The Shop's Most Versatile Plane with Anne Briggs

[Music] hi I'm and some of you may know me as an of all trades and I have my own YouTube channel and Instagram account that focuses on a lot of antiquated traditions hand tool woodworking blacksmithing homesteading skills and a whole lot more today I'm going to talk to you about my very favorite tool the low angle Jack plane I'm going to go through how to set it up how to sharpen it how to use it properly and talk about all the various jobs that it can perform so how can this tool actually be a jack of all trades where it's a scrub plane and a finishing plane the simple answer to that is that you just have two different blades and for me having two different blades for this one tool has made it universally useful now let's take a second to talk about what it is that sets the number 62 low angle Jack plane apart from these other tools and also how it can emulate those tools the first thing is that this tool just has a whole lot less parts than these tools do if there's one thing that I'd like to emphasize with young or inexperienced woodworkers it's the importance of having the ability to is eliminate as many of the variables in your work as possible so if something is going wrong you can easily hone in and isolate what it is that's going wrong and fix it one of the simplest differences between this tool and this tool is the number of moving parts this tool has a frog it is possible that it could be cocked laterally which would cause you all kinds of problems you could be having problems with your lateral adjustment you could have problems with your back and forth adjustment there your blade could be too thin your chip breaker could be crooked or set improperly your lever cap could be set too tightly or too loosely there are so many things that could go wrong with this tool plus the very fact that there are so many moving parts in this tool causes you issues if you are young and inexperienced and you're kind of have a tendency to knock the tool a lot around a lot and it's used if you just bump the tool or you set it down too hard or you RAM in too cut over here you're actually going to change the setting of the tool so you could have spent 20 minutes setting this up so it would cut the most perfect gossamer shaving but then if you set it down too hard one way or another you would have completely messed up that setting the cool thing about this tool is that it has very few moving parts once you have the blade in the tool its bedded directly down to it and without an extreme bump or drop that blade is going nowhere so you can get your plane set up properly if you have a misfire here or there you can still be pretty much assured that you're going to be making the same cut 15 minutes from setting the plane up that you were when you first set it up the other thing that sets this tool apart from these older tools is that these tools have the blade bedded on a frog at 45 degrees with the bevel of the blade pointing down because of that there is a straight edge being presented to the work when you're using the plan to cut the only way that you can change the angle at which it cuts is by physically raising or lowering the blade to do that you would have to have a different frog to physically raise or physically lower that blade in a bevel up tool the bevel is what is being presented to the work so if you want to change the angle at which your blade is cutting your work then you can just sharpen a different angle into the blade but the last difference between these tools is the ability to open and close the mouth on these traditional style planes with the Frog the way that you open and close the mouth is by loosening these two screws and then tightening the screws down at the at the back of the Frog to move it forward or backward now that's a bunch of extra tools that you have to get out and a bunch of extra steps to be able to do a operation that if you only have one tool is going to be extremely cumbersome as you move through the different planning exercises whereas with a low-angle jack plane you can simply twist the handle open shut open shut change the adjustment of or change the depth of your cut and you're good to go and the final thing that makes this a jack-of-all-trades is the size of the tool this is incidentally the same size as a jack plane in the traditional style and you'll notice that it's kind of the middle size between the smoothing plane and the jointer plane so if you have a very short plane bed for example like in this tiny little cutie there's only this much material keeping your chisel away from the cut so it goes it stands to reason that this is going to be a fantastic tool to get into those little tough spots that you really can't get into any other way now if you're using a huge long plane like the jointer plane then you have this much material keeping your your chisel away from the cut so where this tool really shines is the is its length you're using this tool to joint your wood to make it straight along its length and so it stands to reason that you would have a long registering surface here and a long registering surface here but that long body is also going to disallow the blade or the chisel and the jig from following the hills and valleys of your work so when you're trying to make a perfectly square surface this is the tool that you go for but when you're trying to get a very smooth surface that just is nice along its whole length but squareness doesn't matter that's when you want these really really short plenty buddies I mean that's why a smoothing plane is so much shorter than a jointer plane so where's the happy medium