Reviewing a "Continental" hand plane (budget plane shootout)

so today we're continuing our search for the best affordable smoothing plane for the home game woodworker so far in this series I've only looked at metallic Bailey style planes because I think those are generally the one that everybody should own but you know what I need to throw in at least one wooden plane before I wrap this series up why do I need to look at wooden plans well because they're awesome not only are wooden planes durable effective and simple but also really lightweight and they glide smoothly against the wood they have way less friction and don't require lubrication so a lot of people who are getting into wood work should consider having at least one wooden plane in the arsenal and that brings us to today's plane this is the Piney continental smoothing plane continental because this plane dominates in countries like Russia France Poland Germany Estonia and pretty much every part of Europe that's not England in England and in America we're much more likely to find this style which is called a coffin plane it's kind of a smooth and sleek design and it's more familiar to a lot of woodworkers but if you've never seen the Continental style before don't let the weird looks fool you the main thing that makes this plane look so odd is this giant horn in the front but this horn is a really really convenient handle you grip the plane like this one hand behind the iron and then the other hand in front of a handle because this handle is so beefy and ergonomic it actually lets you put a ton of force into the plane with your non-dominant hand now having a handle on a plane that's nothing new a Bailey style plane has a front handle but it's not designed to put a lot of force into it with this style of plane you're doing almost all of your pushing with your right arm and just kind of steering the plane a little bit with your left arm in contrast when you grab the Continental style plane you're pushing pretty much equally with both hands that gives you a lot of control and it equalizes the pushing force you're not putting nearly as much strain on your elbow that can be a big help this plane has a bunch of features that I really like the main body is European beach a stable traditional choice and it's laminated to a big sole made out of hornbeam this is an extremely dense heavy wood that's gonna wear very slowly over the years it's also got a metal strike button in the back here which means that I can do all of my adjusting with a regular metal hammer that's really handy the iron and the chip breaker are really thick and heavy they look like high-quality but I'm gonna have to sharpen and prepare them and give him a try before I'm totally sure the other thing that's interesting about this plane is that it has a super high pitch most of my plans are pitched at 45 degrees which is called common pitch because it's so common this plane is pitched at 55 degrees which should make it a little bit harder to push but also much better for twisty interlocked grain on exotic woods or difficult boards this plane should perform better for difficult planing tasks the last really interesting thing about this plane is the mouth on it is huge it is so big that I can look through it and see you you need to clean your house by the way it's getting dirty and this plane also has a number of features that I'm less excited about for one thing it was clearly made with a bunch of milling and shaping machines and after they did all the rough shape into the plane they didn't sand it and then they sprayed on a coat of some sort of hard gloss lacquer and that means the grain raised up a lot and there are a lot of places on this plane where the surface finish is very rough it's definitely going to give me blisters they did a bunch of different things to try and round the plane and make it economical but they didn't do it very thoughtfully there are a lot of spots in this plane where there are little things that stick out there are sharp edges there are corners and there are a lot of places that just don't feel good in the hand so what I need to do is just kind of rework the whole plane I'm gonna sand off all of that hard finish I'm gonna use rasps chisels and files to work down all of the corners that I don't like get rid of all the right angles all the places where it pokes me in the hand I'm also gonna ease all the sharp edges and make them less likely to get chipped during use then I'll refinish the whole plane in boiled seedoil that's going to allow the plane to breathe and get acclimated to humidity changes really quickly and it's just gonna be a nice friendly finish for the hand once all that's done I can turn my attention to the iron and the chip breaker so the iron on this plane is pretty much good news all around I took a - a piece of sandpaper glued down to glass and just gave it a couple of back-and-forth strokes and right away the back of the iron was flat especially the half-inch really close to the blade like this I could have stopped right there if I wanted to but I was curious how good the iron was so I gave it several more strokes and I was able to flatten almost the entire back and bring it up to a Polish very quickly this iron was already very close to being flat and that's a sign of quality it's also a very thick stout piece of steel and that's a nice thing to see too so I took it over to my oil stones and I quickly honed it up and strapped it and then I took it over to my arm and shaved a few hairs and the hairs like left off my arm I gave it a pretty quick casual honing and this thing is much sharper than most of the inexpensive irons that I see it's notably better than most of the irons I've looked at in this series if only the chipbreaker were as good as the eye it starts off looking okay it's a nice thick piece of steel with a good curvature and a nice stout piece of hard work and I was able to sharpen a knife edge on it honing out of my stones and strop off the burr just like I normally would with no trouble and I got a really