What makes a plane good or bad?

so in my last video I fixed up this plan the Stanley 12 404 it's an inexpensive plane that you can grab off Amazon right now and after some straightening and grinding and sharpening of the iron it actually worked pretty well but throughout the whole video I compared this plane the 404 to this plane a vintage Stanley from the 1920s and there were a number of times where I said this is kind of a crappy plane and this is a good plane that I would choose to use for my day to day woodworking when I went back and looked at the video and noticed that I never explained why this is a bad plane and this is a good one and if you were a new woodworker you might look at both of these planes and think I don't know they they look pretty similar I mean same size same handles same shape sole they both got a blade they both plane wood what's the difference and you know what it is a damn good question [Applause] so as we demonstrated in the last video the 12 404 is not a total piece of garbage once you tune it up and sharpen it it can work pretty well but even though I was surprised and maybe even a little bit impressed by this plane I still don't think it measures up to a good vintage stanley or a modern premium plane or a number of other planes that you could get that are a lot better even though they're gonna cost a fair bit more money and there are four reasons why the biggest difference between these two planes is the vintage Stanley has a really good mechanical adjuster in our previous video we actually removed the adjusters from this plane and used a hammer to advance and retract the blade because the adjusters that come on this thing are disgraceful they are incredibly bad the adjuster on a vintage Stanley works really well it's easy and intuitive and quick to learn another major difference is the way these planes support the blade which we also call the iron the iron in this plane is barely supported at all there's just a couple little knobs that come out of the casting to hold it up this plane has support almost the full length of the iron and it's a very well machined very flat surface so it really supports cutting-edge as well as you could ask for well we're talking about the blades we should also mention that the 404 has a single tiny little iron and the iron on the vintage Stanley is this much more complicated setup called a double iron the other big difference between these two are the mouths the mouth is the opening in the sole that the blade comes out of and the mouth on the 404 is just an enormous sloppy mess the mouth on the vintage Stanley is tight and very very carefully manufactured it's very fine and it's not going to Nick or ding your work anywhere because it's been well finished altogether these four differences are pretty significant this plane works but this plane works significantly better let me explain why these things matter now the 404 that we restored in the last video it came with adjusters but they were so stupid and horrible that we just took them off and learned how to adjust the plane with a hammer and that's no big deal because planes have been adjusted with hammers for a super long time in fact hammer and Justin is the way that you work with wooden planes I use these all the time and I actually think they're better than metal planes in a lot of ways because they're lighter they don't need to be lubricated and they're less fragile if you drop them but as much as I like wooden planes and as much as I think that hammer adjusting is a pretty straightforward thing metal planes win in one area it's easier to change the adjustment especially while you're working when you're working with a wooden plane and your hammer adjusting it it's gonna take you a little fiddling around to get a setting that you like once you've got it you're really likely to leave it wooden planes are sort of a set it and forget it sort of thing but a good metallic plane like this vintage stanley number four also has a good adjuster this is called the bailey style adjuster it's named after the guy who invented it and this adjuster isn't perfect but it works really well and the thing that it really excels at is changing the depth of the blade on the fly while you're working without even changing your hand position on the blade so from working on a piece of wood and I see imperfections in the surface I can dial in a heavy cut plane those imperfections off that I can dial back a little bit take a medium cut make sure my surface is sort of flat and then I can go to an ultra fine cut and do my final smoothing and then be done from there I can go on to finishing and I might do all of it with just one plan and it's that versatility of being able to change settings quickly and reliably that makes this such a go-to tool for me so even though I own several smoother size wooden coffin plans like this one I pretty much never use them for my woodwork even though they work fine they're good plans but you can't adjust them the same way you can a good metallic smoothing plane and so long with my wooden planes I always have number four or number five because they give me such incredible versatility and I can get that versatility so quickly the 404 is a completely respectable plane but it's a lot like a wooden plane once you get a good setting you're really likely to leave that setting and just sort of live with it no matter what work you're doing the convenience of a metal adjuster is really lacking here another big problem with the cheap 404 is that it doesn't do a very good job of supporting its iron so if I take both the 404 and the vintage Stanley apart you can see there is a big difference in the guts if you look inside the vintage Stanley you can see that there's a metal piece right here it's a piece of machined cast iron called a frog and it extends from far up the iron all the way down to the mouth where the edge of the blade is and this frog is really important because it's a solid relatively precisely machined surface and it provides support for the