The convertible plane: smoother and scrub in ONE.

so in my last video we made this $30.00 workbench it's based off a low Roman design and even though it was cheap and pretty easy to build it works really well but since it's made out of two by fours it's not flat it's really really not flat and if it's gonna be a great work surface then it needs to be flattened out a typical tool for that is a hand plane and in this series of videos we've been using this inexpensive Stanley 4:04 plane and this is a surprisingly good plane capable of doing some decent work but the way we have it set up it's a smoothing plane it takes a fine shaving and even if we set the blade as deeply as it'll go it's still only gonna take sort of a medium shaving if we try to use this to flatten our bench it is gonna take forever we really need a rough tool to do this work so what are we gonna do buy another plane well hell no that cost money [Applause] welcome to woodwork for humans the series where we make great things out of wood using the bare minimum tools and in this video we're gonna be talking about planes for rough stock removal a lot of wood workers who use hand tools like to have a plane like this this is called a for plan because it's used before the other plants touch the work this plane does the rough removal of wood so you can get down to business faster what makes it a for plan is that it has a very wide open mouth and a heavily cambered iron a lot of curvature and that lets it take big heavy bites off the wood without tearing out very much it's a quick and efficient tool now in addition to the four plane there's another rough plane that hand to a workers use a lot and it's called a scrub plane scrub planes are pretty much always metal and they're short like a smoothing plane but they have the same wide mouth and heavily curved iron and they basically do the same thing they're just short a heavy plane like a four or a scrub is exactly what we need to get the bulk of material off of our work bench and then we can just follow up with a smoothing plane that we've already got if you're just starting out in woodworking and you've restored this plane right here it's very likely to be the the plane that you have we could regrind the iron on this to make it into a scrub plane and I'm sure it would work great for that but then you've taken your only plane and made it good only for rough work you no longer have a smoothing plane or a medium plane that's not really gonna work a better approach would be to replace the iron in this one with one that's curved and set up for rough work a problem with that is that Stanley doesn't sell replacement irons for this plane but regardless of Stanley and they're weird decisions we still need to do something with this plane to make it appropriate for rough work luckily I haven't figured out to convert our smoothing plane into a scrub plane we're just gonna need an old block plane iron like this one and these aren't particularly hard to find they're all over a Bay and they're very inexpensive and it's usually not too hard to find a really beat-up old block plane like this one I probably only paid a dollar or 50 cents for this and I got it for parts because it's not restorable it's too rusty it's missing parts there are breaks in the castings there's just too many problems here but it does have a completely serviceable little iron in it and using an old used iron is actually pretty important for this project the way the 12 404 plane is set up it can only handle a blade that's got about an inch of metal beyond the slot if it's got more than that it's gonna stick too far out of the sole the slot on your plane blade also needs to be fairly short so that the screw on the lever cap actually hits the iron when you cinch it down a well-used block plane iron is perfect for this now you might look at this block plane iron and think that it's really narrow especially compared to the iron that came in our 404 plan but here's an iron that came out of an actual stanley metallica scrub plane and you can tell that it's actually narrower than our block plan on and the reason for that is that when you have this cambered blade that's taking big heavy chunks of wood that's a lot of friction and resistance for the user making the blade narrower cuts down on that by making it take a smaller bite out of the wood and in this way our block plane iron is actually perfect for spread plane use converting your block plane iron into a scrub iron he's only gonna take about an hour and it's simple most scrub irons have an 8-inch curve across the cutting edge and we're gonna reproduce that really easily your main tool for making that radius is just a simple eight-inch piece of string with a loop tied on either end tie one loop around a pencil take the other loop and tack it to your bench top and then use the pencil and string to scribe an 8-inch arc on a simple piece of cardstock then put a play an iron over it and add some horizontal lines so you have an obvious template cut it out with a pair of scissors and you now have an 8 inch radius template that you can use for converting any blades you need to make in the future once your template is done put it on top of your plain on earth and use a sharpie to color the tip in as we shape the iron we're just gonna take off everything that's black and that's gonna leave us with a smooth 8 inch radius and a nice gradual cutting edge for reshaping your plane blade you're only gonna need one or two decent quality files if you only have to remove a small amount of metal a single cut fine file like this one is gonna get the job done really well if like me you have kind of a lot