Set Up a Handplane

hi I'm Christopher Schwarz and before I started lost art press in 2007 I was an editor a popular woodworking magazine for almost 15 years and during those years I set up a lot of hand planes a lot of vintage hand planes and a lot of new modern premium hand planes and before manufacturers such as Nielsen and Veritas and Clifton made premium hand planes like this I was in the same boat as everyone else in that I had to fix up a lot of old Stanley's that I picked up at flea markets now I learned a lot in setting up these planes and the planes of hundreds of students that I have taught over the years and recently I've gotten a lot of emails from them and questions about an article and a video that was in fine woodworking on how to set up a premium hand plane are all these techniques were that were shown in the article in the video actually necessary and my answer is well most of them are not and so a lot of the things shown in those videos were totally appropriate and good to do on old Stanley's that were pretty beat-up or the castings had moved but are actually completely unnecessary and can even be harmful to the plane if done to a premium hand tool plane that you paid good money for so today what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a brand new Lee Neilson number four and iron out of the box never been opened and show you how I go about setting up a premium hand tool plane the steps that I think are quite reasonable and can get us to work in just a few minutes so let's dive in here right away now the first rule of setting up a premium hand plane is my gosh you paid hundreds of dollars for this thing so if something is seriously wrong with it send it back there would probably rather fix it for you or replace it for you than try to deal with your diagnosis especially if you are a beginner so here we have number four in iron it's never been used from Lee Nielsen so what I'm going to do is I'm going to release the lever cap first off and loosen that up a little bit they intentionally tighten this down almost all plane manufacturers do so that it won't move while it's being shipped there's a little bit of oil on there and so I'm just going to quickly wipe that off generally I like to leave oil on my parts whenever I can so that they won't rust and I'm just going to wipe off a little bit here but there's not really any cosmoline or any heavy machine oil on this so I don't really go to go to too many links with that some people will disassemble the Frog and clean out under there I found that just completely unnecessary I would rather leave the lubricant that's in there in there and if I have a problem with the tool maybe I'll go poking down there but generally I'm not going to go looking for trouble because I almost never find it the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take the chip breaker and the iron apart and just look at it make sure that it's okay take off a little bit of the excess oil and that's about all I'm going to do right now so the next thing I can do is get my sharpening equipment and get this sharp now the great thing about modern tool manufacturers is that they spend a lot more time and attention on the iron so you don't have to here you can see on this Lee Nielsen plain iron that they someone at factory has done almost all the flattening that we need to do on the the back or what some people call the face of the iron I'm still going to touch it to the stones to try to remove some of those scratches and make sure it's flat but it's almost always dead-on flat and if you deal with other manufacturers such as Veritas they even use rotary lapping to make this a dead flat surface so I'm not going to hit this on sandpaper or anything rough at all I'm going to go right to my 1000 grit water stone now I don't care what sort of sharpening system you use you know water stones I like these because they don't have to be soaked so I'm going to take the back of the iron and put about 3/4 of an inch maybe 5/8 of an inch on there and I am just going to rub it on this 1000 grit stone this would be a soft Arkansas if this were an oil stone and I'm going to give it a few rubs and then I'm going to wipe it off and I'm going to see if I've replaced the scratches from the factory with my own scratches now there's still a few more factory scratches over here this area is cleaning up nicely so I'm going to just do it again now you notice that I'm not dragging the iron back and I found that that generally helps by my acuity is that I can see the scratches more easily if I just push in one direction I'm sure somebody who knows more about lapping could tell me about it why that's true so this is looking pretty good there are a few vertical scratches but they don't reach up here to the to the edge but just because I'm anal retentive I'm going to give it a just a few more scratches a few more swipes great so I've replaced all of the scratches from the factory with scratches that I am very aware what these scratches will look like I've replaced them all with my scratches at the edge so that back is all that's as flat as we need to get it all right so we're going to now sharpen the bevel we're going to put a secondary bevel on the primary factory bevel I usually set a secondary at 35 so I have this inexpensive side clamp honing guide and I have this little stop block that tells me exactly where 35 degrees is and then I tighten that and then tighten it again and now little more water I can go to town now I'm going to put a slight camber on this blade by putting fingerprint or finger pressure and more strokes at the corners than I do in the center okay so I'm going to wipe off I can see that I have sharpened all the way across the bevel and I'm going to feel to see if I've created a burr on that backside and if I have all the way across and the birds even I'm done so I'm going to wipe the wheel and if I wasn't sure of my curve I would check it with a little straightedge but I am pretty well attuned to the way these stones work and my jig so I'm going to just trust my experience so then I'm just going to go to my polishing stone this is an 8,000 grit stone and after I make sure that the wheel is wiped I'm going to do exactly the same operation on this so now it's a visual game I'm going to try to catch the light in in the secondary bevel and see if I've removed all the scratches from the 1000 grit stone