good fit between the iron and the chip breaker in just a couple of minutes but here's the problem this screw that holds the iron the chip breaker together it should be tapped at an angle should go out a little bit like that instead it's dead flat let me put this together with the iron and I'll show you why that's a problem when the two pieces are fitted together like this you can see that the chip breaker screw only actually contacts the iron in the frontier if it were tapped at the correct angle you'd be getting contact with the underside of the screw all the way around the iron so when you go to tighten it down only the front part of the screw touches let me show you why that's a problem as I'm tightening this down the chipbreaker is getting a little bit squirrely on me it's wanting to move quite a bit because it's not bearing down equally I'm gonna keep tightening it until I've got a pretty good fit but at this point the chip breaker has gotten very cockeyed in relationship to the blade now this isn't a huge deal I'm just gonna take my screwdriver and give the chip breaker a whack now it's pretty straight now I'll tighten it down a little bit more and adjust it laterally a couple more times what's happening here as I'm tightening it is the chip breaker is getting squashed flatter against the blade and the underside of that screw is making much better contact with the iron now it's a good solid unit and I'm pretty happy with it means a little bit of adjustment that way while you're fussing around with it you might have the chip breaker pull back from the edge of the blade a little bit that's no problem flip the whole thing over take your screwdriver and adjust it by just whacking that screw a couple times this is a handy trick that I picked up from Richard McGuire the English woodworker he has a great channel I will link to him down the description after I've made a couple of adjustments my iron assembly is ready to go we can go ahead and play but just like any metallic plane a wooden plane needs a dead flat sole if it's gonna work right most people just plane the souls of their wooden planes flat but what if this is your first plane what do you do then no big deal grab your plane iron and wedge put the iron and the wedge in the plane and tighten up the wedge so that the iron is well retracted into the body check it with a scrap of wood and be really sure that your freshly sharpened edge isn't sticking out of the bottom of that plane then just pull over that same sheet of sandpaper and glass color you're playing in with pencil and go back and forth on it until all the pencil lines disappear it took me about five minutes and now my plane is dead flat I should also mention that I bought this plane about three weeks ago and just left it sitting in a corner of the shop so it could absorb moisture get rid of moisture whatever and do whatever moving it was gonna do don't expect this plane to move a lot now that's fully acclimatized you might want to let your plane do the same thing now that we've got a sharpened iron fitted chip breaker and a flat true plane body we're ready to start testing if you've never adjusted a wood bodied plane before I can teach you how to do it in about thirty Seconds and they take my iron and insert it into the throat of the plane I keep my finger underneath to keep the iron from falling out it's perfectly safe I've never been cut doing this then I'm going to insert my wedge and give it a couple of nice taps with my hammer then I'll take the plane and just sight down and I can see what's going on is I have way too much iron sticking out and it's not even across the plane so there's a strike button on the back I'll hit that a couple of times tap my wedge to retighten it still got too much iron so a stronger taps and maybe a little bit of finger adjusting tighten up that wedge and then I will sight down the plane and I see that my planet Eire needs a little bit a lateral adjustment it is sticking up a little bit too far on this side so I'll just tap with the hammer to bring it into line and now it's looking pretty good another quick tip you could just take your thumb and sort of feel very gently how much iron you've got anytime you loosen the iron or bring it back always follow up with one or two taps to the wedge to keep that seated if everything went well this plane should cut I have a narrow piece of action device let's see what happens yep it totally cuts but I've got a little too much iron brand-new planes typically take a little time to settle in and adjust really nicely this one is just like other new wooden planes I've owned it's a little tricky right now beginning but it gets easy really quickly let's see not bad that's a pretty decent shaping I'll make a couple more little adjustments to the plane and we'll run it through its paces on a bunch of different ones I started out planing the narrow edge of a piece of ash and the continental smoother produced nice shavings but I kept having problems at the end of the piece the plane would sort of hang up and then dip off the edge sort of suddenly what I noticed was that the super wide mouth of this plane was actually so big that the end of the wood was falling into the planes mouth and then the plane would nosedive off the end of course there's a simple solution to this when you're planing the edge of board you just need to skew the plane that allows the eye to ride across the end of the board without digging in no more problems but it was still weird and annoying thing to run across next I wanted to do a large face grain surface so I grabbed a wide board of red oak I was pretty pleased with the way the plane was performing it left a smooth and fairly shimmery surface but then I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I was actually going against the grain and I was still getting a really good service for against the grain work this plane was performing actually really well I flipped the board around and planned it again and then the surface went from good to being excellent so in this instance the