What is a Fore Plane? Ask M&T

[Music] [Laughter] hey everybody this is another segment of ask M&T where we take questions and try to answer them and give you some helpful information we get a lot of a lot of enquiries a lot of people wondering about for planes and so today I hope we can answer some of those questions for you first and foremost what is a four plane this is a four plane the four plane is the plane you use before all the other planes basically it's used to waste off a lot of material quickly it's used for stock prep for going from rough cut boards to a surface that you can work with other tools and it's a coarse tool it's not a fine tool you're not taking paper shavings with it but this is a four plane yeah and some people would call it a jack plane too so that's where some of the confusion comes in isn't that a jack plane isn't that it I'm gonna scrub plane maybe right um so we've dug up a few things because those terms have been used kind of interchangeably at some point some people say oh no this is a four plane this is a jack plane some people see a distinction and one place to start is Joseph Moxon's text mechanic exercises 1703 this version was printed and he describes the four planes as Mike described the roughing tool he says the iron has a convex edge so it's rounded so it takes a nice deep cut in the middle and he says this is used basically as coarse as possible he says it this way that the iron of the four plane is to be set as ranked as you can make good work with it it means as heavy as heavy use you can make good work with it and that four speeds sake so he's saying this is the tool to just get stuff done hagh material off work as fast as possible I did some research on the main cabinet maker and he was working from 1796 to the middle of the 1820s and he he talked about his for plane he had a for plane but he never used the term Jack plane which is interesting Nicholson where's that book Peter Nicholson's book I think the first printing was 1812 he only really talks about the jack plane the four plane I think there may be a reference to a four plane somewhere but primarily he saw him at the Jack plane and an interesting reference if you look at what a really good book for this is Charles Hummels book about the dominie family it's called with hammer in hand and in his section about the four planes of the jack planes of the dominie family he's got pretty much the the biggest the longest explanation of the history than the way that people have used the term and he has a quote here from Randall home in 1701 home said the jack plane is so called by the carpenter and the same is called the four plane by the joiners so that's one distinction home you may yes but I mean it really yeah the terminology is not necessarily or you can call it whatever you want you can call this a jack plane or a fork plane but don't call it a scrum plane because a scrub plane is something else entirely a scrub plane is is from German woodworking tradition it's a different tool it's a smaller tool it's shorter it has a narrower iron so a scrub plane is is used kind of in the same basic way to waste off material but a for plane and a scrub plane are not synonymous yeah I think it look up now scrub planes like yeah and and a half inches or something it's a short little plane they're really narrow really really very different tool yeah not for the same task though right the basic idea of what we're talking about when we're defining us a four plane or a jack plane is a tool that the it's about 16 inches long some of them are maybe a short is 14 maybe up to 18 somewhere in that range I've seen a bunch of different lengths listed so all the ones we have here we had a whole pile of them these are all 16 inches long almost on the dot mm-hmm that's the first key feature the second key feature of a four plane is that has a convex iron or that the iron is ground in a rounded shape so that it takes a nice deep cut in the middle and the third feature is very important and it's a wide open mouth really gaping wide mouth because the point is not to it's not like a smoothing plane where you want it nice and tight to prevent tear-out this is to remove a lot of material so you want that wide open out of the way so big shaving can straightness can come right out yeah yeah so so why do you need one of these basically if you are prepping your wood by hand prepping your rough wood by hand you meet one of these this is the most efficient way to prep rough wood with hand tools and otherwise it's a struggle so I'm Joshua I started out you know trying to teach myself how to do woodworking on canoe paddles my the only plane I had was a Stanley block plane and I was trying to thickness inch and a half stock down to you know half inch or under for for a canoe paddle with a block plane and that's the wrong tool for the job and if you struggle through that you'll think this is awful but this is the tool for that um and you should get one for sure the next question a lot of people ask is why would or should I get wood or does it make sense to have a wooden body for plane rather than you know a Stanley or something like that and we're both sold on wood for a number of reasons one it's lighter and if you are using this plane what would you say 75% of the times that's how I would you want to get three quarters of your planing is with this tool and so with each stroke if you have that much less mass to push you're saving a ton of energy over the course of you know a few hours it's the wood on wood slides a lot better we find you don't have to wax or lubricate sole nearly as often if ever I almost never do I forget that people do that everyone smile oh that's right yeah you have to try it yeah and then I take a few passes it's