Making a Scrub Plane - Convert your Stanley | Paul Sellers

sometimes when we're working with wood we need a scrub plane to rough down the surfaces to take off the high spots to develop the surface get it ready for smooth planing and we use a scrub plane for this and scrub planes to buy a specifically made scrub plane there is a very minor advantage to having a engineered scrub plane but you can make a scrub plane from a flat from just a regular number four Stanley or a four and a half but a four works best and then what you want the difference between this and say a regular Stanley or a regular plane is this can you see on this one I have a straight iron in here and this one I have a convex edged along the edge so it has a camber on the whole length of the edge that's the difference between the two so one is used to create a flat surface but this one we're reconfiguring it to make so we can scrub off the surface and remove all the high spots get the rough down ready for smoothing but also I use this sometimes if I've got a table that I'm doing a restoration arm and part of the original table may have had the undulations from hand tool work from 1700 I would use this plane to replicate that so let me show you what we do and why we do it and explain it so here I've got a regular square edge down it's just a second hand line you can have this original plane with its square line and you can take the iron out and have a second dial and then and just create a special iron just for scrubbing so this would be great to do that so this one's got the bevel already cut on it but it has no Canberra it's dead square I just strike a line down the center of a piece of card like this and I set my compasses to about 7 inch you can go more and you can go less this one I've got at 7 and 1/8 which is the radius that I find works just fine for me so here on the center line here I just strike an arc here and then I'm going to cut this arc just with my knife like this but this is not an exact science as you can see oh it looks pretty good to me so then place this make a center line on your on your iron you don't really have to do this you could just place this on here and just eyeball the radius so I'm I think I'm about where I want to be I'm leaving this away from the edge by about 2 millimeters and I've centered it on the iron and I've got a sharpie on here and I'm just going to go around that radius there so it's half on the paper and half on that and that's going to give me the guide I need I don't have to take the line out can you see that now so I'm going to grind this on the grinding wheel so all safety precautions put your safety glasses on put your respiratory masks on whatever you need I've taken the guy the the visor off here so you can see exactly what we're doing for this I've got my cooling water here it's just a tin can with water in there are my plates after for refining the bevel so let's go to the grinding wheel now and see what we can do to refine this edge the only reason I'm going to the grinding wheel is you can't really file this it's it's a tool steel and it's probably going to be too hard for most files so we're going to grind it you so I'm going to go on I'm not going to go on the wheel so I take the radius first here I don't really want to overheat must deal so I keep plunging periodically just to keep me so there you can already see I've got most of my radius now I still have a thicker edge here and here and I'm right near the edge there wherever you get near to the edge is going to be where the biggest do fastest eat will change it so just taking a little bit warm so I'm at my radius now I'm going to take the corners off I don't want these to dig in when I'm using the scrub so I've taken the corners off now I'm going to get my radius here you can see it starting to take shape keep plunging don't let the heat build up now I'm getting into my continuous arc so you can see the bevel I think now see that this is where you're going to get me the biggest buildup of heat is going to be right on this corner it doesn't really matter as soon as you plunge it's going to re Harden that probably so it's developing your bird on this surface when I get to the edge it'll develop a burn on this surface and I know I've reached the edge I've got a bird on the top side here so I know I've reached this edge now so I don't see any light shining a little bit on this edge here but that's got my bevel where I want it to be and now I'm ready to to work this on my stone so that's what I'm going to do now I'm going to go through the diamond plates and I'm going to refine the edge and then and sharpen it and that will be me ready to work on the plane itself when you've got your your iron ground like I've got this one I've got this ground now I think you can see this here I've got a fairly low heel on here but right now that near the edge there I'm probably somewhere around 30 degrees it's it's a good idea to check yourself and make sure 30 degrees is optimal it's perfect really you don't want too shallow an angle on the scrub because it hits the wood quite hard so right in here right at the very tip you can see I've taken the heel off and but right at the very tip you can see I've got a almost like a secondary bevel it's the first 1/8 of the iron here 3 4 mil is slightly steeper but when I start to meld those two angles together I create a camber I create a camber this way but and then I've also got my camber this way so