Troubleshooting a Bench Plane

well whenever you're at a woodworking show or you're watching somebody else using a hand plane or even a DVD everything seems to be going right all the time and you just have these fluffy little shavings flying all over the place but what happens when things go wrong in your own shop when you don't have somebody there to help you so let's talk about some of the things that go wrong commonly with these tools and how to solve them so the first thing that a lot of people have problems with is they'll come in here and they'll take this weird wacky inconsistent shaving you know that doesn't look like like you know what the pros get when you're at the woodworking show what could be causing this well usually it's the board when you first begin planing aboard is it's not going to be flat and so they're going to be sections of it that are higher and those are going to get cut off first by the plane so before you start saying once I put this flame the thing to do is to take a few passes across the board and try to see if the shavings become more consistent or if they don't now if they become more consistent like that then things are working fine so now instead of those little wacky crazy shavings we're getting wider shavings that I would more expect expect from this board and so the first thing to do is just plain the board and then then then you'll figure it out now let's say that that doesn't work you take shaving after shaving after shaving and you know it still just takes like a cut here and a cut here and it won't take a cut here or it will only cut in the middle or it only cut on one edge it won't cut over here or the shaving just just doesn't look right it's just not that full width you know what could be causing that now a lot of people will say well the soul is clearly out and you need to take it back and you need to you know take it to a reference surface and stuff like that and you know I don't really default back to the soul we looked at the soul and we dress the soul and I feel pretty confident that the soul is true on this tool but how do you actually check it to confirm that when you're you know when your brother-in-law comes in and tells you that that's the problem well what you don't do is what I'm about to show you what you don't do is you don't hold the plane up to a strong backlight you don't take a straight edge and you don't lay it on the soul and look for gaps because you know what you're gonna see them and what this procedure does is it gives you a false reading you're I can spot about one one thousandth of an inch gap between two steel surfaces and then the shiny soul is going to reflect that little beam of light and double the error so when you take a a soul and you put a straightedge up on it they're all gonna look bad even the real premium ones are going to look out and then a Madison isn't the right right word but but this one I can I can clearly see light underneath the straightedge but that's not the way to do it the right way to do it is to clamp gently clamp the tool in your bench vise retract the iron of course because you don't want to cut yourself and you don't want to have this straightedge rocking on that and you're gonna put your straightedge it doesn't have to be a machinist straightedge it just has to be a straightedge that that's metal and it's fairly straight and then you're gonna take the feeler gauges that we worked with earlier and you're gonna take your smallest feeler gauge and these are my grandfather's and the smallest one is 3000 euro to put the straight edge on there and you're going to try to get under that straight edge with your with your feeler gauge so you got to hold the straightedge against the soul and then probe so I'm holding and probing and holding and probing so nothing in the middle so I'm going to go over this end this long edge and see if I can get anything under there and it's just nothing gonna come over here and try that I almost thought I got something there but nothing now what I'm really concerned as we talked before is right here in front of the mouth and I can't get anything under the mouth three thousands of an inches is is perfectly fine now you're gonna find feeler gauges my especially modern ones that are thinner than 3000 e-flat so I would immediately now rule out that the sole is that is is the problem here with this with this plane so what else could it be the next place to investigate when I have this problem is I'm going to look at my bench top itself because the bench table can be warped and if there is a hollow in your bench top and your work is thin enough this probably won't warp very much but you know 3/4 inch stock 1/2 inch stock anything less than that definitely will balance what will happen is you have a valley and then when you come here with the plane it pushes the stock into the valley and but the act of pushing it into the valley in your bench top denies access of the wood to the cutter and what does that really mean well in in in the real world what that looks like is I'm gonna come along here and I'm gonna take a nice cut then as soon as I get in the middle nothing I'm not gonna get any cut no matter what I do and then I'm gonna come to the end and I'm gonna be able to take a cut and that what that that's because that middle is springing down into the hollow so if that's the thing that happens with every thin board that you put on there I think it's time to investigate your bench top instead of the plane and III this bench top seems about fine it seems fine and it doesn't have to be a completely flat machinist like surface to to get a nice shaving but it does need to be fairly close I found that you know hollows of about six thousands of an inch on your bench top can cause you some problems less than that no it doesn't have to be