of material to remove you're gonna want a larger and coarser file like this one no matter what you go with make sure you get handles for your files the tangs on these things are quite sharp and they can jab you in the hand don't use them without some sort of handle to do the actual reshaping clamp your plane iron to your bench with the bevel side up files only cut on the push stroke and they can be damaged if you pull on them so put the tip against your work push it all the way through pick it up reset it and push it in your plane iron is gonna be hardened steel so the work isn't gonna go super quickly but it's not gonna take a long time here you might find that you need to file with a bunch of different angles of attack to end up with a plain iron that you can use for the most part I suggest angling your file so that you're kind of mimicking the eventual bevel that you're gonna want the iron to take that's gonna make the grinding and sharpening go much more quickly but sometimes you're gonna have to work on the profile of the iron so you're gonna want to switch your grip and just work on the edge shaping it and getting a nice smooth curve also to make sure that curve is as smooth and fair as possible you're going to want to go around the edge sometimes and putting the file parallel to the iron and taking a long stroke is really gonna help with that as you're getting rid of all the black sharpie marks that were left from the template you can occasionally bring the template back check your progress and make sure you're really ending up with a good shape once you're done shaping the end of your iron then it's time for grinding and honing just like we did in our original plain restoration video get out your sandpaper on glass and using coarse paper just quickly flatten the back of the iron this is a rough iron for coursework and it doesn't need to be really highly polished just get it mostly flat then go ahead and get it in your sharpening jig and start working the bevel back and forth on the coarse paper you have a wide very aggressive camber on this blade and if you just go back and forth with the honing guide you're only going to sharpen it in the middle you're going to need to follow that bevel by putting pressure on each corner of the iron as you go back and forth and alternating that pressure kind of rolling the bevel as you go back and forth that's going to give you a smooth and consistent bevel that accurately follows the curve once you've ground the whole bevel and you can feel a burn on the back of it flip your glass over and go back to your wet and dry paper it's the exact same drill as we did when we were sharpening this as a smoothing plan start with your courses paper go back and forth wait till you feel a burr go to your next paper repeat repeat repeat by the time you're done you should have a sharp and polished bevel you can strop it or not it's totally up to you so here is the final plain tiny little iron big aggressive camber and when you actually take it to a piece of wood this thing is a monster it chews through boards and takes huge shavings these are totally unlike the shavings that you get from a smoothing plane that are all feathery and flexible these are big and brittle they snap as soon as you put any pressure on them because they're more like wood chips than wood shavings and this plane is going to allow me to flatten the bench that I'm sitting on right now much more quickly and efficiently than using a more finely set smoothing plan and that's actually the next video that I'm gonna do so tune in later this week to watch me flatten this bench using only this plane a couple of scraps of wood maybe a ruler or two we'll see we'll see what it takes like most of my videos this one has a free tip sheet it's basically a one-page illustrated article that has all the details and measurements and links to all the products that I used I haven't actually made the tip sheet yet but I think I can just put a little 8 inch radius on there and it'll be a little guide that you can just cut out and stick on your plan ion and color in and you'll be good to go you won't have to mess around with a string or anything like that and if this is your first video in this series would work for humans is a whole series of videos for people who want to make great things but a cash-strapped and just getting started and I have a bunch of videos on tools and techniques that anybody can approach even if you have a very small working space and a very small amount of money for tools so go ahead down in the description and check out the playlist to those videos and the links to all the tools that we've used so far and just like always I really have to thank my patrons on patreon for instance this week one of my patrons posted a picture of himself doing woodwork on the roof of his apartment in Paris France there is flattening a plane on a workmate on the roof truly these are my people they're the ones who make these videos possible so if you want to join this community and make videos like this happen go over to patreon.com slash Rex Krueger and throw in a dollar or two it makes a huge difference in the amount of content I can make and how good it is and I appreciate my patrons more than I can say and everybody who's watching this video thanks so much for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 37,530

Rating: 4.9701319 out of 5

Keywords: plane, hand plane, handplane, scrub plane, fore plane, convert, restore, iron, blade, sharpen, camber, rough, cheap, cheap tool, beginner, noob, diy, shop, handtool, shoplife, make, maker

Id: rjs79CgWT-U

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019