Set-up & Use A Hand Plane Like A Pro - One Take // Woodworking

hey everybody how's it going welcome back to another one of these one-take videos and on this video I'm going to talk all about hand planes and setting them up and using them like a pro and being able to handle really difficult grains and kind of what are some of the uses for some hand planes and others so so a lot of information hopefully I don't forget too much and we're gonna dive right in I'm gonna bring you in close and talk a little bit about some of the principles of how hand planes actually work first and then that'll help you better understand what I'm gonna be doing actually planing so if you come on in here we'll talk a little bit about some of the principles here that are really important to making a hand plane work good and we're really gonna be kind of talking about difficult grains curly woods figured woods that give people the most trouble if it's nice easy grain direction like if the grains running away from you like you're supposed to plane in the direction of the grain that means the grain is running off then you'll usually have no problems if you have a sharp blade and stuff isn't off too much this when you have to plane into the grain and that usually happens when there's figured woods or the wood grain changes direction halfway through a board that's where people usually run into problems and have tear out so some of the really important principles is having a sharp blade and then also the depth of cut now certain times in the life of a board when you're bringing a board from a rough sawn board down to your finished piece you'll go at it in a different manner you might start with a scrub plane now this is a number four which was designed to be a smoother but I didn't have a lateral adjuster I got it for super cheap and I just converted it to a scrub plane a scrub plane has a really wide open mouth it has a big chamber a big cambered blade and the chip breaker is set far away from the blade edge so that you can take really big scoops at once so you're not really worried about tear out too much when you're going through that scrub process you're taking a rough board and you're getting it close to its final dimensions you're working on twists or any warpage you're taking off high spots at a high rate of speed and you might move to something like a joining plane or a four plane like your stanley number seven number eight seven or six to then start taking all those roughing marks out and start flattening that board even better and at that point your mouth still gonna be a little bit open your chip breaker won't be set too close to the cutting edge and we're going to talk about why that's super important later on it's not really important yet we're still trying to take off quite a bit of material and do the process of flattening so the depth of cut is gonna have a big impact on how much tear out you have if you're taking big depths of cut you basically have a stronger shaving because it's thicker and it can act like a wedge and break into the wood almost like an axe splitting a piece of firewood does the same thing in this situation here we don't have a chip breaker the grain of the wood is running off and away from us in the direction we want to be planning so you're not going to have a whole lot of problem here then one of the other important principles is cutting angle most of your standard old stanley planes are gonna be a 45-degree cutting angle and nowadays there's a lot of these low angle Jack planes I don't own one I probably never will because I see a lot of faults with them I think it makes the plane less versatile because you can't have a chip breaker on it because the blade is flipped upside down so it would be this side on the top and you just can't put a chip rake around there and chip breakers are the secret in my opinion to planing and smoothing and handling really really gnarly grain it's all about the chip breaker plus a couple other things so here's a diagram of what you'll run into if you're playing against the grain and maybe your blade is not super sharp or you're taking too big of a cut now even if you have a really sharp blade and they're taking a fine cut what likely is going to happen is you're going to get tear out and what happens is this blade is acting like a wedge and the grains running down in a way and what its going to want to do is this is maintaining a pretty shallow curve not a very steep curve and it holds on to its strengths and therefore will start tearing ahead of the blade now there's some really cool little tricks some really awesome science that helps us prevent that one of the things and there's different opinions out there but what I believe in most is a chip breaker and a chip breaker that's super close to the cutting edge much closer than I think most people think it's supposed to be so what kind of happens on a microscopic level here is that the cutting edge cuts the piece of wood and the chip or shaving as soon as it is cut slams into this chip breaker and the chip breaker should be at a certain angle and anywhere between 50 and 80 degrees if it's too steep of a chip breaker then it really doesn't help your chips can still stay basically strong and act like a lever so what we're doing is we're rolling that chip over we're breaking that chip and what kind of happens is the fibers of the wood they're made up of many many many fibers and they're running in this direction and what kind of happens as soon as this chip hits that chip breaker and it's immediately forced to roll over you're essentially causing a shear failure shear strength which is when you're holding two things together and they slide next to each other you're breaking that force of those wood fibers and sharing that and they essentially start sliding next to each other almost like if you take this piece of this notebook if you start bending it over they're able to slide by each other and Bend really easy and you can just roll it along now if this was a