The Block Plane - Tune Up and Use - Most Useful Hand Plane In the Shop

today I want to talk about how to tune up and use a block plane now the block plane is the smallest of all the planes like my friend Danny here but it is the most useful and the number one plane I reach for in my shop so let's bring it in the bench and talk about the anatomy of a block plane alright so these are three different types of block planes they are all low angle I don't personally like the high angle block planes and here's the reason let me show you what the angled Newtons the angle of the block plane is this is the bed angle and our low angle plane that's going to be 12 degrees we're on a standard angle that's going to be 20 degrees and why I like to use the low angle is because that is 12 degrees plus the angle of sharpening which typically a plane iron is 25 degrees you put a micro bevel at 30 so 30 plus 12 is going to be 42 degrees now your standard angle of attack on like a number 4 bench plane is going to be 45 degrees so you don't have a ton of difference there but when you get into the high angle and you have a 20 degree plus 30 degrees you're getting into 50 degrees which makes it more of a high angle plane rather than a standard angle and sometimes that's way too much of an angle of attack it works great for heavy figured wood but on your typical day to day operations a low angle is gonna work a lot better for you now there's two basic types of block plane which is you have something with an adjustable mouth like this one here you can see that the mouth opens and closes and now this is the absolute most used plane that I have it's great for so many different things we'll go over here in a minute first we're going to go over tuning them up here is sort of kind of a specialty plane from Lee Nielsen it's called a rabbiting block plane which is a great plan to have it certainly is something I reach for a lot for cleaning up rabbits you know half lap joints it's great for getting right along the edge of something and these are really cool but when you get a block plane I highly recommend a low angle and an adjustable mouth now let's talk about how we tune them up the most important part to tuning up a block plane whether it's one you just got and if it's a very high-end one the sole should be flat when you get it this is from the scary sharp system video that I just did we're gonna breeze over the sharpening part of this really quick but if you want to see the system it's awesome it's inexpensive it's linked right here in this corner great great sharpening system when you get a new block plane like this wood river one is greatly Neilson is great I think this was a shop Fox one that I got I'll link all these down below they all work the shop Fox is a little bit thinner than the wood River but good plains I think in order of cheapest to most expensive it goes this way but I like all these they work this wood River one the Weaver cap is so nice I love that makes using it really really easy but you need to flatten the sole now what is really important is that you don't take the blade out to do that when the blade is engaged and everything's tightened up there's a small amount of flex that happens in a block plane and it may be impersonal to you but it makes a massive difference when you're lapping or flattening the bottom so what you do is you make sure your blade is in there but you just back it all the way off so you back your blade all the way up so that it's not coming in contact you can feel don't cut your finger but back it all the way up so it's not gonna come in contact with your sandpaper because obviously you don't want to mess that blade up you keep it tight I can tell I'm not it's not cutting anything and then we're going to lap it now this is on float glass here so I know this is really flat in a pinch you could probably use a small piece of MDF but it's good to get something that you know is flat this is just some sandpaper this is regular 150 grit I believe that would be for like heavy stock removal and then this is 300 grit that is from the scary sharp system with a three hundred grit I would use water with 150 I wouldn't and you just take your plane you can see a big problem that I have and this may be something you can avoid this is like a nightmare here is I use these a lot when I'm doing glue ups and things like that and I just forget to wipe them down afterwards so and then I set it back up on the Shelf and I don't notice and a week later you get these little rough spots so this is something I actually do kind of regularly because I use and abused my block plane so much that I always check and make sure the bottoms are looking good so we've got this shop fox here and I'm gonna start with the higher grit because you don't want to take off more than you have to and if it looks like I have to do a lot more stock removal I'll go to the dry 150 grit I'm just gonna spray a little bit of water on there and you want to make sure you're not working one more than other so you want to either stay on your thing or do even strokes all the way through but I'm just going to take it like this go back and forth and then take a look and you can see I'm getting scratch patterns just about everywhere I'm missing a little bit on the heel here and a little bit here in the center which was from when I owned this seven years ago I didn't know you had to have the blade in there and I kept getting this Hollow and I didn't know why and that's why so let's get these flat and then we'll get into sharpening now the next thing you want to do especially if you've done a ton of lapping like you had a really old block plan and you really needed to work on it to get it flat is these corners can get very sharp and especially here in the front that can dig into your work as you're going along or you know I've had them where I get like a sharp enough edge that I can get a little cut in my hand so you just want to take a file and lightly give the corner it's just a little bit of a little bit of a rub they're not that way and especially in the front you want to just kind of give all those edges just a very light chamfer I've seen some people who like to take these corners completely off but that's up to you I don't think that's necessary now when it comes to sharply I'm not going to do a whole sharpening video I have a really great video here this is linked right here in the corner for the scary sharp system I use it chisel in that video