Using an Electric Hand Plane - Beginners #24

[Music] hello everyone Colin cadet here for woodwork web today after many many requests I'm finally getting around to doing a beginner's video on using a hand electric planer there are a few different units like this on the market and there are little different widths and different lengths but they're all very similar the main difference between them is this one has replaceable blades that come out and get resharpened and the way that works on these kinds is you have three bolts that need to come out you take the blade out either sharpening yourself or have a sharp and replace it and reset it up they're a little bit more difficult to set up the blades and these the other kinds of units that are more popular these days are those with replaceable blades and those blades look very similar to this this is just a file but this is very much what the blades look like and the way they work is when you have a blade in that's dull you simply take the new blade and just push it through and the old blade comes out and the new blade replaces it very simple to replace but you can't really sharpen those blades so just a couple of differences there all of these units have an adjustable front you notice that there's a rear platen and a front platen the front platen on all of these is adjustable and normally it's by a knob here and as you turn that knob this front platen moves up and down a lot of them also have a guide and I don't have the guide for this one but if there was one that you might want to use a guide if you were going past a a straight piece of wood and you didn't want this to move around at all there is a guide you could put in here and that's what this button is for just to lock that on the reason you see me setting this on a piece of wood like this is because I don't want to damage the blades here if the blades are like this you could lay it down but I don't always look at that so I always leave the blade up like that or the unit up like that so the blade never touches a flat surface and we do that with all hand planes to try and keep them elevated somewhere so that the blade doesn't touch something and get chipped or dull the other thing that this one has is a chute here and they all have some kind of a chute and this is where the chips will come out as you're going through the wood so you'll want to watch where that's point to that I should also mention this little red thing on here all this is is just a little tab so that when I I'm not using this planer I just wrap up the cord and put that in because I know somebody will ask that this unit cell normally for a hundred and fifty on up you might get them for cheaper I purchased this one used at a garage sale for twelve dollars and it's as you can see it's in pretty good shape and I had to do some work on it but I want to tell you why I got such a great deal on it when I went to the garage sale I saw this sitting there and it had a little bit higher price on it than this but I asked the person that was selling it if it worked and they said yes it ran but it didn't work very well and when I picked it up the first thing I wanted to look at of course it was unplugged and when you're viewing these things there you always want to make sure that they're unplugged when I was viewing this at the garage sale I first of all checked the blades and the first blade looked fairly sharp and they only have two blades i when I rolled around to the second blade I noticed that somebody had installed and backwards and when you do that of course it doesn't work properly and I knew them that why it wasn't working properly so I made them for I said I might be able to fix it and they were anxious to just get rid of it they didn't want it anymore and so they took $12 for it let me show you what that what I discovered when I picked this up and why you can put these blades and backwards if you have a planer or are going to purchase a planer that has the little replaceable blades like this this won't have the same meaning but if you're getting an older one or you already have an older one that has big replaceable blades these are usually three inches by about an inch and a half wide and maybe 1/16 thick this will apply to you now in a hand planer like this here's the frontal that little part remember I said that was movable and the back is like this and the blades spin around in this direction now and of course the planer will then move in this direction in the wood what I discovered on this planer when I purchased it those blades when they're sitting in there if you look at him enlarge that those blades should be sitting in such a way that the bevel is towards the back of the machine and this always the very front tip wants to be cutting wood the bevel wants to be trailing the wood so the bevel always was to be behind the wood that's already cut in this one they had one blade like that the other blade instead of being let me see if I do this upside down instead of being instead of being well in let's do it on this one here instead of being like this the second blade was like that and that's why it wouldn't cut properly so they had one in right the right way and one in backwards now I want you I want to take that a further level because this applies to your jointer you or planer your even your hand plane all of these units have to have it doesn't matter when you're cutting into the wood all you ever have to remember is that the angle that's cutting into the wood needs to be that part the bevel is always trailing the wood and when you take this and flip this around anyway you want of course the blade is traveling always in this direction whatever that might be you know might be traveling in this direction in that case the bevel is going to be like that if it was going like that but that's a hint for every tool that you have even your hand planes but that bevel needs to be in that sort of the situation and and of course the chips and and so on would be flying off in that direction that that will always guide you how that blade wants to be set the basis of some of these planes are flat and some of them have grooves all the way through them down here those grooves are nothing more than to help reduce the friction they don't do anything this particular unit has a groove a single groove in the front and what that's for is if you want to cut a sham for and a sham for is when you cut just one edge of something and you take that edge off and you can see that if you put that on there just like that and run that along it does a perfect little cut and it will take that edge right off and make it flat along the top there so that's what that little edges abuse your plane has one of those on it it has that's a sham per slot now hand planes only have a length of around 12 inches so if you're doing a on six-foot or 8-foot board don't expect this on its own to make the board flat and straight because depending on how the board is this might move up and down what these are for is taking something that's already rough and taking it down to a basic smoothness now when we're using these planes as I mentioned the first thing we want to do point this the first thing we want to do is set the depth and I always like to do a very fine depth so you'll adjust this so that this front platen will move up and down and I'm going to set this in a second here to a very fine cut right about there cutting with the plane the way to do this is to find the flattest part of the wood and we're going to set this on here and we're going to guide this straight on when we get to the point where the plane is more firm on the second part we want to shift our weight to the back we don't want to be having pressure on the front because I'll show you in a second here how you cut that out so here's the proper way of cutting wood [Music] here's what happens when you put too much pressure on the front you will gouge the front [Music] and you can see I emphasize that bit but you can see even from where you're viewing there's a gouge in there and that's because there was too much pressure on the front and it moved into the cutting blade well that's it that's all there is to know about electric hand planes and I'll be honest I don't use this unit an awful lot but there are times when it's the only thing that will do the job correctly so it is a handy little tool and if you can get a good deal on one so much the better don't forget there will be an article on woodwork web about this so that you'll be able to double check that for more information don't forget if you haven't subscribed we ask you to do that like us on facebook follow us on twitter i Michalek an ad for woodwork web thanks for watching you

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 2,295,189

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Id: fSSObGEMkno

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2015