plane worked very well next I tried a piece of walnut and there were no surprises here the wood planed really easily and the surface the plane left was excellent and very smooth after digging around in my scrap bin for a while I came out with this old hunk of soup a lei that I haven't used for anything because the grain is really squirrely and this piece was very difficult to work with it's got a mixture of heartwood and sapwood and that can be a problem for planning so this plane performed you know kind of the way I would expect on this the surface that I got was alright I turned the board around a couple different times I got one pretty big spot of deep tear out and I figured I was going against the grain when that happened so I flipped the board around again and taking a light shaving I went over it and then when I was sure I was going with the grain the end results were fine not amazing but definitely fine to wrap up my test I pulled out this piece of cherry I deliberately chose piece that was rough sawn and had heavy marks on one face this piece also has a knot right in the middle of the face the grain is going to change direction right there and that's going to be a prime location for tear-out and other planing problems right off the bat I was very impressed with the Continental smoothers ability to get quickly through those song marks and leave a smooth and shimmery surface but right around the knot I got exactly what you would expect fairly severe tear out and went over the piece a couple of times and generally the tear out got better the longer I was working on it that didn't go away just for a comparison I grabbed my trusty Stanley number 4 and went over the same board in the same way and I got you know more or less the same results I still had tear out over the same area the actual tearing of the fibers seemed to get smaller and shallower as I went at it with the Stanley but that could also be because the wood was changing as I planed way more of the Troublesome wood so now let's get down to business should you buy this plane is it a really good value well honestly I'm not totally sure now it has the lightweight and easy gliding characteristics of every wooden plane that I've ever used it comes pretty well fitted straight from the factory and the price is reasonable at 60 bucks with Free Shipping this costs a lot less than a lot of other planes you might get but it's also the most expensive budget plane I've looked at so far and it's not a standout performer compared to the other ones now the biggest issues that I have are with the iron and the chip breaker the iron itself is excellent I wish all my plans had irons this good but the fit of the chip breaker and all the fussing around you have to do whacking it with the screwdriver that is a pain and it's a huge time waster so I'm not a fan of that I guess the last thing I have to figure out is what do I think of the high pitch of the iron combined with the enormous mouth what effect does that actually have well I think they sort of cancel each other out this high pitch iron does seem to offer some benefits on some woods and it allows you to play an effective leaf against the grain or fight tear out in certain species but definitely not all of them but I think a lot of the effect that you get from the high pitch of the iron is negated by the Grand Canyon over here having a big mouth like this just leads the plane to tear out more often than it has to now you might be thinking wait a second Rex maybe continental planes all have big mouths oh I'm afraid not here's an ECE it is a highly respected German maker of really fairly expensive planes and you can see that this little smoother has just as tight a mouth as any of my metallic plans do maybe even tighter honestly so a huge mouth isn't a necessary component in a continental smoothing plane I think when it's all said and done if you want to have a wooden plane that you can just buy new and know that it's not going to be cracked or messed up this is a pretty good choice it's not very expensive and it comes shipped directly from the Czech Republic where it's produced if you live in the European Union these my be quite inexpensive if you live in America you can order these from Amazon and I have a link down in the description or there's an American company called infinity that slaps their name on these and imports them and sells them kind of a big markup honestly they have a whole line of planes that are clearly made by the Piney corporation I will link to them down in the description I have no affiliation of any kind with the Infinity company now that I've got this plane figured out I have looked at a lot of budget smoothing planes including several that I haven't done videos on so I think it's about time for my final roundup video and I expect to have that ready in the next couple of weeks make sure you don't miss it when I release that shoot out video I'm also gonna be releasing my died to buying and restoring budget new smoothing plants it's gonna be a highly detailed fully Illustrated look at everything you need to know to pick the right plane and get it up and running I'm actually really excited about that thing I'm already working on it and just like in every video I have to thank my patrons without my patrons on patreon none of this content would be possible I make these videos full-time and I do that because of them if you'd like to support the kind of independent unbiased on sponsored content that I do here go on over to patreon comrades cruder and check out the early access exclusive content and rewards that I haven't just for my patrons I'll be back next week with a brand new video look forward to seeing you there thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 75,415

Rating: 4.9392543 out of 5

Keywords: hand plane, handplane, smoothing plane, smoother, hand tool, handtool, woodworking, tool, tool review, shootout, budget, beginner, steel, sharpening, milling, lumber, furniture

Id: zCtMQaE5MrU

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 02 2019