Scrub Plane Use and Care

[Music] what I have here is the 40 and a half or scrub plane it's a unique and somewhat misunderstood tool in that in modern uses people will flatten and level level boards that are too wide for their jointer most joiners in a home shop are six to eight inches wide and if you've got very wide stock you can't flatten one side it's really important that one side of your stock is flat before you run it through a planer if it's not then you won't get a true reference for the the finish side on the top side the scrub because of its length is not really as effective for flattening stock as it is for dimensioning and width and as a traditional use it would be more of a Carpenters tool than a cabinetmakers tool if you've got to take a quarter of an inch or a half an inch off an 8-foot long stud it's going to be a lot faster and easier with the scrub plane than it is with a handsaw if you do get some tear out in the material that you're trying to flatten something like the tooth blade in the number 62 low angle Jack plane is going to let you clean that surface up get rid of the tear out but also the the Jack plane is the tool that would traditionally have been used in a cabinetmaker shop for leveling the surface of a board put a heavy camber on it so it has a blade more similar to the scrub and you've got more bearing surface so you can flatten and level but if you if you're going to be doing the roughing with your power planer then the scrub plane lets you a very effectively level out one side before going to the planer at its heart this is just a fun plane to use so let's put it to work it's a good idea to work at a diagonal about a 45 degree angle that way you're removing material along the length of the stock as well as the width so you can be leveling in both directions once you've gone up and back from one direction come from the other direction and do the same thing create a crosshatch pattern if you're noticing that you're getting a significant amount of tear out but you still need to take that that area down aggressively work directly across at 90 degrees and that'll let you take not get as much tear out because rather than getting in underneath the green fibers you're cutting across the grain fibers so you don't get the same kind of engagement and tear out that you'd get you can if everything is going smoothly you can go length ways as well to make sure you're level in the length I haven't gone quite as deep as I can because I wanted to see how it was going to perform in the material so I'm going to bring that blade down just a little bit deeper I'm working at a diagonal so that I spread out the removal in both the length and the width I've gotten some areas of heavy tear out here I may find that I want to go at a 90 degree across that area to get to not get quite as much tear out looks like I can go a little bit heavier I went up and back from wonder if diagonal I'll go up and back from the other as soon as I'm getting a cut all the way through that's about as flat as I can get the piece in with this particular plane if I want to get a flatter surface I need a lot switch to a larger plane like the jack I've gone back across there from the other direction because if this piece is cutting more cleanly you may actually want to leat use this textured surface as an effect in something like a door panel in these areas where the tear out happened badly that's where I might go to something like the tooth blade to clean it up or working at a ninety degree across you may notice that along the edge here there was some pretty heavy tear out that's always going to be a problem when you're working with with the scrub plane so you don't want to be doing it in words that are finished dimension across the width if it's finished dimension in length that's not as much of an issue but across the width you'll almost always have this this tear out off this off the side when you do have a finished side something that's going to be run through the planer or you're going to finish it off by hand you can figure out the final dimension widthwise that you want or thickness wise that you want by using a marking gauge set that to either the exact dimension you want to be or their thinnest portion of the stock transfer that mark around the board and if there's a significant amount of material you may want to go to the scrub plane to bring this other side down to finish or you may just be running it through the power planer we've talked about the more modern uses for the scrub plane let's look at the more traditional techniques and if you're trying to put on a piece of molding onto a wall or around a door rarely is the wall going to be flat it's there's usually some bumps and unevenness there and so to get the molding to fit flush to the wall the easiest thing to do is just place it up against the wall and inscribe a line that represents any unevenness that might be present on the wall itself once you've got that come back with the plane and find the the deepest area that you need to remove material and starting their work your way out following along the lines if you can do it take one last clean up pass through to establish the bottom bottom line point I think you'll find that because of the length of the plane it's easy to to get a much deeper cup and you might have thought in that you can follow deeper deeper contour points if the plane was longer then it would be referencing off more high spots on the on the length of the moulding and you wouldn't be able to get quite as deep whether the traditional uses for the scrub is dimensioning and width like we mentioned earlier if I scribe a line about a half an inch deep along this edge it's going to take me a while to get that brought down with a hand saw I can get it very very quickly with the scrub plane remember as you're working this down it's not going to be a finished surface when you're finished you'll go back over this with another plane like a jack plane keep going down till you get just short of the line and then you'll finish off with the with the other tool you may find that you want to leave this finish in there if you've ever looked at the studs on an old house you'll see a surface some very much like this that's that came from probably from a scrub plane makes really nice bracelets do the curved blade on the scrub can make sharpening this tool seemed a little bit intimidating [Music] [Music]

Channel: Lie-Nielsen Toolworks

Views: 55,835

Rating: 4.9142857 out of 5

Keywords: Scrub Plane, woodworking

Id: 6osskqppymU

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2011