here we are in the jack plane so this tool gives you enough length that you can really trust it to be able to square up your wood nicely but it also has a little bit of a shorter body so that you can actually trust it too to be able to follow those hills and valleys when it comes to the finished planing of your wood to leave a very nice beautiful surface as well and the fact that this one tool can either augment or replace all of these other tools as well here's what a typical piece looks like when it comes into my shop and so I'll kind of just give you a little example of what the scrub plane is going it's going to remove a China material in our tree but it's also going to leave a really scoop surface and I'm gonna have to be really careful that I don't plane away too much from a certain area if I wanted to remove a ton of material in a hurry with the jack plane I have two options at this point I have the option of just opening up my mouth and seeing how the planes cutting with just its regular blade because here's the crazy thing about the low angle Jack plane is that I've found that with a nice sharp blade you can pretty much cut any surface very well with this tool there are only a few times when I need to actually go ahead and change my blade so at this point I would yeah be pretty tempted to just open the mouth in my plane wide up loosen my lever cap just ever so slightly and take a more aggressive cut with the tool and if I'm not experiencing a whole lot of tear out all the better I can just remove a bunch of this material in a hurry and now as the grains getting revealed I'm also realizing that I may need to turn the piece of wood around now if I'm taking big little shavings like that I'm gonna need a little bit of lubrication on the bottom line plane so I'm gonna grab some beeswax or some mutton tallow and just use those to lubricate the bonnet for my plane so it looks like the wood back better and here we're getting a an actually spinach ready surface just from that nice sharp blade even though we have a wide open mouth there and now let's just take a look at what the tooth blade would do one of the coolest things about these low angle Jack plans both the Lee Nelson Anna Lee Valley Fair toss versions have what's called a tooth blade and what this is going to do is it's going to basically act like that's like that scooped feature of the scrub plane by taking little cuts all at once but the coolest thing is that because it's to store serrated in that way those little cuts don't continue to scoop if there is if it gets caught on some curl or some tricky brain and so what you end up doing is making a grated looking surface but it's going to be a surface that's completely flat and then it only takes a few strokes of a regular plane blade to clean that up the other really cool thing about the tooth blade is that you sharpen it just like a regular clean blade and tons of people really struggle getting the camber ground and sharpened correctly on a scrub plane but a touch sharpening job is never a reason not to use a certain tool so once we removed all that material it takes just about it just takes a few strokes with your other straight blades to get it back to a surface that's completely finished ready and I'll just take a little minute here to talk about proper planning technique you'll notice that this bench is very low this is actually a hand planing bench it's set up for me to prepare material and it allows me to be above the workpiece with the ability to use gravity to my advantage when I'm hand planning wood as opposed to being up here and being forced to use all of my upper arm strength so here hand planning is a core exercise I am actively engaging my core I'm trying to use my entire body to move the plane as opposed to just pushing it with my arms like this I have my dominant foot forward my dominant hand forward and I'm yes in guiding and pushing the plane here but your pressure needs to be here and so you'll notice that with every plane stroke I am bringing the blade fully off the workpiece and registering here before I even begin my stroke that ensures that I'm not you know going like this and just being all crazy with my hands and strokes which is going to leave an uneven and out of true surface Stanley actually made a low-angle Jack plane and number 62 in the Stanley numbering system and the concept was good but the execution was actually pretty poor the castings were too thin the blade was too thin the machining wasn't great so it didn't quite work the way that it was supposed to be it was what I would like to call a tool shaped object and the stanley number 62 is a collectible item today because they're fairly rare why are they rare because I didn't quite work the way that they were supposed to be and so they didn't make very many of them now well a lot of vintage tools are going to be significantly more affordable than their newer options and you can tune them up and make them work great as they are I really suggest that if you're going to get a low-angle Jack plane that you invest in a good quality one and you buy a new plane my two favorites are the Lea Neilson and the Lee Valley Veritas and there are other companies that are making them but they require a little bit more work out of the box and what you're paying for when you buy a higher-end tool is that some of that work has already been done for you if you're buying a new plane and this is in fact your first plane it's really really helpful to start with what I would call a gold standard tool from the get-go so that you know and understand how a tool is supposed to work and I actually got my start in this whole