Woodworking Magazine Blog

One of the world's biggest tool collectors is bringing his brand-new traveling tool museum to Northern Kentucky on Oct. 1-2 to show it off to the public at the Woodworking in America event at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center.

John Sindelar of Edwardsburg, Mich., has spent his entire adult life amassing some of the world's rarest, most expensive and beautiful tools. And this year Sindelar built a traveling tool museum that will travel the country to share some of the highlights of his collection at festivals and fairs.

Even if you got shut out of the classes at Woodworking in America this year, the Marketplace itself is well worth the trip (and it's only $7 for two days).

I wrote a short review of Karl Holtey's No. 982 smoothing plane for the October 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine (which is mailing now to subscribers). And you don't write a review of a tool that costs $10,500 without bracing yourself for some comments from readers.

Overall, I quite liked the tool, which was on loan to us for several months from its owner. For me, the experience was like driving the BMW 700-series sedan that belonged to a friend of my mom. At first it was terrifying, and I handled the tool like an injured wombat. After a few weeks of babying it, however, I started to explore its limits.

Learning to sharpen has little to do with your sharpening stones. It has a lot more to do with being able to see your progress and knowing when to stop.

Showing a class of woodworkers what a sharp blade looks like in the flesh (a real poor choice of words) has proven to be tricky for me. So I've resorted at times to line drawings, which helps.

Today a reader sent me some great photos he made using a scanning electron microscope, usually called an SEM in the business. Want to read about how the microscopes work? Brace yourself for some scary images of pollen.

My first Stanley shoulder plane (a No. 93) was the worst plane I ever bought. The sole was more than 1/8" out of alignment, and it took me a couple hours on a belt sander to even get the tool working.

That dog of a tool was built during the sunset days of Stanley's U.K. plane production, and I've always imagined that my plane had been made by someone who was drunk, hung-over or having a nice stroke.

I don't relish handing out bad reviews of tools. But as someone who gets stoned occasionally by an angry mob, I know that a critical review can help improve the quality of my work in the future.

Router planes are the Starsky. Handsaws are the Hutch.

These two tools work together all the time in my shop. In fact, all the sawing classes I teach are actually classes on the router plane in disguise. So I have seen a lot of woodworkers struggle with sharpening the router plane's L-shaped iron.

So we shot two 25-minute episodes of "The Woodwright's Shop" today. So you are probably wondering what the heck I did with the other 23 hours of my day.

Manicure? Pedicure? Facial? Crystal Meth bender?

Nyet.

I woke up this morning at 6 a.m. at Roy's place -- he lives in an old mill, and the guest bedroom sits right on the water. We slugged down some coffee. Roy sat in a rocking chair and quietly looked out over the dam next to his mill. I was poring over one of his books on Virginia shore furniture (I could spend a month here just browsing this man's library).

I'm packing up all the tools I'll need in North Carolina for the coming week, and I was a bit shocked this morning as I went through my checklist.

One of the "Woodwright's Shop" television programs Roy Underhill and I are shooting this weekend will deal with the typical toolkit of a joiner circa 1839. I compiled my list based on an old book, "The Joiner & Cabinet Maker," which detailed the fictional life of a young apprentice.

Isshi Yamada never said much to me when I was dating his daughter in college. To us Western students who studied Eastern religions, he was an enigmatic Zen Buddhism professor who was famous for giving exams that bordered on the surreal.

Most of my memories of Dr. Yamada put him sitting at his dining room table in a worn Irish fisherman's sweater – drinking a little sake and watching the affairs of the household.

One day, however, Dr. Yamada became quite animated on the topic of human perception. And his short lecture sticks with me to this day.

"What is the one thing the eye cannot see?" Dr. Yamada asked.

Bob Baker, a furniture and tool restorer and excellent planemaker, died unexpectedly last week.

I had the pleasure of meeting Bob in February of 2006 when we hosted a gathering in Cincinnati for many of the best planemakers and gave each of them the opportunity to present their work to one another, and to talk about planes, planemaking and toolmaking in general. Bob was high on that list of "best planemakers." In the picture at left, he's presenting two of his planes to the rest of the group.

I met him only that one day, but as I look back through the pictures of the event, I remember a kind and genuine man who had a grin on his face almost the entire time. Kari Hultman, who knew him better than did I, has written more about Bob on her blog, The Village Carpenter, and there are some touching comments below her post that I hope you'll take the time to read.

Chris wrote a story about about our "planemakers'" event for the August 2006 issue, which features some of Bob's work. You can link to it here. 

— Megan Fitzpatrick

Thanks to the steady stream of tools that flow in and out of our shop, I do a lot of sharpening. I set up more tools from scratch than I care to admit. And I wear out sharpening stones.

Last week I noticed that my #1,000-grit Shapton Glasstone was getting wafer thin. This is the second #1,000-grit Glasstone I've burned through in the last few years, and it brings up something that has irked me about some brands of sharpening stones sold in North America.

Here is my gripe:

When I worked at a liquor bottling plant one summer, the bosses found out I was in college and decided to put me in charge of the robots.

I had to summon the robots from the warehouse, pick up an entire pallet of coffee liquor with a giant robot arm and load it on the little scurrying buggers.

Oh, I also forgot to mention something: I know nothing about robots.

I can make my own beef jerky, but that doesn't mean I want to apply veneer-making techniques to a hapless bovine.

So when I found out that long-time woodworker Bill Rittner was making knobs and totes for vintage Stanley planes, I jumped at buying a set for my vintage No. 6 fore plane.

This is by request. And for me this is like showing you my basement. Did you see the pawn shop's basement in "Pulp Fiction?" It's like that – but without the Spandex, leather and shotguns.

A reader asked to see the angle-setting guide I use for setting my tools in my side-clamp honing guide when sharpening. It was featured (briefly) in the DVD "Handplane Basics" that we released late last year.

Before we get into details and philosophy, let me state that I know this jig isn't a new idea. And my version is junky blue-stained Eastern white pine. It is nothing like the sexy guide made by Deneb Puchalski at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. Heck, that thing has a leather thong. No lie.

Stanley Toolworks unveiled three new hand tools today at a press conference in New York City – two different kinds of chisels and a shoulder plane.

I couldn't attend the press conference, but Publisher Steve Shanesy is there (as I type this) taking photos with his phone. I don't have a lot of details yet, but here is the first look at the new Sweetheart socket chisels, which look like Stanley's venerable 750 tools (and Lie-Nielsen's).

In the world of infill planes, there are several tools that stand out as iconic designs, including Karl Holtey's "bad arse" A13 and his groundbreaking No. 98, which laid the groundwork for all the modern bevel-up planes.

On this side of the Atlantic, few planes are as distinct as Stephen M. Thomas's "Loopy" infill. It started as a joke, way back in the early years of the Badger Pond discussion group (we didn't have WiFi, we didn't have Skype, we didn't have "air" – and we liked  it!).

John Sindelar, who owns the most jaw-dropping, drool-inducing tool collection I've ever seen, is bringing a big chunk of it to our Woodworking in America show Oct. 1-3 in Cincinnati.

And here's the best part: The collection will be displayed (in a traveling trailer) that will be on the floor of the Marketplace. If you are registered for our event, then you will get to tour the collection. No extra charge. Nothing else to register for.

When I was assisting a woodworking class this April, a student asked why anyone would buy an infill plane. They are more expensive than a premium plane from Veritas or Lie-Nielsen, and perform at the same very high level.

"Well," I answered. "I build stuff by hand. When people occasionally buy my stuff it's expensive. So I believe in supporting people who build tools in the same way I build furniture."

Another student at the back of room put it better than I did:

The subject of skew block planes gets people's bodily juices going.

When I announced at our weekly staff meeting that we had received a new skew block plane from Veritas, two of the editors who use primarily power tools sat up straight and said "Really!?" and "Cool!"

After many years of working here, I can reliably translate "power tool guy" language. (I also speak "drunk guy," "baby talk" and "agitated feline.") So here's a quick translation of "Veritas Skew Block Plane."

After a couple of weeks of working with the legs for this new workbench, I am certain the material is not pine.

Yes, I know. Shocker. The good people at Home Depot were mistaken.

What is it? Heck if I know.

The world needs more makers of new wooden handplanes, especially moulding planes. Vintage moulding planes can be testy in my experience. The narrow stocks can be twisted or bowed, the irons can be rusted to oblivion and many wedges need to be replaced.

If you read my article on Clark & Williams planemakers in the April 2010 issue, you probably concluded the same thing that I did: There are enough woodworkers out there to support another maker.

Several weeks ago I was planing a piece of palm when my hand slipped, and a deep sliver of the nasty grass dove into the middle finger of my left hand.

I dug out as much of the splinter as I could. But now almost six weeks later, the foreign object (as my doctor calls it) is deep inside my soft tissue. I can wait things out, or I can see a hand surgeon (I'm a good waiter).

Wood can be nasty stuff. Rosewoods make my tongue swell up like a Ballpark Frank. Some species (redwood, especially) sting like crazy when I get a splinter. And spalted stuff can kill you dead.

But aren't you worried about what wood can do to your tools?

One of the great mysteries of the hand tool world is how Roy Underhill never seems to get older. (Is there a cursed painting in your attic, Mr. Underhill?) The other great mystery is about the unbeveled faces of vintage irons in handplanes.

If you've even bought an old plane you know of what I speak. You take one look at the face of the iron (what some people call the "back"), and it looks like crap.

One of my first handplanes, a Stanley No. 5, had a shopmade tote that was all kinds of wrong. Wrong shape, wrong wood, wrongly made.

So as soon as I could, I bought a replacement front knob and tote. These also were all kinds of wrong. Wrong wood, wrong glossy finish, wrong high knob. But the tote was the right shape, so I kept it on the tool for the last decade or so.

Today I put on a vintage rosewood tote and the original low knob on the plane and went to work raising some drawer bottoms. I have no idea if the tote is of the correct vintage (nor do I particularly care), but it sure looks and feels right to me.

So thanks to Carl Bilderback, who sent me the tote after seeing my flashy one (and probably rolling his eyes).

— Christopher Schwarz

There are still some spots open in the woodworking classes I’m teaching this winter. If you’ve recently come into a little money (thank you First National Bank of the Plasma) and have a little time available, here are some details on these classes.

If you're parsimonious, tardy or just plain wary, then this post is for you.

My book "Handplane Essentials" is now on sale for the first time since its release this summer. Until Feb. 15, you can get "Handplane Essentials" for 20 percent off, plus free shipping in the United States. The book is normally $34.99. With the discount, it's $27.99 plus free domestic shipping.

To get the discount, all you have to do is enter the coupon code: PW10LUV at checkout.

Many woodworkers think it's bonkers to use a curved cutting edge in a jointer plane. After all, the plane is designed to make things straight and flat, so using a curved cutter seems ... let's say "counterintuitive."

Years ago I got a phone call from planemaker Larry Williams that changed the way I look at long planes.

"Do you have the book 'American Furniture of the 18th Century?'" he asked.

I sure did. I had rescued a damaged one that my company was throwing away back in 1996 when the book came out. It's still marked "cut" – the mark for the dumpster.

Larry continued: "Turn to page 118. What do you see?"

We've just received our shipment of our newest DVD: "Handplane Basics: A Better Way to Use Bench Planes." And despite my needing a haircut when we filmed it, I'm pleased with the result.

Check out the trailer above for a quick preview. (Yes, there is banjo music.)

I'm a mediocre guitar player. But because I'm a fair judge of craftsmanship, I have an immense respect for real-deal lutherie.

Have you seen one of Jameel Abraham's ouds in person? They walk that fine line between something that looks and feels both handmade and perfect. On the other side of the equation are musical instruments that are neither, such as my Gibson OP25 acoustic guitar.

After years of development, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks is planning on making a No. 51 chute-board plane that should be released in the first quarter of 2010, Thomas Lie-Nielsen says.

Legendary English craftsman Alan Peters used a Stanley No. 7 for every bench plane operation.

David Charlesworth uses a No. 5-1/2.

Joseph Moxon says you need a fore, jointer and smoothing planes.

And many woodworkers use just a bevel-up jack plane.

After years of teaching hundreds of people to use bench planes and answering thousands (yes thousands) of e-mails, phone calls and questions from woodworkers, I became convinced that the more you read about bench planes, the more confused you'll get.

So a few years ago I began to rethink the Western bench plane system. Not to develop some idiosyncratic new way of using them – that wouldn't be helpful. Instead I set out to explain the bench plane system in a way that embraces historical approaches, explains all the modern ones and gives you the power to adapt your existing set of planes to your work.

The key to all this was to stop focusing so much on the size of the plane and to focus far more attention to how it is sharpened and set up.

This DVD "Handplane Basics - A Better Way to Use Bench Planes" is the result of all that work. Over the course of a month, Drew DePenning, Megan Fitzpatrick and I boiled down this approach in a 70-minute DVD that:

1. Explains the bench plane system so you can immediately understand the proper use of everything from a "scrub plane" to a "panel plane" to a "fore plane."

2. Shows you how to sharpen, set up and use the three planes you need to process rough lumber into gleaming boards.

3. Explains and demonstrates how to four-square your lumber. I take a rough board and show exactly how to deal with its faces edges and ends so you get a project part that is flat, square and good-looking.

I'm quite proud of this DVD, from the content itself, to Megan's direction to Drew's filming and editing. The DVD is being pressed as we speak and should be shipping withing four weeks. If you pre-order the DVD, you will get it for $19.95 – that's 20-percent off the $24.95 retail price. This sale ends on Dec. 31, 2009.

You can read more about the DVD or order a copy from our store.

— Christopher Schwarz

Today most of the magazine's staff spent the day with Ron Herman, a seventh-generation housewright in Columbus, Ohio, who has spent the last 29 years building, remodeling and restoring homes and historic sites – in many cases using only traditional tools.

His small shop north of the city is one of the wonders of the Western world. Amongst the machinery (much of it converted from a line-shaft system) are more hand tools than your eye can possibly take in. If this were a tool collection, it would be stupendous. The fact that Herman sets up all these tools and uses them is mind-blowing.

Herman spoke on handsaws at out last Woodworking in America Conference. But he knows about a lot more than saws.

I'm still trying to process all my notes and photos for a future article. Herman can talk. And his shop is a feast for the camera. In the meantime, I've pulled out a few good quotes from my notebook and some of the photos I took during our visit.

Hi. I'm a long-time reader and a first-time caller. I really want to start using handplanes in my work. I've been looking at some of the premium handplanes from Veritas and Lie-Nielsen and wow! I can't afford that. Could you tell me where I could get some planes that are just as good as those but cost far less?

— B. Ginner, Poor, Tenn.

Mr. Ginner,

Thanks for your letter. Those planes are available at the same store that sells unicorns that fart cupcakes.

Sincerely, A Grumpy Editor

In the interest of full disclosure, the following book – "The Perfect Edge" – is being published by my parent company, F+W Media. Also, I consider the author, Ron Hock, a good friend. Oh, and once I got on stage and shook it with a belly dancer in Greece after too many grape leaves and shots of ouzo.

OK, now that all that's on the table, I think I can also say I'm a big fan of the two other big sharpening books out there: "The Complete Guide to Sharpening" by Leonard Lee (Taunton) and "Taunton's Complete Illustrated Guide to Sharpening" by Thomas Lie-Nielsen. I've also sharpened a few tools in the last 15 years using everything from a brick to a $1,000 electric-powered record player.

I like it when the name of something is eponymous – it fits. Was there ever a woodworker who was more aptly named than the late "Art Carpenter?"

When I was working as a newspaper reporter, I dealt occasionally with a spokesman named "Woody Forrest." I don't even know if that guy was a woodworker. Why isn't my name "Woody Forrest?"

Instead, I've had to endure a name that (according to our dog-eared dictionary of baby names) means: A Christ-like war-monger who is black in color.

I crossed the border from Missouri to Arkansas this afternoon, and I knew immediately I was home.

For starters, the land is achingly beautiful. I miss the Ozarks I grew up with, which are surprisingly unspoiled by development. Every curve in the rugged terrain brings a new vista. You might be high over a lake one minute, deep into a fog bank the next and then spiraling down switchbacks the next.

The roads are magnificently contorted, narrow and treacherous. In other words, it's a fun drive.

I drove to Indianapolis last weekend for dinner. Chris was demonstrating there at a Lie-Nielsen show, a friend who lives in California cashed in some frequent flier miles and flew in, and it’s always fun to see Angie and Alex and the rest of the show gang. And Chris has been raving about Brugge Brasserie, a restaurant that specializes in crepes, and has excellent French fries served with myriad dips.

When I bought my first smoothing plane at a flea market in Burlington, Ky., I could fit everything I knew about handplanes into one of the Elvis Presley shot glasses I stumbled upon that weekend.

One vendor had a lot of smoothing planes on his table, so I picked up each one, took it apart like I knew what I was doing and inspected its guts. After that mummer's farce, I ended up buying the plane that felt good in my hands. After all, some of the planes were a bit heavy, and others had totes that were square.

In a move that will please traditionalists and people who pare, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks has started offering some plane irons and chisels made using oil-hardening (O1) steel – in addition to the more modern A2 steel.

I've always been an advocate for low workbenches, especially for planing operations. My workbench is at 34" (and while standing on my horse stall mat it's 33"). And I've become quite fond of Megan's bench, which is at 30" (horse mat included).

But I can tell you that 16" is just too low. Yes, you really can get your weight right over the plane at 16", but then there's the problem of the occasional and inadvertent somersault.

— Christopher Schwarz

This week I'm building the sitting bench for the White Water Shaker community, which will be featured in the Winter 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. The version I'm building is a very close copy, so it will be 13' long. The version for the magazine will be 4' long.

Dealing with long stuff is a challenge, so I thought I'd post a couple movies during the next week that demonstrate some of the tricks to doing it well.

If you liked the video of me walking up a wall, you might enjoy this alternative treatment sent in by a reader who we like to call "Cheeseburger, No Meat."

If you are offended by references to my bum, or to masked avengers, then please do not click on the video.

— Christopher Schwarz

You know, at our Woodworking in America event last week I didn't get to talk to a lot of the toolmakers. In fact, I didn't even get to see some of them. That is what a madhouse it was. So that's why I'm particularly pleased to announce a couple additional toolmakers who are coming to the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event Oct. 16-17 in Indianapolis.

In my book, there is one rule for buying vintage tools: Buy them from someone who will take them them back if the tool stinks.

That rule keeps me on my toes on eBay, at auctions, flea markets and at garage sales. If I can't completely inspect, disassemble and use a tool before I buy it, I really want a money-back guarantee.

One of the weaknesses of the so-called transitional handplanes is the way the tote attaches to the metal frame of the tool. The tote comes loose when you touch it, look at it or even think about it.

This year I've made friends with my chisel plane. In fact I don't think I could have installed the Benchcrafted wagon vise as a retrofit without it.

Today I got another lesson in chisel plane use from Carl Bilderback that I'd like to share with you. Carl is a woodworker, semi-retired carpenter, tool collector and active member of the Mid-West Tool Collectors Assn. As a finish carpenter, Carl had several specialties, including repairing finished or veneered surfaces on the jobsite and hiding those repairs from customers.

For me, there is something that is far more interesting than the purported uses of "the nib" of a handsaw. And that is: The origin of the term "jack plane."

I never got to meet James Krenov, and so last week I hesitated to write anything about his death. But as I drove home on Friday afternoon I forgot to turn on the stereo in my car, and my mind drifted to a long weekend in 2006 when I was sure I knew the man.

When I teach people how to sharpen and set up a handplane, I can jabber endlessly to little effect. Sure, I'll get in a few jokes about lemurs and frogs (and their forbidden love), but I really don't earn my keep until I start the "show and tell" section of the lecture.

The first time I ever met toolmaker Ray Iles, we got into a conversation about the planes made by Karl Holtey. I asked Ray: Have you ever used one of Holtey's planes? How do they work?

It's little wonder that Stanley chose to bring its No. 62 low-angle jack plane back to life when the company decided last year to re-enter the premium handplane market. After all, the original No. 62 is highly prized by tool collectors – and Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and Veritas have both improved the plane and made it a workshop favorite among modern craftsmen.

When I began teaching at woodworking schools several years ago, it was the most selfish act imaginable.

I didn't do it to share what I know about woodworking. I didn't do it to inspire other woodworkers. I didn't do it for the travel or the all-you-can-eat breakfast bars in mid-range hotels.

I began teaching so I could save enough money to buy a half-set of Clark & Williams hollows and rounds. I have coveted these planes since I first saw them in 2002 when I met Larry Williams at the WoodWorks show in Ft. Washington, Pa.

Several customers have asked why the pages in their brand new copy of "Handplane Essentials" have a slight wave to them, like David Hasselhoff's hair in a botanical garden.

The good news is that the wave should go away in a couple weeks. If you want to know why this happened, read on.

Because paper is a wood by-product, it is also somewhat hygroscopic, meaning that it can absorb moisture, according to our manufacturing department. We printed this book here in Ohio, where it has been very wet. After all the pages were printed, they sat at the printer for a few days while they awaited time in the bindery. During that time, the pages absorbed some moisture and got a little wavy.

As the books acclimate to your environment (like wood acclimates to your shop) they will flatten out.

We received some of the first copies from the bindery and they had the wave to them. Those first copies are indeed flattening out.

I'm told this is actually a common malady. But when you print books overseas, the books have a good long time in a container ship to acclimate.

— Christopher Schwarz

I got wind last week of a new German-made smoothing plane from Kunz and – surprise – today it landed on a table while I was signing books at our Woodworking in America conference.

It’s called the Kunz Plus, and it’s a 9-3/4”-long smoothing plane that is quite obviously a departure from the company’s planes of the past. I think the kindest thing I can say about the old green Kunz planes is that they, ahem, "required tuning.”

I got to spend a little time in the Marketplace area of the Woodworking in America conference this morning and got a first look at some new hand tools that will be available soon.

First stop was with Dave Jeske at Blue Spruce Toolworks. Dave has a new line of try squares coming out this fall (they will be ready in time for our Woodworking in America Hand Tools show in Valley Forge, Pa.).

When the new premium planes from Stanley arrived, it was agony. I was in the middle of another project and had to just stare at them for a week before I could get my mitts on them.

The first tool I set up was the No. 4 smoothing plane, which I reviewed for the October 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking. I think this plane is the best of the new Stanley crop, but when I first set it up, I was grumpy.

Time to drop my drawers and lose all my Neander-cred.

My favorite planing stop for drawers and casework is the rip fence on my $1,200 Unisaw. The rip fence is completely adjustable, at the right height for me (34") and 100 percent stable. Also, the benchtop (cast iron and melamine) never needs flattening.

Some things about sharpening everyone knows (it’s two metal surfaces, an abrasive and friction). Other things nobody knows (such as the best system ever). And there is a third category of sharpening facts: Things that everyone should know, but some people don’t.

I’ve been doing a lot of sharpening these last few weeks, both for my own work and for tool testing. And three things have struck me as belonging to that third category. All three things are little steps I take that speed up the sharpening process.

A shooting board is one of the most essential accessories for a handplane – everyone should have one. But not every woodworker is confident enough to build one or isn't able to build one accurately.

Rob Hanson of Evenfall Studios now offers a custom shooting board of his own design that is well-made, accurate and easily fine-tuned for your work. Sawmaker Mike Wenzloff (of Wenzloff & Sons fame) loaned me his Evenfall shooting board to take it for a test drive. So for the last couple weeks I've been using it in place of my two standard shooting boards. I am quite impressed.

All custom planemakers are judged against the work of Karl Holtey. His work has the precision of a Swiss watchmaker, and the tools are finished to such a degree that they some might classify them as jewelry – if they weren't such hardworking tools.

Look around your neighborhood. The next time you see a truck belonging to a contractor or cabinetmaker, there’s a good chance that the company uses a handplane in its logo.

Though the image of a plane is the mark of the craftsman, there are few craftsmen who really know how to use the tool. Has this knowledge been lost? Are the tools simply obsolete?

The truth is that neither statement is true. The handplane is the most advanced and cunning wood-cutting tool ever invented, and it has yet to be surpassed by anything with a power cord. After World War II, handplanes began to disappear from shops because we traded speed for skill and expediency for quality.

When The Schwarz first handed me the M.Power PSS1, I was intrigued because sharpening has always been my woodworking Achilles’ heel – if you’re looking to round the end of a chisel, just hand it to me. I can do it. Having a device that locked everything in place to sharpen and touch-up my chisels and plane blades could be a godsend. If you’re a hand-sharpening guru, I doubt this is the setup you’ll be interested in using. But if you struggle with sharp, read on.

When you pick up an old plane in an antique store or swap meet it is sending off clues. This is (I'm told) a bit like speed dating – your job is to weed out the twitchy, drooling, camo-wearing sociopaths to find a suitable mate for life.

After being in and out of print during the last several years, David Finck's "Making & Mastering Wood Planes" is finally available for sale again directly from the author.

This 192-page, full-color book isn't just for the person who wants to build handplanes based on the designs of James Krenov. I read this book when it first came out and was impressed by how much Finck focused on the mechanics of the tools – things that apply to planes no matter what materials they are made of.

We're received the much-anticipated new planes from Stanley Works and are beginning to set them up for a review in a future issue of the magazine. In the meantime, here are some of the details on the tools that will help clear up some of the misinformation and confusion on the Internet.

A curved cutting edge is critical to most operations with your bench planes. The curve prevents the corners of the iron from digging into your work, and it allows you to correct the flatness of the face or edge of a board.

But how do you create this curve, sometimes called a “camber?” And how do you create it with a honing guide, which seems to encourage a cutter that is sharpened straight across?

There are lots of valid ways to create the curve. Here’s how I do it.

The little side-clamp honing guide is my favorite bit of sharpening equipment. But it frequently is criticized for two shortcomings:

• It is poorly made and sloppily painted. So you have to tune the little sucker up before it will perform reliably, especially with chisels. This is a 100-percent valid critique of this honing guide.

• You cannot rely on the honing guide's directions for setting the correct angle on a plane iron – i.e. make the iron project 1-1/2" to sharpen a 30° angle. This inaccuracy is because these instructions are based on using thin irons only, back when most plane irons were consistently about .08" thick. Today many manufacturers use thicker irons.

As a hand-tool woodworker, I try to avoid bookmatching my panels. Bookmatching creates a panel where the grain in one board runs one way and the grain in the other board runs the opposite.

When you handplane that panel, tear-out is almost inevitable. Bookmatching is, in my opinion, better left to those with sanders and dust masks. Sometimes, however, it is unavoidable when dealing with boards that have been cut sequentially from a tree.

I’m building an early 19th-century five-drawer chest this week and needed to glue up some panels yesterday for the 20"-wide sides, bottom and top. And when I got down to it, I needed to bookmatch three panels so that the chest  looked its best.

Instead of writing about the flatness of plane soles, perhaps I should talk about something less controversial, such as religion or politics.