so there's two differences when you're sharpening plane irons one you don't need to flatten all the way up the back you really only need the first you know millimeter of it to be flat because that never comes in contact with the wood you just need the flat part to meet this at a perfect angle and that's what causes the sharpness so what I like to do for that is I just hit it a little bit here on the edge and just make sure that I get a shine and scratch marks all the way across you can see here that I have sort of a hollow so I need to keep going but there's even an easier way than just trying to fly in the back which is called the ruler trick I forget who created it I think I first saw it from raw rob Cosman but he wasn't the creator of it where you use a very thin ruler and you can just flatten the very very tip this ruler is probably even too thick I would use something thinner than that maybe even metal shim stock and you just get that back barely barely flat right at the very very edge the only other difference in sharpening a plain iron versus a chisel and I couldn't find my gray little cheap honing guide that I used in that other video which I'm starting to like a lot more in this this just has way too many gizmos I like to just quickly set it up and get to sharpening but the only other difference is let's say you're gonna do 30 strokes here so you know whatever 30 after you finish your 30 I'd like to do five with all the pressure on this corner and then five with all the pressure on the other corner and what that does is it creates a slight camber on the blade and all that's for is when you're using it the very corner isn't going to dig into what you're doing so if you use overlapping strokes you're never gonna get those lines from a hand blade and that's all you would do that is different than sharpening a chisel so please check out this video this system works great I love it now let's get into setting these up we're gonna come back with some sharp plane blades and we'll set up these planes and then the last thing you want to do before we get into the actual setup to cut wood is just give everything a light oiling and what I do is I just take a little three-in-one oil and just sort of wipe everything down that gets rid of any moisture and water on there that could cause rust and then I just sort of kind of wipe off the oil and then I do that to the plane as well because we've flattened that and that has had water on it I just kind of rub all the exposed metal parts and I don't leave any kind of oil sitting on there but it'll be kind of greasy and slick and then some people I'd like to put a little paste wax or candle wax on the bottom of their plane I think that's a great idea I just don't have any with me currently so let's get this thing set up for use and we can talk about how to set it up and what it's used for in a lot of instances next we need to set the blade and depending on what you're doing sometimes you want to take a big depth of cut but most of the time you want to take a very small depth of cut and so what I do is I take the plane blade and I'll hold it up - for me I use my video lights cuz something super bright my buddy Mike Farrington suggested like holding it up to a super bright window but what you want to do is think of this is the horizon right here and you want to be almost looking straight down the plane and you want to be looking for a boat to come out on the horizon and what you want is as you advance the plane you want it all to come out the same the same depth so you'll see it all the way across and sometimes you'll see one side go up more than the other and like this plane for example has a lateral adjustment but both of these planes don't have a lateral adjustment so what you can use is like a small mallet and you tap it on the opposite side of which way you want it to go so let's give it a light tap and that'll move the blade over the other way so let me show you actually in the light so you can see exactly what I'm talking about and we'll adjust this so that it's perfectly straight across now if you put a camber on your blade it may be that the the most of the center comes out first followed by the corners and that's okay but you basically want just everything or 90% of it to come out all at once if you have rounded corners you'll see one side is gonna come out first you can see right here on this side of your camera do you see how it's starting to come out first now your eyes are so sensitive that you're gonna be able to see that and you can see that that sides coming out first and you're going to want to adjust it so that everything comes out at once so once you have that so that it's set evenly and this brings up a great point I inevitably will get a comment in every video when I set a plane down like this I think someone says oh you made the worst faux pas Woodworking you set you're playing down with the blade iron facing down now the step we just took is the reason why most if not all really good woodworkers lay their planes with the face down you saw how easily it was to adjust it with a very slight tap of a hammer now if I put this down too hard like this what do you thinks gonna happen that blade is gonna come out of alignment and if my wooden bench can affect my a2 tool steel blade in any way that is a terrible blade so I disagree I think if you watch Paul Sellars Rob Cosman Mike Peck of they all set their planes with the sole on their bench you don't want to slam it down but when I put it down I just kind of lightly put it down it's not gonna affect anything of Steel versus wood so come on guys sorry that was a angry tangent from comment frustration but we now have our blade even and set our mouth is wide open if you have adjustable mouth now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take it and I'm gonna back it up all the way until I'm not cutting any wood and this is important is you need to once you back it up you need to turn it the other way you'll feel there's some play in there that's just called backlash it's the difference between changing directions and you go until you feel that tighten and it's not loose anymore and then I'm just gonna take it and keep slowly turning it until I start to get a very light shaving and you'll see here I just felt just a very little bit there now a little too much you can cut that out all right so then you just keep going for it and there we go I'm just getting a very light shaving now I'm gonna