woodworking industry restoring antique tools for folks and it wasn't really until I had purchased my first benchmark tool that I really understood how these older tools were supposed to work and so if there's one area that you really should spend some money and invest I would definitely say that it would be a great investment to buy a low-angle Jack plane so why do I keep calling it a low-angle Jack plane who's Jack well it's a jack of all trades and generally speaking I am NOT a big fan of tools that do every job this stanley number 55 is an example is a total joke but this tool actually is a jack-of-all-trades and really does a good job at what it's supposed to do and so we're going to explore that more in this video there's a couple things that need to happen to get this ready to use and one of those is closing up the mouth and that's the mouth of the plane that's the opening here between the bottom of the plane soul and the front of the plane soul and where the blade projects at the front you want just a slightly larger mouth opening than the shaving that you intend to take and this is probably one of the single most awesome features about this tool is that the mouth opens and closes with the simple turn of the knob the mechanism works a little bit differently on both of these tools the Lee Nelson has a little lever adjuster and the Lee Valley has this little screw that you can put in and out based on how far you want that mouth to like basically a stop and so I'm going to close this mouth up ever so slightly so why do we want to be able to change the opening of the mouth a hands land body is basically just a jig that holds a chisel it's what's making sure that the chips are stopped ahead of the cut and so on and so forth so without the mouth of the plane to stop it this chisel is going to as we push this chisel across the wood it's just gonna want to continue to dig further and further into the wood because you know there's nothing stopping it from not doing that and so the mouth of the plane basically keeps it so that those chips don't continue to get deeper and deeper ahead of the cut and then the body of the plane basically keeps this so that it's cutting at exactly the same depth along the entire cut which is obviously impossible to do with just without a plane body to hold it so once we have the mouth of the tool set properly we need to set the blade as well so what I like to do is I like to put the blade forward until I can see it looking down the tool and then I want to retract it until it just disappears throughout this process I'm going to continue to inch the blade forward as I use a scrap piece of wood to test and see how far it's projecting so once I've got the blade position all sorted I want to tighten the lever cap not to a Herculean amount but you don't want that thing to scoot around when we're using the tool and this is also a great opportunity to just double check your mouth opening and to scooch it back ever so slightly if it needs to be squashed that looks about good now let's take the tool to somewhat here we are getting really nice shaping a nice sharp blade and nicely setup tool is going to give you a whole lot of success and even on that really curly walnut we get a fantastic finish ready surface from the plane set up this way I mentioned earlier in the video that my favorite of the newer low-angle Jack planes are the Lee Valley Veritas version and the Lee Nielson version so what are the differences between the two here they are the Lee Valley Veritas obviously looks a little bit different Lee Valley tools are a lot more sleek and modern looking whereas Lee Nielson tools are designed to be replicas of their older historical versions the Lee Valley Veritas version is significantly heavier than the number 62 and so in my own shop this is the one that I end up gravitating towards a lot more if we're talking about an eight-hour day where I am using this tool for the majority of that eight-hour day preparing stock or planing stuff that weight difference becomes a whole lot more noticeable that said that a ton of people prefer more weight in their hand tools and I think that that's why Lee Valley went with a heavier model is that if you really are using this for the majority of your planning purposes then that extra weight that extra gravity pulling your your blade down into your work is going to be a huge benefit and for someone who doesn't have a smaller frame as I do I can a hundred percent see that being the benefit the other major difference actually is the tote size and the the grip size once again I have very very small hands so I tend to gravitate towards tools that more comfortably fit my hands but that's just my personal opinion and these are both fantastic tools and an excellent value should you choose to not like using a low angle Jack plane both of them are going to hold their value incredibly well and you can resell them on Craigslist or on eBay but as much as I love cutting straight brain cherry the real test of whether a plane can actually do every planning job or not is on some extremely curly violin back maple thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video if you have any other questions about the low angle Jack plane or hand tools in general please feel free to head over to my channel and of all trades [Music] you

Channel: Popular Woodworking

Views: 91,785

Rating: 4.7984495 out of 5

Keywords: Popular, Woodworking, anne of all trades, anne briggs, handplane, handplanes, low angle jack plane, low-angle jack plane, woodworkers, woodshop, hand tools, furniture making

Id: IwRhkhXe0uE

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018