When purchasing a vintage plane, the flatness of the sole can be critical when making a purchasing decision. So I’m going to man-up here and talk about how I approach this potential problem.

The soles of vintage handplanes can be warped for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they were poorly manufactured. Perhaps they weren’t properly stress relieved and the casting moved over time. Perhaps they were dropped or abused in service.

Cincinnati is not a tourist destination like nearby Big Bone Lick, Ky., So when people come to visit our shop I try to accommodate all their requests so they consider their journey to “Porkopolis” to be worth the gasoline.

This weekend, one of the visitors to our shop pointed to the anvil by my workbench and asked:

“Is that the anvil you used to beat those planes with a hammer?” they asked.

“Yes, it is,” I answered.

Whenever I teach a class on handplanes, I'm amazed at what the students bring to set up and use. I've seen Holtey planes and Harbor Freight planes in the same class.

And there's always at least one student who brings an entire box of vintage planes that he or she bought at a garage sale (price $5). And this is where I usually find the biggest pieces of garbage and the brightest jewels.

Because many beginning woodworkers have trouble telling the difference between a good vintage user and slag, I've decided to devote some time to explain some of the hallmarks of good planes and bad ones. In this post, I'd like to talk about frogs, the movable chunk of metal between the blade assembly and the body of the plane.

Sometimes it seems like there are 100 things that can go wrong with a handplane before it will do one thing right: Eject a perfect and fluffy shaving.

Lately I’ve been using a lot of bevel-up planes on softwoods and have become attuned to some of their peculiarities. Maybe I’m the new dumb kid on these issues; if so, then this blog entry will just be a note to myself.

The vintage Stanley No. 48 plane was one of the most gizmo-tastic planes in the company's arsenal. It's a single tool that can cut both the tongue and the mating groove. All you have to do to switch the plane from one function to the other is pivot the fence 180°.

I've had a No. 48 for years and I've inspected a bunch of vintage ones, and they seem to have a common flaw: a wobbly fence. I don't know whether the wobbly fence is caused by years of use or from less-than-perfect manufacturing, but it does hurt your results.

When the fence wobbles, your tongue tends to look like a real human tongue: It's rounded at the top and let's say it's "organic" looking. And the groove tends to look more like a strip mine than a picture-perfect European canal.

If you have been putting off buying an insert from toolmaker Paul Hamler that converts a bench plane to a scraper plane, you might want to start checking your couch cushions for change.

The most miserable aspect of hand work is setting up the tools for the first time. Removing the coarse manufacturing scratches from the unbeveled faces of your edge tools can be grueling, boring and filthy work.

(One side note before someone spanks me about David Charlesworth's "ruler trick." I really think you need to remove those deep scratches before you polish the tip with the assistance of a ruler. If you don't, the deep scratches will remain or you'll be ruler tricking that tool for a very long time.)

After setting up hundreds of tools for testing during the last 13 years, I've found that a few inexpensive magnets make the job easier and more accurate.

Get a Grip
I don't know about you, but my left hand gets pretty cramped when flattening the unbeveled faces of my tools. Once I get a cramp (even though I've waited 30 minutes after eating) I find it difficult to apply enough pressure. So the flattening process takes even longer. And so my hand cramps some more. And when I walk out of the shop, my left hand looks like the shriveled prop from "The Monkey's Paw."

So I stick a magnetic base from our dial indicator on the blade and grip that. No, it doesn't magnetize the tool. And no, in my experience, it doesn't bend the tool. What it does do is speed the process. It requires much less effort to keep the blade against the stone. My guess is that it cuts my flattening time in half.

The magnet, which is from Grizzly's G9623 Magnetic Base With Indicator ($16.95 total), doesn't slip or let go – until you want it to. I've also used the square magnetic bases that have a switch. These work fairly well, though I like the lower profile and shape of my base.

Another option might be the Mag-Jig gizmos, though I haven't tried them.

No More Slippery Rules
I do use the ruler trick quite a bit, especially when I teach sharpening and time is of the essence. Students love the trick, but they struggle to keep the ruler stuck to their stone. It tends to slide around, no matter what they try.

My solution? Magnets again. The ruler I use for sharpening is a 12"-long job that I received as a gift for subscribing to the British magazine Good Woodworking. One side is metric, so it's fairly worthless to an Imperialist like myself.

Like all rulers, it would slip on my stone. So I stuck a couple rare-earth magnets on the back; this prevents the ruler from sliding on the stone. I've been doing this for years; it works brilliantly.

Now the only thing that makes me nuts about sharpening is the grime (surgical gloves don't work – my hands get as hot as a monkey's bum). Perhaps I need to get my boss to start paying for manicures – that would definitely get Art Director Linda Watts and Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick interested in sharpening.

— Christopher Schwarz

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I spent most of this weekend on my knees, and it had nothing to do with a lengthy visit to Chicago’s Hopleaf gastropub or the large cooler of Julius Echter wheat beer that a reader brought to us.

Instead, I spent most of the weekend on my knobby knees at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Chicago for three reasons. One: To demonstrate how to use winding sticks about a dozen times during two days. (I think some of the attendees were just trying to get a look down my shirt.) Second: To try out a new Lie-Nielsen rip panel saw on a makeshift sawbench cobbled out of a shipping crate. And third: To examine every single speck of the new Benchcrafted leg vise on Jameel Abraham’s traveling workbench.

Let’s start with the vise because lots of people bent over this weekend to see how it works. The beauty of the vise is that it is so smooth and quick. Thanks to two rubber wheels on the vise's parallel guide and a Delrin bushing, the vise glides – nay floats – in and out. It’s about as fast as a quick-release vise. And when you spin the 8" round handwheel the jaw closes tight enough on your work to immobilize it. You don’t have to crank the wheel at all.

Other details: The rubber wheels on the parallel guide run on ball bearings, and the jaw opens to 10" – more than enough.

Jameel of Benchcrafted is planning on putting it into production soon; he already has some orders from this show. He said it should cost a bit less than his wagon vise hardware, which costs $350 and is dang well worth it. Yes I ordered one. No, I haven’t yet told my wife, Lucy (Hi sweetie! Sorry!).

The vise will include everything but the wood and the pin for the parallel guide. Jameel was showing the vise on a new traveling bench, which he was sharing at the show with plane maker Ron Brese of Brese Planes.

Ron’s extremely nice and fairly priced infills (which I’ve written about for the Fine Tool Journal) were sitting out all weekend so you could give them a test drive. They were all set up and ready to go. In addition to his smoothing planes, Ron also was showing a new miter plane he’d built using ebonized walnut as the infill. The plane was doing its thing on a nice miter shooting board. I gave it a test drive and became very worried about my wallet.

Not to be outdone, the Lie-Nielsen folks were showing a bunch of new products, including their drawbore pins (which I review in the next issue of Woodworking Magazine), a new DVD on design from George Walker (more on that later this week) and the production version of the company’s tongue-and-groove plane and panel saws (both of which are now shipping).

The tongue-and-groove plane is sweet. Lie-Nielsen has really nailed the form and fixed the problems with the original Stanley. I ordered one a few weeks ago (my personal attempt to stimulate the economy) and will have a full report this week or next.

The panel saw is also nice. After getting a gander at it last weekend, I was itching to give it a test drive. The Lie-Nielsen folks had the rip-tooth version with them and it worked well. Deneb Puchalski (said Poo-hall-ski) with Lie-Nielsen said the saw I tested had not been taper-ground and it didn’t have its etch, so I’m going to hold off on the details until I get my hands on a production version.

The event was held at the shop of furniture maker and woodworking instructor Jeff Miller. While the shop is fantastic, it is exceeded by its occupant. Jeff’s work is extraordinary. He makes wood do things that wood doesn’t like to do. And his mastery of curved and compound joinery is humbling. Add to all that the fact that Jeff is low-key and as friendly as they come. I spent some time prodding him to write for us. We’ll see what happens.

After spending the weekend on my feet and knees, however, I’m ready to spend an evening on my back. Starting now.

— Christopher Schwarz

I'm fairly well convinced that my ears are different than yours. The music I like isn't going to sound the same to you. It's almost impossible for me to share with another person what the Heartless Bastards sounds like to me. Language is too imprecise.

Same goes with the eyes (and tastebuds). How you experience a Paul Klee or a Hebrew National is impossible to share with me.

The problem is that our senses are tied to our big, dumb brains, which process and filter the waves of information our organs receive.

And so it makes me crazy to explain how to sharpen to people because it involves so many senses (except taste I think) that are processed. And there is so much information that comes in through our eyes, fingers and ears that beginners cannot focus on what is important.

So here is what I see when I sharpen a plane iron. I'm going to show what it looks like on the unbeveled side, which I call the "face" and others call the "back."

Above is what the face of a smoothing plane iron looks like when it is fresh from the wrapper. The vertical scratches are deep and are left behind by the manufacturing process. These have to be removed. So I begin by abrading the tool on my #1,000-grit waterstone.

After a short time on the #1,000-grit stone the metal gets a scratch pattern that looks like this. I move the iron back and forth diagonally on the stone and examine it every couple minutes. I'm looking for where the deep vertical scratches go all the way to the end of the iron. That's where the metal is weakest and the edge will begin to break down. The arrows point to where I see problem scratches. When these scratches disappear at the end of the iron, I can move on to the next grit – #4,000 grit.

Usually #4,000-grit stones start to give me a good polish. And so the #1,000-mesh pattern is generally replaced by more of a polish. Some #4,000-grit stones don't do much polishing, but most do. Try working the iron in one direction – this brings up the polish faster.

If I can see the deep vertical scratches, I might need to drop back to the #1,000 grit. In the drawing above you can see some #1,000-grit scratches and one deep manufacturing scratch at the right that are problems. Usually I'll drop back to the #1,000-grit stone here for a few minutes to get that deep scratch out.

I'll also start to see faint horizontal scratches left behind by the #4,000-grit stone. When the #1,000-grit scratches and manufacturing scratches are gone, move to your next stone. For me, that's the #8,000-grit waterstone.

This stone should bring up a nice mirror-like polish. You might have some horizontal scratches from this stone, but those generally aren't a problem. Look for any #1,000-grit diagonal scratches (as shown with an arrow above). Keep working until all the vertical and diagonal scratch marks are polished away right at the cutting edge. Don't worry about the scratches that don't make it to the edge.

I'm sure all this looks different to other experienced sharpeners, but these crude pencil drawings are about as well as I can explain it without coming to your house.

— Christopher Schwarz

While teaching a class on handplanes this weekend, one student in particular was having a heck of a time with his Veritas No. 4-1/2 smoothing plane. Let's call him Mr. Papanicolaou. (I just hate it when writers use simple names for pseudonyms.)

Papanicolaou was trying to dress a board with the plane, but the plane refused to take a consistent cut. The plane would take a shaving at the beginning of the board, but then it would kinda crap out somewhere in the middle.

And so began our diagnosis.

First we checked to make sure the frog was secured tightly to the plane's body. Check.

Then I looked at the board to make sure it wasn't springing between the bench dogs. Check.

Then I checked his mechanical adjuster to see if there was any backlash in the mechanism that was fouling him up. Nope.

Then we reassembled the entire plane. I checked the sharpness and shape of the iron (check and check). We reattached the chipbreaker and made sure it wasn't bending the iron off the frog.

We checked the tension on his lever cap to make sure it was holding the cutter assembly against the frog.

Then I took some shavings with the plane myself on my workbench and on a board I knew to be flat. Perhaps Papanicolaou was applying pressure at the wrong places. Perhaps the bench had a bad hollow. Perhaps the board was just wacky on the junk.

I had the same problems as Papanicolaou.

And that's when I turned my attention to the sole of the plane. I didn't have any feeler gauges, so I checked the sole using a straightedge and held the plane up to the light. Sometimes this method exaggerates the problem because you see the light reflected off the sole – effectively doubling the error.

But the problem leaped out and poked me in the eye. The sole was the shape of a malformed banana. There was a large bump right behind the mouth. And another smaller bump at the heel. (The photos are of the plane taken in front of a tracing box.)

In this photo the plane is rocked forward on the bump behind the mouth so the toe is touching. This plane rocks!

Papanicolaou sheepishly volunteered that he'd flattened the plane's sole to try to increase the performance of the tool. Now we had our answer.

This isn't the first time this has happened during a class. And so here's my advice: If you spent serious money on a tool, don't flatten the sole yourself. If you suspect you have a problem, call the manufacturer for advice. If there's a problem, they can fix it for you.

If you are buying old tools, take a straightedge and feeler gauges with you. Check the sole of the planes you are interested in buying. You need the areas in front of the mouth and along the sidewalls to be coplanar (a hollow area in the middle of the sole behind the mouth is usually OK). If you find problems that are more than .004" in critical areas, be wary.

If you do decide to flatten the sole of a plane, practice on a junker first and read up on the various techniques on the Internet. Here's what I do: I glue a long strip of blue belt-sander paper to granite. I can flatten block planes, smoothers and jack planes with this setup. Jointer planes are a bear.

Not all your planes need to be dead flat (anything used for roughing can be wonky). But if you want to take really fine shavings, it's important.

— Christopher Schwarz


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This weekend I assisted Thomas Lie-Nielsen during a class on handplanes at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. Thomas brought along some of the new tools they are working on and talked to the class about new tools in the pipeline in Warren, Maine.

Here are some details:

Panel saws: Lie-Nielsen is starting to ship its first panel saws. Yes, it's true. I first saw the prototype for this saw about eight years ago when Rob Cosman was using it at the Woodstock woodworking show. Since that prototype, the saw has evolved considerably.

It has a taper-ground sawplate, a nib at the toe and a gorgeous curly maple handle with a lamb's tongue detail. Thomas brought the saw in a nice leather holster. I didn't get a chance to try out the tool, so now you know everything I do about the saw. More details to follow.

Tongue and groove plane: Lie-Nielsen is also starting to ship these planes. I got to use a prototype of this tool a couple years ago when we were shooting the "Workbenches" DVD. The production version of this tool is far and away better than my original Stanley No. 48.

Instead of two irons that you have to fiddle with to get exactly even, the Lie-Nielsen version has a single iron that is forked. Also, the fence on the Lie-Nielsen is more robust than on the Stanley and moves very little.

I made some joints with this plane during the weekend in hardwood and was impressed. While my No. 48 struggles in hardwoods, this tool had no problem in oak or maple.

O1 Steel: Thomas mentioned a couple times during the weekend that he was hoping to offer some more tools with high-carbon oil-hardened steel. For the most part, Lie-Nielsen uses A2 steel in its blades, but some customers prefer O1, especially for tools that require a low sharpening angle, such as paring chisels and blades for some low-angle planes.

Speaking of paring chisels, those are also on the drawing board.

Workbench hardware: Lie-Nielsen has begun making its own workbench hardware. Thomas brought along a new tail vise assembly to show, and it was sweet looking. Thomas says it's much faster to install and won't droop over time. It also has another surprise, but I'll have to save that for another post.

One final tease: Thomas says he has a load of beech that he's letting dry.

I'm sure I'll hear more details at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Chicago this weekend (Friday and Saturday). If you're in the area, stop by at this free show, say hello and you can see some of this stuff for yourself.

One final thing. To the student this weekend who brought me a six pack of Bell's Two-hearted Ale: Thanks! My wife thinks I'm getting a reputation as a lush because whenever I go out of town to teach I come back with a trunk full of alcohol.

Is this bootlegging? And is it a bad thing?

— Christopher Schwarz


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There are lots of people who will show you how to handplane the edge of a board. A few less who will show you how to really flatten the wide face of a board. A smaller number will show you how to flatten a glued-up panel (stay tuned – that tutorial is already written) and even fewer who will demonstrate how to plane an assembled carcase.

After lunch I dressed a small dovetailed box I'm building and took some photos along the way. Have a minute? Get the alcohol!

Really, get the alcohol. A dovetailed carcase has a lot of end grain, so moistening the end grain with denatured alcohol will make the work easier.

Set up a planing platform for your carcase. Big carcasses can be sleeved over the end of your bench. Small carcasses and drawers can be worked on a platform that's clamped to your bench.

As with all aspects of hand work, everything begins with stock selection. I try to pick boards with the straightest grain so I can plane them in both directions – from the ends and into the middle of the carcase. This avoids blowing out the end grain of the pins and tails.

If the board has a pronounced grain direction (which stops me from planing both directions)  I'll use a plane with a high pitch to do all the smoothing work – this also allows me to work from the ends and into the middle. High-angle planes can ignore grain direction. And, despite what you've read, you can plane end grain with them. Sharpness fixes almost anything.

Trim the Pins
I trim the pins with a sharp block plane. The reason I prefer a block plane is that it's quite narrow, so I can work in small areas without planing away stuff I want to keep. You can skew the blade to make the cut easier. And don't forget the alcohol. Work from the end toward the middle – but just trim the end grain, not the face grain.

With the pins trimmed on both ends of one face of my carcase, I need to make a decision. If I'm going to attach moulding to the carcase, I want to ensure those areas are dead flat. (Bending moulding = no fun.) I'm attaching base moulding around this box so I trued its lower section with a jointer plane. Note that I start the plane at the end, work into the middle and lift off in the middle.

Check your work with a straightedge to make sure you're not creating a hill in the middle of your panel. If you are, work the center only until you get it flat.

Smooth the Face
Then use a smoothing plane to dress the face. Start from the ends and work to the middle, lifting at the end of the stroke. At the moment your joints' baselines disappear, you're done.

One difficulty people have here is with boards that have a pronounced grain direction. Here's how I deal with it: Plane "with the grain" on the carcase face for the majority of the panel. Lift off only at the very end.

Then come back and dress the other direction with a high-angle plane, working only a short distance. That way if you have to scrape, it will only be a small area. Now plane the other side of the carcase using these same techniques.

Trim the Tails
Now trim the end grain of the tail boards. Moisten the end grain with alcohol and work from top to bottom (or bottom to top). This prevents you from having any blowout on your tailboards. When the tails have been trimmed, grab the jointer plane and smoothing plane and work from the ends and into the middle again, just like you did on the other two faces.

Note: There are other ways to tackle this job. You can plane a small chamfer on all four corners and plane straight through on all four faces of your carcase. This is faster but risky. If your chamfer isn't big enough, you're toast. You also can fetch the belt sander or random-orbit sander. But you wouldn't be reading this blog entry if you sleep with your sander.

— Christopher Schwarz

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With the release of the new Veritas Small Scraping Plane last week, lots of people are saying: Cool! I want one! Do I need one?

Good question. Scraping planes are curious birds. The large scraping planes are typically used to dress tabletops and large panels that have unruly grain. Scraping planes can ignore grain direction, work large surfaces and leave a relatively flat surface – especially compared to a card scraper.

The small scraper planes work the same way, but I wouldn't want to use one for a banquet hall table. So they get used in other ways. You can use them like a block plane for dressing edges – this is how bodger Don Weber uses his Lie-Nielsen No. 212. If you have trouble bending a card scraper, the small planes are a good substitute as they are easy on your hands. And they can be used for evicting localized tear-out on a larger surface.

Veritas officials loaned us one of their new Small Scraping Planes last week. I was involved in testing a pre-production model of the tool, so I'm already quite familiar with the way it works. It is very clever and easier to set up than the No. 212 model made by Stanley and Lie-Nielsen (I've owned the Lie-Nielsen No. 212 for many years). The Veritas also costs less money (It's $119 and on sale now for $99. The Lie-Nielsen costs $160 to $175.)

Both tools, I found, have plusses and minuses. Let's take a look.

Veritas: Easy to Set But Can Clog
What makes the Veritas different is its blade system. Unlike the Lie-Nielsen, the Veritas uses a thin blade (.039" thick vs. .120"). The thin blade allows you to camber it gently by turning a small straight screw at the rear of the tool. This is much like the system on the venerable Stanley No. 80 cabinet scraper and the excellent Veritas Large Scraping Plane.

The net result of this system is that the Veritas scraping plane is easier to set up than the Lie-Nielsen. You insert the blade, tighten the clamp and give the cambering screw a turn. Then you scrape to your heart's content.

The other new twist with the Veritas is the adjustable palm rest that gives the plane its Beetle-esque shape. It's impossibly clever – you simply move the rest until the plane fits your hand, then lock it in place with a hex-head wrench (included). Once locked, it's quite stable. You can force it out of position, but you have to work at it.

In addition to that ergonomic touch, the toe of the tool has a nice lip for your thumb.

My only complaint with the tool is the same one I had with the pre-production version. I think the tool clogs with shavings more easily than the Lie-Nielsen. I suspect – but could be wrong – that the cause of the clogging is that the blade-clamping mechanism is bigger and lower on the blade. And the tool's mouth is fairly wide open. What tends to happen is that you take a stroke with the tool, and on the return the last shaving drops below the sole. As you push forward for your next stroke, the stray shaving fouls the mouth.

If you pull the shavings out regularly, you won't have this problem.

Lie-Nielsen: Won't Clog, But Trickier to Set Up
The Lie-Nielsen uses a variable-pitch frog that allows you to set it for a wide range of pitches. This is handy for experienced users but sometimes frustrating for beginners. If you want a camber on your blade, you are going to have to add it while sharpening – there's no cambering screw on the tool.

This makes setting the tool a little trickier. You have to tap the iron left and right to get the camber in the center. Then you sometimes have to fine-tune the frog to get the shaving you want. After a while you get the hang of it, but I wouldn't want to learn to use the tool on live stock.

On the plus side, I can't recall this tool ever clogging. The mouth is tighter and the blade-clamping mechanism is fairly high. Shavings fall out and don't get pulled back into the mouth.

As to ergonomics, I think it's a draw. The Lie-Nielsen, while odd looking, is remarkably comfortable to my hand. And the Veritas is exactly whatever I want it to be.

— Christopher Schwarz

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When most people think about cutting dovetails, they think: handsaws. However, there’s more to dovetailing than sawing. You also need to be mindful of your handplanes when you’re dovetailing. They can create gaps or help prevent them.

This week I’m dovetailing a bunch of drawers and smallish boxes, so my planes are heavy on my mind.

If I remove any material from the inside of this pin board, the joint will become gap-tacular.

First, let’s talk about how handplanes can cause gaps. If you cut your pins and tails for your box and then plane all the inside surfaces, then you are asking for trouble. Planing the inside surfaces of your pin boards will make you look like a crap-tacular sawyer.

Don’t get it? Think about it for a minute: The interior surface of your pin board contains the wide triangles that fit into your tail board. Every stroke of your handplane on the interior of your pin board makes the joint looser and looser by removing the widest part of the joint (the same advice holds true for the belt-sander crowd).

You can, however, plane the interior surfaces of your tail boards with little consequence. The more planing you do, the more trimming you will have to do after assembly, but this is really no big deal.

So how do you avoid this problem? Plane the interiors of all your surfaces before you cut your joinery. This is a good idea for many reasons. First, planing helps remove any twist or bow in your stock, which makes joinery easier. And second, it prevents your joints from getting looser as you refine their surfaces.

For casework, here’s how I do it: First, I dress all the long-grain surfaces with a jointer plane. Then I cut the joinery. Assemble the carcase. Trim the proud nubs. Smooth plane the exterior. Be done with it.

When cutting a cross-grain rabbet, first draw the tool backwards so the nicker can define the shoulder. This results in cleaner cuts (and is historically accurate, thank you Peter Nicholson).

Here's the completed rabbet. It's less than 1/32" and a bit more than 1/64". It's all you need.

Now that we know that handplanes have an evil side, how can we use them to tighten our dovetails? Use a moving fillister plane to cut a shallow rabbet on the inside of each tail board.

This shallow rabbet is the width of your stock’s thickness (use a 3/4”-wide rabbet for 3/4”-thick stock). And the rabbet is less than 1/32” deep. What does this rabbet do? It makes transferring your marks from your tail board to your pin board (or vice-versa) much easier. The mating board nests right into the rabbet so you don’t have to fuss around with lining things up on the baseline.

Senior Editor Glen D. Huey showed me this trick in 2002. He was using it to line up pieces of differing thicknesses, but the rabbet also made transferring the marks from one board to another almost foolproof.

I use a moving fillister plane to cut the shallow rabbets. A true moving fillister has a depth stop and fence to regulate the depth and width of the cut – plus it has a nicker that scores the cross grain ahead of the cut. This reduces tearing.

This shallow rabbet, which is used by other dovetailers such as Rob Cosman, is completely worth the effort to make it. It takes just a few strokes with your plane and prevents an endless cycle of fussing and adjusting.

The Veritas Skew Rabbet Plane meets all the criteria to make this cut, as does the Philly Planes moving fillister plane and vintage moving fillisters. The Lie-Nielsen Skew Block Plane (with nicker) is lacking only a depth stop (you have to count the shavings and be careful if you use it for this purpose).

Next week: How a hammer can tighten up your dovetails.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here I'm pushing the rabbet against my pin board. This makes transferring the shape of the tails a can't miss affair.

Plow planes are some of the easiest joinery planes to use – once you know a few tricks to getting good results. I struggled with the tools until Don McConnell (now a planemaker at Clark & Williams) set me straight years ago with one simple piece of advice:

"Each hand should have a separate job," he said. "One hand holds the fence. The other pushes the tool forward."

Before that point, both of my hands were engaged in job sharing. My hand on the fence was also pushing forward. My hand on the tote was twisting the tool to keep the fence tight on the work.

Here are the other things I've learned about gripping a plow plane over the years:

1. It's a bit like sawing. The hand that holds the tote (or the stock) should be directly lined up with the cut and should swing free. Sometimes this means getting your body over the work (a low bench is helpful here). If your forearm is not in line with the skate of the tool, it's gonna be a roughie.

2. It's a bit like jointing an edge. For my fence hand, I wrap the web between my thumb and index finger around the stems (sometimes called posts) of the tool. I reach my fingers around the fence and touch the work and the front edge of the bench if possible. My thumb is pressing down. If you joint edges of boards by hand, you'll recognize this hand position immediately.

Workholding: Keep it Simple
There are lots of ways to hold your work for plowing. If your end vise and dogs are positioned near the front edge of the bench, you can usually pinch things directly between dogs. You also can use a sticking board, which is a little shelf that holds your work.

Or you can do what I do: Clamp a batten to the benchtop to brace the edge of your workpiece. And plow into the tip of a holdfast. This is very quick for plowing drawer parts – there's no clamping and unclamping and you can work with a bunch of different lengths easily.

Set the Fence
Set your plow's fence so it is parallel to the skate and the desired distance from your cutter. The most common cut I make is a 1/4"-wide groove that's 1/4" from the fence. Conveniently, the brass section on my folding rule is exactly 1/4" long, so it’s easy to set things at a glance.

Begin at the End
You can use a plow plane like a bench plane and make full strokes that run from the near end to the far end. But I have found this to be sometimes troublesome. Sometimes the cutter will follow the grain in the board and the tool's fence will drift away from the work. The results are ugly.