a granite surface plate the other thing that can go wrong if you're getting an inconsistent shaving is that you're putting pressure in the wrong place on the tool and when you're a beginning hand playing user a lot of times you will be applying pressure at the wrong place at the wrong time let me show you the right way to do it the right way to do it is to start the plane with the cutter slightly off the work you put your off hand on the front knob and you press down really hard and that gives you a nice consistent starch so it's called settling the plane so I've settled the plane on the work this is pushing down then I'm gonna come in here with my dominant hand and I'm going to push forward I am NOT pushing down with with this hand I'm only pushing down with this hand as I get into the work now I am pushing down with both hands as I approach the middle of the board consistent pressure here consistent downward pressure here and then as I come to the end of the board I can almost take my off hand off the knob because the hand on the tote is providing all the downward pressure that is what allows the plane to take a consistent shaving and allows the plane to produce a flat surface if you use consistent downward pressure both at the back and at the rear through the whole stroke the board is going to become you know it's it's going to become very very convex and that's what the plane wants to do so you have to trick it now all that sounds like a difficult thing to remember while you're planing aboard the way I like to that they can remember that though all those actions is to pretend that this is like a big thing of ice cream a big vat of ice cream and what you're trying to do is with the plane you're trying to scoop out the middle the the soul won't let you scoop out the middle but if you try to scoop out the middle with the tool then you will do all those actions and those differing pressures that I just showed you well there's other things to consider with a plane that takes an inconsistent shaving and the next thing to look at are the frog screws and we talked about these earlier when we'd arrested them and we lubricated them if you're taking an inconsistent shaving take the iron out and get in there with a screwdriver and really really tighten those up because that can produce an inconsistent shaving and we'll every time it'll it'll make you crazy and it will also make a chattering chattering cut so so get in there and tighten all that stuff up and that will fix a lot of problems that you have with planes so now we know what we're doing and how to fix it when it comes to an inconsistent shaving well let's discuss next what will happen if the plane simply won't cut and that's what we'll cover next after I get the plane adjusted back here's another common problem when with hand planes is you get everything set in the tool you go to the work and the plane just won't take a shaving at all it won't cut what could be the problem well there are a few things that could be going on here the first thing you want to do is take the lever cap off and take out the chip breaker and iron assembly and take a look at it what happens a lot especially at the beginning stages of learning use a hand plane is you haven't tightened to the chipbreaker screw enough I see this all the time people will finger tighten it and maybe they'll put a little bit of English on it with a screwdriver but that's still not enough you need to have this thing so tight that these operate as a single unit the problem what happens here what makes the plane not cut because of this is that this is too loose the plane iron adjustment dog that comes up through the hole in the chip breaker engages the chip breaker and then you try to increase the cut what happens oh you don't move the iron you end up moving the chip breaker forward and so the chip breaker may not be sharp enough to cut and and the iron is concealed under it so nothing happens or in some crazy situations the chip breaker actually tends to make the cut and then the shaving just looks crazy or horrible and the plane is impossible to push so this chip breaker screws are a very common problem and tightening them is the solution when the iron won't cut that's usually the first one the next thing that could be making the iron fail to cut is your sharpening now if we look at the bevel on on this plane is we have a 25 degree bevel that we ground on there with sandpaper if you remember that earlier and then we honed with the sharpening stones a 35 degree bevel right at the tip now that will work in almost every plane that I've ever picked up however sometimes your sharpening may be let's just say completely wrong and what you've done is say you put a 40 or 45 degree secondary bevel instead of a 35 degrees secondary bevel that is too steep too steep of a level and the reason it's too steep of a bevel is the frog that we cleaned up holds this iron at a 45-degree angle in the tool so if this bevel where it's touching the work is at 45 degrees the plane won't cut it might cut for an inch or so but then there will be a fiber spring back that pushes the iron out of the work behind the cut so if you are anywhere near 40 to 45 degrees the fiber spring back behind that iron won't won't allow it to cut so if the iron won't cut and the chipbreaker screw is tight the next thing to look at is is oh look at your look at your bevel your bevel might be too steep or too thick some people say it's too thick I say too steep so even and if you can't measure it then the best thing to do is just go back to the stones and resharpen because you know sharp fix just about everything other thing to consider is once again those frog screws if the plane won't cut the Frog screws might be so loose that the Frog just rides up on them when you try to engage the plane in