something that different yeah yeah without wood is there's not a lot of friction there yeah yeah and so you know those two things plus um you know this is not a you're not taking tissue paper shavings with this tool so it's not really intimidating to go out and find one of these that's old and maybe a little warped to tune it to do what you need it to do because it's a coarse tool so this you know I like to say it's it's like the Gateway to the gateway tool to wooden body planes yeah you start with one of these you learn how to tune it you learn how to tweak it and get it just right just how you want it for the the course tasks that it does and it opens up the world of wooden body planes - that's right yeah so I mean I think what we often have people say is well then where do you get one of those things and I only know where the Stanley's are and we live in Maine so in our area at least they're all over the place in antique stores yeah but so I would recommend especially if they're in the East Coast that's all I could really speak to that I know that they're kind of all over the place sometimes they're screwed to restaurant walls yeah sometimes there are some like fake flowers in there really nice yeah but they're all over the place and the ones I buy are pretty heinous they're in pretty rough condition they're not very special or unique if you can't if you don't have an antique store close to you that has any of these I would recommend hopping on a few different websites jimbo tools is always a good place can be kind of hard to find a specific tool just with the search but if you go to the the superior works Patrick leeches place or hyper kitten calm a bunch too they're out there a number of plays pencil journals yeah yeah you've got a big dialogue of stuff the fine till a journal online catalog in auction they got a lot of stuff you can call them to you can yes a just say hey do you have this and they have like 10,000 tools in stock at any times so you can get them yeah it's it's a one click away from the on the internet you're gonna find this source and so what I would look for when I pick these up like I said I'm not really picky because this is a coarse tool anyways you can see this one's been worn down over time it's pretty tapered down at the toe and they the iron doesn't need to be rounded when you find it because you can grind that you're gonna grind it anyways probably because it's got a chip in the iron or something so you grind that to whatever shape what you do want to kind of watch out for it's not a deal breaker but you can see this iron right here doesn't have a lot left and depending on how you grind this may last you only a year and a half or something alright you know depending on how you grind but you know if you have a few options look for one that has a good amount of usable life left in the iron and a few of the things I would look for that are repairable but I would pass up for a better condition one would be there's on this on the side here there's a split or the wedge caused it to split out a little bit it's probably from shrinkage a little bit so that can be glued and repaired but it's one more thing you get a mess with and then like in this example you can see it's got a bunch of tape on here because the toe is all is broken it's got a screw driven down through it again repairable it's just one more thing to mess with they're always grungy and dirty I always clean it up basically what I do is I just do a quick clean with mineral spirits pad a little bit of Lac sharpen the iron yeah and that's it that's remember Ely pretty much it I never have actually even checked the soles of my formula because that's not that big of a deal he could throw out a ruler on there just to see straightedge check it right it doesn't have to yeah when I bought this one the soul was pretty chowder doc I mean this was a deal this was like $8 or something and so I did a quick run of a few passes with a big triplane on it just to get the worst of the stuff off the bottom and flatten it a little bit but you know five minutes work yeah tonight most of the so we have to see it this one is $21 this one's 18 this one's 12 yeah this one's 9 you know so that's kind of the price you're looking for it you could expect to spend $20 on a plane like this yeah I think the thing to really know about this is that for us you know our mission here at M&T is to promote hand tool usage and just say hey it's not slow it's not inefficient can you understand the tool for the job and you use the right tool for the task hand tools are not slow right and what we're saying because we think this tool is absolutely critical yeah it's absolutely critical if you don't have a course roughing plane for a hand tool only work hand tools are slow yeah we're going to take you forever you want to be taken as much material off as you can and when you get close to the line that you're planning to then you can use a more refined tool yeah so we think that this is an essential tool the tool that I use more than any other in this kind of work so now we definitely definitely recommend everybody picks one of these up yeah yeah so that's those are our thoughts on the floor plane if you have any more questions you can interact with us comments below or you know on our blog or on Instagram Facebook any further questions for a future ask a mentee segment just send to us and also if you like this content go ahead and subscribe and look for more stuff coming up so thank you very much yeah thank you [Music]

Channel: Mortise & Tenon Magazine

Views: 14,538

Rating: 4.9378238 out of 5

Keywords: Fore plane, hand tools, woodworking, mortise & tenon, craftsmanship, hand plane

Id: Cokh4rYxx_A

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017