Instead, I start at the far end of the board and make short cuts. Each succeeding cut gets a little longer until I am making full-length cuts. The advantage to this is that if your plane wanders, it will only be for a short distance and the next cut will correct the error.

After you are making full-length cuts there's little danger of the tool wandering.

The shavings should be fairly thick – you don't want to do this all day. These shavings are .015" thick. I could probably go a little thicker in pine.

Results and Then…
When the tool stops cutting, you stop stroking. The edges of the groove might be a little furry – that's typical even for the best work. That's why I wait to smooth plane my pieces after I have grooved them. That removes the fur. Here's what the groove looks like when I'm done.

— Christopher Schwarz

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A couple years ago I finally got to go to Winterthur, the DuPont's estate in Delaware that is a shrine to early American furniture. Right as our tour of the collection was about to begin, the docents segregated me from the gaggle of chattering blue-haired old ladies.

In retrospect, the docents were probably afraid I was going to mug them in the Marlboro Room.

In any case, it was a lucky turn of events. I and the two guys with me with were paired with our own personal docent for a tour. When she found out that two of us were furniture makers, she gave us little flashlights.

"I know your type," she said. "You're gonna crawl under the highboys."

And crawl like slugs we did. I learned a lot about casework that day, but the most lasting memory was getting to examine the sides of some of the grandest bonnet-top highboys I've ever seen. These were masterpieces of design. And yet, on almost all of them the side panels were split. Plus the panels would never pass muster in Ethan Allen. You could feel and see the regular scallops of the smoothing planes. Heck – the undulations were so regular and obvious that you could tell what width the craftsman's smoothing plane was.

And that was the most beautiful thing I saw all day.

Handplaned surfaces are not perfect. And thank goodness. They have a slight irregularity to them that I embrace. While it is entirely possible to tune a smoothing plane to produce a surface that looks like a machine dressed it (I'll do it at shows to impress the power-tool guys), that's not my goal. I aim to remove tear-out but to leave my mark.

So what does this look like?

Close up, it looks like crap. The photos above show every little detail of my work on a tabletop of the server I'm trying to complete this week. You can see how I angled my plane to begin my stroke, which reduces chatter at the beginning of a pass. You can see evidence of toolmarks everywhere when you get close enough.

When this top gets a finish on it (oil followed by lacquer), these hallmarks will become less obvious, but they will still be there for someone who knows how to look. For me, they are as telling about my work as my name that I'm going to stamp on the leg.

— Christopher Schwarz

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When I glue up panels from several narrow boards, I use my jointer plane to dress all the mating edges. While our power jointer is fairly well tuned, it's rarely perfect – we have a busy shop. So I find it easier to dress my edges by hand than to fuss with the powered jointer.

My jointer plane has a cambered iron, which allows me to correct an out-of-square edge. (I'll cover this in a future blog post after I pick up some Kevlar undergarments to protect me from the flak.)

Until I mastered using a cambered iron in my jointer plane, I used to use a straight iron and a jointer plane fence to dress my edges. I still use a jointer plane fence on occasion when I only have one or two chances at getting an edge dead-nuts square.

There are two kinds of commercial jointer plane fences. The more common one now is the Veritas Jointer Fence, which attaches to the plane with two rare earth magnets and a post that wedges the whole thing on your plane's sidewall. This fence works with almost any bench plane, though I usually use it with a plane the size of a jack or a jointer (14" to 22" long).

The other kind of fence is like the discontinued Stanley No. 386. This fence attaches to the plane using thumbscrews. The nice thing about the No. 386 is that you can set it for a wide range of angles and it has a knob that I find useful for the edge-jointing process. The other nice thing about the No. 386 is that I can use it with a cambered iron because the fence is under the sole of the tool. The fence centers the plane over a typical edge, where the cambered iron is basically straight. (You can do this with the Veritas fence by adding a wooden block to the fence.)

The No. 386 can be tough to find in the wild. St. James Bay Tool Co. makes one that is similar, but I haven't tried it.

How to Joint Edges With a Fence
Just like with using a power jointer, there is some technique involved in using a jointer plane fence.

Things to watch: The cutter has to be sticking out of the tool dead square. This is why I learned to use a curved iron in my jointer plane – it's actually a more forgiving setup than using a straight iron.

Second: Use your dominant hand to push the plane forward and your off-hand to control the fence. With your off-hand, use your thumb to push the toe down against the edge and use your fingers to push the fence against the face of your board.

Third: What you have to understand about handplanes is that the tool's cutter sticks out below the sole of the tool. As a result, the tool takes a slightly heavier cut at the beginning of the pass when only part of the plane is on the edge.

Last week I tried to measure this by edge jointing a 30"-long board and then measuring the shaving's thickness at five points along its length. At the beginning of the cut (toe engaged only) my cuts were consistently .0055" thick. In the middle and end of the cut the shaving was .005" thick.

That is not much difference. But it can add up. After several strokes the edge develops a gentle curve to it. And that's no good for gluing.

So here's what I do: First remove some of the middle section of the edge. I start the cut a few inches in from the end of the board, and I end the cut a few inches from the end. I'll usually take two passes like this. (This is similar to what David Charlesworth does, though I believe he continues to make passes until the plane stops cutting.)

Then I take a pass all the way through the edge. If I get one perfect unbroken shaving, I'll test the edge with a straightedge or the board's mating edge. If the edge is perfect or is a little hollow in the middle, I'll get the glue and the clamps. If the edge still bulges, I'll remove another shaving in the middle.

One more thing: Some woodworkers poo-poo the jointer plane fence. As Senior Editor Bob Lang might say: "You might as well show up on the job site wearing a dress."

Well since today is "National Tartan Day," I think you can get away with it.

— Christopher Schwarz


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In my kindergarten class, someone was snitching cookies from the lunchboxes of the rest of the class. (Spoiler alert: It was the fat kid.) While the teacher's investigation was ongoing, she gave us a speech that I still remember.

"I once had a student who stole cookies," she said. "Then he stole lunch money. Then he stole money from his parent's wallets…."

Long pause. "Then he robbed a gas station."

If you are still in the "smoothing plane" (stealing cookies) stage of your slide into handtools, let me give you a peek at some of bad deeds you'll be committing against your family's checkbook in the years ahead. First stop: plow planes.

Plow planes make grooves in the edges and faces of stock, which is great for frame-and-panel work. They also can be adjusted to make the tongue on a tongue-and-groove joint. And they are great for wasting away stock when you are making decorative moulding with moulding planes.

There are many different kids of plow planes, but I think there really are two families: the wooden plows and the metal plows. And their differences are in more than the raw materials used to make them.

Because that's the most obvious difference, however, let's start there.

Metal vs. Wooden Bodies
If you're buying a used plow, the metal ones are usually in better shape than the wooden ones. And the metal ones can usually be resurrected a little more easily. That's because the wooden body of a plow can warp (very difficult to fix), and the wooden wedge that secures the iron can be frozen in its mortise or can be so modified that it is useless.

That said, I always prefer a wooden grip on a plane, so the metal grips aren't my favorite. Heck I've thought about wrapping some friction tape around the handles to improve the feedback.

Where the Shavings Go
In use, the biggest difference for me is where each tool's shavings go. On the metal plows, the shavings eject into the fence and the user's hand. This is annoying because many times the shavings bunch up like a wad of toilet paper in the fence and you have to stop your work and clear things out.

On the wooden plows, the shavings are ejected away from the user and onto the benchtop. I have yet to find a disadvantage to this way of work – except that you have to sweep off your bench once in a while.

About that Fence
The fence on a metal plow is usually secured with two thumbscrews. Because of the tight tolerances when the tool is made, it's usually simple for the user to get the fence parallel to the tool's skate – a critical detail.

With wooden plows, it's all over the map. Fences can be fantastic or one step above semi-adjustable firewood. The bridle mechanism on my D.L. Barrett & Sons plow is perfection. It's better than a metal plow. One thumbscrew locks everything, and it's always parallel to the skate.

However, most of the wooden plows you'll find have two wooden screws that adjust the fence (or sometimes wedges do the job). With the two wooden screws, it's a bit more of a hassle to get things parallel. Plus, sometimes these screws are damaged beyond saving.

Different Depth Stops
On a metal plow, the depth stop is on the side of the skate that is opposite the fence. On the wooden plow, the depth stop is between the fence and skate. I haven't found either to be troublesome, but you do have to pay attention to your work. You don’t want to waste away part of the wood that you are going to need your depth stop to contact on a later cut.

I work with both tools and find that they both do everything a woodworker needs. The choice of tool comes down to:

• How much you can spend
• What is available in your area
• How much work you want to put into the tool
• And which form makes you drive by Texaco stations that aren't on your way home.

— Christopher Schwarz  

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There is no single best way to set a bench plane to take a proper shaving. I’ve seen people do it by eye, with their fingertips, using scraps of wood and even working on live stock and making adjustments on the fly. This last technique takes guts. It’s like working on a car while the engine’s running.

I’ve tried every single method above and can do them all with great ease. There is no secret to unlock any particular method. Only practice.

The following is how I prefer to set a bench plane to take a shaving. It’s in more detail than I usually go into on the blog, but here’s the dirty little secret about that: The reason I started writing this blog in 2005 was to create a way for me to answer common e-mail questions. Want to know the difference between bevel-up and bevel-down planes? Instead of answering that question six times a week, I could paste this link into an e-mail six times a week instead. Oh, and the blog would serve as a way to remember when I got my last tetanus shot.

Before we get to the good part, let me shove a little dogma down the disposal with the evening’s chicken bones. All of my bench planes (the fore, jointer and smoothing planes) have irons with curved cutting edges (so does my block plane, but that’s another entry). I camber the cutting edge to keep the corners from digging into the work and to allow me to remove material from selective areas on a board. People who disagree with my approach are encouraged to come to our shop in May for the Lie-Nielsen show with their torches and pitchforks.

The good news is that the way I set a bench plane works for any plane (even joinery planes and moulding planes). So don’t flee yet.

Step One: Kentucky Windage
The goal is to get the iron centered in the mouth of the plane. The strongest part of the curved edge should be in the middle of the mouth, and the corners of the iron should be tucked safely into the body of the plane. If your curve is too pronounced, you’ll take too narrow a shaving. If your curve is too flat, the corners will still dig in.

First you want to sight down the sole of the plane. Gaze at the toe of the sole and advance the iron until it appears as a black line across the sole. If your bench is light in color, you can use the benchtop as a background. If your bench is bubinga, do this against a sheet of paper.

Adjust the iron laterally until the black line appears consistent across the mouth. The camber on a smoothing plane and jointer plane isn’t really visible, so you’re looking for a consistent line.

Use a Scrap to Refine
Retract the iron into the body of the plane and start advancing it. Use a small shim (1/16" x 3/4" x 1-1/4" is nice) and run it across the mouth of the plane as you advance the iron a bit. Where the iron is cutting, you’ll feel it drag against the shim. It’s not dramatic – more like a tug. I first got this trick from David Charlesworth. Thank you, David.

Where do I get my shims? Well you could send me $20 and I'll send you a bag of them. Or you could look in your garbage can for waste that has fallen off from your rip cuts.

The end result is that you want to feel zero drag at the corners of the mouth and a little drag right at the center. You can adjust the iron using the lateral adjustment lever (if you have one), but I prefer hammer taps using a small Warrington or tack hammer. These are love taps and are unlikely to mushroom your iron. I’ve been tapping one iron on one smoothing plane for about five years. I’ve almost used up the entire iron and still have yet to find a mark from my tapping.

Final Adjustments
Then I start planing – either on scrap or live stock. Likely the shaving is too thin. And that’s OK. Advance the iron until you get the shaving you want from the plane. Then take a quick look at the shaving and where it is coming from in the mouth.

The shaving should be centered in the plane’s mouth. And the shaving should look like this: It should be thickest in the center and fade away to nothing at the edges. And it should be as wide as possible. That’s the sweet spot.

If I’m a little off-center at this point, I simply tap the iron with my baby hammer to move the shaving into the center of the mouth. Then I get busy.

— Christopher Schwarz

Anyone who has worked with me for about five minutes knows that I really like chamfers on my work. Stop chamfers, such as those found on early English and American work, are particularly attractive to my eye.

I also like through-chamfers, and my favorite tool for making those is the Veritas Chamfer Guide. This $22 accessory for the Veritas Block Planes is beyond clever. It beats up and steals the lunch money of traditional chamfer planes. I have a nice English version of one of these old planes that I bought years ago from Patrick Leach, and it just does not compare.

The genius of the Veritas guide – patented in 2003 – is that you can set it to make chamfers up to 1/2" wide with unerring precision. Set the guide to the chamfer you want. Keep stroking until the plane stops cutting. Victory!

There is one downside to the guide: Veritas doesn't make it for other brands of block planes. I'm sure it would be a nightmare for the company to offer it for other brands because there are as many kinds of block planes as there are flavors of gum.

I tried fitting the Veritas guide to some of the Stanley block planes in my shop and could find only one (the venerable Stanley No. 65) where this worked well. The only problem with the retrofit on the Stanley No. 65 was that I had to scavenge a knob off my Veritas plane to prevent the host from rejecting the transplant. So that's not much of a solution.

So if you do have a Veritas block plane, I highly recommend this attachment. If you don't own the plane, I highly recommend you try freehanding things. This weekend I was planing some chamfers sans Veritas and used my old Sandusky jack plane instead.

My chamfers weren't as tidy, but they looked good enough. And the nice thing was I could do the chamfers at any angle, not just 45°. To make the chamfers, I laid out the two lines – one on the face of the board and one on the edge – with a marking gauge. Then I went to town with the jack. When I got close to my scribe lines, I switched to a plane that took a fine cut to finish the chamfer.

Both techniques work better (for me) than a router with a chamfer bit, which can leave nasty chatter marks that have to be sanded or planed out anyway.

— Christopher Schwarz

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When you're a professional writer, people tend to give you cranky manual typewriters as gifts. They don't expect you to use them, per se. But they do expect you to display them in your home. Good thing I'm not an undertaker.

For years I despised manual typewriters and rolled my eyes any time one of them showed up at my door with a bow on it.

My hate affair with these clackety beasts began in journalism school. Though our school had modern computers, the school decided that Basic Writing students should use manual typewriters only.

So every evening my head ached from the pounding of letters against platens from the fingers of 20 would-be scribes in my writing lab. My pinkies ached from pressing the shift key. The smell of correction fluid made me wince. I bought my first Macintosh that year and never looked back. Until this weekend.

My youngest daughter became curious about one of the typewriters in the basement, so I pulled it down and got it working. She's pretty fast on a keyboard, but watching her struggle on a typewriter was a revelation.

The manual typewriter taught me some critical lessons.

1. Use the fewest words possible to say something.

2. Make as few mistakes as possible.

3. Always think two sentences ahead of the one you are typing.

Without those three lessons, I doubt I'd have this job.

When you are a woodworker, people tend to give you beat-up wooden-stock handplanes as gifts. They don't expect you to use them, per se. But they do expect you to display them. Good thing I'm not a proctologist.

My mom gave me one this summer that made me shake my head. It's an old jointer plane, probably craftsman-made from ash or something oaky. The maker included the pith of the tree in the body – generally a no-no in planemaking. And the body has cast into a wacky rhombus shape.

I took one look at the tool when it came out of the box and set it aside. This week, something compelled me to take a closer look. I knocked its wedge loose and removed the chipbreaker and Ward iron. The iron has been ground away to almost nothing, but it is interesting. It is perfectly crowned – just like I crown a jointer plane blade. And the face of the iron has clearly been polished during honing.

This was a working tool. I took a close look at the sole. Ignoring the holes from some insects, it was obvious that the sole was burnished from hard use – it was the best-looking surface on the entire tool.

So I resolved to get this thing working. Perhaps it has a few more lessons in store.

— Christopher Schwarz


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These days investing in premium tools might have less financial risk than the stock market.

Just about every week I get an e-mail or phone call from a reader asking me if they think that premium handplanes from Veritas, Lie-Nielsen and Clifton are worth the extra expense. I think they are worth the money, and I always tell the person the following:

"If you don't like them, you can always sell them on eBay and get most of your money back."

This morning I decided to run some numbers to determine if I'm full of poo. So I checked the price of 36 recent eBay transactions for Lie-Nielsen tools. It was mostly planes, but the list included a couple sets of chisels, a saw and a screwdriver.

Here are some typical prices:

• The Lie-Nielsen No. 164 low-angle smoothing plane. Retail: $265. eBay: $235.
• Large Shoulder Plane. Retail: $250. eBay: $220.02.
• Lie-Nielsen No. 4-1/2 Bench Plane. Retail: $325. eBay: $250.

There were a few surprises on my list.

A couple sellers actually made money. A rabbeting block plane and a chisel set sold for more than the retail price. That can be caused by bidders fueled by testosterone or by other factors (including the fact the buyer could be in another country).

On the whole, the Lie-Nielsen tools sold for an average of 16 percent less than the full retail price. If you averaged out all the transactions, the average Lie-Nielsen tool sold for $38 less than the retail price.

So there you have it. My collection of Lie-Nielsens is doing better than my 401(k).

— Christopher Schwarz

Need to clean up the corners of really wide rabbets? Then I have the plane for you.

This Stanley plane is so rare it doesn't even show up in John Walter's "Stanley Tools Guide to Identity & Value." You won't find it at Patrick Leach's Blood & Gore web site. Heck, I don't even think John Sindelar – tool collector extraordinaire – has one.

That's because it doesn't exist. These oddball planes show on eBay sometimes with breathless verbiage about how the tool is super rare. Truth is, it's a bench plane with a broken casting.

I know this for a fact because I broke it myself on Friday while we were shooting a short video that demonstrates the difference between gray iron (which the Stanley plane is made out of) ductile iron (which Lie-Nielsen and Veritas planes are made from) and cast steel.

So I took handplanes made from these three materials, put them on an anvil and went Old Testament John Henry on them. The Stanley plane shattered like rock candy. As for the other two, you'll have to wait until we get the video edited.

— Christopher Schwarz

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For the Lie-Nielsen fan who has everything, you might consider getting a Lie-Nielsen tattoo for the arm that pushes your bronze and ductile iron beauties.

Casual Lie-Nielsen fans can purchase the temporary tattoos Lie-Nielsen Toolworks sells at its web site ($5 for 10 of them). Or you can go all the way and get a permanent tattoo, like Rob Giovannetti of Illinois.

Giovannetti’s wife is an accomplished tattoo artist. He loves handplanes. And so the natural result was this tattoo on his right arm.

Giovannetti showed off his tattoo on his new blog, Cherry Creek Woodworks. Knowing him, this won’t be the last outrageous thing he does there.

And this isn’t the first tool tattoo I’ve seen. About five years ago, one of the demonstrators in the Festool booth at a trade show had Festool tattooed on his right forearm in the company’s bright green. The guy installed custom floors for a living. And if memory serves me right, he also had Festool emblazoned on his truck. And he even kept his firstborn in a Systainer for its first couple weeks of life. (OK, I made that last detail up.)

— Christopher Schwarz

Sometimes brand-new chisels and planes (even from the best manufacturers) don't hold an edge well. I've seen some edges crumple like tin foil after two whacks with a mallet or two strokes on a board.

Weak edges aren't as common a problem as weak chin lines, but they do happen. When I teach a class of 18 people, for example, there's always one person with a spanking new tool that would crumble if you chopped a Moon Pie.

My solution to this problem has always been to take the tool to the grinder and create a new primary bevel. Then I grind off just a tad more. I take the tool back to the stones for honing and then (by magic) the tool holds its edge.

The strategy almost always works, but I've never known exactly why.

So I went to tool steel guru Ron Hock of Hock Tools looking for answers. As always, Ron set me straight. There could be two culprits: too much heat or too much oxygen during the manufacturing process.

"Should the blade be subjected to temperatures in excess of the steel's critical temperature (the temperature at which the iron crystals transform from ferrite to austenite) the steel will tend to form large grains, which don't stick to each other as well as we'd like," Hock writes. "This will cause the resulting steel to be very brittle and crumbly, though it will test as properly hard with a Rockwell hardness test."

If a tool breaks, you can see evidence of this problem, according to Hock. In a well-treated tool the fracture should look a very fine-grained gray (almost like gray primer paint).

"If you see sparklyness instead, it's been overheated," Hock writes, "Which is probably why it broke and you're looking at it."

Because the cutting edge of a tool is typically the thinnest part of the tool, it's the easiest part to overheat, even if the overheating is brief.

The other culprit is oxygen. As steel approaches its critical temperature, the carbon is released and is free to migrate about the steel. If there is air present when it reaches the surface (such as when heat-treating in air with a torch or forge) the carbon atom will run off with the oxygen atom to become carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide and the carbon is lost from the steel, according to Hock.

Most professional heat treaters use furnaces with atmosphere control (vacuum or inert or carbonaceous gas) to minimize this problem, which is called "decarburization."

"This creates a low-carbon skin on the steel," Hock writes. "This would not be a big deal except for the fact that the flat back of the tool is the cutting edge, and any loss of carbon results in a loss of hardness. Here again, the edge takes it in the shorts with the most to lose and the least to lose it from."

Both of these problems can completely ruin a piece of steel through-and-through. But usually the damage is localized, and you can get to the good stuff by grinding away some of the bad stuff.

Just tell your spouse you're exfoliating.

— Christopher Schwarz

There are still some spots available in the class on handplanes that Thomas Lie-Nielsen and I are teaching in April at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. This is the only class I am teaching in 2009.

The weekend class is April 25-26 at the school, which is just south of Indianapolis. The class is fast paced because Thomas and I cover a lot of ground about the history, theory and use of handplanes. And students get plenty of hands-on time to put the lessons into practice on the excellent Lie-Nielsen cabinetmaker's workbenches at the school.

Here, in a nutshell, are the major areas we cover.

• Handplane anatomy and geometry. Thomas and I dissect the different types of bench planes and explain their differences and similarities. We also debate the practical differences between bevel-up and bevel-down planes. We also delve into the geometry of the tool and explain the trade-offs you'll have to make with your angle of attack, the effort to use the tool and the amount of tear-out you're experiencing.

• Sharpening. We show you what real (not theoretical) sharpening looks like in the shop. We take a new plane iron from the wrapper and prepare for use it in about five minutes. We also show you how to get a curved cutting edge (essential to bench plane work), and how to get extremely straight edges on your chisels and joinery plane irons. After the lecture, all the students put the knowledge to use by sharpening their own plane irons.

• Use. Learn to flatten a board with handplanes, whether it's rough from the sawmill or fresh from an electric planer. We show you how to detect and remove twist and cupping from a board using historically accurate techniques. Then every student gets to put these principles into practice on their own board.

• Your questions. Every year, the students' questions also fill up a significant amount of time. Some years we emphasize joinery planes. Other years we discuss moulding planes, specialty planes, tool maintenance, rust, manufacturing tolerances, rehabbing old tools, tools in the works at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and so forth.

• A Tour of the Toolworks. Thomas always brings a great video that shows how he makes his tools, from casting to polishing and assembly. He narrates the whole thing and takes questions as he goes. If you've ever wondered how your planes are made, you'll find out. Plus Thomas is always happy to sign your tools. (And me, I'll sign anything.)

The class is $300. You can register online at marcadams.com through this link or you can call 317-535-4013. You can learn more about the school and other excellent classes there through this link.

— Christopher Schwarz

Last week I compared the Lie-Nielsen and Veritas small router planes and concluded that I really would like a Lie-Nielsen with a closed throat.

So, of course, a reader showed me how it can be done.

Tony Sutton closed the throat on his Lie-Nielsen router plane using some UniBond 5-minute epoxy. Sutton built up some dams on the router plane using modeling clay and then filled them in with the mixed adhesive.

After the resin cured for an hour he trimmed it with a carving chisel. Then he waited 24 hours and sanded the sole flat. Finally, he painted the epoxy black (nice touch) with his daughter's acrylic paint.

And it works! Thanks Tony.

Next week: Knitting a cozy for your router plane.

— Christopher Schwarz

The first time I saw a chisel plane was at an antique market in Kentucky. It was sitting out on a table with a bunch of common planes. Every person who walked up to the table picked it up to check its price tag, but the seller knew what he had. The original Stanley No. 97 "Cabinet Makers' Edge Plane" is a fairly rare bird.

It turns out that wooden-bodied chisel planes are also uncommon, according to John M. Whelan's essential book "The Wooden Plane." As a result, I've always been a bit skeptical as to how useful the form is.

One user told me that he used it for trimming plugs flush to the surrounding surface. I haven't had much luck with the plane for this purpose. Most of my plugs are a tough species, such as oak. And no matter how closely I saw them, there's still too much wood there for me to pare with a chisel plane. Instead, I've had far more success using a plain old smoothing plane for trimming plugs flush.

Lately, however, I have found a few instances where the chisel plane earned its keep.

• Fairing one surface to another. Recently I had to extend the slot on my bench's top to install some new vise hardware. I sawed out the waste and then used the chisel plane to bring the sawn surface into the same plane as the existing slot. It worked brilliantly. The sole of the chisel plane rode the existing slot and pared the face grain with ease. And because there was no mouth on the tool I could work right up to the end of the slot. This operation could have been done with a paring chisel, but it was much easier with the chisel plane. Similarly, the chisel plane helps me fair up the corners of rabbets after I've chopped out the waste with a chisel. Again, this can also be done with a chisel, but the chisel plane makes for tidier results.

• Removing glue. I've been turning to the chisel plane to remove the globs of glue that remain after a panel glue-up. I pare these globs away by working across the grain. The chisel plane works well at this because it doesn't have a mouth. When I'd do this with a block plane, softer globs of glue would get squished by the tool and make a mess of things. I also prefer the chisel plane to a glue scraper because it is less likely to damage the panel.

• Removing finish sags. When I get sags on my film finish, I like to cut them away before adding another coat. I used to use an old block plane iron for this, but it can be hard to hold on vertical surfaces. The chisel plane makes quick work of sags.

In the end, I don't think the chisel plane is an essential tool for your kit – all of the operations above could be handled by other edge tools. But they are handy. If you have found a good use for your chisel plane, I'd like to hear about it, and so would other woodworkers. Post a comment and let us know.

– Christopher Schwarz

When I first bought my chisel plane I tried using it to trim some oak plugs flush. It was not ideal.

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Pint-sized router planes see a lot of use in my shop. Instead of using a trim router, I always prefer to cut mortises for hinges with a chisel and a router plane. So as soon as Veritas and Lie-Nielsen started making small router planes based loosely on the Stanley No. 271 about 18 months ago, I was first in line.

I now have many hours on both tools – I've sharpened each one about seven or eight times. And I have developed some firm likes and dislikes about each tool. The next paragraph is a spoiler, so if you like a little suspense when reading blogs, skip it.

Neither router plane is perfect. But nor is there one clear winner in the category. If I could combine the best of both tools (the Lie-Veritas?) I think it would be the router plane of my dreams. Here's the lowdown on each tool.

