Tool Talk - Block Planes

so I've wanted to talk about block planes for a while there work on strip building boats and particularly shaping strips and fitting them together I end up grabbing my block plane a lot and in fact I keep it in my apron and there's actually planes called apron planes but I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about the differences between expensive planes cheap planes etc for example so here I have a really lovely Lee Neilson plane it's all made out of bronze excellent steel in the blade the planes you know over an eighth inch thick it's a really beefy tool really nice tool fits in my hand just it's it's a joy to look at it's like over $100 something like that here's a plane my friend at in Ireland recommended and I got on Amazon it's from Stanley it was $8 it's made out of bent sheet metal stamped the blade we're lucky if it's a sixteenth of an inch thick but a boat made with this plane with this plane or this plane is not going to handle any differently on the water they're going to be exactly the same when you're done you can make every bit as good a boat with an eight dollar plane as you can with a hundred dollar plane so what's the difference you know why do I bother paying a hundred dollars when I can make every bit as good a boat with a eight dollar plane so I guess there's a couple reasons so the first reason is just the ease of use a good plane is just easier to use the very simple thing about adjusting the blade so it cuts right most more expensive planes have some sort of depth adjustment screw and just with this if I turn this screw one way it closes up the blade I do it the other way it opens up the blade that simple operation is worth a fair amount because you probably have to do it quite a bit as a general rule however the more expensive planes you actually have to do it less because everything's held in place better I had there's a clamp here a thumb screw that clamps the blade in place and so once this is adjusted the blade really doesn't have a tendency to move we're on an $8 plane there's one screw this just clamps the blade in place and in order to adjust it you've got to sort of grab a hold of it you can sort of tap on the back with a little hammer to move the blade in and out you can tap on the blade a little bit it can be tricky to adjust the other thing about this plane versus this plane is the way this plane fits in my hand and how it feels this there's no smooth spots on this plane everything is sort of cutting into your hand a little bit it'll work great your hand will hurt after a while it's I like a small plane because it's easier to hold and there's you know you can definitely hold this in a comfortable way but with this plane everything's nice and smooth it feels good and it's just a more of a joy to use this is a functional usable tool but there's nothing special about it it's probably gonna hurt your hand after a while you'll get tired of using it this tool is really meant for somebody who doesn't use a plane very often or for very long just you know maybe trimming the edge of the door once and so they want something for eight bucks they can get the job done and essentially throw away when they're done obviously I've spent some money on good tools because these tools are in my hand a lot so my to go to planes are these two right here this is Lee Neilson this is a Veritas they're essentially the same planes the Veritas is slightly bigger but very similar idea I use some kind of interchangeably there's really reason to try one over the other this is a little bit smaller I find it fits my hand slightly better the Lee Nielsen does than the Veritas but they're you know they're very similar in size and shape one advantage so the Veritas not only has a blade in and out adjustment but this knob here pivots from side to side and in doing so I can adjust the angle the blade in the throat there so there it's on one side see now it's way out of whack bring it back here and straighten it out and what that allows you to do is have a blade where you sharpened it so much it's not quite square so you can square it up to the make the throat and even gap all the way along there's also the times when sometimes I want to be able to do with the same plane an aggressive cut and a fine cut if I tilt this blade off to one side I can have an aggressive cut on one side of the plane and a light cut on the other side and so I can do sort of hog wood off on one side and then do fine-tuning with the other side so the benefit of this blade angle adjustment is you just have more degrees of freedom to deal with different situations I do find the Veritas overall more easy to adjust than the Lee Neilson the Lee Neilson tends to bind up a little bit this doesn't tend to bind up as easily the the mechanism for adjustment on this is a little bit more surefire than the mechanism to for adjustment on the Lee Neilson these are the high end of the spectrum again I think the Veritas is a little bit less expensive in cast iron then the Lee Neilson is in solid brass I know Lee Nielsen used to make a cast-iron body of these I don't think they do anymore I'm not certain and Veritas has some really high end block planes that are even more expensive than this what's most available for people is you can find these Stanley's at most decent hardware stores and there's two kinds there's a high angle in the low angle what they're talking about with the angle is just the angle of the blade here relative to the base and so as you can see this is overall lower than this and that affects the angle of the cutting blade as it hits the wood from my perspective it doesn't really matter that much the angle at which the blade hits the wood is really determined by the angle at which you sharpen the blade so if you put a steep bevel on the end of your blade you're gonna have a high angle blade if you put a shallow bevel on the end of your blade you're gonna have a low angle blade doesn't matter what the blade is being with it doesn't matter which tool the blades being held in so again from my perspective in the work I do strip building boats I just happen to like the low angle better simply for the reason the smaller so it's easier to hold it weighs a little less and you throw it in your apron it doesn't drag on your neck quite as much so that is my preference with this stanley's and again these are generally available in hardware stores however this one I've had for probably thirty years now it's still the same blade on it it works great even in my lifetime the quality of Stanly tools has deteriorated they're no longer quite as good as when I bought this when I was in my 20s this is a more contemporary Stanly one thing you can see right off the bat at the bottom of this is very rough it looks like it's been used enough that it's smoothed out here I didn't actually buy this tool it ended up in my tool bag after a class if this yours you were in one of my classes and you're missing it I have it please let me know the