take my mouth here's something to know about adjustable mounts the mouth should be open no more than the depth of cut so if your mouth was open this much you better be taking a quarter inch depth of cut or eighth inch depth of cut there which would be pretty much impossible so because we're taking a very light shaving I'm gonna close that up to be just about I don't know a 64th open I mean you want it as close as you can without cutting out the shaving and sometimes like this block plane you can see that it doesn't look like my blade is square you don't want to use your mouth opening to adjust squareness because you want to go by sight and then if you need to you can go by feel by going on one side to the other but I hate that because the amount that you might think you're right could be way off if you're looking at it this could be just that this isn't square to the the adjustable mouth isn't square to the plane which is something I can work on but is not a very big deal at all to me so I'll leave it so that you just get a little sliver gap there because that's about the width of Shea we're gonna be taking you want it to be maybe slightly bigger than the width of shaving right you know that we have our mouth set we're going to go over to our board and just give it a little check here and make sure we're getting good shavings and you can adjust your depth of cut as needed that was probably a little bit thicker than I wanted it to be here so I'm just gonna back it off just a little bit and there we go we're just getting nice paper whispery thin shavings something that William Walker absolutely can't do because he's trash garbage and if you haven't seen our feud head over to Instagram hashtag cats Moses Walker feud which he reignited this week in a video so just tell them it's been a bharat in' but we get these perfect look at that just look look how see-through these are alright let's talk about the main uses for a block plane and why it is just the most common plane that people reach for first breaking edges so when you have a piece and you're done and before you go to finish breaking edges is always great and you just take a block plane get little shavings there until you get the chamfered corner that you want and you can change the angle if you want to round it you can move your block plane up and down but you get these broken edges which you can see here now use I guess you'd call it one because it's basically the same thing but it's here's a great little tip for you when you are going around breaking edges count your strokes and always do your longer in first so let's say we did five strokes here we know we can go across our long grain the fibers are going this way essentially end grain which a low-angle block plane is great at you could then do four strokes here because you've already removed the long grain and you're not going to get tear out on your corner so you can see that was three four five and then six yeah I'm starting to get a little bit of tear out probably could go a few more but that's a great little trick for getting chamfers another use for the block plane is trimming up joinery now these are proud dovetails from a joint of the week I did a while ago but it's a great example of what a block plane is great at when you finish your dovetails if you did them right you'll probably be a little bit proud on your pins and Tails by just a little bit a block plane because it's so good at endgrain is great you don't want to come out this way because you'll just tear out your dovetails but you can go in towards the center of your project and just flush those up until you start to take wood off of your mating piece you know they're perfectly flush and you can go on with your project maybe move to finishing that kind of thing it's also great for finger joints for the same reason it's also great for butterfly keys so when you put in a butterfly key gosh that is a terrible drawing this is going to be proud of your surface if you did it right because obviously you would rather take down this small area than the rest of your project to get to the same level and it's really easy to just start to use your block plane and you can just get that to be flush with your surface and if you have it set to a very light depth of cut you shouldn't get any tear-out anywhere in your project you get a nice flush clean surface same thing with plugs if you drill a hole for like a screw or something you saw in that magnetic light project I just did I had a bunch of plugs in there block plane works great for cleaning that up and you know a block plane is great for so many other things a lot of times when I reach for it is like cleanup you know I've got some dried glue or epoxy that I need to flush up I reach for a lot for flushing up joinery flushing up things that stick out of stuff you can put heavy chamfers on things it's just a great great plane it's great because you can use it one-handed or you can put your thumb on it and use it two handed but it's just really one of those things that everybody should have a decent block plane and it works good in your shop I'll link these down below I have no affiliation with these companies so I really like the lever cap on the Wood River one it makes a great plane of course Lee Nielsen makes incredible but I've also a great luck with this shop Fox which is you know kind of a mid-range price one a little bit lower maybe off Amazon so guys thanks for watching in these uncertain times your support has been astronomical and has kept all of us working and you know putting food on our table so I really appreciate that if you want to support the channel head over to the cats Moses store get a stop lock dovetail Jigar t-shirt thank you so much for watching guys stay safe in the shop have a wonderful day [Applause] you

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 85,954

Rating: 4.9368496 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, block plane restoration, block plane setup, block planer, block plane sharpening, block plane uses, block plane review, block plane assembly, block plane adjustment, block plane adjustable throat, block plane angle, block plane angle sharpen, block plane low angle vs standard, block plane basics, block plane bevel up or down, block plane blades, block plane bevel angle, block plane buying guide, block plane comparison, block plane chamfer, block plane end grain

Id: Q_osprDKrtI

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020