The Veritas Small Router Plane
First the good: This plane has a closed throat and is quite compact. The closed throat allows you to work on the edges of boards without any danger of the tool tipping. The downside to a closed throat is you sacrifice a little visibility – it's a tad more difficult to see where you are cutting.

The compact size is a big plus with the Veritas. The tool is 3-1/4" at its widest, and that is an asset when you are cutting hinge mortises inside assembled casework. Sometimes larger router planes are too big and ram into the top or bottom of your case. This little guy sneaks in everywhere I ask it to go. The fit and finish is excellent, as is the knurled brass locking knob. The iron is durable.

The downside: I don't care for the round shank that the iron is mounted to. No matter how tightly I secure the locking knob, the shank can shift if you take a big bite of wood with the plane. When the shank slips, usually the blade height doesn't change, but the iron rotates left or right. You can rotate it back, but there is the danger of changing your blade's projection. So take light cuts.

Lie-Nielsen Small Router Plane
The good: The blade-locking mechanism is incredibly solid and the iron never slips. The iron is mounted to a square shank, so there's no chance that the iron can rotate during heavy use. Plus, I quite like the fact that the blade-locking knob can be turned with a straight screwdriver. The knob is small, so this is a big plus.

I also like the curved fingerholds on the body. These are comfortable and feel right when you are skewing the tool into a hinge mortise. Plus, they give the tool a little sex appeal. The fit and finish on this tool is also excellent. The iron is quite durable.

The downside: The tool has an open throat. The almost 3/4"-wide open section on the sole makes the tool unsuitable for work on narrow edges, such as cleaning up the ends of haunches in frame-and-panel work. If your work consists of a lot of work on edges, this isn't the tool for you.

Bottom line: I think the perfect plane for my work would be a router plane that had a closed throat, a compact size, curved fingerholds and an iron that had a square shank. Perhaps there's a vintage tool out there that meets these criteria, but I don't plan to start scouring eBay any time soon. Having both these tools covers all my needs.

— Christopher Schwarz


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The stuff I write about Stanley's metallic scrub planes always gets me in trouble with the people who use the tool to dress the faces of rough lumber. You can find my stories here and here. You can find the floggings on any of the forum sites (just search under "Schwarz"+"pin-headed mouth-breather").

In any case, I think it's lovely if you use one of these planes to dress the faces of your lumber. But I really like using it for edges, a use that seems to be supported by some documents and chats I've had with an older union carpenter. The tool is a tracheid-chomping monster on edges, a fact that I was reminded of yesterday.

I was faced with making a panel out of some Eastern white pine for an upcoming story in Popular Woodworking on gluing up panels. The long edges of the boards were really waney. I was going to have to remove 1" of width on each edge to get to the good material. So I marked out my scribe lines with a panel gauge, grabbed my scrub plane (instead of a hatchet or drawknife – other good options) and went to work.

Using short, choppy strokes, I could hog off more than 1/16" in a pass. Each edge took less time than Lucinda Williams took to sing me one of her new songs off of "Little Honey." Within about 12 minutes, all four edges were done and ready for the jointer plane.

Sure, I could have used the Powermatic 66, but I don't like missing a minute of Lucinda.

— Christopher "numb as a flounder" Schwarz

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Though the new Stanley premium handplanes won't hit stores for a month or more, the company has released these photos of the planes that are going to be used on some packaging. These photos were taken by the company's United Kingdom employees.

Up until now, we've only seen computer renderings of the planes. Though the resolution of the photos here don't really allow you to see all the detail, the tools look quite good under Photoshop's magnifying glass.

In case you've actually been woodworking (instead of reading or writing about it on the Internet), you can read all the details about the new line of planes here.

— Christopher Schwarz

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The new line of premium Stanley planes should be available in January or February 2009, according to Stanley officials. The planes were originally planned for a November 2008 release, but a company official said they needed to fine-tune the finished appearance of the tools – plus Stanley ran into a couple mechanical snags.

The premium line of planes – two block planes, a smoothing plane, shoulder plane and low-angle jack – are aimed to compete with premium planemakers such as Veritas, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and Clifton. You can read a detailed write-up of the specifications of the new Stanley tools in this earlier article.

Stanley's premium chisels are still being fine-tuned, and no release date has been set, according to the official.

Meanwhile, Stanley officials are working on the packaging and released the updated renderings shown here. You can see how these new planes incorporate the famous Stanley "Sweetheart" logo into the tools. As soon as we have photos of the tools, we'll post those as well.

— Christopher Schwarz

The unveiling of two new Veritas block planes this week has thrilled some customers with their sleek design, and confused others. Is Veritas – a company historically focused on function more than form – changing its course with these new planes?

"It's not a direction change at all," says Robin Lee, the president of Lee Valley Tools and Veritas (the company's tool-making arm). "We have four planes coming out soon that are all under 100 bucks."

Instead, the new more-expensive planes are a way to provide a full range of choices for the customer, from Lee Valley's less-expensive Utilitas line of planes in a maroon finish, to the standard line of black planes that the company has been building since 1999, and to this new line of shinier planes that are designed for the customer who demands better materials, more features and a more refined design aesthetic.

"Some people want something that looks better," Lee says. "It's definitely a different aesthetic. But we have never meant for this to be a high-volume product. If it is a high-volume product, we'll go broke."

So why did Veritas produce it?

Check the jump for the full story.

— Christopher Schwarz

Handplanes with corrugated soles vex many woodworkers. If you find them on a vintage plane, should you grab it or should you shun it? If you order a bench plane from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, should you spend the extra $35 to get a corrugated sole or is that money better spent on some Lehman Brothers stock?

Corrugated soles started showing up on planes in the late 19th century. Craftsmen noticed that their newfangled metal planes were harder to push than their old-fashioned wooden-bodied planes, according to period accounts and patent papers.

So manufacturers began to mill corrugations in the soles of their planes. For a peek at their reasoning, check out this 1869 patent by E.G. Storke:

“…(E)xcessive friction was caused by their exact and even faces (of their soles), which were not materially varied by use or atmospheric changes.

“When used on very level surfaces, there were so many points of contact that the friction was troublesome, and the adhesion was further increased by atmospheric pressure, as partial vacuums would thus be formed.”

In other words, the planes were sticking to the work when the boards became really flat. I’ve encountered this when working with closed-grain woods, especially poplar and maple. In fact, if the board isn’t too large, I can occasionally lift the board off the bench because it is stuck to the tool’s sole. It’s a neat trick.

But is the plane harder to push if it doesn’t have corrugations? Many pointy heads I’ve talked to about this are dubious. Friction, they explain, is a function of force – not the surface area of the sole.

I have planes with both smooth soles and corrugated ones, and if there is a difference in effort required to wield them, I cannot discern it.

But there are some practical differences you should be aware of:

1. Corrugated soles on vintage planes are easier to flatten because there is less metal to remove. So if you have an old sole that needs work, corrugations are a plus.

2. The corrugations hold paraffin or wax. This wax wears away completely during use, so I assume it is lubricating the sole.

3. Corrugations on some sizes of vintage tools are rare. So if you are a collector, keep an eye out for them.

So here’s my bottom line: Corrugations don’t change the function of the plane for better or for worse, so it doesn’t really matter either way. I wouldn’t spend extra money to have them added, but I wouldn’t kick them out of bed for eating crackers, either.

— Christopher Schwarz

A lot of people ask to see my tool collection. I tell them I don't have one – I'm a user, not a collector. If I say that again, however, I'll be a liar.

Somehow during the last few months I've started acquiring edge-trimming planes. I've owned a Lie-Nielsen version – a right-handed copy of the Stanley No. 95 – for many years, and that was all this woodworker needed.

But this spring I heard Thomas Lie-Nielsen tell the story of how he got started in the plane-making business in the 1980s to a group of students at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. I'd heard the story before: Lie-Nielsen began making the edge-trimming plane after picking up the business from machinist Ken Wisner.

This time, the story was different because one of the students at the school (Jeff Skiver) brought one of the Wisner planes to the class to show. (You can read about his plane in a blog entry I wrote in April.) As I held the little sucker, I thought it would be cool to own one of these Wisner planes as a piece of modern planemaking history.

So I started trolling eBay with little luck. Meanwhile, we got the new Veritas versions of the edge-trimming plane in iron, and (mystery of mysteries) those ended up in my tool chest. Then I stumbled upon an AMT version of the tool for sale that I couldn't pass up. The AMT version is, by the way, a complete piece of dung. Its red velvet bag is nice, however.

I knew I had crossed over when I started regretting not buying the stainless steel version of the plane that Veritas offered but is now sold out.

And this week, I finally got my Wisner.

Thanks to some help from Skiver, I found an eBay auction for a Wisner plane and snagged it for a fair price. When it arrived, I was thrilled with it. Not only is it well made, but it is the first used tool I've ever bought that came perfectly sharp and ready to go. That's the good news.

Here's the bad news: My Wisner plane has an iron body with a brass lever cap. So now I'm going to have to look for a Wisner with a bronze body. And the Veritas version in bronze.

And that stainless Veritas plane. Curses.

— Christopher Schwarz

Several years back I was fitting some 1/4"-thick mullions and muntins into a door and needed to plane the little suckers to remove their sawmarks.

Planing thin stock can be a real pain. I've seen how other craftsmen do it. Lonnie Bird drives escutcheon pins into his benchtop (or a planing board) and works against those. It's a neat trick. David Charlesworth attaches the stock to a planing board temporarily with cyanoacrylate. This is fantastic for long stock especially.

Here's how I came up with my method. I like to use planing stops because they are fast. And as I was considering how to plane these little nubbins of wood I was staring off into space outside my shop window and the tool rack hanging before it.

I remember thinking to myself: "For this planing stop, I need a really thin and rigid piece of material. Something with really square edges so they'll grab the work. I need something like a steel ruler."

So I searched over the junk pile in the window well behind my bench. (Note: This is my secret shame area. Though I don't have a tool well in my bench I have a junky window well instead.)

None of the little bits of wood in the window well fit the bill. They were too thick or their edges weren't crisp. Then it occurred to me: Hey moron, why not use a steel ruler?

And so I did, and I continue to use my slender 12" Shinwa to this day. It works great. I clamp it to the bench and go to town. And now to go get some ginseng.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of the most powerful things about hand tools is that they allow you to work on small areas of a board with ease. Instead of running the whole board through an electric planer to remove a small area of ugliness, you can usually remove it with a couple well-placed swipes of a handplane.

But exactly where you put those swipes is the topic of this blog entry.

This week I'm building a contemporary Arts & Crafts cabinet in maple for the master bath (OK, you caught me, it's a flipping potty cabinet). One of the structural details of the cabinet is that it has a thick base piece and top cap that are attached to the carcase.

The top cap and base are face-glued to the carcase. Getting the pieces to mate can be tricky. There are a lot of surfaces to get flat, and the fit between the carcase and the top cap and base will be highly visible (to me and my spouse, at least).

To encourage mating, I recommend friction (I think the human resources department is going to come down on me for this post).

First secure the carcase against your bench. Then take the mating piece and rub it vigorously against the carcase. About 10 swipes will be enough. Remove the mating piece and then get yourself down low so you can see light reflecting off the carcase. The high spots on the carcase and its mating piece will be burnished and will be shinier than the low spots.

Mark the high spots with a pencil. Then remove the shiny spots using a plane with a short sole, such as a low-angle block plane. Remove the high spots from both the carcase and the mate. Then repeat the process until you get the fit you want.

— Christopher Schwarz

Mark the shiny high spots with a pencil.

Then remove the high spots using a plane that has a short sole.

Reader Tim Williams writes: I have a number of old Stanley planes that I’ve spent a lot of hours cleaning and refurbishing. I’ve read multiple places about how when tuning up a plane, it’s a good idea to flatten the mating surfaces of the frog so the iron beds well, with lots of contact, to avoid chattering.

However, I find that whenever I take a flat iron and attach a chipbreaker to it, the tension of the chipbreaker on the iron puts a very gentle curve on the iron. So, when I attach the chipbreaker and iron to the frog, there’s a very slight gap under the middle of the iron (just enough to see light through if I hold it up to a light). I’ve tried loosening the bolt holding the chipbreaker and iron together to reduce the tension, but if I loosen it enough to remove the tension, the iron slides against chipbreaker.

 On one plane, I’m using a Hock chipbreaker. It mates more fully against the iron and doesn’t curve the iron, so it appears to bed better on the frog.  Finally, I’ve not really used these enough to notice much chattering.  Should I even be worrying about this?
 
What's happening here is that you have too much curvature in your chipbreaker. When you cinch down the iron, it bends to match the shape of the breaker. There are several solutions to this: You can remove some of the curvature in your chipbreaker. Place one end of the breaker in a vise and push against it gently. It will bend easily. Then try again.

Another solution is to replace the iron with a thicker aftermarket iron. This is always a good idea. The thicker iron will resist bending. Or you can replace both the iron and chipbreaker, which is what I like to do with vintage handplanes that I am going to use for high-tolerance planing (jointing or smoothing).

The bigger question is if the bending is even a problem. It depends. With some forms of planes (such as infill planes) the lever cap puts so much pressure on the iron and breaker right up by the mouth that it doesn't matter if the iron ouches the frog or not.

In Bailey-style planes, the more contact you get between the frog and iron the more stable the whole assembly will be and the less likely that bad things will happen, such chattering or the plane going out of adjustment while planing.

When I set up a Bailey plane, what I shoot for is a flat sandwich of frog, iron and breaker, as shown in the photo above. That works best.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Our RSS feed has been bockety this week. If you like this post, you might also like my post earlier this week on how to understand the system of bench planes which is here.

Almost every day I get an e-mail or a phone call that goes something like this: "I'm a beginner. I want to buy some handplanes. But I have no idea where to start or what to buy. Help."

I'm happy to answer these questions (it's my job), but I noticed after 12 years of answering these pleas that I was saying many of the same things over and over again. So last night I did a mid-sized brain dump on the bench planes – both bevel-up and bevel-down.

It explains my rationale (and the historical rationales) for each plane size, from the No. 1 up to the No. 8. I fully admit that this article has a lot of opinions in it, but they are opinions based on a lot of work and experimenting with many different methods of work (there's a good reason I grew a beard like David Charlesworth's....)

In any case, you might find this article useful, infuriating or amusing. It might also help you if are ever asked: "Hey, I'm a beginner...."

Read the Full Article: "Understanding Bench Planes"

— Christopher Schwarz

Stanley Works will unveil a new premium bevel-edge chisel this year that bears some similarities to the company's vaunted Everlasting line of chisels that were made between 1911 and 1942.

Like the Everlasting chisels, the new Stanley chisels will have the blade, head and shank made from one piece of solid steel with wooden scales. The vintage Everlastings were a little different in that the wooden handles completely surrounded the steel shank. The new chisels will have the beech scales infilled into the steel, much like a H.D. Smith perfect-handled screwdriver.

Stanley officials said the chisels will be made from high-carbon steel hardened to 59-62 on the Rockwell "c" hardness scale. The tools will be hand-finished and be available in the following sizes: 1/4", 1/2", 3/4", 1", 1-1/4" and 1-1/2". The tools will be sold individually or in boxed sets of four and six sizes, officials said. They will be available only in woodworking specialty stores. Estimated pricing for the individual chisels is $17.99 to $19.99 each.

Company officials released the two computer renderings shown above. Production models are not yet available for testing.

Stanley has been testing prototypes of this chisel with woodworkers and builders, and 74 percent of those who used it said they'd consider switching to this tool. Because of its heavy-duty construction, Stanley officials said the tool will be ideal for both workshop and installation work.

From a furniture-making perspective, woodworkers will be interested in how narrow the side bevels of these chisels will be. Narrow side bevels are ideal for hand-dovetailing. It's hard to tell from a computer rendering what the tool will look like in steel, so I wouldn't make too much of the illustrations.

Also, many chisel users are keenly interested in how long their chisels will hold an edge. In my book, Stanley has always done well in this department. The yellow-handled Stanley U.K. chisels have always maintained a terrific edge for me. And the company's FatMax chisels have also been surprisingly durable and easy to sharpen (I have a set at home).

We'll obtain a set of these new chisels as soon as we can and report all the details. The chisel market is a crowded one (just open any woodworking catalog), so the quality of these new tools will be closely watched by competitors and consumers.

Also, a Stanley official sent me updated computer renderings of the company's new line of premium handplanes that we reported on here. There have been a couple changes to the details, particularly in the shoulder plane. I've posted these new renderings below.

— Christopher Schwarz

The standard-angle block plane.

The low-angle block plane.

The low-angle jack plane.

The No. 4 smoothing plane.

The shoulder plane.

The new Stanley No. 4 smoothing plane.

Stanley Works will release five premium-grade handplane models this year that are designed to compete with planes from Veritas and Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, officials said.

The line includes new designs for a No. 4 smoothing plane, a low-angle jack plane, a shoulder plane and two block planes. All of the Stanley planes will have features that users have come to expect from high-end tools, including irons made from thicker A2 steel, bodies made from ductile iron and handles made from highly polished rosewood.

The new Stanley No. 62 low-angle jack plane.

Additionally, the sole castings will be heavier, all the knobs will be made of brass, the soles will be flat to .003" and many of the planes will incorporate a "patented lateral adjustment locking lever," according to company officials and literature.

The planes, which should be available by November, will have the following manufacturer's suggested retail price: The No. 4 and the low-angle jack will list for $179. The block planes and the shoulder plane will list for $99. The planes will be available through woodworking specialty stores, not home centers. Company officials said the tools’ A2 irons will be made in England and the plane bodies will be made in Mexico.

Stanley officials said they designed these planes after working with the company's "discovery teams." These teams went into specialty stores and furniture-making shops and conducted two-hour interviews with woodworkers about what they wanted in a handplane.

Stanley then designed prototypes and solicited feedback from these users, which they then incorporated into the tools' final designs.

The end results were very interesting. For example, the new Stanley No. 4 is a bevel-down plane. What's different is that the frog and base are cast as one piece. This reduces the opportunity for blade chatter to occur. Also interesting: The plane has an adjustable mouth like a block plane. You unscrew the front knob and slide a throat plate forward and back for different mouth apertures.

The No. 62 Low-Angle Jack Plane also has many of these refinements, including the patented lateral-adjustment mechanism.

The new Stanley No. 92 shoulder/chisel plane.

The No. 92 Shoulder/Chisel Plane also features brass adjustment knobs and a wooden grip at the rear. Though Stanley officials didn't have the finished width of the tool available, the No. 92 was historically a 3/4"-wide tool.

The new Stanley No. 60-1/2 block plane.

The two block planes – the No. 9-1/2 standard-angle plane and the No. 60-1/2 low-angle block plane – have less radical changes compared to their historic brethren. However, they have been redesigned to look like the rest of the new family of planes, and all the planes will use the famous Stanley "Sweetheart" logo from the early part of the 20th century.

When asked if other plane designs were in the works, a Stanley official said there was nothing they could discuss at this time.

As soon as functional production models become available, we’ll be testing these new planes and will report the results in an upcoming issue of Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine.

— Christopher Schwarz

The new Stanley No. 9-1/2 block plane.

Veritas has just released its much-awaited Side Rabbet Plane (at a special introductory price) and Veritas was generous enough to permit me to test-drive it here in our workshop.

Though I still am getting comfortable with the tool, below are my initial impressions after trimming out about a dozen grooves and rabbets this week.

About Side Rabbet Planes
Side-rabbet planes are specialty tools that belong in the family of joinery planes. They are used to clean up and widen the difficult-to-trim walls of rabbets, grooves and dados. To be honest, some craftsmen don't use these planes at all. Instead of trimming a dado wider, they will trim the mating panel instead. Both perspectives work.
 
There are two kinds of metal-bodied side-rabbet planes (and there are wooden ones as well). The Stanley Nos. 98 and 99 have a right-hand version and a left-hand version so you can work with the grain in grooves in rabbets. The other format is to combine both cutters into one tool. Stanley did that in its No. 79 (with mixed results in my book). And the English Preston version (and later Record version) got it right.

Lie-Nielsen makes versions similar to the Stanley, but in bronze. I've used them and they work quite well.

Veritas Specifications
The Veritas Side Rabbet Plane is similar to the Preston plane: One cutter is on top. One is below. A handle is in the middle. Veritas, as always, has made improvements to the design that are beyond the "socks on a squirrel" variety.

The sleek handle – which reminds me of a beetle's back – pivots up and down depending on which cutter you are using. The handle is spring-loaded and doesn't slip during use – which is saying something because you have to apply significant hand pressure to these tools in use.

The handle is comfortable. It burrows into your palm without poking you.

The other major advancement for the user is the irons. Veritas has lapped the flat faces of these O1 (high-carbon) steel irons so sharpening them up takes only minutes. And when it comes to skew-cutting planes this is critical. A small sharpening error with a skew plane and the tool won't function correctly.

The other thing to note about the tool is its depth stop, which locks quickly and squarely (thanks to some clever machining) in either direction. You also can remove the toe piece of the tool with a screwdriver so you can work into the corners of stopped rabbets, grooves and dados.

In putting the tool to use, I was impressed (as always) with the irons and how easy they took an edge. Sharpening them without a jig is fairly simple work because the bevels are quite large and register firmly on a sharpening stone.

The only modification I'd recommend to the irons is to relieve the acute corner of each iron as it will dig in a little deeply in use (and will get worn away anyway). Veritas recommends this in the manual, and it is a two-minute job with a file. Be careful not to go too far – the point needs to extend beyond the sole a tad.

The real skill to learn with this plane is starting the tool. All the varieties of this tool have a small nose that you have to register against the sidewall of the joint you are going to trim. So it takes a steady hand to start a clean cut. Once you begin, the tool is easy to manage in the cut. The Veritas works in cuts up to 1/2" deep.

Trimming the long grain of grooves and rabbets is easier than trimming the end grain in dados, so start with the easy stuff first. This style of tool isn't hard to use, but I wouldn't practice on a live project piece.

The Veritas Side Rabbet plane costs $139, but it will be offered at a special introductory price of $119. You can order one through this link.

— Christopher Schwarz

My first fillister plane was so pathetic it's a wonder I'm not the poster boy for DeWalt routers. But then, I don't look so good in yellow. Mom says I'm a winter.

Abut a decade ago I bought a Sargent copy of the execrable Stanley No. 78. I know I'm being hard on a plane that many people like and use ("execrable" means "not so good"). But every example I've used of this plane has a wobbly fence – no matter how tightly I screwed the thing in (yes, I used a nail) or how tightly I cinched the lone thumbscrew.

So I was quite pleased to buy a C. Nurse moving fillister plane with a wooden body. It is a Cadillac: steel sole, brass wedge securing the nicker, smooth-acting and locking depth stop. But I've always been at a loss as to recommend a new maker for those woodworkers who don't want vintage.

This week I received a moving fillister plane that I ordered from Philly Planes in England, and it is all I can do to stop typing and rush out to the shop and cut some rabbets. In fact, I'm just back from another rabbeting session.

Philip Edwards, the man behind Philly Planes, has done a remarkable job of building a traditional wooden-bodied moving fillister plane that works right out of the box. (Another choice for those who like new planes is the European moving fillister version from ECE. I've also seen one from Clark & Williams.)

Here are the pertinent details: The Philly Planes moving fillister is 9-3/4" long with an 1-1/4"-wide skewed iron that's 1/8" thick and made from O1 – high-carbon steel. The iron is pitched at 55° and (once you get the fence involved) the plane will cut rabbets up to 1-1/8" wide and 1-1/8" deep.

The fence is a ½"-thick slab of beech secured to the body of the plane with two straight-head bolts and threaded inserts – which will ensure many years of long service. The depth stop adjusts smoothly with a knurled brass knob. Also a nice touch: The sole is lined with a sizable chunk of boxwood that covers rabbets up to almost a 1/2" wide – again, it's another touch that says this plane is in it for the long haul.

Everything about the plane feels right, from the action of the wedges to the fit in the hands. And, as a bonus, it comes fully sharpened and ready to go. And that's a good thing because I was ready to go as soon as it arrived.

In use, the plane performs as a well-tuned vintage wooden-bodied moving fillister. Shavings curl up smartly out of the escapement and drop onto the bench. Rabbets form quickly, whether cross-grain or with the grain.

The price is 175 pounds. With our weak dollar that's about $350. Delivery time for me was about five weeks from the time I placed the order.

The moving fillister is as essential to a hand woodworking shop as a smoothing plane, and Philip Edwards makes a very nice version. If anyone has experience with the ECE version, please add a comments below. I'm sure we'd all like to hear about it.

— Christopher Schwarz 

Lately I've been planing stuff that has been a lot nastier than your typical run-of-the-mill cherry, oak and walnut. First Senior Editor Glen D. Huey tried to torture me by bringing in some curly maple for the blanket chest on cover the Summer 2008 issue.

Then I built the cover project for the Fall 2008 issue from some walnut that should have been on the burn pile. Honestly, I had to go through about twice as much material as usual to find enough wood to build this 18th-century wall cabinet.

Then, this weekend I had to plane some rowy mahogany while teaching at Kelly Mehler's School of Woodworking. Kelly had prepared mahogany pieces for the project that the students built (a Shaker utensil tray). And a lot of that was rowy – which is when the wood has rope-like bands of grain through it where the grain reverses in each rope.

The tool that has kept me away from the wide belt sander these last few months has been my little Wayne Anderson smoothing plane. I've had this tool for more than two years now and have published an article on its long-term performance in the most recent edition of Popular Woodworking, the August 2008 issue.

Below is the text of that article, plus a link to download a pdf slideshow presentation that shows the evolution of this form of plane using pictures supplied by Wayne himself. Enjoy.

Despite the amount of bronze, iron and beech in my tool cabinet, most woodworkers need only three bench planes: A fore plane to reduce the thickness of boards, a jointer plane to flatten them and a smoothing plane to prepare them for finishing.

That’s in a perfect world. In reality, we work with a material (wood) that is unpredictable, cantankerous and vexing – like my first redheaded girlfriend.

During the last few years, I’ve gradually folded a fourth plane into my  arsenal, and now I cannot imagine working without it.

It’s a small smoothing plane with a steeply pitched iron (a 57° angle of attack), no chipbreaker and a mouth aperture that a gnat would have a hard time squeezing through without damaging his Dipteran hinder.

This is my plane of last resort. When my 50°-pitch smoothing plane leaves nasty torn grain in its wake, I pull out this plane. It doesn’t care if there’s a grain reversal in the board. Or if I’m planing against the grain. Or if the grain is interlocked, curly or worse. When set for a fine cut, this plane almost never fails me.

This plane has become a staple of Wayne Anderson, a custom planemaker in Elk River, Minn. (andersonplanes.com or 763-486-0834). This form of plane started out several years ago with Wayne’s interest in high-angle planes without a chipbreaker. He built this version for writer Kerry Pierce to test for a competing magazine. Then I bought the plane from Wayne. (Despite the fact that it was a used tool, I paid full price.)