entire blade if we compare this to the 404 you can see the difference is really huge the 404 doesn't even have a frog and there's almost no surface here for the blade to ride on instead the casting of the bed has some sort of goofy knobs that come sticking up out of it and the iron just touches in a few strategic places it touches down here at the mouth which is good and then in a couple of places further up now for everything I know about planes this design should be a catastrophe it shouldn't work at all it's actually kind of surprising this plane functions because the iron should more support than this and in a way I sort of grudgingly respect the cost-cutting bean counters at Stanley because they came up with an extremely cheap design that does function you can plain wood with this but when you have an iron like this one that's pretty thin and also has such poor support you are going to run into a thing called chatter and chatter is when the blade vibrates or flexes in the cut and you get sort of an incomplete cut as a result so if I go over to this piece of hard maple which is a kind of challenging wood to plane and I go at it with the 404 I can plane it but when I examine the surface there are a lot of imperfections that the plane has left behind there are these little spots where it's interrupted and these little sharp Diggins this is chatter these are the places where the iron was vibrating or flexing in the cut and not taking a smooth shaving this is exactly the problem that you run into when the plane iron isn't fully supported the vintage Stanley on the other hand supports the iron better and also dampens vibrations because there's just so much more mass here and that allows it to take a smoother cut and you can see this with any quality plane look at so for instance if I disassemble this old wooden coffin smoother you can see that the bed on the coffin smoother is so much like the Frog it's a very flat very true surface that extends most of the way up the iron and then all the way down to the mouth and because this plane is made of wood and because this iron is so much thicker than a more modern iron this simple wooden plane is also very good at preventing chatter and keeping that iron from flexing in the cut this isn't the most convenient plane that I own but it does leave an excellent surface now as long as we're talking about chatter we should also talk about the blades that you find inside plants if we look inside the cheap 12 404 we find this little blade here it's pretty short and it's pretty thin now the length doesn't matter at all but the thickness does make a difference because thin blades are much more likely to vibrate and flex in the cut because there a plane like the 404 would probably work a lot better if it just had a thicker blade now if you open up a vintage Stanley or most high-quality modern planes instead of that single iron you find this which might call the iron assembly it's three pieces it's the iron which is still pretty thin a chip breaker which is just a regular piece of mild steel that's been bent into this sort of humped shape at the end and then there's a screw that holds the whole thing together now chip breakers are a huge topic I could do a whole video about them let me try to make it quick though let's say you're planing with just a single iron like this as the iron enters the wood you really want the wood to be splitting and curling up exactly at that cutting edge I'm gonna simulate this with a chisel and as I start the cut you can see the wood is doing exactly what you want it's rising up just at the cutting edge and starting to curl into a shaving but then something that happens a lot of the time is the wood starts to split out ahead of the cutting edge when it does that it usually splits down into the fibers of the board and you get a very rough and uneven surface we call this tear out and tear out is probably the biggest reason that you might get fed up with a plane and just grab a power sander instead it's definitely happened to me a couple of times but any hand tool user has a lot of strategies for fighting tear out one of the really important ones is the double iron with the chip breaker you can see that if I take the same chisel set up and just flip it over so that the bevel is up that chip that shaving would rise at a much sharper angle and be much more likely to break off sooner and not tear off away into the rest of the fibers that's what the chip breaker does this little hump right at the end here forces that shaving up makes it curl and break much earlier that's why it's called a chip breaker but it's got a couple other functions that are important to if we disassemble our iron setup from our vintage Stanley we can see that the blade is actually really thin it's just as thin as the cheap blade on the 404 but it works better why is that well part of it is that the chip breaker in addition to breaking the chip it also mates taken with this iron with that strong big screw and the two of them together make a much thicker and more rigid cutting assembly that rigidity combined with the really solid bedding of a good plane really reduces chatter and vibration while it's reducing tear out and it's pretty easy to see this in action so I found a piece of ash with a lot of twisty reversing grain this would be challenging to plane in any circumstance and I'll go at this with my four oh four the four oh four will play in this wood no problem but it's gonna leave a ragged surface because that single iron with no support is tearing out a lot if I go back over this with the good plane the vintage Stanley I'm gonna end up with a much smoother surface this is because the iron is more rigid and it's got the chip breaker to break the shaving but also because I can do a little trick with the chip breaker usually I'd have it set back a couple of millimeters from the edge but if I have work that's causing me problems and causing me tear out I can sneak that chip breaker up until it's just literally a hair's breadth away from