fused together piece of wood if I tried bending that over it would start breaking and cracking and everything like that so it's that same kind of principle at a really really microscopic level and it weakens those fibers and lets you plane even with the grain to a certain extent I want to talk about the angle of the blade in which it enters the wood too so sometimes some of you may have heard of high angle smoothing planes and it's kind of the same principle as a card scraper with a card scraper you're pretty much attacking the wood at past the 90 degrees and the hook of your card scraper is hitting the wood at almost a 90 degree angle and it just instead of cutting and wet driving a wedge into the wood you're just scraping that surface and you're instantly rolling over that wood and causing it to break so high angle planes kind of do the same purpose and serve the same function of these chip breakers is that the wood jams into them right away and they cause that wood to break and fail and can smooth through really difficult grains I haven't ever found a piece of wood yet that I haven't been able to use with a regular just 45-degree plane and the chip breaker set right so like I said the chip rehgar need to be super close it needs to be between 50 and 80 degrees and it needs to be dead flat to the back of your iron and your iron needs to be really really sharp those things there will cause you to be able to handle pretty much any wood now there's some trial and error if you have your chip breaker to close it might start causing jamming things like that if it's too far away that's when you'll start getting your your tear out so there's kind of some variables that you have to fill around what they get it just right but after some practice you'll get really good at and you'll be able to tackle the nastiest of woods another thing that I've seen some people do is they temporarily will put a steeper back bevel on their cutting edge and you would have your chip breaker basically meet right here and then now you have essentially created an angle at which this blade is entering the wood instead of 45 degrees it's either 50 or 55 degrees and then the last piece of the puzzle that really helps is having a tight mouth on your plane so the tighter you can get your mouth without causing jams which is what will happen if you get too tight all of a sudden everything will jam up in there it's kind of that sweet spot so the mouth of the plane will press down and compress the front of this wood to prevent that wood from wanting to break up and away it keeps it pushed down nice and tight until that blade can cut it so those principles together there's pretty much nothing out there that you can't handle and this is an example of curly wood or some figured wood you have green going away from you which is what you want then all of a sudden going back into the wood and this is where you'll get tear out and that kind of thing so we're gonna go back over here now don't one last thing I wanted to show that I see a mistake a lot of people make is they have their regular number 45 hand plane and this is the angle 45 degrees and they think that if they skew it they'll be able to get a nicer cut well this makes it easier to go through the wood but what you do is you're actually reducing the angle at which that blade is cutting the wood so you turn a 45 degree angle a nice steep angle into something like 40 or even less and here's an example so here's a bevel gauge set at 45 degrees now watch when I turn this at an angle and I'm still traveling in that direction you can see it's much more than 45 degrees now it kind of doesn't make sense at first you think that oh yeah this is gonna make things now it'll push through the wood easier and it'll slice easier but it's not going to reduce tear out more actually if you have a smoothing plane set up properly or those high angle ones they're actually kind of hard to push through the wood because there's so much force resisting you but that's how you get that smooth surface and then here's an example of this this is a stanley ten and a half and you can see a really good profile side profile of the chipbreaker the iron you can see I have that chip raker set right down to the edge and then with your mouth for different tasks say you're doing rough work you would have the mouth open you know maybe an eighth of an inch and then when you're doing smoothing stuff you have that chip break you're really really tight and your mouth really really closed you know like a sixteenth or less and then you just have to play with it to see what works so let's hop over here and I'll show you some examples so I have a piece of really really curly figured maple here and it has a glass smooth finish on it right now and I have a smoothing plane here and I have one of my number Five's that I have set for smoothing so these if you can see hopefully through the light back there that the mouth is set really really tight and the chipbreaker on these and these are aftermarket actually I have this thing set a little bit looser this is what most people have their plane set at it if you can see that hopefully you get a reflection of light there's a little dust there you can see it's about a sixteenth of an inch or so that's where most people have their planes and this is a good this is really good for general use but this is probably gonna not work for smoothing nasty woods and I also ground the front edge of my ship breaker I made sure the bottom of it was dead flat I made sure the face of my plane blade was polished and then I put a bout seventy degree small little bevel on the front edge of that so as soon as my chip it's cut by that blade it's hitting that that 70-degree chip breaker and instantly rolling and rolling over and breaking now I have a couple videos I have a video on restoring a hand plane I talked about a lot of this stuff and I have a video on sharpening a hand plane or plane blades and other blades and I show you a couple different methods so check