Since that time, I’ve fallen head-over-heels for the plane, and Wayne has pushed the tool’s design in new directions for other customers. If you’re not familiar with Wayne’s work, he’s a bit different than other custom makers. He seldom makes the same tool twice.

The profile on the rear of the iron might change. Or the shape of the sidewall or lever cap will morph. But the tool still looks like itself – like a fraternal twin.

As to the function of the tool, you could set up a 6"-long block plane to do the exact same job, but there’s no way the tool will look as good or fit your hand so well.

With this small smoothing plane, the coffin shape of the body lets you squeeze the tool right in the middle by its mouth. And having mastered the tool, I find I can change the depth of cut merely by squeezing and pressing at the center of the tool, or by releasing that pressure. The weight of the plane (2 lbs. 2 oz.) keeps the tool in the cut without chattering (try that with your block plane) even when I use little-girl pressure to control it. The result: Thin shavings; no tearing.

The rear bun is rounded nicely so it feels good against my right palm, and the tall iron keeps my hand right where it should be.

The short sole (about 5-1/2") allows you to plane in areas that longer smoothing planes can’t get to. When I say this I don’t mean tight little spaces inside a cabinet, I mean the small and large hollows that occur on any flat board. A small tool rides the gentle waves of a board where a longer plane skims off the peaks instead. And when you’re trying to get a tabletop looking right (perfect flatness be darned) a short plane is invaluable.

If you’re thinking of investing in one custom plane, this plane would be an excellent addition to any standard lineup. These tools start at $825. Need more convincing? Wayne has provided a slide show of the different forms of this plane during the last few years that you can download below. I’ll warn you, however, it’s dangerous to watch.

WAminis-1.pdf (2.16 MB)

— Christopher Schwarz

Last week I bought a toothing plane from a Midwestern tool collector. I've always wanted one of these tools, and this one is particularly nice.

Toothing planes are lot like scraping planes: The iron is vertical. What's different is that toothing plane has a serrated cutting edge – instead of a smooth edge with a tiny hook, like on a scraper plane.

Toothing planes can be used in a couple different ways. Some people use them to flatten a board's surface. The vertical pitch of the iron prevents tearing in gnarly woods, and the serrated teeth allow you to take a fairly big bite.

Other craftsmen use a toothing plane for traditional veneering jobs with hide glue. The toothing plane would prepare the substrate – flattening it and giving it some "tooth" – before you apply the adhesive and the veneer.

I'll probably use this tool for both of these sorts of jobs – they're handy and simple tools. This one was probably made by the craftsman, and the maker was likely German. The "horn" at the toe is a feature of many European planes.

Oh, there's one other feature of the plane I like:

I wish I had a good story about the origin of this tool, but I don't. The tool collector who bought it acquired it during a tool swap meet. So there's no cool history to share – just the mystery of me wondering what sort of work the other "C SCHWARZ" did.

— Christopher Schwarz

Thanks to my job and the freelance work I do for The Fine Tool Journal, I get to see a lot of specialty handplanes that most people see only in the catalogs or in one of the lusty tomes by The Sandor.

But despite getting to actually use a corebox plane and dozens of other unusual and cool forms, I tend to stick with the basics when I build. I use the jointer plane more than any other bench plane, followed by the smoothing plane and block plane. A few other specialty tools – router planes, a moving fillister and a plow plane – round out my personal set.

One plane I’ve never quite made nice with is the Stanley No. 95, the edge-trimming block plane. This tool is now made by both Veritas and Lie-Nielsen Toolworks in iron or bronze. And though the two brands have some significant differences, the basic form is the same.

The No. 95 is a block plane with a skewed blade and an integral and fixed 90° fence. The idea is that you press the fence against the face of your work and the tool planes the adjacent edge perfectly square to the face.

I’ve never been fond of the tool – I tend to use my jointer plane to dress edges square to the faces. But during the last few projects I’ve built I’ve found the tool in my hand a surprising number of times. I’ve been using it to plane solid-wood edging square and flush to plywood. I’ve been trimming face frames flush to carcases. And I’ve been dressing rails and stiles of doors and face frames before assembly.

That last task finally convinced me that the tool is a gem for a shop that blends power and hand tools. Here’s why: When I dress stock by hand, all the edges of my rails and stiles end up planed square from the jointer plane. So the No. 95 sits idle.

But when I dress my rails and stiles with a powered jointer (as I’m doing this week), the edge-trimming plane shines. The goal there is to remove the toolmarks, to keep the edges perfectly square and to not remove a lot of material. The No. 95 accomplishes all three goals with aplomb. Typically one or two light passes is all it takes to get crisp inside and outside edges on the parts for a frame-and-panel construction.

Here are a few tips for use: First, the set-up is key. The iron has to project evenly from the mouth or your edge won’t be square. Take some test passes and examine the shavings. Their thickness should be the same on both long edges. Shift the iron around until the tool makes a consistent shaving and a square edge.

Second, press down on the toe of the tool with more force than you would use with a block plane. The plane tends to want to rise out of the cut in softer woods. Also, use one hand to press the tool’s fence against the work and use the other hand to press the work against the fence on the opposite side. All this pressure ensures your cut won’t go astray, which can be trouble.

Now, despite my crush on this tool, I haven’t been able to justify getting both a left- and right-hand version, however. Because my stock is dressed with a planer, it’s true on both faces, so I can work with the No. 95’s fence on either face of the stock without worrying about grain direction. The tool can be pushed or pulled with ease.

Now if I could just find the same love for my chisel plane/paperweight I wouldn’t feel so guilty every time I open a certain drawer in my toolbox.

— Christopher Schwarz

As woodworkers dive into handwork, they usually start with a block plane, then the bench planes, the saws and the joinery planes.

Joinery planes – such as plow planes, router planes, shoulder planes and rabbeting planes – are some of the easiest planes to set up and use. Their irons are straighforward to sharpen (no curves needed), and because the tool doesn’t produce a show surface, you don’t need to be a maniac about the keenness of your cutting edges.

One of the most essential joinery planes is the moving fillister. It cuts a rabbet either across the grain or with the grain. And it can make a rabbet of almost any size thanks to its adjustable fence.

Moving fillisters are different than other planes in the rabbeting family in that its fence is adjustable (planes with a fixed fence are called standing fillisters), plus it can work across the grain because it has retractable nickers (planes without the nickers are just plain old rabbet planes).

The iron Stanley No. 78 is the most common vintage version of this tool, however I’m not fond of the form. The fence wobbles because of the way it is attached to the body, so the plane does a poor job in hard woods (in my experience). Record, by the way, fixed this problem with its metal version of this plane, though it’s a tough tool to find in North America.

This really is a case where the wooden versions of a plane are superior. Wooden-stock moving fillisters are fairly common in the secondary market, though they usually require some rehabbing to be usable. So what do you do?

You could ask Clark & Williams to make you one – they showed me an excellent moving fillister they make a couple years ago. You could buy an ECE from toolsforworkingwood.com. Or you could buy a new traditional one from Philip Edwards at Philly Planes in England.

Philip’s planes are excellent. I recently reviewed his miter plane plus a plane designed for raising panels for drawer bottoms. They both work like a charm. So it’s very exciting to me (and a good sign for hand work in general) that there is a new moving fillister on the market from Philip’s shop.

We’ve ordered one for our shop here, and I will offer a full report once it arrives. Until then, however, if you need a moving fillister, I can recommend Philip’s planes highly.  

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Want to learn more about joinery planes? Then definitely pick up a copy of “The Wooden Plane” by John M. Whelan.

When a young Thomas Lie-Nielsen set out to start making premium handplanes in the early 1980s, he launched his business with an adaptation of the Stanley No. 95 edge-trimming plane.

But Lie-Nielsen wasn't the first person to make this tool in bronze. That footnote goes to machinist Ken Wisner, who made the planes in small batches and sold them through the Garrett Wade catalog. When Wisner decided to get out of that business, he turned over his patterns to Lie-Nielsen, who took them to Maine and set up shop in a shack on his farm.

I've always wanted to own one of these Wisner planes – partly out of curiosity and partly out of my desire to own a piece of recent history. But they're hard to come by. And they're expensive when they do come up on eBay.

So this weekend, I got a little schoolgirl thrill when Jeff Skiver pulled a Wisner out of his bags of tools during a class on handplanes at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. He wasn't looking to sell it, and I won't tell you what he paid for it. Suffice it to say that Skiver practically stole it from a starving widow who had substantial medical bills.

The Wisner is an interesting piece of work. On the one hand, the main casting was nicely polished and the machined areas were crisp and clean. But the thumbscrew on the lever cap was black plastic (the screw itself was metal, however). And the main screw that joined the lever cap, iron and body casting was an off-the-shelf hex-head screw.

Wisner signed his name on the plane with some sort of rotary tool (perhaps a Dremel). And the blade was thinner than the Lie-Nielsen version.

Of course, when you are blazing a trail like Wisner was, you have to overlook details like this and appreciate the sheer fact that this plane exists. Plus, look at what this little plane led to in Warren, Me.

And if anyone has a Wisner plane they'd like to part with (for the sake of history, natch) please drop me a line.

— Christopher Schwarz

The fore plane is a traditional English tool used to get rough boards fairly flat so that you can then make them really flat with a jointer plane and ready to finish with a smoothing plane, scrapers and (sometimes) sandpaper.

Fore planes are supposed to be about 14" to 18" long. If you want to use an old metal plane as a fore plane, a No. 5 jack plane or No. 6 fore plane would be a good choice. I use a Hock Tools A2-steel replacement blade in my fore plane. A2 is a little harder to sharpen for me, but this modern steel takes a heck of a beating before it gives up, so it's perfect for a fore plane. I also have a couple wooden-bodied fore planes that are nice because their light weight makes them less tiring to use.

Fore planes are supposed to have a curved cutting edge and are used directly across and diagonal to the grain of your board. Most people understand the idea of working across the grain (it allows you to take a deeper cut without tear-out). But many people are flummoxed by sharpening the curve on the edge. In fact, I've had about a half dozen readers send me their irons and ask me to do it for them.

Because I don't want to open a sharpening service, here is how I grind and hone the curved edge of a fore plane's iron. It's a simple process. And if you take your time the first time you do it, I know that you will succeed.

This week I noticed that the edge of my metal fore plane was chipped up and the tool was getting quite hard to push. It was time to grind and hone a fresh edge. The first thing to do is mark the shape of the curve on the iron so I can replicate that shape. I use a curve that is an 8" radius. I've experimented with lots of curves between 10" and 6" radii. I like 8".

I have a wooden template that is the same width as my iron and has the curve shaped on one end. I place the template on flat face of the iron and mark the curve with an "extra fine" point Sharpie.

Place the template on your iron and trace its edge on your iron. A thin, consistent line is best.

Then I go to my grinder to remove all the nasty chipped-up metal. I keep my grinder's stock tool rest set to always grind a 25° bevel. I don't futz around with the tool rest. The first thing to do is to grind away the excess metal right up to your marked curve. This is done with the iron at 90° to the stone. I just balance the iron on the tool rest and go to town.

Grinding at 90° to the stone removes metal quickly to the shape you want and it creates a small flat on the edge of your iron. This is a good thing. The flat helps prevent your steel from overheating while you grind away the bevel at 25°. Thin steel heats up really quickly.

Hold the iron 90° to the wheel and show the edge to the iron. Remove all the steel right up to your Sharpie line. The first time you do this, take your time. It gets easy real quick.

When you get to the Sharpie line, put the iron flat on your tool rest and start grinding the bevel until the flat spot on the end is almost – repeat almost – gone. You remove the last little whisker of the flat on the sharpening stones.

Start by showing the middle of the iron to the grinder wheel. You'll feel when the bevel is flat on the stone. Then sweep the iron right to grind up to the left corner. Try to keep the bevel in full contact with the wheel the entire time. Then repeat this process and sweep left.

Continue to grind and watch the flat shrink. Don't use a lot of pressure when applying the iron to the wheel or you will cook your edge (it will get black).

Show the center of the iron to the wheel and sweep left or right. Here I'm sweeping right to grind to the left corner.

Here is my completed edge, ready for honing.

Here is the flat left on the tip of that edge. The reflection makes it look bigger than it really is. It's a little less than 1/64".


You can then hone the edge freehand. The edge doesn't have to be perfect because the fore plane never produces a finished surface. However, you can use your cheap little side-clamp honing guide to help you (and your edge will look a lot sweeter, as well).

Put the iron in your honing guide and set the iron to hone a 30° secondary bevel. Place the iron on your coarse stone (#1,000-grit or coarser if you've got it). Put finger pressure hard on one corner of the iron and press that to the stone. Pull the guide toward you and shift your pressure to the other corner. This will feel awkward at first. But eventually you'll rock it smoothly and naturally.

Repeat this process by starting with all your finger pressure on the other corner. If you are doing this correctly you should see an X-shape appear on your stone. Then it's just like sharpening any tool.

Rock the edge back and forth as you move the jig. This might look hard. It's not. It also tends to shape the wheel of your honing guide into a slight barrel shape – which is a good thing.

Remove the flat bit on the end of the iron – you'll know it's gone when you can feel a burr on the other face of the iron. Then move up the grits until you run out of grits or patience.

Now reassemble your chipbreaker and your plane. Sight down the sole of the plane and tweak the lateral-adjustment lever until the curve of the iron is in the center of the sole. This is easy to see.

When you are done sharpening you should have a nice even secondary bevel.

Then work directly across the grain of a board. Increase the projection of the iron until you are removing material quickly and can easily push the plane. The shavings should be thick – I shoot for 1/32"-thick with most woods.

You can probably take a larger shaving in a softwood, but I usually poop out if I try to take a shaving thicker than 1/32" – but yet, that's a lot of material for one stroke of a plane.

The fore plane is really useful for me, even though I have a nice powered planing machine. It allows me to remove material in a localized area with ease or to peel the edge off a rough board faster than my jointer (because I can work only the high spots). And it allows me to flatten boards and panels that are too wide for my jointer and planer.   

— Christopher Schwarz

“After many vain attempts at ornamentation ‘on my own’ I learned that choice classic designs had been well thought out and established before my birth. It was for me to study them, to revel in their line and proportion until the spirit became my own and controlled my perception.”

-- Walter Rose, “The Village Carpenter”

Among all the many types of handplanes, it is the so-called moulding planes that generate the most confusion, consternation and frustration among beginning woodworkers.

Drawing a fair moulding profile, selecting the tools to cut it and actually proceeding with the work is enough to make many woodworkers cling to their collection of router bits forever.

If you’re curious about cutting mouldings by hand, then I heartily recommend a new DVD from Don McConnell and Lie-Nielsen Toolworks that will lay the groundwork for you to understand the tools and how they are wielded.

And as valuable as these lessons are, I think the most eye-opening aspect of the DVD is that you get to watch McConnell make several profiles from start to finish. Seeing the profiles appear stroke by stroke, plane by plane, is a convincing argument that the work is fairly straightforward and do-able. And plus, the results are more beautiful than anyone can achieve with a routed and sanded moulding.

McConnell is, in my opinion, one of the most knowledgeable scholars on early woodworking tools who is working today. Plus, McConnell spent many years as an interpreter at The Ohio Village, a professional hand-tool furniture-maker and a highly regarded ornamental carver in the Columbus, Ohio, area. I’ve always thought of him as the Indiana Jones of the hand tool world – his encyclopedic knowledge of early woodworking is backed by years of putting his book-smarts to use at the bench.

As a result, this entire DVD is a jewel. McConnell, now a planemaker at Clark & Williams, explains the basic anatomy of mouldings so you can understand the difference between Grecian and Roman shapes, and you can see how complex mouldings are in fact the assemblage of simple forms.

McConnell then demonstrates a couple basic complex moulding planes (the side bead and the ovolo) so you can see how a complete (usually simple) moulding can be created with one plane.

Then he moves into the hollows and rounds, which are the tools that you can use to create almost any shape or size of moulding. McConnell efficiently shows how to lay out a moulding on your work and then prepare the profile with cuts from either a rabbet, plow or moving fillister plane. Finally, he demonstrates how the hollows and rounds bring the final moulding to shape with little fuss if you have followed the correct procedures. Proper rabbets help guide your hollow and round planes as they do their work.

In addition to creating several mouldings, McConnell also demonstrates how to sharpen moulding plane irons and how to maintain (and fix) their cutting profiles. He also shows how to properly saw (and shoot) your moulding so it can be applied to your project. That is followed by an eye-opening discussion of snipe bill planes, one of the least understood wooden moulding planes in the traditional toolkit.

When you’re done watching the DVD, be sure to print out the accompanying glossary and bibliography on the disc. The glossary will help reinforce the names of all the shapes McConnell discusses in the DVD. And the bibliography suggests some books on furniture and tools that will help you build on the basic principles in the DVD so you can create well-proportioned, classic and crisp mouldings for your own work.

— Christopher Schwarz

Legacy Planeworks officially opened its doors on Tuesday and began selling kits that allow a home woodworker with no metalworking experience to build an English-style shoulder plane with naval brass sides, a steel sole and an exotic wood infill.

The company currently offers two sizes of shoulder planes – 1" wide and 3/4" wide – with prices starting at $425. And two more infill kits are on the drawing board: a chariot plane and a Norris-style A6 smoothing plane with a mechanical blade adjuster, says Marty Sivar, one of the owners of the company.

The kits have been in development for many months, Sivar says, and the parts are so finely machined that you can literally snap the metal dovetails in place when you take the parts out of the box.

"We wanted to offer a refined kit," Sivar said today in a phone interview, "not something you had to spend hours prepping the parts for assembly and cleaning them up."

The kits come with all the metal components you need (even the drill bits for boring the wood components). The home planemaker will need a ball pien hammer, a steel plate (or anvil) and a handful of files to complete the project, Sivar says. Legacy Planeworks also sells all the files required for planemaking on its web site: legacyplanes.com.

Some woodworkers might remember the kits that were sold by Shepherd Tool, a Canadian company run by two partners outside Toronto. After Shepherd's early success with its first Spiers-style smoothing plane kits, the company ran into some rocky times and shuttered its doors in early 2006 with a crowd of angry customers who were upset about a variety of problems, from not being able to get technical questions answered, kits that were missing parts, and credit cards that were charged with merchandise never shipped.

Sivar was one of those angry customers of Shepherd, and he said he and his partner, Ernie Barber, have set out to make sure that Legacy Planeworks is everything that Shepherd Tool was not.

Sivar says that the company's web site will not sell you a kit unless there are more than two in stock, and that every order will be shipped within two or three days of it being placed. Plus, Sivar says that Legacy now has plenty of kits on hand to sell right away (one of them is heading for our office for a full review, by the way).

The kit components for a Legacy shoulder plane (both photos courtesy of Legacy Planeworks).

Every kit has a money-back guarantee and includes a 52-page instruction manual that includes many step photos that will walk the planemaker through the process. The manual, Sivar says, has taken a long time to develop and has been through many revisions to make the instructions as complete and foolproof as possible.

"I think our customers will be very satisfied from the minute they open the box," Sivar says.

Sivar has experience both as a woodworker and a metalworker. He started his career as a machinist and then went into the military. After a short stint as a corporate pilot, Sivar completed some marketing and management training and went to work for a petro-chemical company, where he is now an area manager and nearing retirement. Barber works in law enforcement and is an accomplished woodworker and carver who specializes in 18th-century furniture.

Sivar says all the plane components are going to be professionally made by other metalworking companies to Legacy's specifications; that will leave Sivar and Barber to focus on working with current customers and developing future products.

Personally, I'm quite pleased to see someone getting back into this business. I built several of the Shepherd kits, including a couple smoothing planes, a chariot plane, a shoulder plane and a panel plane. Despite the glitches (my kits were missing critical parts, too) the overall experience was fun and you learn a lot about plane mechanics by building one of the tools.

I think it's especially encouraging that Legacy has started out offering just the shoulder plane kit. Of all the kits I built, that one was the easiest to complete and will likely give would-be planemakers a good taste of the process.

In the coming weeks, I'll post photos of the new kit and my progress building it.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I was first learning to use a handplane, I was both intimidated and skeptical of some of the claims made by the "handplane gods."

The gods claimed they could plane any species of wood, with any grain direction and with any sort of figure in the wood without the wood tearing out. So what was the secret of the gods?

Sometimes it was the tool (usually an infill plane, but sometimes a Bedrock that had spent some time in a peyote hut in New Mexico getting in touch with its inner frog). Or sometimes it was their sharpening skill and waterstones (#100,000-grit stones, or perhaps the trail of split hydrogen atoms they left in their wake.) Sometimes the secret was their skill – they could plane any board with a piece of tin foil taped to a Monchhichi doll.

But I was skeptical, because these boasts were never accompanied by photographic evidence.

So here's a bit of truth about my own work. I've been handplaning boards for more than 15 years now, and I still fight and struggle with tear-out, even in some domestic species. Usually, the way I deal with tear-out is to choose my wood with extra care and stay away from boards that are going to give me trouble. Careful planning makes for easy planing.

After that, I must say that I have the most success in removing tear-out by using a plane with an iron pitched at a high angle (usually 60° to 62° – whatever my honing guide can manage).

This week I'm building a blanket chest for the Summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine, and the wood is some kicking tiger maple that I bought from a fellow woodworker's private stash. While machining all the boards, the grain tore out in some critical spots.

Then I flattened all the boards and assembled panels with my jointer plane. It was freshly sharpened, pitched at 45° and set for a fairly light cut – .003" or .004" I'd say. The tear-out didn't recede much, but I didn't panic.

That's because I have a plane with a 62° angle of attack that is for just this purpose. The one shown on my bench is the Veritas Bevel-up Smoothing Plane, but don't take that as an endorsement of that single brand. I have a Lie-Nielsen version at home (the low-angle jack) set up identically. And I can even get this 62° angle on a standard old-school handplane by honing a back-bevel on the iron.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's not the tool as much as it is the angle.

The photos show the results of the high-pitch plane. The tear-out took about eight passes to remove with the tool set to take an extremely thin shaving. I don't think I've entered the realm of the handplaning gods, but when you have small victories like this, it sure makes you feel like one.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of the best things about building old-style workbenches (like Andre Roubo's bench above) is that there are little lessons you learn by using them. At times, you learn the lesson unconsciously and it takes a couple years for you to even learn that you learned it.

This morning I was flattening the panels for the blanket chest I’m building for the Summer 2008 issue by planing them directly across the grain — what Joseph Moxon calls “traversing” in his book the “Mechanick Exercises.”

So I’m minding my own beeswax while traversing, and I notice something I’ve been doing for a while without really thinking. While traversing, I wedge my left foot under the stretcher, and I use that foot to help pull my body back on the return stroke.

So I paused and I pulled my left foot out from under the stretcher and tried planing with both feet planted on the floor instead. That felt a lot like working. So I wedged my foot back under the stretcher and returned to work.

Did Roubo design this workbench with this little detail in mind? Likely, no. But the stretcher’s location has always been curious to me – it’s only 5" off the floor. Other benches I’ve worked on (and constructed) put the stretcher considerably higher off the floor. If you have a low stretcher, give this a try and let me know what you think.

— Christopher Schwarz

Memory is a funny thing, especially in my family. But I swear that during my last days as a college undergrad there was a car dealership in Chicago that offered a special deal to its customers.

Buy a car and get a Yugo for just $1.

If there is a Yugo of the woodworking world, it has to be the Stanley planes that are called “the transitionals.” These poor suckers have a wooden body with a metal Bailey-style adjustment mechanism that works a bit like an Australian toilet (that is, they spin backwards than what we are accustomed to).

Most modern woodworkers first encounter these planes through Patrick Leach’s venerable web site “Patrick Leach’s Blood & Gore.” This site offers commentary on almost every plane made by Stanley. Tool collectors print out every page of this enormous site. They put the pages in a three-ring binder. They live by the advice, which is, for the most part, totally dead on the money.

For example, Leach contends that the Bed Rock series of planes are overrated (bingo). He laments the fiberboard planes (fair enough, but so do small children, invalids and lunatics). And he mocks the No. 55 (which deserves it). But he also runs down the No. 6, a plane that I find quite useful. And he advocates the ritual burning of almost all the transitional planes. He even has photos!

Let me be the first person to say that the transitional planes aren’t perfect. Many of the defects he points out are dead-on. But some of these tools have some distinct advantages that, when realized, are impressive. Here’s my take.

Downside: The adjustment knob is too puny.

The transitional planes are excellent for some jobs, and are fairly worthless for others. You just have to think about it for a minute. Personally, I think the transitional planes that are jointer planes and fore planes are outstanding. I’m not so fond, however, of the many transitionals that are smoothing planes.

Let’s take a look at the way these planes work for a minute and I think you’ll see where I’m coming from.

In essence, these planes marry a Bailey-style blade adjuster with a wooden body. The advantages of this sort of tool are:

1. The sole is tremendously easy to true compared to a metal plane.
2. The tool is lightweight, thanks to the wooden body.
3. You can purchase enormously long and accurate jointer planes (up to 30") in this form because the wood is so inexpensive.
4. You can dial in your shaving thickness with great accuracy thanks to the patented Bailey adjuster.
5. You get the same sweet wood-on-wood feel as you would when working with a traditional wooden plane.

The disadvantages are:
1. Closing up the mouth of this tool is a stupid exercise in shimming under the blade with cardboard.
2. The tote and knob are poorly attached to the plane (most are wobbly).
3. The blade-adjustment mechanism works opposite of the same adjuster on a Stanley metal plane – you spin the wheel counter-clockwise to extend the blade.
4. The blade-adjustment wheel is too puny.

If you carefully sort through these advantages and disadvantages you’ll see why these planes make excellent jointers and fore planes. First, the soles are easy to true – far easier than truing the sole of a metal plane. When I fixed up my first jack plane, I spent days (yes, days) lapping the sole to dead flat. I want those days back.

When I flatten the sole of a transitional plane, I set my power jointer to the lightest cut I can manage and make a pass on the plane’s sole. Then it’s dead-flat and done. When readers ask me how to flatten the sole of a metal jointer plane, I’m at a total loss. I’ve never been able to manage it to my satisfaction. I just make the sole worse, turning it into an iron banana.

With a fore plane and a jointer plane, the mouth aperture is fairly unimportant. So the fact that it gets larger as you true the sole is immaterial. However, it’s this problem that makes the transitionals troublesome as smoothing planes. You can stupidly adjust the plane’s frog forward to close up the smoother’s mouth, but that just makes the iron chatter because the wooden bed and the iron bed that hold the iron are then out of alignment. The best way to close up the mouth on a transitional is by patching the mouth with an extra piece of wood.

Downside: The metal frog and wooden bed are two separate pieces. Close the mouth (or open it) and you'll make chatter, not shavings.

The light weight of these planes makes them excellent jointer and fore planes. They are easy to wield, even if you have the arms of a little girl (of which I am guilty).

