What Hand Plane Should I chose for Woodworking Use Stanley Bailey Handplane Numbers

this will be a plain video sorry I had to [Music] hey y'all hi I'm James right and welcome to my shop one of the most common questions I get is okay what plane should I choose when I want to work with wood do I use the little number three or do I have to pull out the big number eight eight and I want to joint a board and I want to kind of go through what are some of the differences in an also touch base on the standing numbering system I know that is kind of confusing for a lot of people so hopefully we can make that a little bit easier to understand so let's start down here at the narrow end and work our way up and to what are some of the differences between them the number three is an inch and 3/4 wide whereas the number four is two inches wide the the center the iron is the easier it is to push the wood so you have to put as much force behind to get it through when you start getting into these wider irons you have to put a lot more force with than to get them through the wood and so a narrower plane is easier so if you're working with difficult hardwood and you want to smooth it out a number three might be a great choice it's easy to push through the wood it flows through things easier the other big difference is that the number three is shorter than the number four by by an inch and that allows it to ride up and down to the valleys as you go through these numbers they get larger and longer so the number three is a lot shorter than the number eight and the difference for that is sometimes when you're finally finishing a board you don't care as much about flat you just want to take that wispy shaving off that amount that you're never going to be able to feel but you want to cut through some of the dings or a chip out that you might have happened when planing it flat you can bring in a number three and it can ride with the highs and lows of the board and you can focus on one area and get the Terra on that area and move on to something else the number four and the number five are kind of the all-round go-to planes you know you could do just about anything with either of these the number 5 is commonly referred to as the Jack plane can serve the jack-of-all-trades it's long enough that you can joint with it but yet short enough if you really need to you could smooth with it whereas the number 4 is kind of the opposite spectrum it's not quite long enough to do most jointing at least by itself but it's short enough that you can smooth with it and it can be a really nice a smoother as a matter of fact most smoothers nowadays are number fours even though I generally prefer my final smoothing to be with the number 3 I do often grab my number 4 for the number 5 because it's longer can ride over valleys so if the board has a dip in it as this rides over the dip might be down far enough that the blade doesn't cut anymore so it skips over the dip but it will hit all the high spots and so this will allow you to flatten the board but if the board gets longer you might want to use a longer and longer and longer plane basically the rule of thumb is you want the plane to be at least 1/2 of the length of the board well until you start getting the size of the bench in which case then you're not going to want to plane that's 4 foot long unless of course you really want one of those huh but if you have a board that is like 3 foot long this is all the length of a plane that you need to joint the board really nicely this will give you a nice flat surface it will tell you if it's flat now if you don't have one of these longer planes that's fine you can flatten the board with a number four or number three it's just going to take more work the problem is the soul will not tell you if it's flat so this will ride through the valleys and hills and we'll take off a shaping whole way along and so you need to use a straight edge to tell you where to take off the material with a number 4 whereas when you start getting the longer plane the plane will tell you where where it needs to take off material because it will either cut or it won't cut depending upon if the board is flat so back into the numbering a little bit as we start getting up into the number 5 there is also a number 5 and a half and a five and a quarter the five and a half is just like the four and a half it is the wider two and 3/8 wide blade whereas the five and a quarter is a thinner blade much like the number three if you want a longer plane that's easier to push through the wood a five and a quarter might be good whereas if you want to take off a lot of material very quickly with still having a longer plane five and five and a half might work you will where as then you start getting into the 6 and the 7 they're the same width as before and a half but they start getting longer I personally don't have a whole lot of use for the number six I just it's not something I really want to use if I want to grab that I'm apartment number seven just a little bit longer and it really isn't that much on weight difference between the two so that's my personal preference but everyone's old a lot of people really like the number six the number seven it's just a longer version of the number six the number eight though the number eight is even wider than the six or seven the number eight is wider and longer it's a full 24 inches long it is a pain to flatten it takes a lot of work is a very very heavy plane but once you get this to moving and you push it through the wood it doesn't stop it's got a lot of momentum to it and it's a lot of fun to use but it's a big big beast I have been holding off on restoring this one until I reef Lattin my bench top in which case then I'll restore this to to do the flattening work on a lot of fun there so how do you actually go about choosing which plane should you use for which task and that really depends on what you're trying to do there are basically three different things you can be doing number one you can have a plane that takes off a lot of material