Scrub Plane - a Historical Perspective - | Paul Sellers

you know in any craft you'll have people using terms especially craftsmen like myself you'll have other woodworkers saying woodworking will be using terms that others have never heard of and one of those terms I want to talk about today is the scrub plain a scrub plain somebody says you know I use a scrub plane for this or that what does the scrub plane do and what is the historical perspective on it where did it come from when did we start using it and then and when would we use a scrub plane what can you expect from a scrub plane and that's what I want to talk about and I want to take us back a little bit into the history of it because if we understand the history we'll see where we came from and where we're going to here I've got a couple of old wooden block planes we would call them these were smoothing planes they're not very long and these two planes have developed they've changed you can see this one has a very wide throat this one here has a very narrow throat but this one the one with the wide throat was this plane in the beginning so what this plane did it was a smoothing plane we used it to smooth surfaces like this we took a shaving off we made that the shitty surface nice and pristine and and that's what the smoothing plane did when this smoothing plane started to wear down look at the height of these two these this one is quarter of an inch lower than this one when they start to wear down in their height here this is starts to widen and open up the throat becomes wider the more wear you get on here and eventually it has such a wide throat it can't really be used for smoothing surfaces because the grain raises up too far ahead of the cutting iron so what does this mean this means that we throw this away remember going back in the history of this this wasn't a mass made plane if you go back to the 15 14 15 16 hundreds this was a craftsman making this plane from an offcut of beach where he just made a dining table a table leg he had 12 inches of beets leftover he made a plane from it and then eventually it became a production model and joiners became plane makers and plane makers were just a specialized field of woodworking so instead of throwing this hard work away he kept this plane and this is when I was a boy as an apprentice often if a craftsman wanted to hug off a lot of wood he would pull out an old plane like this one because it had a big throat and what this plane will do is very interesting you've got two planes here you smooth the surface here you get these beautiful shavings but then you want to hog off a lot instead of adjusting this plane with the tap of a hammer you have a plane like this one that will hug off a millimeter with each stroke so now there's four millimeters there's five millimeters there's six millimeters I just took off quarter of an inch of wood six millimeters of wood in six strokes when I finished with this hogging off plane and that's what the scrub plane is I go back to my smoothing plane and I put this pristine edge on there and I'm moving in the right direction to getting my wood ready for preparation for joinery or whatever else and that's what I want you to understand is these planes were never abandoned because they didn't work but something happened around the mid to late 1800s when Stan Lee and people like that started to introduce a tool we call the Bailey pattern number four plane number five six seven different sizes of plays became bench planes this one replaced this one or should I say replaced this one but this one created a place for this one because it had the ability to scrub off lots of wood when these started to get phased out because they were made redundant this plane came into being craftsman started to say hang on a minute we've got this plane and it will plane off some very nice shavings but it won't hog off I need a plane that I can scrub off lots of wood and that's what this left the void is so then the term scrub plane actually came into being in the late 1800s when Stanley came out with the scrub plane which was a crude plan it had no leave a cut like this it had no cap iron had a thick iron it was very crudely made it was very crudely used because it was used to hug off wood lots and lots of wood he didn't really finally set it you just took off all the high spots and prepared it for the smoothing plane like this one and that's the transition from the wooden plane to the metal plane and that's where we got the term scrub plane from and it was used to replace the wooden scrub plane that was already in existence but probably not named we're using a scrub plane that wasn't named for maybe two or three hundred years before now we have a title for it we're giving it the name scrub plane and I want to show you what this plane will do so that you can judge for yourself how this works this is got the open throat I'm ready here now one thing I haven't adjusted this yet so if I do need to adjust it I've got my hammer this is the simplicity of it watch here so we use it tangential to the grain generally and what we're doing is this is hogging off lots of wood on the high spots wherever I want it I can go along the grain like this so I work from which work from the high spots work down there's quite a lot of protrusion no matter which scrub plane whether it's a metal bodied or a wooden badi the blade protrudes considerably through the mouth so actually this could be protruding a millimeter here nothing on either side so it is quite an awkward plane no matter what tight you have got here work along your board just attack the high spots this is no wimpy wood this is oak I'm using a nice piece of oak so that's how we use it then we switch planes this is when we bring in out of the jack plane or the smoothing plane and this hits the high spot like this and you can see these planes work very very efficiently get down your high spots take off the ridges left from the scrub plane and all of a sudden you've got this silky smooth surface that you can work with what about the edges of your boards yes the scrub plane would be used a lot on the edges of boards like this so here I'm taking about half a millimeter off here pick shavings yes it worked very well the thing is you can still pick these up you can still buy these what about the Sham for here come on here with your scrub plane take a sham bar now because the blade is protruding quite a bit it might leave little undulations in the surface so this is when you bring in your smoothing plane like this just finish off your sham fur and you end up with this beautiful silky smooth finish like this now what happens if you pick up this is going to be changing now from a century earlier I come back can with two planes here this is my scrub plane you can see I've got this curve in the blade here all the way along the edge I'll show you the two compared with each other in a second but let's go here now this is taking off this is a millimeter that's probably too much so just back off the iron so this is doing the same as the wooden one so it's hogging off these super thick shavings I go back restore my bevel with it you can see how handy this is in my everyday work I pick up the scrub plane take off the bulk of the stock which is what it's really good for then I come in with my smoothing plane and just true up the surface with a few strokes to up the bevel just like I did before so now let's take a look at the contrast between the two planes because if I put this here you can see that the top plane has a big old gap on the either side of the center point and this one's per long as it's a straight edge with just the wings of the cutting iron taken off and there you have the difference between the two planes one with the adaptation the other one with its original iron in place so now you have this insight you can look back on it you can understand how we got here you can look at the industrialism you can look at the progress that was made through the periods the industrialized giants coming into being disappearing the machine coming in but now we're working with hand tools we still need the scrub plane and you can see why I reach for this play and this is my scrub plane there is no compromise these two planes would work side-by-side equally and the functionality of my modern-day plane is just the same I use it whenever I want to hog off a lot of material in exactly the same way they did two three four hundred years ago and this is my modern-day scribbling this is what I use in the everyday of life

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 127,460

Rating: 4.9732261 out of 5

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

Id: i1r1LIkJcOg

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 07 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/SPG2469]

Good bit of history here.