I'm going to use the router plane to not only clean up that cheek but dial in exactly the width of the tenon that I'm looking for now I can do one cheek at a time or 1/10 and at a time by referencing the router plane here and coming across and just cleaning up this cheek but it's even better to go ahead and put two Tenon's end-to-end you get better reference and you're doing both at the same time so let me go ahead and clamp this to my bench and get started I've got the two work pieces clamped to my bench and a little bit of a backer board just to keep them in place as I work the router plane across the cheeks go ahead and it's a little bit high so unlock the depth adjuster go ahead and ratchet down just a little bit here and lock that back in and take some passes and just keep doing that little bit down lock it in and I'll slowly start wasting away these cheeks and getting them dialed in to work to the width that I'm looking for now on the other side it's a good idea to come in from this side so I'm not blowing out that edge I don't really have support here across the front I'll be better if I did but you want to come in from both sides and that will help you not really blow out your tens now already that's getting a lot better and I'm getting close to the depth that I'm looking for which will give me the desired width now what you really want to do is go ahead and flip these over and work both sides at the same time that way you'll be coming in equally from your outer edges and that tenon will be perfectly centered I'm going to go ahead and just do one more pass here to show you cleaning up this cheek here and then you could do the other side the exact same way now you can see I've gotten that really smooth on this side all exactly the same depth from my show surfaces here and perfectly centering that tenant if I use the exact same depth on the other side and this is also a great place to go ahead and use your depth stop as you're working I turn my work pieces over to the other side and before I did it though I set the depth stop to the depth that we just did on the other side so now I'll go ahead and raise the blade a little bit to get started on this side and then I can go ahead and use go down all the way to that depth stop and I know when I get there that my Tenon's are now the same distance from the show surfaces which means I've got it perfectly centered tenon and there I've hit my depth stop I kept going down using the depth adjuster until I hit the stop and I've got a nice smooth surface on this side same distance got a perfectly centered tenon so there are a couple of common applications for pulling out a router plane now on this small router plane it's a very straightforward little tool the lack of lack of depth adjustment is a little bit annoying but honestly in a tool this size I think that would be over complicating so you do have to use little hammer for tapping that really just you know dial it in and then lock it in but usually working in such small places that you really just set it to the depth you need lock it in and you're good to go you don't have to make multiple adjustments now open throat versus close dude the open throat on the small one does allow you to see a little bit further ahead on your workpiece but honestly you're working on small types of joints and so I don't really think that's a big deal you can't see that much further it's a very small kind of hump allowing your eyesight in there so I would go with the closed throat it gives you a little bit better support in some applications when your turn in a certain way you could take advantage of that and so I think the closer is a little bit better than the open throat now on the larger model the depth adjustment and depth stop are great showed you use for that and I really like how you can fine-tune the depth and the open throat here you go open throat or closer this one is the open and you can see a lot more here it's obviously a bigger hump you can really see ahead of your work and I don't know the clothes though it would definitely give you some better support in some applications but the open throat does have a significant advantage really seen you're usually working forward of where you are doing a long data or groove or something like that so being able to see ahead has its advantages as well now the quality of these Lee Nielsen tools is just like everything that I've used from Lee Nielsen it is fantastic everything is just really smooth polished has a really nice feel and weight to it so if you want to dial in some of your joinery and get really nice smooth surfaces and also get it exactly where you want consistent depth across your joints I would definitely check out router plans

Channel: Highland Woodworking

Views: 111,974

Rating: 4.8312831 out of 5

Keywords: lie nielsen, lie-nielsen, lie-nielsen toolworks, router plane, 271 router plane, closed-throat, open-throat, large router plane

Id: 3jTY8FoP-1I

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2013