those out I'll put links down in the description and some cards up at the top here so what I would want this app for smoothing is I want this blade just I mean less than a fine pencil width almost like you know about as thin as a hair on your head and most people don't get that so it's just the tiniest of slivers that's poking through there and actually right now if you can see it that's even a little bit heavy of a cut if you want to tackle some nasty grain I know I got this guy set up really well so I'll just show you an example of this this gnarly if you could feel this right now and hopefully we can capture in the light it's just glass smooth right now that's the beautiful thing about a smoothing plane is that it actually or any kind of plane that's got a good edge on it the surface you can't get this with sandpaper even a thousand grit it's just not as smooth and by using a hand plane all the pores of that wood are open so it takes oils and stains so much better they look a lot more beautiful than if you're sanding and clogging all that stuff up so there's a beautiful cut now I have this number five over here set to kind of normal use and I'll show you real quick so the mouth opening is about a little more than a sixteenth of an inch and the chipbreaker on that is set back about I don't know a little proud of a sixteenth of an inch and this is a nice this is a piece of white oak in the greens running in the proper direction there's nothing squirrelly with this piece of wood and it should cut this no problem there's no tear out its planing no problem but when I use the same plane on a bigger piece of wood like this I'm anticipating that we're gonna have a bunch of tear out and you should probably be able to hear it did you hear that that was allowed to tear out so that plane cut beautifully and that's not too thick of a shading it's a pretty thick shaving but it's not it's not ridiculous and cut beautiful on that oak when I was going with the grain but now I don't know if you can see in the light but it is torn out like crazy basically every dip there's tear out I want to show you I can take this same exact plane and do some adjustments to it those adjustments I talked about I'm gonna move the chip breaker right to the front edge now this is a nice sharp blade so I'm gonna bring this chip breaker right up tight to the front edge and I also tune this chip breaker so that it's dead flat there's no there's no chance that stuff's gonna get clogged behind it try to get in the right light alright that's pretty tight so you might not even be able to see it it's just a sliver of light that cutting edge right now and the front edge of this chip breaker is meeting that plane blade at about 60 70 80 degrees I don't get too caught up with exact measurement so now I'm going to move this chip breaker or this frog forward a little bit to tighten up that mouth see what that looks like so if you're ever wondering what the difference between a bedrock style plane is and a regular Stanley the bedrocks allow you to adjust the frogs without having to take the blade off which is kind of a really convenient that's why they're they're very sought-after and expensive mainly people collect them not so much because they want to further use okay so I'm just in the plane blade now looking down it on a light color background and you'll see the blade just stick out like a sliver and I'm gonna go ahead and try to get it centered I'm adjusting the lateral adjustment so that's even all the way across okay I have a tighter mouth now still could go tighter but we'll we'll try it we'll try it like this first I'm gonna bring it into the wood and slowly start bringing the depth down here thats hitting all those high spots and skipping the tear out we won't know if it's not tearing out until we do a few passes and get down because it's gonna sound like it's tearing out for a while so I have a pretty fine cut yeah that's working nicely hey buddy going go inside we gotta finish up okay go inside watch your show we'll be right in okay time out everyone all right we got the child back inside I haven't done anything else so I'm gonna continue on here it's starting to take care of all that [Applause] now curly maple will no matter what sound like that as it's hitting the different types of wood but right now and you know that it's you've got rid of all that air out when there's no more open spots so a hundred percent clean cut and if you could feel this right now it's absolutely beautiful actually there's still some on the far edge there go so yeah that's it's just so silky smooth so anyway that's kind of the principles of setting up and using a hand plane I hope I covered all the topics I hope maybe you learn some stuff hand planing can be really frustrating at first but if you practice some of these principles and understand how that works a little bit try some of those out make sure your hand planes nice and sharp and tuned up like that get that chipbreaker tuned get it close to the cutting edge and you'll be able to go through basically any wood out there so everyone thanks so much for watching if you haven't already please consider subscribing to the channel I really appreciate any comments let me know down in the comments section what other videos you might be interested in seeing and if you go over to my website I have plans and merchandise and I also have lists of all the tools that I use and recommend there's a bunch of Amazon links on there so if you purchase anything through Amazon it greatly helps me out get a little bit of a kickback and it doesn't cost anything extra it's just a nice way to kind of help me keep doing this type of stuff right now in these trying times so thanks so much everyone I appreciate it I appreciate everything we'll see you on the next video stay safe

Channel: Third Coast Craftsman

Views: 56,902

Rating: 4.9608541 out of 5

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Id: T2-Ac6wbrFY

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020