very quickly and that is often and you know it as a scrub plane or a full plane will have a very heavy camber on the iron and it can take off as much as eight inch on each path then you have your general plane and this is the plane that takes off a moderate amount of material a lot of times your jointer will fall into that because it's not taking a very light wispy shaving but it is taking off a decent amount and it's trying to get it down to flat and then you have a plane that takes off a very very light amount which is generally your smoother some people will have another plane that will pick off an even less amount which would often be like the number 304 or how you set it up but all of those have more to do with how you set up the mount is it wide open its blade engaged for how close is the chip breaker to the end and those things are going to determine how thick of a cut you make on top of that you're going to be then figuring out do you want the plane to be jointing the board you want to make it flat or do you want to just to smooth it out and so you've got to play all those in a balance my general normal is I have a number five that has a very heavy cambered iron that is my scrub point on my four plane and that's usually the first plane to hit the wood is the plan that touches the wood before other planes otherwise known as a four plane and that will take off a lot of material and then I even have either have my number four or my number five with a fairly heavy cut that will come in and clean out the marks left by the four plane and it will take a fairly heavy cut it will still leave some tear out it's not intended to be a really clean plane after it kind of cleans the wood then I'll come in with my jointer and this will be what actually takes it down to flat now I will try to get it flat with the heavier cutting plane but I'll have a jointer set up with a moderate moderate cut this will be a fairly clean cut and it will make the board perfectly flat and I'll choose a jointing plane depending upon how long the board is if the board is two foot long the number-5 will work great this will work great up to like three foot long at four foot long you're probably going to while you're thinking about a six or seven because it's starting to get long though anything over four foot you're probably gonna be wanting to look at an eight it is the the plane that will do long boards and makes them flat right off of the plane but then once I've actually flattens the board and jointed with a longer plane then I'm gonna come back through the smoothers and I'm going to take off a very delicate wispy amount in different areas trying to get rid of any marks that might have been left by the flattening any tear out that might still be in there from one of the heavier planes the smoothing plane has been the last plane to touch the wood so you're kind of working through this progression of taking off a lot of materials getting it getting it to where you want to be flattening it out and getting a nice even surface and then smoothing it and making it feel good and so you kind of want to bounce through them you can do all of that with one point you can have one plane and switch the air in out and put a camber error in there and flatten all with one plane let's count what the jack is for because you can do just about anything with a number five you can joint you can flatten it just becomes a little more difficult smooth because it is long now a lot of people will then jump into like a block plane for their smoothing plan but the black plane is not intended for force whereas you have a handle on here you can get behind it and you can push it a block plane is just intended to rest in the palm of your hand it's not intended to push so it's not a forceful tool this is great for doing cambers or cleaning up the ends of boards anytime you have pegs sticking through you want to flatten them out small items is what a block plane is for so not as much for your spine so I hope this cleared up a few misconceptions it is a topic that a lot of people kind of get worn out about and it kind of confuses people that no you really can't use a number five for smoothing or you can't joint with a number four really you can use any plane for just about any task just some are going to be a little bit easier to use than others and a lot of it has more to do with how the mouth is set up how deep is the anger and cutting and that is what determines more or less it to use other than joy anything along the plane is nice so yeah there are a lot of other things that I'm sure there's give you a lot of other questions and things that I missed or probably should have said please let me know in the comments below I'd love to answer those I hope you enjoyed this video it was a fun one to put out one of them wanting for a long time one of these days I'm going to get a five and a half and a five and a quarter and a two and one and I'm going to do a whole video with a long series of Stan Lee numbers and I thought that'd be kind of fun but not say if you did like the video please hit like and go ahead and smash that subscribe button I want to say thank you the patrons on patreon you guys are the reason this channel is running today if you'd like to help out with that you can find out more at the patreon link right over here if you did like this video feel free to check out one of my others you might find something you like there and until next time have a wonderful day

Channel: Wood By Wright

Views: 85,071

Rating: 4.9508972 out of 5

Keywords: stanley numbers, stanley number, Stanley Bailey, how to pick a plane, How to chose a plane, Wood By Wright, woodworking, Handtools, Hand tool, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, Chisel, how-to, howto, how to, traditional woodworking, carving, woodwright's shop, woodshop, hand tool woodworking, woodworking projects woodworking project, handtool woodworking, Stanly number, What plane Should I use, dating stanley planes

Id: 2iXhRBtTr60

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2017