the work and the iron just lifts up so everything lifts up and you may not see this but but it certainly won't make a cut so once again if the if the if the plane won't cut get in there and tighten tighten those frog screws and then the last thing is one you don't read about a lot but boy I I see it happen in my own work a lot and if we look on the sole and is more specifically the back of the mouth is this area back here where the screwdriver tip is touching that a dust and pitch tends to accumulate behind the mouth a lot especially after a lot of heavy work and if enough dust accumulates back there and you'd be surprised how little dust you need back there to cause a problem but if enough dust accumulates back there it's the same because of the same sort of problem as when you have it's too steep is that all of that dust denies access denies the Qatar access to your work so get in there with the rag and you know wipe out the dust and that will usually help clean clear out that problem and you then you can get back to work so now we know what to do if the planes not cutting at all but let's talk about when we take too much cut and let's find out what happens when the plane clogs is another real common problem with beginning planners let's talk about clogging and clogging is is a real common problem and it's almost always your fault it's not the planes fault the most common way to get a clog is that first off you let the mouth the mouth fill up with shavings and eventually you know things get too jammed in there and you don't allow them to come out we have a nice you know bevel on the front of our chip raker that we added in that is that it's helping the shavings clear but the other problem is here's the most common problem so you take a cut and I'm not it's hard for me to make a bad cut on here because this poplar is so easy to play but what happens is you run over a shaving so you make a partial cut or something and then you come back and you end up running over the shaving you did you ran over again you see how it didn't cut so if you have any shavings on the board is they'll get driven into the mouth like this and that's because you didn't clear the mouth or you ran over the shaving again so you don't have to keep the mouth clear and you also have to keep the work clear so let's simulate what happens here a lot when you run over your own plain shaving so as you can see I'm pulling back and not severing the the shaving from the board and then I come back and run over that and then once again it gets completely clogged there so always take complete shavings all the way along the length of the board don't stop and if you see a shaving that remains attached to the board like this you need to need to grab that and pull it off before you make another pass with the with the plane the other thing you'll find is that like I was saying earlier the chip breaker can cause a lot of problems with a bench plane and if you did not do a good job of eliminating the gap between the chip breaker and the iron this area right here becomes a big shavings trap so you will be planing and planing and then the you're not clearing the mouth and the iron stops cutting and then you clear the mouth and you can't get all the shavings out well what that usually means is that shavings have jammed up into the gap between the chip raker and the iron so take the thing apart and if there are indeed you know shavings in this area clear them out then try to tighten the chip breaker screw as tight as you can and then once again you know try to find out where the problem is so you know site with the strong backlight like we were doing earlier when we were tuning up the breaker and then look between that gap right here and and I can see that this thing is it's it's only touching to tiny little places so this this little breaker assembly would be would be bad news for anybody who wanted to try to play so those are the places that clogs can occur most often so always check the chip breaker and always clear those shavings out and don't run over your shaving again then the final and last thing to check is that the mouth itself is so rough that the shavings get trapped on it when you sever them from the board and if that mouth is is really rough and and you're getting lots and lots of clogging but it's not the chip breaker and it's not you running over those shavings again then it's probably your mouth you know that either it's so tight that the shavings jam up or that the mouth aperture is so rough that the shavings snag on it and the way to get that fixed is what we showed earlier when we filed the mouth of the plane is we're going to put it back into the bench vise toe up and then file that mouth and get that roughness away so that once again we've reduced the friction and the shavings can rise up in the mouth and not get clogged down there so once you get a plane that won't clog and it cuts nicely then you can start paying attention to the actual surface it leaves and one of the most common surface defects are what we call plane tracks and plane tracks are those little shelf-like marks all the way across the board and those are usually caused by one of the corners of the iron digging into the work and we're going to discuss next how to fix that and some of the defects that look like plane tracks but are actually something else plane tracks are the bane of a hand plane user's existence for one of the many Bane's including clogging and not cutting and blah blah blah but this is something that really affects the finished product and it looks terrible and the goal planes is to make the surface flat and smooth and you may have some gentle ripples left by the iron but if you have a shelf like this you really need to eliminate it like we discussed earlier when we were talking about setup the most