And you don’t have to create a perfect surface with these two classes of tools – that’s the job of the smoothing plane. So if you have a jointer plane iron with a few pits in it that leaves a few plane tracks behind, then so be it. The smoothing plane (or Fein sander, or Timesaver wide-beltsander, or the abject blindness of your loved ones) will fix that.

But here is why you really should buy these planes. They are dirt, dirt cheap. The No. 32 shown in these photos was $35, and I overpaid. You can get transitionals really cheap. In fact, some tool dealers think they are too lame to even sell them.

Some people give them away like Yugos.

— Christopher Schwarz

If you are one of the thousands of people who have taken a chair class at Michael Dunbar's "The Windsor Institute," then you have certainly used one of the travishers or spoon-bottomed planes from Crown Planes.

The makers of these fine tools, Leon Robbins, passed away earlier this month. If you don't know the interesting story of how Robbins came to make chairmaking tools, I highly recommend you link over to Dunbar's blog, where he has posted a fitting tribute to Robbins, one of the pioneering modern planemakers.

The good news here is that Crown Planes is still in business and making high-quality tools for making furniture and chairs. Jimmy White, who now runs the business, has promised to loan us a few tools in the coming months so we can publish a review of his wares.

— Christopher Schwarz

Whenever I'm in the presence of a piece of furniture that is designed and built to perfection – such as a chair by Brian Boggs – it is a thoroughly humbling experience. Like I should just put my tools up for sale on eBay and take up a serious hobby of finally mastering tiddlywinks.

And after a few years of using planes from Clark & Williams, I should, by all rights, feel the same way. The planes that come from this planemaker's workshop in Eureka Springs, Ark., are as perfect a piece of woodworking as you will ever find. Every detail, inside and out, of the planes is crisp. The surfaces of the beech tools look as good as any piece of fine furniture at Winterthur. And the overall design aesthetic of the tools connects you directly to the best 18th-century British planemakers.

But here's the thing about these tools. When I use them I'm not humbled. I am, instead, inspired to push my furniture-making skills to their absolute limit. To make my furniture look as good as these planes look (and work).

I'm not alone. Whenever we have visitors in the shop (or whenever I teach), I put a Clark & Williams 3/16" beading plane in their hands and show them how to use it. Within four or five strokes, they are hooked, usually forever.

I've owned a small coffin-shaped smoother from Clark & Williams for more than five years. But it wasn't until almost two years ago that I became totally ensnared. I got to borrow an entire set of hollow and round moulding planes, plus, I logged some time on the company's plow plane (for cutting grooves) and moving fillister plane.

The list of moulding planes I want has gotten to the point that I am considering teaching more woodworking classes somehow just to get the scratch up to buy them. Don't get me wrong. I don't think these tools are expensive at all. Considering the craftsmanship and handwork involved (not to mention the performance) I consider the Clark & Williams planes to be a bargain. A half-set of hollow and round planes (that's 18 planes) is $2,455. That's $137 per plane. Buying them one at a time is, obviously, more expensive.

Now, if you are interested in these planes but cannot afford the tools, your gut reaction might be to buy old moulding planes instead. This can be a perilous path. For every four moulding planes I buy off eBay, usually one is serviceable. The rest have warped wooden stocks, hopeless wedges or irons that verge on worthless.

So instead, I have a second option for you: Make your own. Larry Williams has a new three-hour DVD that is just out from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks that explains the process. Not just making the wooden stock, but about how to design the plane, how to sharpen and use the planemaker's tools and how to fabricate the irons. The DVD is a time capsule of traditional methods that have all but been lost and is enjoyable to watch even if you don't want to build a plane.

A few weeks ago a couple readers visited our shop, and one of them brought a couple of his Karl Holtey planes. Holtey makes the finest metal planes I've ever seen. Every construction detail is perfect, no matter how closely you look. We set up one of the Holtey planes and started making shavings on the nastiest Jatoba board we could find.

But the hero of the day was my little 3/16" beading plane. After making their first bead, both readers were ready to order one for their shop. That beading plane is as perfect as anything I've seen from Holtey's shop. And I've seen quite a few.

If you ever have the opportunity to get your hands one a Clark & Williams plane at a woodworking show or in a friend's shop, do not pass up the chance. The planes were my ticket to the next stage of craftsmanship. And they might well be yours.

— Christopher Schwarz

Kelly Mehler has opened the registration for his 2008 classes, including three classes that I’ll be teaching on precision handsawing, planecraft and building the Holtzapffel workbench from Issue 8 of Woodworking Magazine.

There are still spots available (as of this posting). If the classes fill up, I encourage you to sign up for the waiting list. People’s schedules change and so many of the people on the waiting list get in.

Before I drone on about the classes I’m teaching, I also want to point out that Larry Williams and Don McConnell of Clark & Williams will be teaching a class on making wooden moulding planes at Kelly Mehler’s school on Feb. 25-29. I would take this class if I had the time in my schedule available. These two gentlemen are a living treasure, and the way they build these tools is without compromise or shortcut.

OK, now for the self-serving part of the entry that helps keep my children in Nikes.

Precision Handsawing: March 1-2
This is one of my favorite weekend classes to teach because I think there is so much to learn about sawing and sawtooth technology. During the weekend, we’ll be learning all about an English-style of sawing (though you don’t have to use Western saws to do it). And we’ll be building a traditional sawbench. That’s a good thing, because I keep giving my sawbenches away to woodworkers as gifts.

Building Furniture With Handplanes: June 14-15
This is a new weekend class that I’ve developed based on requests from other woodworkers. Many handplane classes focus on the bench planes but they ignore the joinery planes and how to actually use the tools to build furniture. In this class, we’ll learn a bit about sharpening and a great deal about using both bench planes and joinery planes, such as rabbet planes, plow planes, router planes and shoulder planes. And we’re going to use all these planes to build a Shaker silverware tray.

Build the Holtzapffel Workbench: Sept. 8-13
This six-day class is going to be the highlight of my fall. We’re going to build the Holtzapffel Cabinetmaker’s Workbench, the bench on the cover of Issue 8 and the bench I use in my shop at home. I’ve modified the construction process slightly so we’ll be building benches that can be knocked down and shipped back to your home when we’re done. You’ll be able to build the bench in ash, yellow pine or maple. We’re going to source all the wood for you and do the brutal machining before you arrive so the first day we’ll be gluing up the top.

If you have any questions about the classes, feel free to drop me a line. Also, I’ll soon be posting my schedule with the Marc Adams School of Woodworking as well.

— Christopher Schwarz

Preparing small tabletops or irregular-shaped tops for finishing can be difficult with handplanes. If the top has a lot of mass, you can usually count on friction to help hold the top in place. Or you can screw it down from the underside – assuming the underside is not a show surface.

But sometimes the best solution is to make some cauls to grip your work, which is what I did this morning in the shop to plane the top of some 18"-diameter tabletops for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine. The cauls are made from the scrap parts that fell off when I cut the tops to rough shape on the band saw.

Then I skipped the scrap pieces through my planer to reduce their thickness (I also could have used a jack plane). Then I bored 3/4"- diameter holes in the cauls so they would press-fit over my 3/4"- diameter round dogs in my benchtop. Finally, I pinched the top between the two cauls using my wagon vise (though any end vise can do the trick).

When I've done this on workbenches with square dogs, the solution is to cut the pointy end of the caul so it is flat. Then you brace the flat against your square dog.

No matter how you rig your cauls, pinching the work between two cauls has some advantages, as long as you don't use too much pressure. With two cauls you can rotate the top to work cross-grain if necessary or move the top so it's more convenient to plane.

This arrangement works great with belt sanders. It's not necessary if you use a random-orbit sander to prepare your work. Then you can just place the work on a blanket and get to work.

— Christopher Schwarz

Whenever I get into some serious handwork, I always try to boil down the processes so that I can 1) remember it myself and 2) occasionally explain it to others (including a couple children who are slack-jawed with boredom).

Today as I was cleaning up the half-lap joints for the Stickley 603 tabouret on my workbench, I was reminded of one of the guiding principles: Don't work the end grain unless you have to. End grain is unruly. It is usually confined to small surfaces that are hard to work accurately. And working it poorly will rip out chunks of precious face grain  as well.

This is why I don't own any side-rabbet planes. In all my years of working wood, I have honestly never encountered a situation where I had to have those tools and no other tool would do. (Boy they look cool, though.) If a dado is too skimpy, I'll thin the mating shelf's face grain instead. The face grain is so much easier to plane, my tools don't have to be as sharp, my work is less at risk and it is another chance to remove tear-out in the shelf.

So when I was fitting the first half-lap shown in the photo above, I cut my shoulders just a hair tight. So I took two swipes of the edge of the mating piece. Perfect fit.

One side item: In the magazine world, we're supposed to ignore our competitors. It's a time-honored tradition. We're supposed to pretend they don't exist so that readers don't flee our product in droves. So with that in mind, I'm actively ignoring an interesting new workbench plan in the newest issue of Woodsmith magazine (No. 173). I suggest you also ignore their quite excellent and robust plans for a wagon vise (what they call a tail vise in the book) in that issue.

– Christopher Schwarz

Let’s talk about the historical and controversial scrub plane. First a little history, then the controversy.

Whenever I talk about the fore plane, the handplane used to get boards to rough dimension and flatness, there’s always someone handy who asks if the fore plane is the same as a scrub plane.

They’re not the same. A scrub plane has a shorter sole and a cutter that has an edge that is far more rounded. Traditionally, scrub planes were a European tool (the Germans called them Bismarks or Cow planes), and fore planes were an English tool. Yet Stanley made two metal-bodied scrub planes between 1896 and 1962, and Lie-Nielsen and Veritas make them today. So confusion abounds as to which tool one should use for roughing lumber to build furniture.

You can use both. I think the longer sole of the fore plane makes it easier to get a board flat, but I’ve seen people who can do wonders with a scrub.

OK, that’s the history. A few years ago I wrote an article for the Fine Tool Journal that discussed a little theory of mine that the metal scrub plane was more useful for working down the edges of boards on a job site than for working down the faces. And I have taken a beating for that article from a few people. And hey, that’s fine. I like a good airing of the grievances. (The original article is available at Wiktor Kuc’s fine site.)

Recently a reader, Jeff Ross, passed me a few entries from old Stanley catalogs that helps shed further light on the scrub plane and its historical role. It turns out that it was used both to remove wood from edges and from faces. Here is the text from an 1898 Stanley catalog:

“It is particularly adapted for roughing down work before using a jack or other Plane.”

OK, that sounds like it was used in a cabinetshop for processing rough lumber: Point: Critics. Let’s read an entry from a 1914 catalog:

“With these planes the user can quickly plane down to a rough dimension any board that is too wide to conveniently rip with a hand saw, an operation that is sometimes called ‘hogging.’ ”

OK, that sounds like working on edges. Point: me, mostly, I think. And then the 1958 catalog:

“A time and energy saver! When you have to remove quite a bit of wood from the edge or surface of a board – not enough to rip with a saw but a great deal to plane – use a Scrub Plane.... Use it to back out base boards, true up sub flooring, size rough timber, clean gritty boards etc.”

OK, that sounds like carpentry work, mostly, a view supported by a retired union carpenter I interviewed a few years ago. So I’d say that the scrub plane was probably used for any operation that was rough. Use it on edges. Use it on faces. Use it anywhere you need to remove a bunch of material in a hurry.

Any more theories or evidence are always welcome.

— Christopher Schwarz

Shooting boards are one of those hand-tool jigs that people talk about (a lot) but few people actually know much about. Whenever I teach, students always clamor for a demonstration of the device, even when I'm teaching something that doesn't directly relate (sawing tenons, sharpening, steaming salmon).

Recently, Bill Kohr at Craftsman Studios in San Diego loaned me a ramped shooting board that he sells in his catalog and store to try. So here's a short review of the shooting board and a brief tutorial on using it to trim end grain.

First things first: Why do you need one? Shooting boards are one of the most powerful trimming tools in my shop. They are the only tool, machine or jig that I have that reduces the length of a board in .001" increments. They adjust the ends of boards so they are square, even if you have only 1/32" or less to remove. Trimming cuts like this can be tricky on power equipment because the spinning saw blade can deflect in the cut, giving you an inconsistent cut through the thickness.

The shooting board (some call it a "chute board") holds your work in position and 90° to a track that a handplane rides in. Push the plane in the track and it will trim the end of the board until it is square. (Note: There also are shooting boards designed for long grain, but I generally plane these freehand or use the tail vise and dogs to do the job – but that's an entry for another day.)

The shooting board shown here is made by Micheal Connor in Australia from New Guinea Rosewood, a dense and stable material. This shooting board is unusual in that the area that holds the work is ramped about 4° along its length. This ramping does two things: It spreads out the wear on your plane's iron a little. For example, a 3/4" x 6"-wide piece of stock will wear an area of your iron that's 1-3/32" instead of a 3/4"-wide area of your iron. Plus, the ramp makes the plane a bit easier to push through the end grain because the ramp creates a shearing cut.

Having the ramp is nice, but I wouldn't call it a do-or-die feature. My shop-made shooting board is flat and made from plywood. It's fine. I just have to push a little harder and sharpen more often.

The downside to the ramp is that you have to do some extra rigging to support long workpieces that stick out off the shooting board. I have an adjustable planing stop on one of our benches that can be angled to support the work at 4°. Another option is to make a block of wood that has a 4° ramp – easy work on a band saw.

The Connor shooting board is well made and dead-nuts accurate. The fence, which is the most critical component of the jig, is secured in a dado in the ramp, so it's not ever going to move. My only real quibble with the jig is that the finish on the fence and ramp allow your work to slide around more than I like. I'd put a layer of stick-on sandpaper on the fence, which is what I have on my shopmade shooting board.

Shooting Board Use
There are many ways to go about using a shooting board. David Charlesworth has an excellent DVD on the topic that explores his simple shooting board and the techniques to use it. I've used his shooting board and his techniques with excellent results. But perhaps because of my American-ness, I do it differently. Charlesworth takes a pass with the plane, then pushes the work up against the sole of the tool and makes another pass. He repeats this until he makes a full-width cut and is at his destination length. I usually use his technique when reducing boards in length, but do it a bit differently when correcting the angle on the end of a board.

So I start with my out with a board I've trimmed on our out-of-whack (surprise!) miter saw. It's out by a couple degrees. I put plane in the track (I always use a heavy plane with an iron that is sharpened straight across). Then I put the jointed edge of the board against the shooting board's fence and show the wonky end to the plane's sole. That shows me which corner is high and which corner is low.

Now relieve the corner of the work that will go against the fence. Cut a tiny bevel with a chisel to reduce blow-out on the end. If I am working to a knife line I'll chisel the corner to that line.

I take the plane off the track and position the board so the low corner is flush to the track and the high corner stick out over the track. Then I push the work against the fence (push hard!) and then place the plane in the track and begin planing. Focus on pushing the plane down and forward. Use just enough force against your workpiece to keep the tool in the cut. If you push too much to the side you'll push the work out of position instead of cutting it.

When the plane stops cutting, the edge is square. Check your work to confirm.

The Connor shooting board is available in both left- and right-hand versions and is $95. For woodworkers who don't want to build one or question their ability to do so, I think it's an excellent way to get a jump-start on shooting.

— Christopher Schwarz

To most handplane users there are three principal ways to adjust the cutter in the tool: You can use a Bailey-style adjuster made popular by the U.S.-made Stanley planes, you can use a Norris-style adjuster made popular by T. Norris & Sons in its English infill planes, or you can use a mallet and tap the thing into position.

For years the debate had raged about which sort of adjustment mechanism is best (the American, the English or the Neanderthal). Me, I prefer the Bailey-style adjuster in metal-bodied planes, but that’s not the reason I’m writing this. Instead, it’s to explore a little wrinkle about the history of the Norris-style adjuster. As tool collector and carpenter Carl Bilderback told me: “Norris might have made that adjuster popular, but they didn’t invent it.”

Exhibit A is the Stanley No 12 Victor “Pocket Plane,” made by Stanley between 1879 and 1884. Bilderback showed me this plane from his collection in May, and I was intrigued. After taking the sucker apart, it’s clear that the adjuster is indeed almost identical to a so-called Norris-style adjuster, which wasn’t patented in England until 1913 (Patent No. 11526-13). Leonard Bailey patented his adjuster in 1878 (you can read the original patent on Google patents or download it:

IMPROVEMENT_IN_CARPENTERSJ_PLANES.pdf (77.97 KB)

The adjuster on the No. 12 works exactly like the adjuster on my Norris A5 smoothing plane. There are two threaded sleeves that (with the help of a couple studs) control both the projection of the cutter and its position in the mouth of the tool.

The No. 12’s adjuster works quite well. Bilderback had even sharpened up the blade on it and let me use the little guy for a bit. It was pretty sweet. In fact, it was so sweet that toolmaker Paul Hamler developed a keen interest in the plane and asked to borrow the tool so he could make a copy of it.

So perhaps we need to start calling both types of mechanical adjusters “Bailey-style” adjusters. (I really doubt that will happen.) But this little bit of research actually opens the door to some more research (if you’ve ever known an academic, you know that this is always the case, even when the additional research would be really uninteresting). Dig into the description of Bailey’s patent for the No. 12, and he admits that he wasn’t the first to come up with this idea for an adjuster, though he doesn’t name the person who beat him to the idea. Curious.

— Christopher Schwarz

Some manufacturers require a thousand square feet of booth space to show you the new tools they are going to introduce before the end of the year. Others require you to simply push the water glasses aside on the dinner table to see the new line.

This evening the editors of Popular Woodworking had dinner with Robin Lee, president of Lee Valley Tools, and his spouse, Lucie. We brought our appetites. Robin brought a bag of new handplanes and tools that he pulled out one after another. First there was a round of beer. Then came the new router plane and some new rulers. Salads. Squirrel-tail planes. Bread. The long-awaited plow plane. (While I had salmon for dinner, this tool was the main course for me.)

Plus, Robin shared lots of information about the products you are going to see appearing in the catalogs in the coming months. Just remember this: You are among the first to see some of these tools, so the photographs aren’t my best (a bedspread is a poor photographic sweep). And that you should be patient when trying to get your hands on them. With that in mind, here’s some of the really cool stuff.

Veritas Small Router Plane
The Veritas Router Plane is one of the company’s most finely made tools, in my opinion. So I’m pleased to report that the Veritas Small Router plane is another winner. This is a closed-throat router, and it reminds me more of the routers built by pattermakers than it does of any historical model.

Here are some details: The small-scale router is ideal for cleaning out shallow grooves or recesses, such as hinge mortises. The 1/4"-wide blade is simple to adjust up and down using a knurled brass knob threaded through the body. Loosen the knob to adjust the blade and nothing happens. Yup. Nothing. That’s because of a wave washer that keeps the blade in position quite well, even with the blade’s locking mechanism loosened.

Nudge the blade and it shifts in position. Then lock the sucker back up. The router is quite comfortable to hold with the tips of your fingers. And the 3-1/4"-wide and 2-1/4"-deep body is made from ductile iron; the sole is flattened with a special lapping process that makes it dead flat. In addition to the standard position in the mouth of the tool, the blade also can be adjusted for use in bullnose work. The price is $45 (U.S.). Lee said this tool should be ready by Sept. 1.

Other cool planes and accessories in the works:

• Two Squirrel-handled Planes: Based on the “Little Victor” handplane released recently, the company is expanding the line of tools with these two new palm-sized planes. One is quite similar to the Little Victor except it has a nice palm-rest that looks much like the curled tail of a squirrel. The sole is flat and the blade-clamping mechanism is the same as on the “Little Victor.” (Read a review of this plane on our blog.)

The second plane has the same body style but the sole is curved, like that on the Stanley Model-Makers Plane. However, the curvature on the sole of the Lee Valley version is not as extreme. The side-to-side radius is 1-1/2". Front-to-back radius: 12".

Both planes measure 3-3/8" long at the sole, 4-7/8" long overall and 1-3/8" wide. Pricing: The pair will be sold for an introductory price of $65. After that, the planes will be $36 for the flat-soled tool and $42 for the curved one.

• A set of Phi Rulers: These cool rulers allow you to draw Golden Rectangles using the Golden Section (a proportion of 1 to 1.618). The rulers work like a CenterPoint ruler with a direct-reading scale. Translation: No math! You use one edge of the ruler to draw the longer dimension of the project, then you use the Phi ruler to generate the shorter one. You also can start with the smaller dimension of the rectangle and determine the longer side. A fair number of woodworkers use the Golden Section in designing furniture as this ration of 1 to 1.618 is pleasing to our eyes.

Also, Lee says that his staff prepared a 16-page instruction manual for the rulers that covered the history of the Golden Section and explored its application. Lee said, with a laugh, that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to send a 16-page instruction sheet with a ruler, so they’re going to post that on the web site.

The price of the rulers is right: A set of 6", 12" 18" and 24" is $15.95. (Available soon, if not now.)

• Veritas Small Plow Plane: The highlight was getting to see the much-anticipated Veritas plow plane, which is based loosely on the Record #044 plow plane. The plow plane is still a useful plane today for making the grooves for drawers bottoms and for small-scale box and door work – grooves for panels in rails and stiles. This plane (which was not ready for me to photograph) has a streamlined design.

Unlike other plow planes, the rear tote is wood instead of metal, which feels nice to the hand. The fence is designed to encourage the proper grip of the tool. And the way that the fence is held fast has more to do with the technology surrounding router bits than with historic tools. Think: router collet. Then think: very cool.

The Veritas Small Plow Plane should be available by the end of September. It will come standard with an A2 1/4"-wide blade and sell for $199. You also will be able to purchase the plane with four additional blades (1/8" up to 3/8") for $245, or purchase individual blades.

I didn’t get to use the plow plane (a couple key parts were plastic, plus we were in a restaurant), but the overall profile of the plow is curvier and more fluid than I expected. It was a bit hard to hand back over the table.

• A 30th Anniversary Plane: To celebrate the company’s 30th anniversary, Lee Valley is going to make a limited edition stainless steel edge plane. Lee says they are going to make 300 of them (using the lost wax process) and then destroy the molds. The plane looks like a cross between the company’s bronze version of the edge-trimming plane and they company’s more recent ductile iron version. No word on pricing or availability (and that’s my fault – I forgot to ask).

• The Veritas Hold-Down is getting an accessory – an optional shorter post. This will be a boon for people who don’t have a lot of extra space below their benchtops but still want to use a hold-down. The post is 5-1/2" long and will cost $7.20.

— Christopher Schwarz

Long-time toolmaker Paul Hamler has developed a new device that can turn many handplanes (both vintage and new) into a scraping plane that is easier to set up, tune and use than any other scraping plane I’ve used.

I’ve been working with a pre-production version of this scraping insert – which simply replaces the frog on your plane – for about three weeks now. And already I’m convinced that I want one in my personal toolkit and I’ve placed an order with Hamler. This is despite the fact that neither the price (an estimated $125 to $150) nor the delivery date (some time later in 2007) is yet firm.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. There are lots of questions that first must be answered about this unusual piece of equipment and why it might belong in your shop. Some readers might even wonder why anyone should spend money on a scraping plane when a card scraper can be had for $7 to do the same job. (The reason is that a card scraper is more likely to dish your surface, leaving ugly ripples that show up when you apply a film finish. Scraper planes don't do that.)

In fact, one of the first questions is why bother with this scraping insert when there’s another one available from Lee Valley Tools. Good question. The interesting answer is that the Veritas Scraping Plane Insert was invented by Hamler (he, Leonard Lee and John S. Lynn are listed as the inventors on the 1996 patent papers). Hamler says he thought the design and materials of the original could be improved upon and so he developed this new insert and is producing and selling it himself.

And indeed, this new insert is almost nothing like the Veritas version. Here’s how it works:

The insert fits into the wide-bodied Bailey-pattern and Bed Rock-pattern planes made by Stanley – the Nos. 4-1/2, 5-1/2, 6 and 7. The Bed Rock version also will fit Lie-Nielsen wide-bodied planes of the same sizes.

To install the insert you remove the entire frog assembly of your plane and replace it with Hamler’s device. Tighten the plane’s frog mounting screws and the job is done. The scraper, a thin 2-1/2"-wide piece of steel, drops into the tool and is secured with a single thumbscrew. This looks and feels just like Stanley’s old scraper planes, such as the Nos. 12, 112 and 212. But this is where the similarity to the old (and existing new) tools ends.

Intuitive Controls
The way you adjust Hamler’s scraping insert is truly ingenious and improves upon more than 100 years of doing things the hard way. What’s the hard way? If you own a scraping plane, you already know the answer. You adjust the cut of a traditional scraping plane by pitching the scraper backward and forward. Tipping the scraper forward makes the cut deeper and more aggressive. Tipping it back has the opposite effect.

One of the most frustrating things about the old mechanism is that it’s a true pain to change the angle. You change it by loosening two jam nuts. Then you twist one to tip the tooling forward or twist the other tip it back. Then you have to retighten the two jam nuts and test your cut. If you don’t get it the first time (and you won’t) then it’s back to the jam nuts for another round of righty-tighty time.

Hamler’s insert replaced the forward jam nut with a strong spring. So to adjust the scraper forward you turn the knob counter-clockwise and take a cut. To move the scraper back you turn the knob clockwise and take a cut. No jam nuts. No overshooting your mark. It works and feels much more like using a bench plane than the torture device that is the No. 112’s mechanism.

So how does Hamler get away with removing that forward jam nut? Isn’t it necessary to keep the insert rigid during the cut? Nope. The forward jam nut is a gill slit or an appendix. You need only one nut to keep the insert rigid because rigidity is important only when the tool is cutting – and that’s what the rear knob does. The spring keeps all the parts in tension so things aren’t flopping around annoyingly on the return stroke.

But About That Length…
The other curious aspect of the insert is that Hamler made it for (and demonstrates it in) a jointer plane body. That’s a 22"-long plane. Traditional scraper planes are much more like smoothing planes (the No. 112 is about 9" long). Why do you need a scraper insert in a jointer plane?

I haven’t talked to Hamler about this specifically, so he might have another opinion on it. But here are my thoughts. Scraper planes excel at dealing with large surfaces that have a lot of grain problems. I use them especially when dealing with glued-up tabletops. When you glue up a top, the first order of business is to arrange the boards to best appearance. But that might involve a lot of boards that have grain running in opposite directions.

Handplaning a top like this is a massive pain. And getting the seams right is enough to drive one to the random-orbit sander. But a scraper plane can generally ignore grain reversals. So you can flatten the top with a jointer plane and then follow up with a jointer-sized scraper with no problem. In other words, just skip the smoothing plane when the deck is stacked against you and go right to the scraper plane.

This is a time-saver in unexpected ways. Typically, I’d try to deal with a top first with a jointer plane, then a high-angle smooth plane, then a card scraper to deal with localized tear-out, then sandpaper to blend the planed and scraped surfaces together. With the Hamler insert I can go from jointer plane to jointer scraper to a bit of hand sanding.