I'm using diamonds because diamonds are forever they last a very long time and they work so well on sharpening all cutting ions I love them so what I'm going to show you here is a couple of methods that I use I would probably use the figure of 8 because I'm so used to it so watch what happens I drop my iron on here I push forward lower to the out reach and back in so I in the configuration I do this figure of a some people don't like it I know Joseph prefers his method which is this way you go on here you just push forward and you work on the tip at 30 like that and then you keep dropping your hand with each stroke and working back to the heel and that gives you a very strong bevel - so can you see now we're getting rid of some of the coarse grinding from the grinding wheel and we're working to the edge I can feel a bit all along the edge so I keep going here until I'm satisfied then I go to this one I do exactly the same so I'm starting at 30 here then I'm dropping my hand dropping my hand till I'm back on to the rear end of this cutting iron so I've got the burr all the way along here same here now I could do this like I've said before I could just go in and be wallowing the cut like this using the full width of this of this sharpening plate because you don't want to wear your diamonds unevenly so figure-of-eight for me I love it so it means it's cutting on both the forward stroke and the backward stroke and there I think I'm pretty much ready for removing the burr the burr is on this side so I don't need to go here unless this isn't flat if this isn't flat on this type of a plane it's not so critical because we're not really relying on the cap iron as a joint venture of tensioning so much because this is actually going to be quite a distance away from the actual cutting edge by the time we've finished so I'm filing I'm grinding off this face I want to see what I've got and you can see I've got a high spot and a high spot here so I'm going to go to this one and there's one thing that I do on my scrub planes that I like so now I've got down to I've got down to the cutting edge you have a slight hollow here that's not going to affect it here in here but I am down to the cutting edge what I'm going to do is you're going to go all the way back to this fine stone and I'm going to lift up just about 1/8 and I'm going to rub the main center part of the eye and avoiding the edges and what that gives me it gives me a different angle of presentation can you see that if I wiggle it around a bit so I've got a slight back battle which is often called a York pitch but I've done this on this one I need to do a little bit more here because that gives me a strong presentation to the wood but it also presents it at an angle that's less likely to tear into the grain so that's what I do now generally for scrubbing using as a scrub plane I have a bird on this side I would probably just leave you Tomic it's going to break up but if you want to you can go the whole hog and go to a strop like this just a piece of leather and adhered to a piece of wood this is just buffing compound on the surface of the leather and then I just use the heel of my hand in here really hard and bear down all the way working that radius just pressing where I need to about 30 to 40 times just to get this tool ready to go not really necessary for a scrub like a scrub plane you could even do just at 250 grit and it's going to work it won't create a dead smooth surface but it will hog stuff off so look what we got now there's my paws bevel and so I just have this one face to do and that's just purely to break the burr really and that's ready to go let's see what it does now we're going to work on the plane though I want to try and work on the plane a little bit get rid of this when we put this in the you know when we when we're loading this go across the iron like this bring it past the front of the cap iron like that turn it around now let's take a look at this point here can you see if I leave the cap iron like this where the corners are not catching and I have this huge gap between the cutting edge that doesn't matter you wouldn't matter if I was quarter of an inch away from the cutting edge it wouldn't matter in the cut itself he's not going to really affect the cut where it will affect the plane though is when you load it in the plane the protrusion through the sole is massive can you see that and and the problem with that is it's too big of a cut for one thing but the problem is when you pull this when you withdraw the iron to bring it back up out of the throat like this you still have a big protrusion so you have to get the cutting the cap iron nearer to the fore edge of this new new shape so what I'm going to suggest you do is going to be right on this can you see here I have about two and a half to three millimeters of surface on the inside of this edge I can file that I can file this now here on these outer edges like this that will get me about two millimeters closer in without affecting the functionality of the plane and now you can see again I hope right here you can see you have taken the corners off here and that's going to help me to get my iron really much closer just show you here without the screw so that's getting me much closer into the edge KC now I'm only about two or three mil from the cutting edge so reload this way like this past the cutting edge and then slide it up here and actually the cap iron can even patru slightly