with these eight thought with this 8,000 grit stone needs a little more work alright oh that totally did it alright so I'm going to wipe off the wheel just so that it is clean the next time I use it and then I'm going to release it from the honing guide the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to polish a little secondary bevel on the backside I don't need to polish that whole tip so I'm going to use this thin little ruler and this is a trick made popular by David Charlesworth and I'm going to slide on to the stone about five eighths of an inch and then slide back out slide back in and slide back out so the first time you do this it's going to take a few times to get that tip completely polished and then when you come back to reown you will find that that polishes up a lot faster because you've already done most of the work here so that is now polished all the way across I can see no deep scratches so I'm going to take my thumbnail and I'm just going to feel that edge to see if it's completely smooth don't want to do this with the other side of your finger so now I just need to put some oil on this because this is a water stone that we sharpened it on and then we'll put the chip breaker on and we are almost ready to cut wood one of the other real nice things about modern plane makers pretty much all of them is that they have made nice chip Breakers instead of the whale hump breaker of the past from Stanley these are much more like chip breakers you would find on its infill plane and so this chip breaker and some other chip breakers they have a little raised area here that mates with the back of the iron so you really do not have to do anything to it and before I do anything to the chip breaker I'm first going to confirm that I need to do anything with the chip breaker so I'm going to move the chip breaker just absolutely as close as I can since this is for a smoothing plane I'm going to try to get it just you know five or six thousandths away from the tip which will help control tearing and I'm going to try to catch that bevel a secondary bevel on the back catch it in the light tap the chip breaker up real close like that and then do the final tightening there so the next thing to do is we need to sight through these gaps on either side to see if there is any light poking out from beneath the chip breaker and if there is then we need to remedy it so let's just take a look here I can't see any light coming through this side can't see any light coming through this side so that we're done okay so what we're going to do now is put the plane back together you know I'm not going to do anything to the sole I generally don't check it with a straightedge if there's something wrong with the plane the way that it interacts with the wood will tell me that and then I will go looking for trouble with a premium plane generally you don't have to I'm not going to file or sand the corners they all feel nice and smooth if the when the plane gets dinged I might sand or file those away everything looks fine the way I like to get the iron into the plane is I hold the frog surface so that it is parallel with the floor and then I navigate by dropping the iron on to the Frog adjustment screw and then dropping it on to the Frog adjustment dog on the Frog lay in the lever cap put our thumb on that and then snap that down now that was not a good enough snap so I'm just going to tighten this up a little bit until it gets a little tighter you want it tight enough that this won't move around in use but loose enough that you can adjust it while you are planing with the adjustment knob here so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to site down the sole and extend the iron out until it appears as a black line all the way across the mouth and then I'm going to adjust the iron laterally with the lateral adjust knob here until that black line appears parallel all the way across the mouth when it looks parallel then I'm going to retract the iron until it just disappears then I'm going to remove some of the slack from the mechanism I'm going to take a small sixteenth inch thick chip and I'm going to run it over the mouth and see where the iron is cutting so it's cutting here in the middle and it's not cutting here right at the corner and it's cutting just a tiny bit there on the corner so I'm just going to tap it a little bit here with an iron with a hammer because I think that a hammer is more sensitive which isn't always the case but in this case a hammer is more sensitive so now we've got a nice curve the curve is in the middle and so we are ready to plane some mahogany so let's first joint it flat with the jointer so that we know what sort of surface were dealing with and then we can see how the smoothing plane is doing generally the stuff that comes off of the machine is going to be pretty wonky at least as far as the jointer plane is concerned so the first thing to do is to get rid of those machine marks and get it flat and that way you'll be able to tell what your smoothing plane or your new plane or whatever it is is really doing so now I took full length shavings with my jointer so now I can see what the smoothing plane is doing now the first the first few passes don't really count because I'm just removing shavings from or stuff that is left over from the jointer plane now might be wondering why this is making such a different noise than the jointer and that is because I have that chip breaker set up really close and it does make a little different noise and it does compress the shavings a little bit but this piece of mahogany which has interlocked andro grain is just completely clean of tear out and the plane is behaving exactly as I would expect so I don't think that there's anything wrong with this plane so there's no need to go looking for trouble but I can now get to work with this guy one last thing I would say is you know if you're getting tear out you can close up the mouth of the tool by adjusting the the Frog adjustment screws back here or in some cases the whole frog has to be disassembled and moved forward if you're not getting tear out and you're not in the planes not clogging then don't mess with don't mess with success

Channel: Lost Art Press Customer Service

Views: 429,218

Rating: 4.8002105 out of 5

Keywords: Set, Up, a, Handplane

Id: WAYcwubAO2E

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 08 2012