If you like the shorter format, you can always put the insert in a No. 4-1/2 and it will be much like a No. 112. But I like the extra mass of the No. 6 that I have the prototype in. Plus, the longer plane will result in a flatter surface than a shorter plane or the washboarding that comes with a card scraper in inexperienced hands.

Another objection that some woodworkers might make is that you can convert a bench plane, HNT Gordon plane or bevel-up plane to a scraping plane using various tricks (such as large back bevels, turning the iron over or honing a very steep secondary bevel). All of these work; I’ve tried them. But they don’t allow you to change the pitch of the tool forward and back, and that’s useful when dealing with different species and different hooks on the scraper. The Hamler insert handles this task with enormous ease. Plus, the Hamler insert can hold scrapers of different thicknesses so you can choose a thick one for aggressive work or a thin one for light cuts in tricky burls.

The pre-production model shown in these photos is utilitarian-looking, according to Hamler. The production version will have more spit and polish. Believe that. If you’ve ever seen any of Hamler’s other work (he specializes in miniature tools), it’s impressive.

Hamler doesn’t have a web site, but you can contact him via e-mail at hamlertools@alltel.net to inquire about getting your name on the list for one of these tools.

— Christopher Schwarz

While my blog might pinch your checkbook on occasion, Konrad Sauer's new blog is a mugger in a dark alley with a Bowie knife. Yes, planemaker Konrad Sauer is now a blogger.

Oh sure, he lures you in with a hilarious story about the mummified squirrels in his house. Then there's a little entry about our trip to John Sindelar's hand tool event (for the record, our desperate search for a decent beer in northern Indiana was much more tragic than Konrad lets on. Note to self: Must blog about monkeys, fires and Corona – the other Guinness).

But then he wallops you with a photo of his newest little jewel. A high-angle, no-chipbreaker, toteless smoother that absolutely stole the show at Sindelar's. Several people (who shall remain nameless) ordered this plane. I am not on that list yet.

I got to use this little beauty and it works and feels as good as it looks. You can use it one-handed if you please. Or you can cradle it between both hands and coax out sweet sweet gossamer shavings from the escapement. I would say the shavings come from the mouth, but I couldn't find one on the plane.

Konrad plans to add an entry to his blog every week. So get in line at the plasma center (behind me). It's going to sting a bit.

— Christopher Schwarz

(And by the way, his entire site has been redesigned. Very nice.)

If you've ever struggled with sharpening a card scraper or using your handplanes while building furniture, there are two new DVDs on these topics you should find useful.

"Hand Scrapers: Understanding, Preparing and Using the Ultimate Finishing Tool" and "Building Furniture with Hand Planes" were produced by Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and hosted by Woodworking Magazine editor Christopher Schwarz (that's me).

The DVD on scrapers is based on my research into all the conflicting advice given on sharpening scrapers. I went through every one of my woodworking books and found 14 distinctly different methods explained for preparing this simple rectangle of steel. Using each of these techniques, I then prepared 14 scrapers and we compared the results in our shop here at Popular Woodworking.

And, as is our way, we took the best details from all the techniques to create a 15th way to sharpen card scrapers that is fast and makes a hook that is far more durable than those on any other scraper I've used. This 30-minute DVD shows you, step-by-step, how to prepare a scraper using these methods and how to properly use the tool.

Now, I generally am the harshest critic of own work (just ask Lucy, my spouse), but this DVD and the technique shown is one of the things I'm most proud of in my 11 years here at the magazine. It really was one of those few "a-ha" moments of my career. I hope you'll agree.

The other DVD, "Building Furniture with Hand Planes," explores a realm of hand-tool instruction that gets little ink. While there are endless articles on how to set up a plane (I should know, I've written some of them), there is precious little advice out there on how to actually use the tools on furniture. After all, we don't make shavings, we make furniture.

This 60-minute DVD shows you how to use a jointer plane, smoothing plane and block plane when building furniture. I offer my method for setting up all three planes with slightly curved cutting edges and how to use those curved edges to your advantage when making furniture.

With the jointer plane (one of my all-time favorite tools), I discuss:
• How to work on edges to produce square, straight edges and spring joints.
• How to work on assembled panels and case sides to flatten them using cross-grain and diagonal strokes.
• How to turn your tail vise into a huge shooting board (an old French trick).
• How to gang-plane your boards to identical thickness.
• How to cut tapers to fit an inset door.
• Match-planing, the pros and cons.

With the smoothing plane, I discuss:
• How to set up the tool to take a very fine shaving.
• How to use your smoother as little as possible (and why)
• How to smooth assemblies.

And for the block plane, I discuss:
• Why a curved iron is sometimes desirable.
• How to trim end grain without blowing out the ends of your work.
• How to use the tool for chamfering and in conjunction with your jointer plane to eliminate the splintering of edges.

The DVD on scrapers costs $20; the DVD on using planes in furniture work is $25. Both are in stock and available from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. Also, all Chris's proceeds from these two DVDs go to the Roger Cliffe Memorial Fund, a charity that provides tuition assistance to students in need at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. So your purchase will help other woodworkers.

— Christopher Schwarz

This weekend I got a chance to show off the Holtzapffel workbench at the Sindelar Tool Meet, talk to a bunch of tool collectors and buy some tools I've been coveting for too long.

But the absolute highlight of the entire event was a brush with greatness.

You see, I got to meet "the boy."

OK, some background for the uninitiated: Tool dealer Patrick Leach has been selling tools on the Internet for as long as I've been buying them. Every month, Leach sends out an e-mail newsletter that is (hands-down) the best-written tool newsletter in the business. His tools for sale are always the cream of the crop and his descriptions are oft hilarious.

(By the way, Leach is also the founder of the Blood & Gore web site, the best online reference on Stanley planes, and started Independence Tool with Pete Taran, which made the dovetail saw that Lie-Nielsen now sells. That saw launched the premium handsaw market.)

Anyway, one of my favorite parts of Leach's newsletter is that he has a "Tool of the Month," which is usually the most unusual, minty or rarest tool on offer. And every month, one of the photos that shows the tool features Leach's son holding the tool.

As I've been getting this newsletter for years, I've watched the child grow up, and Leach always peppers the tool's description with some comment about "the boy" or the "tool youth." For example: "Fresh from stuffing his mouth with Oreos while playing with his toy motorcycle, the tool youth wasn’t too happy to pose with this one, the much coveted #164 low angle smooth plane…."

So on Saturday afternoon I took a moment away from my demonstrating at John Sindelar's event to browse some of the tool dealer's tables. I was looking at a small router plane when I glanced up. Now it's rare for me to be speechless (just ask the magazine's staff), but I saw The Boy and all I could do was stutter: "Uhhhh, it's….uhhhh… The Boy!"

He and his father were set up right by the entrance to the building that houses the collection. Leach was working the crowd, cracking jokes and making deals. The Boy was helping out, arranging the tools and tending to the tool bargains that were arrayed on the blue plastic tarp off to the side.

"The best tools are back over here," The Boy called out to the crowd.

I obeyed him and went to have a look. I snatched up a brass router plane made by a patternmaker and an accessory for my brace that would allow it to accept small round-shank bits. The Boy was right.

I wanted to say something like, "I've known you since you were just a wee lad holding an ebony plow plane in a bouncy seat." But that sounded stupid. And I'm sure that it would seem creepy if I started talking to The Boy, and so I just admired him from afar. If you've ever wondered about it, The Boy is a good kid. He helped Leach the entire weekend and was one of the most well-behaved elementary-school kids I've met.



A smallish router plane by Paul Hamler. Yes, I ordered one..

Other highlights: Getting to meet toolmakers Paul Hamler and Jim Leamy. Konrad Sauer from Sauer & Steiner was there as well. I know Konrad quite well and we spent our evenings trying to find a decent beer (we looked a lot, but that's another story for another kind of blog). I did learn that Konrad has a profound weakness for powdered sugar doughnuts. John Sindelar, the host of this incredible event, bought about 3,000 doughnuts for the event. No lie. Konrad ate his fair share.

— Christopher Schwarz

Mr. Peel was shaped exactly like one of the Fisher-Price Little People, he jangled his keys in his pockets nonstop and he had a reputation as a tyrannical shop teacher at Chaffin Junior High School in Fort Smith, Ark.

My friends would talk in the school's lunchroom about how every student had to get a single board straight, square and flat using hand tools before they could proceed to building anything in shop class. Creating this "perfect board" was daunting for most students, and I was glad at the time that I was exempt from shop class (and Spanish class – whew) because I was in the journalism program.

Since junior high, I've heard about other shop class teachers who had a similar exercise, and the "perfect board" is part of the teaching at The College of the Redwoods and Rosewood Studios. During the last few months, I've added this exercise to the classes I teach on handplaning and it has been illuminating for me – and I hope for the students.

We don't start with rough wood (these are one- or two-day seminars). Instead I start with pieces of mild cherry or walnut that is ¾" x 6" x 14" and has been accurately jointed and planed on both faces. I quite like using machined wood for the exercise because it points out how machining a board might not make it flat enough for some work.

I instruct the students how to plane a true face using a cambered iron in a jointer plane and then how to use the camber to true both edges to the true face without creating a big hump in the middle. They don't have to smooth the faces and edges to perfection (though extra points are awarded for those who do) – so it's a good exercise even if you have only a jointer or jack plane.

Then the students submit the board to my straightedge and ruler. I show them the problem areas – where the light is leaking under the measuring equipment– I mark the high spots in chalk and send them back to the bench. It usually takes them a few attempts, but I'm always amazed that they manage to correct the problems once they can see them marked in chalk on the board.

If you've never tried this exercise, I think you should. Give it a shot and report back here on the Comments section below.

Now I'm not yet shaped like Mr. Peel; though after pizza last night and the endless web site coding of the last two months I am heavier and balder. And I hope never to twitch like he does, which was why he kept his hand on his keys I suppose. But I am entirely sympathetic to his "perfect board" exercise.

I just hope my students aren't talking about me in the lunchroom.

— Christopher Schwarz

I've got a weakness for shoulder planes. Though lots of people do great work without them, I find them useful for trimming the shoulders and cheeks of tenons, plus fine-tuning rabbets, half-laps, shiplaps and dados.

That said, I think that one of the weaknesses of the traditional shoulder plane has been the ergonomics of the tool. They are awkward to hold for some operations, and so most woodworkers develop special grips that make your forearm and hand look more like a claw.

This week John Economaki at Bridge City Tool Works loaned us one of his new ¾" shoulder planes, the HP-7, for a shop trial, and I was immediately impressed with the tool on all counts. Its design is reminiscent of some of the custom English shoulder planes from the 19th century that collectors call the "rhino horn" pattern – because of the prominent grip at the front of the tool.

I really like the rhino horn pattern plane and find the horn an excellent place to grip when pushing the tool with one or two hands. But there are many more details to the HP-7 worth noting.

This tool has a nice rear end, or (put more politely) a surprise ending.

The stainless steel grip at the back melts right into your palm and the tool feels like an extension of your arm. Your fingers (and thumb) fall into two milled semi-circular areas on the sidewalls of the brass body. The tool's depth adjustment and the mouth opening are controlled by two knurled adjustment wheels inside the body. This means you don't need to use a screwdriver to adjust the mouth – a nice touch.

The real surprise is when you go to remove or coarsely adjust the iron. You lift up the steel grip and the lever cap also swings up – like the doors on a gullwing car. It's so cool I think I did it about 30 or 40 times and showed everyone in the office. The other surprise is how you remove the iron – you pull the throat plate forward and remove the iron through the throat (with other shoulder planes you take it out the rear). There's no real functional difference here in my opinion, but it is a difference.

The tool has a thicker iron than any shoulder plane I've ever seen. The sucker is a full ¼" thick. And the HP-7 weighs more than other premium ¾" shoulder planes. It tips in at 2 lb. 12 oz. The Veritas is 1 lb. 15.7 oz. The Lie-Nielsen is 2 lb. 5.4 oz. You can really feel that extra weight during use, and it comes in handy when plowing through the end grain of shoulders especially.

When pressed into service, the tool was very nice to hold when upright or flat on its side. It performed beautifully, which isn't really any surprise. The extra weight helps keep the tool in the cut. The nice ergonomics keep your hand from cramping.

The tool retails for $589, which makes it considerably more expensive than the Veritas (about $160) or the Lie-Nielsen ($175). I'm supposed to return the tool to John Economaki when he comes here for a visit in June, but that might just be enough time for me to sock away enough money to hand him a check instead.

— Christopher Schwarz

We've had two crippling power outages in our office during the last three weeks. First the computer screen flickers. Then your left hand twitches to hit the keys to save your work. Then the building goes dark. Except for a few groans, the building gets as quiet as a cathedral as work halts.

Except for me, of course.

This week, I'm between big projects in the shop, and so I'm working on a few small-scale pieces to clear my head. I built a small dovetailed silverware tray using some scrap cherry and I've been building a couple picture frames for some paintings that have been sitting around the house.

My taste in art has always been a bit on the odd side. Lucy, my wife, and I prefer to buy what most people call "outsider art," a term I've never liked. (Kinda like the way I hate the word "blog.") These artists are street preachers, visionaries, homeless or mentally ill. We started buying this stuff when we lived in South Carolina and were exposed to artists Howard Finster, R.A. Miller and a few others. We've amassed a small collection during the last 17 years and have recently plugged into the same sort of network here in Cincinnati.

So this week I'm building an Arts & Crafts-style frame for a painting by Barb Moran that we purchased at a street fair in August. It's always a challenge to get into the shop when you're also trying to get a magazine to the printer. But there is nothing like a power outage to change your priorities.

While the table saws, routers and miter saw were quieted yesterday, I spent the afternoon fitting the mortise-and-tenon joints to this frame and preparing the surfaces for finishing. Thanks to the afternoon light from our shop windows, the tear-out in the white oak was easy to see and remove. It was, all in all, a nice break from gerunds and dangling participles.

The funny thing about the power outages is that they take down all of our systems except for the emergency lights and the electric auto-flush toilets in our building. I suspect that senior editors Glen Huey and Bob Lang are making plans to hotwire the building's commodes to our shop's subpanel in case of a third power outage.

Not me. I'm kind of looking forward to it. I just first need to get my left hand in shape to be able to hit the "save" key a little faster.

— Christopher Schwarz

I’ve looked at a lot of old workbenches, and I’ve never seen many that exhibit signs of being flattened. I always look at toolmarks on the benches and what I typically find are toolmarks that are recent and some that are quite old – based on the patina of the gouged wood and the amount of grime that has accumulated.

So benchtop flatness is a red herring, right? Maybe. If you work a lot on a bench that isn’t flat, you’ll see it affect your work. A low spot in the top will prevent you from planing the middle of a board. You’ll only be able to plane the ends of the board.

One possible solution is that woodworkers who toiled on less-than-ideal benches would use a planing board. Planing boards are thick assemblies that you lay over your benchtop and are set up to restrain the work. I first stumbled on them in the book “Modern Practical Joinery” by George Ellis. Despite its “modern” title, it’s an old book.

I made a planing board using Ellis’s description and text, and it works quite well. It’s an unusual piece of work: It’s a frame assembly and inside the frame are seven slats that float in grooves and can be slid a bit back and forth. Here’s where it gets a bit odd: The frame’s rails and stiles are 1-3/8” thick; the slats are 1-1/2” thick. The slats are proud on the bottom of the planing board. The top of the planing board is cleaned up flat and flush all around.

The differing thicknesses, I believe, might keep the whole thing flatter in the end. The center of the planing board will always be planted on the benchtop. You can easily true the underside because it is proud and then flip the thing over and true the whole thing. That’s a working theory. I have a few others as well.

There are two planing stops at the end that adjust up and down. You can also restrain work for cross-grain planing by inserting wedges between the slat and pushing the work up against the wedges. This works great.

And how do you keep the planing board on your bench? The book is quiet on this. I have mine pinched between dogs and against a dog at the back of the bench. I’m going to change this arrangement this weekend. I plan to put a hook on the front edge (just like on a bench hook for sawing). And then I’ll push the thing against a planing stop in use. There’s no need to have a tail vise.

On construction: I’ve included a pdf file below you can download if you like. Here’s the cutting list:

2 Stiles: 1-3/8” x 4” x 36-1/8”
2 Rails: 1-3/8” x 4” x 18-1/2” (1-1/4”-long tenon on both ends)
7 Slats: 1-1/2” x 3-7/8” x 16-3/4” (3/8” x 3/8” stub tenon on both ends)

After dressing your stock, plow a 3/8” x 3/8” groove down one long edge of each stile. Cut 3/8”-thick x 1-1/4”-long haunched tenons on the ends of the rails. Cut matching mortises in the stiles. Cut the 3/8” x 3/8” stub tenons on the ends of the slats.

Bore the two 3/8” x 2” through-tenons in one rail for the planing stops.

Dry-assemble the frame, clamp it up and make sure the slats will move when the assembly is put together. If everything works, glue up the frame and clamp it. When the glue is dry, dress the underside of the planing tray flat. Then flip it over and dress the entire top surface flat. Fit your planing stops and get a few wedges you can insert between the slats.

planingboard.pdf (24.91 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

Moulding planes are some of the coolest planes in a toolkit. Each one is like a modern router, but without the dust, the roaring universal motor and a bit spinning at 20,000 rpm.

Like all hand tools, moulding planes require more skill and initial set-up than a power tool. Plus, you need the right accessories – some people call them appliances – to make them shine. And because many moulding planes have irons that have complex shapes, they can be intimidating, even to a veteran sharpener. But once mastered, moulding planes are addictive. Now, I probably wouldn’t want to trim out a house with moulding planes, but when making short runs of mouldings for a cabinet, they’re efficient tools because they are always set up to make their profile. You just grab them and go.

The most useful accessory for moulding planes (and planes that form rabbets) is a sticking board. There are lots of forms of sticking boards. Mine is a long section of stout wood with a low fence along one long edge. It also has some kind of way of stopping the work at the end of it. Examples I’ve seen have a wooden block with a nail jutting out. Mine has four screws that I can adjust up and down (or remove) to match the profile of the moulding and keep out of the way of the tool.

First secure your sticking board to the bench (there are many ways to go about this). The example in Robert Wearing’s classic “Making Woodwork Aids & Devices” has a spine that runs on the underside of the sticking board. The spine hooks over the front edge of the benchtop and is secured in the face vise. My sticking board is immobilized by other accessories on my bench. At the end of the sticking board, my planing stop holds it, and the bench’s dogs brace the sticking board from the side.

I don’t get to see many designs of sticking boards, so if anyone would like to share theirs, send it on and I’ll gladly post it.

With a moulding plane you plane a little differently than with a bench plane. Begin with short strokes up by the stop. Gradually increase the length of your strokes. This process creates a track for your plane to ride in and makes cleaner profiles. Note that my left hand is pushing the tool against the fence. My right is pushing forward. Each hand has but one job.

Speaking of hands, the leather thing on my right hand was given to me to try last weekend by Charles Murray, the hand-tool guru for the Woodworkers  of Central Ohio (WOCO). I went up to their meeting in Westerville, Ohio, to give a short talk on scaling mortise-and-tenon joints, and Charles presented me with this mitt in the parking lot as I loaded up my junk.

One of the other members had found a reference to it in an old book where it was called a bodger’s mitt. So, of course, they made some of them to try out using scraps of leather from Tandy Leather and some snap closures.

The bodger’s mitt is supposed to protect the right hand when using planes, particularly moulding planes. So last week I gave it a try. I did half a run of moulding without the mitt. Then the rest of the run with the mitt. I like the mitt!

— Christopher Schwarz

All my relationships usually start out rocky. On my first date with my future wife, I almost blew it by presuming to order for her at the IHOP. (I thought it Southern courtesy; she thought it sexist piggery.) But after a few bumps I usually get along with almost anyone.

The same goes with tools and machines. When I switch to a new tool for testing, I usually have a few weeks where I don't trust the tool on real workpieces. So I futz with it on scrap until I'm confident the tool (and its user) are ready.

This week I'm building an Arts & Crafts-style frame for a painting from a Charleston, S.C., gallery and decided to disregard my always-cautious gut. After flushing the joints of the frame with my jointer plane, I picked up my Sauer & Steiner No. 4 smoothing plane and dove into the work.

At first, I thought this was a mistake. The tool's iron was sharp but it needed adjustment to center its gently curved cutting edge in the mouth of the tool. This plane has no mechanical adjuster, and so you adjust the iron with a series of taps with a hammer or mallet. With my other infill planes I use a small Warrington hammer. I tap the sides of the iron to wiggle the iron left and right, and then I tap the back of the iron to increase the depth of cut. If I advance the iron too much I tap the steel or brass back of the tool to retract the iron.

So yesterday it was tap, tap, tap and then expletive deleted. I had advanced the iron too far and needed to rap the back of the plane to retract the iron. (My other time-consuming option was to loosen the iron and start the set-up all over.) The single curse word (sorry mom) was because the back of this beautiful, beautiful plane shouldn't be struck with a steel hammer. It's all gorgeous kingwood. I needed a wooden mallet to retract the iron so I didn't damage the infill too much. But here's the problem: I hate tapping plane irons with a wooden mallet. It just feels mushy to me.

I wasn't pleased about using two hammers to adjust this plane, but then I remembered a tool I had purchased from toolmaker Dave Anderson, the man behind Chester Toolworks. It's a plane-adjusting hammer with one brass face and one wooden face. (Lee Valley also sells a version, by the way.) And the Chester plane hammer was hanging in the rack above my bench.

Three taps later and the shavings spilled from the center of the mouth of the plane as the tear-out left by the jointer plane receded like ugly floodwaters.

Some details: The Sauer & Steiner No. 4 smooth plane is 4 pounds, 5 ounces of perfectly fitted steel, bronze and kingwood. The overall length is 7-1/2". The coffin-shaped body is 2-1/2" wide at its most girthsome. The iron is 2" wide and is high-carbon steel – that's old school. The price is $2,100 Canadian. That about $1,778 U.S. at today's rate.

The Chester Toolworks plane hammer has a brass head with lignum vitae head at one end. The handle is ash and finished with linseed oil. It weighs 8 ounces and is 12" long. The price is $49.

The money I spent on the Sauer & Steiner plane is, hands down, the most money I've ever paid for anything in my shop. The tool was an indulgence after a busy year with a couple extra teaching jobs on the side. When I ordered it, I also felt like I was reaching for something I wasn't meant to own – the same way I felt when I was dating Lucy, who was by far more talented and popular in college.

But I know that this plane will earn its keep. I have a lot of years ahead of me in the shop. And I'm loyal – I'm still married as well.

— Christopher Schwarz

Every Tuesday night we ritually torture our children with a meal that we call “New Food Night.” The kids have to eat something they’ve never eaten before – this week was coq au vin, but we’ve ranged as far as ostrich and bison. In exchange for eating the new dish, the kids get one U.S. dollar and a small prize, usually a small plastic animal.

After a couple years of this schedule my girls have become accustomed to it (or they are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome). But some nights are rough. The most difficult dinner of all was when I made homemade chicken noodle soup. Tears – enormous ones. Shaky bottom lips. Slumping in the seats to a horizontal position.

All for chicken, wide egg noodles, carrots, celery and broth.

Every year I torture myself on Jan. 1 by forcing myself to put away some beloved tools and start using tools that I haven’t embraced. For 2006, I put away my traditional bench planes and used Veritas bevel-up planes: a jack, jointer and smoother. After 12 months of hard use, I’m glad I did it. I now know the limitations and advantages of these tools. First the bad: I still don’t dig the location of the adjuster (it’s too low) or the shape of the handles (which I can fix with a rasp). But then the good: I really like the low center of gravity. I also like how you can tighten up the mouth to admit one-half of a gnat’s hinder with little effort. And I really like how you can hone an ultra-high angle on the blade to make a plane that mocks interlocked, reversing exotic woods.

So on Jan. 1 of 2007, I set the bevel-up tools aside and took out my Sauer & Steiner unhandled York-pitch smoothing plane. I have made peace with this tool and it is a great user, but I don’t grab it automatically whenever I need to do some general smoothing. Maybe I’m not familiar enough with the grip – there’s no tote on this plane. Plus, there’s no mechanical blade adjuster or lateral adjustment lever.

But whether the thing turns out to be chicken soup or coq au vin, this is its year.

Its first major task was finishing up the top of this English Workbench for a photo shoot on Thursday. After completing the bench, I started building the accessories you need: bench hooks, a sticking board and some stuff that grabs round and octagonal work. The sticking board, which is designed for holding long, narrow work for shaping, is about 6’ long. When I placed it on the bench I noticed it wasn’t sitting flat on the top. At first I thought it was the sticking board that was bowed. But after jointing the sticking board again and checking everything with straightedges, I determined there was a hollow in the middle of the benchtop, right up at the front of the bench.

This is the worst place for a hollow in your benchtop. Period.

So I went to work with a jointer plane, working diagonally across the top both ways. Then I worked with the grain of the top with the jointer plane, and then with the Sauer & Steiner smooth plane. Sweet. I checked my work with feeler gauges. I did this out of curiosity – not habit. I get asked all the time how flat a benchtop needs to be for handwork. Until today my answer has been: Flat enough so your work doesn’t bow under planing pressure.

That’s not a good answer. So with the feeler gauges and the straightedges I determined that I shoot for a top that is flat in the critical working area (the front half of the bench) to about .004” along 6’. Is that extreme? I don’t know. But that’s when my work started to behave predictably under the planes.

So is this a good start to the year? I don’t know. I’ll have to noodle it.

– Christopher Schwarz

Question: I've noted that you've recently mentioned that you've been looking into scrapers, so I thought that maybe you could answer a question that I have about scraper-plane blades.
 
Recently I acquired a Stanley #12 scraper plane and the three Lie-Nielsen scraper planes (modern versions of the Stanley #112, #85, and #212).  I am in the process of preparing and using these scraper planes to smooth the surfaces of the blanket chest that I made at Chris Gochnour's Marc Adams School of Woodworking course.  I intend to thereby avoid sanding.
 
I intend to paint the chest (which is made of poplar) following the methods given in the painting article in the recent issue of Woodworking Magazine.
 
I am preparing the scraper-plane blades just as I would plane blades: both back and bevel, five DMT plates of grits from 120 to 1,200 followed by four Shapton water stones of grits from 2,000 to 16,0000.  The burnishing of the 45° bevels to produce a burr is being done with a Glen-Drake burnisher following the method of David Charlesworth (which is similar to the method given by Garrett Hack).
 
It is my understanding that when a scraper plane ceases to proceed shavings and starts to produce "sawdust" that I must go back to honing and redo the burnishing to produce a new burr.
 
Here is my question: How far back must I go in the honing sequence?
 
Certainly I need not go back to the DMT plates.  But, do I need to go back to the 2,000 grit Shapton water stone?  And, can I get away with only re-honing the bevel, or must I re-hone both the back and the bevel?
 
If you are able to help me understand how to do the refurbishing of defunct scraper-plane burrs I would greatly appreciate it.
  