past the corners if you want it to and the plane will work just fine so there you have my plane iron is set when I load this in the plane now I haven't refined this throat yet so I'm making if that you know then if you're using your plane as a smoothing plane you're going to keep using your plane as this moving plane you won't refine the throat you just have to take lesser shape lesser thick shavings off pull this iron up and then lock down like that and now I've got my iron is completely withdrawn it's not showing at all through the surface of the sole now I'm going to put this so you can see the first level of protrusion right there so you can see right in this middle here you can see I think the iron out by advancing this I close up can you see the distance in the throat here is about one and a half mil so as if I advance this it closes up that throat so I'm going to take a little bit off the front of this throat here in a slight round just to open up the leading edge so that I can take off a thick shaving if I want to and how I do that is I just use a flat file you can use a apart round file if you want to but go you see how can you see this make sure that you've got this hole clamped in the vise not these wings you don't want the wings because it'll break them like this then just take your file right into the throat not too much remember this is this is this eye on this cast iron will file very rapidly it's not like steel so just file a midsection like this and then I'm going in on the back edge just to give a an exit from the hole a little bit of sandpaper just to round that leading edge there get rid of the burr and it doesn't matter if the soul's flat on the scrub plane so if you do have an old plane you pick one up on eBay a secondhand shop or a flea market you don't need to flatten the soul to a scrub plane you know I've got my plane loaded with the plane iron cap and set everything and and the distance between the four parts of the plane and the actual cutting edge is just fine but if you get yours loaded and you find it's too tight to that full part of the plane what you have to do is you have to adjust this thing we call the Frog and how you do that is you slacken these two screws here these are set screws right so with those two just you don't have to slacken them a whole lot just enough to move it then you go in the back of the plane here there's a set screw back here that adjusts the Frog backwards and forward so if I turn this clockwise it's going to move the whole of the Frog forward that's going to close up the distance between the cutting-edge and the four paths of the plane that means I have to take a smaller shaving when we're using the plane as a scrub plane we want to take our fairly heavy thicker shavings so we back this this count counterclockwise that brings the Frog back but you can't go too far back because the bevel of the blade will catch on the sole of the plane and it will cause the the iron to belly in there so you can only go a certain distance back so I'm going to so I'm going to show you what I mean there's a slight step in here between the Frog on this type of place is a Bailey patent play there's a slight step between here and here you feel so when you put the iron in sometimes it catches on the back so I've not taken it back too far I'm going to sink these two down so I've opened mine up quite far more than I would normally load it in the plane we're gonna listen wiggle this lateral adjustment leaving around that's not locking down that means see that before it was locking down and now it's not locking down so I'm going to take this out just a bit because I'm pretty sure what's happened is I've gone too far back so the bevel is catching on that back of the Frog so I'm going to move forward just slightly half a turn on that screwdriver we'll do it glad this came out because then that's still a little time with me slacking here and now field fight is moving very smoothly so it means it's resting on the bed which is this part here it's resting on the bed of the Frog nicely so it's moving freely if it's not moving freely usually you've created some tension by moving the Frog too far back so that gets rid of that let straight piece of wood piece of pine maybe it's a work so I'm going to back the iron off so I'm not taking a massive shaving slightly look at this beautiful Wow knots and all so you can see how this would work now I'll show you maybe you can see the surface can you catch the surface on them so we've got this undulating surface so if you were making an old and old kitchen table it would work perfectly for that but now you can see how you can alter your setting and you can probably hog off some fairly deep shavings so even on the hard nuts they're right at the beginning in the end so there we've got it that's a scrub plane and we can take down material very rapidly we'll take it down more rapidly if we're going tangental to the grain like this which is what we're doing a lot take down the high spot and then come in with the longest route here in and out and that's how a scrub plane works so we'll be working on some other projects using this scrub plane but that's how you Fattal your plane for removing stock rapidly

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 311,432

Rating: 4.9525194 out of 5

Keywords: Woodworking, Paul Sellers, Hand Plane, Plane, Scrub plane

Id: XN5QSTaVzRQ

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 25 2014