What's a scrub plane? - LET'S MAKE ONE from a cheap Harbor Freight Windsor woodworking plane!

girl Pappy nubs loved his scrub plan he carried this thing with him everywhere he went during the War of the Roses he actually used it to cut the cheese for Richard the third he said they were good friends because they were both hunchbacks but what made this tool so versatile was this wide mouth which was usually used in conjunction with a curved iron you can really take a lot of material off very quickly with a plane like that this scrub plane was actually made just for that purpose but the earliest old-timey woodworkers didn't make scrub planes as such they made smoothing planes like this one but after a lot of work the soul would eventually wear down and the mouth would get wider and it wouldn't be good for smoothing anymore but if you've ground the blade to a nice radius you give this tool a second life as a scrub plane planes manufactured specifically as scrubs didn't become all that common until a little bit later on Pappy's plane was a German model and a long time ago somebody added an iron plate to the bottom to slow the wear this is another German made scrub plane from the mid-1800s and this one is from the early 1900s so as you can see it wasn't a lot of change in style over the centuries that is until Stanley got into the market and decided to make an iron version this is the stanley number 40 a plane made purely for rough work there are a lot of frills not even a chip breaker just a huge mouth and a thick cambered iron that scoops out big shavings fast this is a great plane but I find it to be a little narrow for some work if I use it to flatten my whole bench top I'd have to take a lot more strokes than I'd liked Stanley did make a wider 40 and a half but I don't have one of those so I'm going to use something else this is a store-bought plane that cost me like ten bucks brand-new it's called a Windsor number 33 which is just a fancy way of saying Harbor Freight point it's a piece of junk when it comes to smoothing but I filed the mouth open a little bit wider and I put an nice three inch radius on the iron now it's a very useful scrub point if you're new to the old timey woodworking world this is a lot cheaper and easier to get your hands on the stanley number 40 just the idea of a $10 homemade scrub plane makes me feel warm inside and it's really not going to be that difficult it's already got a pretty thick iron that's held just by a lever cap all we need to do is to grind a nice heavy camber now scrub plane usually has about a three inch radius on it so I just drew a three inch circle on a piece of hardwood cut that into a pattern and we're going to use it to mark the blade and then shape it on the grinder and then this pattern is going to come in handy when it comes time to sharpen the blade you can just do this freehand on the grinder now I did set the grinder tool rest to about thirty degrees but you could just grind it flat doesn't matter just make sure you dip in water a lot do not overheat your blade you'll ruin it just take your time get a nice smooth arc right up to the line that you marked on the blade and then you're all set now here's our secret weapon you remember this baby we made this in episode six it's our modified work sharp sharpening system and we're going to use that special tormek jig bar to sharpen the camber on our plane blade we're going to adjust the bar all the way down making sure that it's parallel to the disc then we break that hardwood pattern back out the radius is going to ride along the bar which helps us to maintain both the proper angle and the proper shape as we sharpen the bevel on the blade since we just made a rough shape on the grinder I start out with some 80 grit self-adhesive sandpaper use a rocking motion keep the blade flat on the bar and just follow the shape of your pattern after you do a little bit on the 80 grit switch to something higher like 120 would be a good one to use next it's really amazing what cheap sandpaper can do on this setup this was a really rough bevel that we got off the grinder and already with just a couple minutes we've gotten a nice smooth finish now it's time to move from that 120-grit right to our black course emery compound it's only going to take just maybe 15-20 seconds on this grit and then we can switch from the black to the brown and give that in another 10 15 seconds it's really fast you can see that we're already getting a mirror finish and we haven't even gotten to the fine honing compounds of course before you switch to your finer grits flatten the back on top of this desk it just takes a few seconds with your white and then it's time to switch it out again and you're moving on to red some say that red doesn't actually remove any steel it just polishes well I say so what it's only another five or six seconds why not polish it as much as you can of course on a scrub plane you don't really need it to be this sharp but hey when we've got the system that works so well why not just do it you don't have to have a work sharp system to put a camber on a blade there's lots of other ways to do this you can look on the internet and find them but if you do have a work sharp check out the stumpy store because people have been asking us to put the plans for our workshop system modifications in the store and these are going to show you how to get every last little bit of sharpening goodness out of your workshop system plus you can say bye-bye forever to all that expensive sandpaper they want to sell you with a heavy camber like this a scrub plane is going to take big thick chips and so you want a wide mouth now this plane already has a pretty wide mouth if you find that it clogs at all just file it a little bigger but I figure this is going to be wide enough so I'm going to set it to a nice thick cut and start scrubbing scrub planes are designed to take off a lot of wood fast and so you run a crisscross pattern you don't want to run against the grain or even with the grain because you're going to tear it out you're just trying to rough off fast and this plane for $10 oh my goodness you can get a better deal on a scrub plane and it just took a little bit of work you

Channel: Stumpy Nubs

Views: 65,003

Rating: 4.9160371 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, stumpy nubs, worksharp 3000, harbor freight

Id: dXxOF5E4__U

Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2016