quality of the castings are not as good if you look at the pattern in here this is a much finer pattern they're just not reproducing the smooth castings that they used to but again you can tune a tool like this up to work every bit as well as a tool like this I forget what these are going for these days I believe it's in the $30.00 range something like that and what these tools have as far as adjustments over these little apron planes is it also has the ability to adjust how open the throat is between the blade and the front of the sole of the plane and so if you want to hog off a lot of material you can stick this blade way out and give a big wide opening at the front of this blade and you can just tear through material or if you're experiencing a lot of tear out in squirrely green you can back this blade way back so it's barely cutting anything and then support the wood in front of it by moving this throat in really tight so it's just enough room for the chip to get through and end up with a nice smooth cut again the quality of the steel on these is probably not as good as the quality of the steel on the more expensive plane but this is actually probably easier to sharpen just due to the fact that it's not as hard steel it's quicker to sharp and it will hold this edge quite as long you know if you're having trouble sharpening things it's probably easier to sharpen this one than it is to sharpen this one and again to look at the differences between the thirty-year-old plane and the modern Stanley this little lever here which loosens the blade makes it so you can get the blade out and sharpen it this one is made out of cast metal is strong beefy little lever there where this one is bent sheet metal and the thing about bent sheet metal is it bent once it'll probably Bend again if you try and crank this over you'll end up just bending that piece of sheet metal the other thing I have found well here you see is in order to get this off the casting here is not large enough to get over the head of that screw so it's hard to take apart so looking at these you will also find that the leading edge of this is kind of rounded over where here it's sharp down at that edge if you imagine a chip coming up this blade it often ends up hitting the front edge of this I believe it's the Frog front edge of that frog and with this new one that front edge has rounded over and so it's going to tend to get jammed in there if students come in with a new Stanley I'll just file down this front edge a little bit and sharpen that up just so stuff doesn't get caught in there the adjustment system on the Stanley's is quite nice you have an in-and-out thumb screw tends to be a lot of backlash in this you've got to turn it several times before it starts moving and then an angle adjustment just move these wings back and forth and you can adjust the angle of that blade so the other planes I have here are sort of specialty planes so still block planes but they're a little bit more specialized so I've already talked about this plane in my rabbet plane tool talk this is a block plane and I could do all the block plane work with this that I do with my apron planes this is a very nice tool again very good steel on it it doesn't have the adjustments that the a Veritas apron plane has it's pretty much just an in-and-out like the little block plane here this is again a low angle when this is tuned up and sharp it's a great tool does wonderful job so I could be happy if I had to buy one tool I wanted the capabilities of a rabbet plane where it cuts all the way out to the edge this would be a great tool to have this one's very expensive it's more than this one I don't remember what I paid you can go looking for Lee Nielsen site but really nice tool at the other end of the spectrum yeah this is a Lee Nielson also but this little plane I think they call these squirrel tails has a curved bottom to it so it's curved this way as well as this way and so for working on the inside of a boat this could be really nice and before I had this plane I modified this old Stanley I've had this tool just about as long as I've had the Stanley low-angle and I modified this on a belt sander to round the bottom out a bit and give it a little bit of curvature this way again as a tool to work on the inside of boats frankly I find these days so most of the work I used to use this tool for or this tool for I now do with a very sharp paint scraper so at some point I'll do a tool talk on paint scrapers essentially this tool here is what this tool is based on Lee Nielsen's sort of specialized in recreating classic Stan Lee tools in good quality bronze and good call it with good quality steel I think this would have been the high angle version there may have been a low angle version like this as well but you see these are essentially the same tool except this does not have the in-and-out adjustment here you need to essentially tweak this by hand this is my collection of black planes I do have some other planes that I use with some regularity maybe I'll do a tool talk about just my other planes but frankly the planes I use the most are in this category the block planes so my go-to planes of this Veritas and this Lee Nielsen they're really a pleasure to use hold a nice edge hold it for a long time they are a little bit harder to sharpen but very nice tools and I'm hard-pressed to choose between them sometimes I get a little bit frustrated with the Lee Neilson just in its ability to be adjusted again the thumb screw here can sometimes jam up a little bit I've tweaked it a little bit to loosen it up but still this one can be a little bit easier to get dialed in but once dialed in they both work equally as well and again the thing to remember is in the long run we're just trying to save material off the edge of a piece of cedar and so this tool does a nice job but you know you can't really tell the difference of the finished product after using this tool you do not need to spend a lot of money I've got options from $8 up to 108 dollars here and you know I'd be happy with any one of them I've built a lot of boats with my original old Stanley the new Stanley's might take a little bit of tweaking to get into good condition but are still very serviceable tools and again an $8 tool will do it so a $38 tool should do it these are my block planes so if you have any questions about any of these tools post it in the comments they'll be happy to answer your questions if you're enjoying these tool talk videos I'm open to suggestions for other classes of tools to talk about again if you're enjoying this whole series of tool talks please hit subscribe and until next time thanks for watching and happy paddling

Channel: Nick Schade

Views: 15,411

Rating: 4.9142857 out of 5

Keywords: guillemot kayaks, nick schade, tool talk, review, block plane, planes, stanley, veritas, lie Nielsen, rabbet, apron plane, antique, tool review, strip building

Id: SkvdTJWLgs8

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 28 2018