the cutting edge and that creates an extremely fine cut that really fights tear out if I go over that same piece of ash again with this very well tuned double iron plane that I'm gonna get a really good surface you can see there might be one or two little problem areas in it but in general it's like 90 95 percent better than I was getting with a single iron the double iron is an effective way to fight terror and it's gonna make the results of your planing generally a lot better now it's also totally fair to say the chip breakers probably call us almost as many problems as they solve they have to have a very very perfect mating surface with the blade they have to be very finely polished they need upkeep just like the blade does and about ninety percent of the time I get a jam or a problem with my plane it's somewhere with the chip breaker I'd love it if I didn't have to use them at all but have a lot of single iron plates but for instance I've got these two small wooden smoothing planes and I was really excited to buy both of them this one is probably a craftsman made American plane it's at least a hundred years old and this one is an EC that's a really fancy German plane maker I threw down like 65 bucks for this thing at a flea market and that is a lot of money for me to spend on a plane I'm an enormous cheapskate we're tools are concerned I got this thing home and I couldn't wait to use it and it works it okay it's fine but it tears out sometimes it chatters a little bit it just can't compete with my Stanley and I think most of that has to do with the single iron because the rest of the plan is beautifully constructed another aspect of tear-out and another big difference between cheap planes and quality planes is the size of the mouth if I take the 404 and the vintage Stanley and flip them both over you can see the difference immediately if you want to see what a nice fine tight mouth looks like the vintage Stanley has and if you want to see a big mouth you can look right here or right here the 404 has just a really terrible mouth for one thing I could drive a truck through it for another the machining is terrible it looks like they milled that thing with a broken soda can it's just it's an embarrassment I probably should go in there with a file and clean that thing up it might make a big difference in how the plane performs but there really isn't much I can do about the size of the mouth of this plant and that's something that really does matter when you're trying to do good work if we look back at my example with the chisel we can see that that chip is curling up and then flipping over the chisel and curling it at a higher angle that helps a lot it breaks the chip but another thing we can have is a piece of metal ahead of that chip that's pressing down on it and keeping it from lifting in the first place that's what a tight mouth does the closer the mouth is to that cutting edge the less likely you're gonna get tear out and the more likely you are to get an excellent service now some planes have big mouths and that's on purpose for instance a scrub plane or a for plane has a big wide mouth because they take big wide shavings and you could definitely take a plane like the 404 and set it up to be a scrub plane so it would take big heavy shavings and do your heavy stock removal but a small plane like this is also typically a smoothing plan and for smoothing planes big mouths like this not helpful and the big wide mouth is always gonna be a shortcoming with the 404 it just isn't a lot you can do about that so I've had the little 404 on my bench for all of the last week and I've grabbed it to do all sorts of random tasks I have to be honest I'm pretty impressed with it it is a decent plane and it totally works there's nothing about it that'll keep you from doing woodworking if you're just getting started and you don't have a lot of money grab this thing and get going and don't give it a second thought but if you have a little bit more money by all means get something better go for a vintage Stanley or one of their competitors like union or Miller's Falls or Sargent they all made good planes especially if they have the features that I talked about in this video if you've got the wallet for it pick up a premium plane get Ally Nielsen or Veritas I find these planes a little bit pricey personally but there's no question that they work really well having a super good plane like that won't make you a good woodworker but having good tools will cut down on your frustration and allow you to get your work done more quickly and more easily and that's what a lot of us are looking for and hey if you enjoyed this video I produce a tip sheet for all of my videos it's like a short illustrated article it's a single page and it's absolutely free just click on the link in the description or go to rex krueger comm slash articles and you can look at that one and a lot of other tip sheets that done for other videos if you're not already following me on instagram you should really do that because i don't just give sneak peeks and behind-the-scenes shots of my videos but i cover all sorts of things that i'm involved in that never make it onto my youtube channel and i never want to let the video go without thanking my patrons on patreon my patrons support these videos and make all of this work possible if you're interested in approachable low-cost woodworking for beginners and for average people by all means go over to patreon.com slash Rex Krueger and check out the rewards and early access that I have just for my patrons throwing a little bit of support and you can help me make more better videos of course I only make videos so that people can watch them so thanks so much for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 65,026

Rating: 4.9664288 out of 5

Keywords: plane, hand plane, handplane, hand tool, handtoo, wood, woodworking, cheap, vintage, review, restore, tune, setup, buying guide, shop, make, maker

Id: 8L07_rC4Mvo

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019