common problem is that your iron is set over too far and so it's grabbing all on one corner and nothing over here and that's what makes a real heavy plane track like that so usually the solution is just as easy as extending the iron moving it back into the center of the mouth and then confirming its position with your little block of wood and if that happens to you over and over and over again it keeps moving keeps moving that means your frog adjustment screw is too loose so you need to tighten that up if it just keeps if it keeps losing its setting now a lot of problems with plane tracks actually don't relate to the iron at all they actually relate to what we were talking about earlier so if you're getting a lot of plane tracks you've put the iron back in the middle of the mouth the next thing to do is like just do what we did when we were fixing up the sole and that is to run your finger along the rim and make sure that the plane hasn't rammed into a screw or a nail or you're planing stop or your metal dog and damaged it because that will look exactly like a plane track on your work it'll raise a big burr here that will scrape a little corner all the way in your work so feel the rim and sand it or file it off another real common problem especially when you're dealing with soft woods or really sappy woods is that your real plane and not and that's sticky not a little piece will break off and stick to the sole somewhere on the sole and it looks like a plane track at first but when you get down and get real close to it you'll see that it's actually a low groove that has been plowed into the work by that little chip and so you need to get in there and get in there with your rag and loosen up that chip and keep the sole lubricated so things don't stick to it so that's another real real problem so you know look for all those things and then lastly the next thing to do is to site at the iron itself and make sure that the iron hasn't been chipped and the iron can be chipped because it's too soft or it's too hard or you ran into something metallic or you ran into a and you're really hard not and if you can see a little serration or a little tooling on the iron it's time to take it out and it's time to sharpen it so that's how I normally deal with plane tracks another way to deal with plane tracks are with beginning hand tool woodworkers is just to use sandpaper afterwards and eliminate them with sandpaper perfectly acceptable as you're starting to use a playing perfectly acceptable solution the next problem I'd like to discuss is one that happens only in some woods and also even gives advanced hand planners real fits and that is tear-out and that is it is when the wood gets ripped up and it looks really ugly so we're gonna be taking a look at tear out problem next get rid of this let's talk about tear out and what is it well tear out here's it a good example of it down here tear out is when the fibers have been ripped up from the board and the cutting action actually occurs ahead of the cutter so it's it's a little hard to explain you know and is a little advanced thing to think about exactly how tear out occurs a lot of people argue a lot about it but the end result is that you get this ugly tearing and you need to figure out how to remove it and you don't want to go through a bunch of theory to get through you just want to eliminate it there are lots of ways to eliminate tear out the first way to eliminate tear out is to reduce the projection of the iron so instead of taking a thick shaving take a much thinner shaving and a thinner shaving will usually clear up a lot of tear out the second thing to do is to sharpen sharp fixes almost everything so a really sharp iron and a really fine cut can eliminate most of these these tearing tearing problems there are some other things you can do and that's check the grain direction on the board you know this is a reverse grain board which means like the grain is going this way on this part of the board and this way on this part of the board and so you know you you may not be able to fix a reverse grain board but if you just have the board turned around and you're getting tear-out turn it around the other way and see if the tear-out continues or not and then the last thing you can do is to really tweak the chip breaker and the chip breaker when really tightly set can help eliminate a lot of tear-out and so let's take a look at what that means here we have a chip breaker on an iron and this is a real you know about a sixteenth of an inch back is a real typical setting for a bench plane that is designed for rough work now for fine work I'm gonna move that chip breaker closer and closer and closer as we discussed earlier on on tuning chip breakers until I could see only that real whisker that routed just sort of whisker of polish on the back and I might even do that by tightening it up and tapping it with a hammer or something so if you're getting tear out see if you can get the chip breaker even closer than it is before and that will usually pay off when when you're dealing with with a nasty board and a bit of tear out that you can't deal with so that takes care of most of the problems that you're gonna have with your typical typical plane and so now what I'd like to do is get into some of the little things you can do to this plane and any other plane to take it really up to the next level where it can handle almost anything any wood including that African mahogany that we were dealing with at the very beginning of the DVD you

Channel: Popular Woodworking

Views: 85,355

Rating: 4.9352026 out of 5

Keywords: Popular, Woodworking, christopher schwarz, plane, handplane, bench plane, jack plane, troubleshooting, tuning

Id: CME8UOcIEVg

Length: 27min 35sec (1655 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2018