— Dave Raeside

Answer: I have indeed been doing a lot of work on their care and feeding this year. In brief, they are like any other edge tool. All the same rules apply. The burr is strongest when it is turned from the intersection of two highly polished planes.

And so resharpening of scrapers involves exactly the same regimen as it would for a plane or chisel.

1. If the edge is only slightly degraded, I'll begin with a polishing stone (8,000) and then turn the burr.

2. If the edge is mostly used up but still unchipped, I'll begin with the 1,000, then polish, then turn the burr.

3. If the edge is chipped or otherwise damaged, I drop back to the diamond stones, grinder or other grinding abrasives. Then the 1,000, 8,000 and burnisher.

What I don't do much of, is to try to resharpen with burnishing alone. My results have always been inconsistent. Occasionally it works. Usually I get a burr that is OK in some places and weak in others. Other times I get nothing but a trip back to the grinder.

I hope this helps more than it muddles....

— Christopher Schwarz

When I learned to sharpen planes, the mantra was: Bench planes need a curved cutting edge, joinery and block planes need a straight cutting edge. And in a lapse of journalistic crotchetiness, I never questioned that rationale through four presidential administrations.   

A couple months ago David Charlesworth, a British craftsman, author and teacher, called to help me with another story and mentioned offhandedly how he would sharpen block planes with a curved iron. I briefly raised an eyebrow and then we plunged into some other topic.

Somehow his comment got stuck in my head and so for the last several weeks I've been experimenting with using a curved iron in one of my block planes. And what I've found is that a gentle curve in a block plane iron is a nice thing in some instances. When flushing up joints, a curved iron leaves a slightly scalloped surface like that of a smoothing plane, so there's less (or no) follow-up scraping or sanding to do. No plane tracks.

Another advantage when flushing up joints is that you can use the curve to sneak up on an intersection of a rail and stile. In essence, you are using the fact that the tool is taking a very light cut at the edges of the shaving, which is a powerful tool. Here's how. Let's say that you are trimming the proud stile to be flush with the rail. By paying attention to the width of the shaving you can position the plane the thinnest part of the shaving will cross the joint line between rail and stile.

This approach put the heaviest part of the cut on the stile and just barely touches the rail, which is cross-grain to the stile. So there is much less clean up (if any) to do once the joint is flush. I found the same advantage when trimming proud end grain (such as with a rabbet) so it's flush with the surrounding face grain.

There are times when the curved edge isn't so ideal. I do a lot of shooting of small muntins for divided-light doors (a current project). And I really like a straight cut for the shooting process. It keeps the edges true through their thickness.

I have a few block planes, so having two shapes of irons isn't a big deal. I sharpened one of my little block planes with a coffin-shaped body with a curve. Coffin-shaped planes are no good for shooting anyway so I won't ever mistakenly grab a curved-iron plane for a straight-iron job.

So how much curve is correct? I sharpened it like a smoothing plane. First I clipped the corners with a file, rounding them over. Then I sharpened the iron in a honing guide using finger-point pressure. Six firm strokes at the corners. Three medium strokes at a point between the middle of the iron and the corners. Then I checked my work to make sure the curve looked good.

Next sacred cow, please.

— Christopher Schwarz

My head is deep into preparing card scrapers these days. I've vowed to try to make sense out of all the conflicting information we read about sharpening them. And so I've been turning burrs with gouges, chisels, push rods from 1970s-era cars and other odd shop bits.

After looking under a lot of interesting rocks, I've discovered a few shiny items. One of them is this burnisher (also called a ticketer) made by Buck Brothers. It doesn't much look like a burnisher from a distance, but it has some unusual features.

The smooth metal shaft is 3-1/2" long – that's a might bit shorter than most commercial burnishers I've encountered. The cross section of the shaft is also intriuging. It is decidedly football-shaped. The flatter faces of the tool turn a less aggressive burr; the pointed faces turn a burr that is grabbier.

The point of the burnisher is curious. The guy who turned me onto the tool, John Walkowiak, picked it up from furniture maker extraordinaire Phil Lowe. The idea is that the point of the tool can be used to adjust the burr of the scraper after you have turned it. If you turn the burr too sharply, you simply run the point under the burr to lift it up a bit.

I've been working with the tool for about a week, and it works well on all counts. First, I like the tool's overall compact size; it's more balanced than my longer burnishers. It's lighter in weight and therefore easier to wield. The point does indeed allow me to adjust the burr. For fun (yes, this is fun) I turned some heavy 15° burrs with gorilla-like pressure on some card scrapers. These burrs were good for stripping paint. Then I ran the point of the burnisher under the burr. It made the burr much less grabby. It's a nice bit of control to have – just in case.

I still have a lot more questions than answers about card scrapers, however. The English scraper holders are curious to me. They seem to hold the tool flat, preventing it from flexing. Most Americans flex the tool to work localized areas of tear-out. I'd like to see these English scraper holders in use.

— Christopher Schwarz

OK I'm sorry to be a bit of a tease about all this stuff with sharpening scrapers. It's not that I'm trying to string you along, it's just that I still have more questions than I have answers. However, with some research and a phone call today, I have one less question and one more answer.

First, the question: Of the 14 scraper-sharpening techniques I tried, eight of them recommended burnishing the flat face of the scraper several times before burnishing the edge to turn the hook/burr. The explanations for why you burnish the flat face of the tool were varied: It is to soften the metal, to harden the metal, to consolidate the metal, or to warp the metal over the edge so you can turn it into a burr.

So I did what any mind-muddled journalist does: I called an expert.

Ron Hock runs Hock Tools and is one of my favorite metalheads in the business. He spends as much time selling excellent replacement irons as he does dispelling the myths about metal that are spread by woodworkers.  When I explained the problem, he chuckled.

"That," he says, "sounds like what happens sometimes when woodworkers talk about metal."

After some discussion, here's what Hock concluded. Burnishing the flat face of the card scraper does two things: It work-hardens the steel by compressing the crystal structure of the steel. The burnisher is harder than the scraper. Burnishers will typically be of a Rockwell hardness of 58 to 60. Modern scrapers are typically Rc 48 to 53. The harder burnisher will compress the steel in the softer scraper making it harder and probably more durable in use. This would be an even more useful trick when burnishing older scrapers, which would have a Rockwell hardness that was much lower, more like in the mid-40s, Hock said. (Scrapers were typically made from old sawblades in the early days.)

The other thing that the burnisher does is to draw the steel off of the face of the scraper. Essentially, it moves the metal so the steel makes a small point where the face meets the edge. Why is this important? It makes the scraper's burr much easier to turn when you burnish the edge of the tool. You can turn the burr in one stroke and without much pressure.

Hock's points about steel fit in perfectly with my experience during the last 10 years I've sharpened card scrapers. Must you burnish the face to get a burr? No. But if you don't burnish the face, the burr is more difficult to turn, and you must use more pressure or more strokes. Using more strokes or pressure can introduce error and create an irregular burr.

Point two: Burnishing the face creates (in my experience) a burr that lasts longer. Hock suggests that this is because the steel has been work-hardened by the burnisher before turning.

So I got the burnisher figured out today, but there are still a couple questions I'd like to get answered. Such as: Why do card scrapers work when no other plane will?

— Christopher Schwarz

Scrapers are one of the most misunderstood but useful tools in a woodshop. A scraper in its simplest form is simply a piece of hardened steel that has a small hook on its edge that was created by bending the corner with an even harder rod of steel. But this tool is capable of making tear-out free cuts in hardwoods that no plane (no matter what the price or amount of fettling) is able to manage.

But why do scrapers work? No one seems agree on why, though there are some tantalizing clues from some Japanese micrographs.

How should you sharpen them? On this topic there is even more disagreement.  During the last two months I've compiled a list of 14 techniques for sharpening this rectangle of steel, and none agrees on the details. Should you file the edge straight, at an angle (what angle?), or perpendicular to the edge. Which kind of file should you use?

Should you stone both the edge and faces of the tool? To what grit? And how should this be done?

Do you have to burnish the faces of the tool before turning the burr of the scraper? If you do, what angle do you use? And how should you burnish the edge to create the hook? At what angle? Do you slide the burnisher along the edge as you turn the burr?

So in true "I have no life" form, I decided to try every one of these techniques and compare the results. I used high-quality scrapers from Lee Valley, Bahco (formerly Sandvick) and Lie-Nielsen. All of the published techniques basically worked and created a tool that makes shavings. Yet some techniques are faster, some are easier for beginners to master and some make a tool that really grabs the work.

And after trying all of these techniques and applying my own training and sharpening experiences to the scraper, I've think I've found a 15th way to sharpen the tool that doesn't require a lot of equipment, is faster than any of the other techniques and will result in success the first time you try it.

More experimentation is in order, and I need to see if some other people at work can get the same results as I do. But if the technique does stand up, I think it will make a good article.

— Christopher Schwarz

There's one question that I'm asked almost every week that I cannot answer. And here it is: What brand handplane should I buy if I don't want to fix up a vintage plane, I don't like the quality of the Stanley planes and I cannot afford the price of a Lie-Nielsen, Clifton or Veritas plane.

In other words,  is there a middle-priced plane?

Until today, the answer was: No. But now Robert Larson Co. of San Fransisco, a large wholesaler of woodworking hand tools, has introduced a new line of planes made in India by Anant that just may be the plane that becomes the middle ground.

As many of you know, Anant already makes a line of bench planes. I've personally tested a jack plane and found that it was the same quality of a new Stanley U.K. plane. In other words, it was OK for coarse work or work in softwoods, but it just wasn't up to par for really demanding work in hardwoods in a woodworking shop.

(In the interests of full disclosure, several people have written on message boards that they have had great success at tuning their basic Anant planes to a very high level. They must be better at it than I am.)

All that aside, the new Premier line of Anant is different and will be available this fall for all of us to inspect. The company graciously allowed me to inspect a stock Anant No. 4 plane and compare it to the new blue Premier Anant No. 4 this afternoon at their booth at the International Woodworking Fair.

And while I wasn't able to work with the tool, I did get a close look. Here are my first impressions. The Premiere is probably a pound heavier. The sole and sidewalls of the Premiere appear to be machined, unlike the linished surfaces of the standard Anant. The blade and chipbreaker of the Premier were considerably thicker than in the basic model. The frog had more bearing surface to support the blade assembly, and the areas where the frog met the base casting were actually machined (and quite sizable). However, it was not a fully machined mating surface, like those planes in the Bed Rock vein.

There are some small stylistic differences: paint, a couple brass accents and knobs that are a different wood. When all the parts were assembled things seemed to be moving well, though the lateral adjust lever was a bit stiff. The plane's yoke is stamped steel and not cast, and there was very little backlash in the mechanism.

And the price for the Premier No 4? Larson says it should be about $50 or so.

In addition to a smoothing plane, there will be a jack plane, two block planes (a No. 9-1/2 style and a 60-1/2 style) and a rabbet plane based on the Stanley No. 78 in the Premier line.

I should have one in for testing soon and will keep you updated.

— Christopher Schwarz

I finished building a Roman-style handplane from a kit made by Ron Hock of Hock Tools. The kit is designed to be used to make a plane in the style popularized by James Krenov,  but I converted it easily into a Roman-style handplane, with its odd grips.

The reason for the exercise was to see what the plane felt like to grip and use. These planes, a form that is about 1,700 years old, haven't been common for a long time. The unusual slots through the body appear on planes up through 800 A.D. and then disappear, according to W.L. Goodman's "The History of Woodworking Tools." I've always wondered why.

The Roman planes are important for a variety of reasons. Not only are they the earliest examples of a plane iron secured by a wedge, but they are also technically the first metal planes and the first infill planes recorded.

Some of the surviving Roman examples were all wood, such as this reproduction, but many of the other surviving examples have a metal sole. Some more elaborate planes have a metal sole that has a U-shape and is filled with wood. And one example, from Cologne, is almost entirely metal. The grip area is the only part that's wood.

The kit from Hock Tools was a cinch to adapt to the Roman form. This particular example is built like the plane known as the Saalburg jack plane, which was recovered from a well in 1907. Goodman says the plane was thrown in the well when the village was sacked by barbarians.

Here are the differences: The original wooden body (usually called the stock) was  2" thick, 2" wide and 12-3/4" long. My stock is 2-1/4" thick, 2-3/16" wide and 11-3/4" long. In essence, my plane is 1" shorter at the heel. I wish I had that extra inch back there just for authenticity's sake, but the plane is remarkably easy to grip as-is.

The iron on both the Saalburg plane and on the Hock plane is 1-1/2" wide. Unlike a typical Roman iron, the Hock Tool iron and breaker are short. In the Roman examples, the iron will jut out several inches from the top of the stock. The extra iron will add weight and make the iron a little easier to tap left and right to adjust its projection. The iron in the Hock kit is bedded at 45° -- Roman planes are typically pitched much higher – between 50° and 66°.

The other difference is cosmetic. Roman planes typically would have a shallow and wide  dado cut across the bottom of the grip. Goodman is at a loss to explain the reason for the feature – there is plenty of space in the grips for fingers without the dado.  If I ever make another one of these planes, I'll add the dado to that one.

Overall, the plane was surprisingly easy to make. A 1" Forstner bored out the holes for the grips. A handsaw,  chisel and some rasps did the rest of the work. After about four or five hours of work, the plane was complete and ready to use.

The throat is gappier than I'd hoped, but it's actually a remarkably useful aperture – probably about 1/32" all told.

The grips are a bit of a revelation. I've spent a couple hours fiddling with the plane after the shellac dried and was amused by how the grips encouraged me to press my entire weight on the wooden stock. My bench at home is 34" high. I think a 31"-high bench is optimal for this plane and my frame. Paintings and frescoes and the like that show Roman planes typically have a low bench,  so that seems to make sense.



I'm going to be interested in how the wooden body reacts to humidity changes. Coffin-bodied smoothing planes are shaped to expose the maximum end grain, which allows them to react to humidity changes quickly. This plane has even more end grain exposed – right up against the area where the wedge and blade are and at the front and toe. It could be good; could be bad.

Next up: Moving forward from the 3rd century to the 20th as I build a Krenov-style plane from the same kit.

— Christopher Schwarz

This week I'm building two wooden planes from a kit sold by Ron Hock of Hock Tools. The kit is designed to be used to make a wooden handplane muck like the ones popularized by James Krenov while he was at the College of the Redwoods.

When I took the parts out I got to looking at them and realized: "Hey, these could be used to build a Roman-style handplane." So I decided to build one plane like a Roman plane and the other like a Krenov-style plane.

Why build a Roman plane? (I mean, besides the fact that my mother must have dropped me on my head.) Well, I've always been interested in the odd grips offered by these tools. They seem designed to allow you to really press the plane down effectively, and one of the reasons I struggle with wooden planes is that I find them difficult to keep pressed to the work.

This plane is based on the Saalburg Roman plane shown in W.L. Goodman's "The History of Woodworking Tools." This plane survived because it was thrown down a well when the village was sacked by barbarians, according to Goodman. The dimensions for the plane kit are pretty close to the Saalburg plane, though not exact – mine will be a little short.

The kit from Ron Hock includes everything you need to build the plane: Wooden components already cut to shape, the wooden cross-pin, a wedge and an iron and cap assembly. I was a little skeptical when I saw that the directions were a single page, but boy was the kit easy to put together. The plane shown above is the result of two hours of work. The Krenov-style plane will be even faster.

First I glued the sidewalls and sole together. The wood for the body and sole was in good shape, though I tweaked one sidewall with a couple swipes of a block plane to get it to fit perfectly. Then I bored out the two grips using a 1"-diameter Forster bit. Then I started shaping the grips with a handsaw and rasps, which is where I am today. So far it's great fun, quick and rewarding.

This morning I put my hands into the grips and got into planing position. I was surprised how good the body felt with those grips.

— Christopher Schwarz

I recently bought your "Coarse, Medium, and Fine" DVD, from Lie-Nielsen. I wanted to thank you for it, I found it very informative and useful. I have two questions:

1. Would a low-angle jack plane qualify as a coarse plane for basic work, if used diagonally cross grain, with a cambered blade, and a wide mouth? I have a Lie-Nielsen scrub plane, but as you mention in the video it is pretty rough, and also rather small.  I also have a 5-1/2 Lie-Nielsen jack, but I like that for lots of other stuff.  So I was wondering about the low-angle jack ...

2. Has anybody done a video on planing glued up panels?  I can flatten a board OK, and joint an edge. But when it comes to cleaning up a glued up panel, HELP!!!!  Some people say to glue up alternating grain, for stability, some people say to have all the boards in the same direction for ease of planing, and some like to consider only appearance.  I tend to try to visually compose with grain, which is hard enough without adding the problem of varying grain direction ...   In any case, this is one video I keep looking for (hint, hint)!

Thanks for your letter. I'm quite pleased to hear that you liked the DVD. As to your questions:

You can indeed you can use a low-angle jack plane as a fore plane. When I taught a class on hand tools last month I set up several low-angle jacks from Veritas and Lie-Nielsen to do this task.

Personally, I think it's a bit overkill to purchase all that precision workmanship for such a coarse operation. I usually encourage readers to purchase an older Stanley No. 5 or No. 6 (or a transitional plane, like the one I was using in the DVD), and then put the money they saved toward buying a really nice jointer or smoother.

A very good source for used hand planes is Sanford Moss. I see he has several planes that qualify for $50 to $60 on his site right now.



As to glued up panels, I follow two rules for selecting boards:

1. Choose the widest, clearest boards and arrange them for best appearance.

2. Try to move the boards around in position so that all the grain runs uphill in the same direction. A little bit of effort on this can usually produce a top that looks just as good and is easier to plane.

After I glue up the top, I asses the joints. If there are some misaligned edges that exceed 1/32" or so, I'll begin flattening them with the fore plane, working at 90° to the grain. This approach to the work reduces tearout and flattens things up quickly. (Note, however, that it will cause some breakout on the edges of your panel; compensate for this by adding a little extra width to your panel.)

Then I check the top with winding sticks and proceed to the jointer and treat the assembly just like it's a really wide board: Work diagonally first and then with the grain.

And then the smoother and scraper. If you are aware of where the grain changes direction in your top, you can work one section one way and another section the other way. Skewing the plane radically near the boards' seams can sometimes help reduce tear-out at the transition points.

If the grain is quite unruly in the top, I will do everything I can with a smoothing plane and then turn to a scraping plane to finish the top. That tool can generally can ignore the grain direction anyway.

And if it's a really really bad day (or the top is quartersawn sycamore), I'll sneak over to the drum sander.

— Christopher Schwarz

Sometimes a craftsman-made tool surfaces that is just plain mysterious and wondrous. Today I spent the morning with Carl Bilderback, a semi-retired Chicago-area carpenter who has an astonishing collection of handsaws and dang-good collection of other tools. We were working on a story together about resawing with band saws, but he also really wanted to show me an oddball scraping plane he'd bought years ago.

The thing looks a bit like a Stanley 112 scraper plane with some major differences. First, this plane holds the scraper at one angle only – 90°. The Stanley 112 adjusts to an infinite number of angles. And the craftsman-made tool has an odd knob in front of the tote that adjusts the scraper iron up and down in the mouth.

Carl bought the plane years ago (and said he paid too much for it, by the way). And when he started using the thing on hardwoods he found "it didn't work worth a damn" no matter what he did. So the thing sat on his shelf.

Years passed. And the one day Carl had some tear-out problems on a piece of pine around a knot. Scraping pine is generally a difficult proposition, but for some reason Carl's hands reached for this tool and he took a couple swipes. Like magic, it scraped the tear-out smooth and also scraped the knot to perfection. Since then, this tool has become Carl's go-to plane for softwoods.

So today we did a little experiment: We set up his Stanley 112 with a bit of a forward pitch and scraped some white pine. We could pull a decent shaving, but it left an unacceptable and wooly surface. Then we planed the pine with the oddball plane. It left a perfect surface, ready to finish.

Carl said that he can set up his Stanley 212 scraper plane with a perfectly vertical frog to somewhat imitate the oddball scraper plane, but he said it takes a lot of fussing to get everything working right – both the pitch and the projection. The oddball plane is super simple: Just drop the scraper in, turn the knob and go.

The plane was surprisingly well made in many respects. The sidewalls were welded to the sole and it had evidence that it was once zinc-plated. The one apology for the tool was that the front knob was too close to the mouth of the tool, and shavings would bunch up behind the knob. But beyond that, I was very impressed.

"Someone," Carl said, "might want to think about making one of these tools for sale."

— Christopher Schwarz

At least once a week I'm asked if I prefer handplanes that have the iron's bevel facing up (like in a block plane) or facing down (like in a traditional Stanley/Bailey-style bench plane). It's a tough question that I've struggled with for years as both Veritas and Lie-Nielsen have expanded their lines of bevel-up planes.

I first learned to plane with the old-school Bailey tools, but I've made a strong and serious effort to get comfortable with both styles of tools from both makers during the last five years or so. Here then, is what I see are the important differences between the two kinds of tools.

Difference 1: Adjusting the Blade. This is the most important difference for me. In general, I've found the Bailey-style adjustment mechanism (shown above) to be the superior one. It's a bold statement, but here's why: It allows you to adjust the setting of your iron on the fly as the tool is moving. As I plane, I make subtle adjustments to the iron, usually increasing the cut to remove material as fast as possible. The adjustment knob of the Bailey planes can be tweaked without moving your hand from the tote, and this allows a level of speed, sensitivity and feedback I can't get from any bevel-up plane.

All of the bevel-up planes have their adjuster knobs that are out of reach of my fingers as I'm planing. So I have to stop my stroke, remove my hand and adjust the cut. Then I resume planing. This slows me down, breaks my rhythm and requires more thought. This is the same reason I sometimes struggle with infill planes and other planes with Norris-style adjusters. Generally, those adjusters are above the tote or generally inaccessible to your fingertips during a stroke.

Also on the topic of adjusters is the difference in "lateral adjustment." This is where you tweak the position of the iron so it's cutting evenly on the left and right side of the mouth. Bevel-up planes can have a Norris-style lateral adjuster that is incorporated into the depth-adjustment mechanism. One knob handles it all, such as in the Veritas planes – I've found this adjustment to be a bit coarse. Or the plane has no formal lateral adjustment, as with the bevel-up Lie-Nielsen planes, and you have to adjust the iron laterally with your fingers or a small hammer.

The Bailey-style planes have a separate lateral-adjustment lever above the tote. It's also a coarse adjuster, and so I generally use it very little and handle my lateral-adjustment chores with a small hammer – tap left, tap right.

What's important here is that ultimately, all the planes need fine tweaking laterally by some other method than the lateral-adjustment lever. So don't get hung up on it.

Difference 2: Grip.One subtle difference is that the bevel-up planes encourage a four-finger grip, while the Bailey-style planes encourage a three-finger grip. Some people really like the four-finger grip, and I believe them and think that bevel-up planes are ideal for this sort of hand preference. I like the three-finger grip and use it on my drills, saws and planes. I think having the index finger extended is a cue to your brain and helps guide your work straighter.

You can use a three-finger grip with bevel-up planes (I do) but it feels weird having your finger suspended above the tool in space with nothing to support it.

Difference 3: Chipbreakers. I say this all the time: I really dislike chipbreakers, cap irons or whatever you want to call them. I think they are the No. 1 source of clogging and frustration with hand planes, and I question their utility on occasion. Chipbreakers are found on all Bailey-style planes, and this is one of their major demerits. There are aftermarket chipbreakers available from Lie-Nielsen and Hock Tools that helps things out, but they're not a panacea.

The bevel-up planes have no chipbreaker. And I marvel every time at how easy they are to set up and maintain because of that missing chunk of steel frustration. If you hate chipbreakers, you'll like bevel-up planes. Period.

Difference 4: Throat Adjustment. If you want to adjust the throat on your Bailey-style plane, settle in. It's going to take a while. Even the best Bailey planes (with a Bed Rock mechanism) require some fussing and back and forth to get a tight throat opening. Older Bailey planes require you to disassemble the frog.

I don't change the throat much on my Bailey planes – I have one tool set up for each of the three jobs bench planes do. But when I do tweak the throat, it's a big pain.

In contrast, the throat on a bevel-up plane is a cakewalk to adjust. You loosen a knob and slide a shoe plate as close or as far away from the cutting edge as you like. Nothing could be simpler or more intuitive. This is another big advantage for bevel-up planes if you make any throat adjustments in your work – and many people with just a plane or two do this.

Other Differences. The bevel-up planes have more of their mass low on the tool. The Bailey-style planes can be a bit top-heavy. The funny thing is, I like top-heavy. And I don't know why, it probably is just what I'm used to. Beginners report that the bevel-up planes' low center of gravity makes the tools easier to balance when working on narrow edges. I believe it. I chalk this up to what you are used to. I have become more comfortable with the balance of the bevel-up planes over the years, but I still favor the top-heavy feel of the Bailey.

Also, the bevel-up configuration allows you to change the angle of attack of your tool by honing a different angle on your cutting edge. With the bevel-down planes, this is harder to control and involves back bevels or shims or other work-arounds. If you work with difficult material (exotics in particular), you'll like having a bevel-up plane around that cuts the wood at a really high angle – 60° or even a tad higher.

But if you work with mild material, you won't find this a striking advantage because the stock 45° angle of attack is fine.

Bottom Line. Get a bevel-up plane if you're going to have only one or two planes in your shop, if you're a beginner or you deal with a lot of oddball planning situations that require you to quickly change the angle of attack and the throat. Get a bevel-down plane if you have a fair-sized arsenal of planes and like tools that are dedicated to one function alone.

— Christopher Schwarz

Some days it's overwhelming to think about all the woodworking and toolmaking knowledge that's been lost. Last weekend at the Mid-West Tool Collectors Association national meeting it was astounding to see all of the quality tools that simply have vanished from the shelves. And today, while tuning up a plow plane for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine, I was reminded again of the amazing work that came out of Sheffield at one time.

For a good while I've been a fan of the Record 043 plow plane, a small metal plow that is sweet for drawer-bottom grooves and other small-scale work. So last month I picked up a Record 044, its bigger brother. The Record 044 comes with seven irons and mine were neatly packaged in a blue cardboard sleeve.

I've been avoiding setting up all the irons because seven cutters can take a long time to flatten the faces, grind and hone. But today I had a spare couple hours and decided I could tweak one or two of the irons to get things rolling. I started with the widest irons, which I don't think were ever used in my set. They looked completely untouched.

I took a deep breath and started flattening the unbeveled face. This part is usually drudgery because there's a lot of metal to be removed. The first iron was bowed a bit from heat-treating, but the bow worked in my favor – pressing the cutting edge against the stone so it polished up immediately. A lucky break.

So I did the next iron. Same exact bow; same luck! The next two were exactly the same. The grinder or heat-treater or both knew what the heck they were doing because they had oriented the tooling so the bow worked for the woodworker. In fact, in the entire set of seven cutters, only the smallest two were messed up. And that was because they had been used and the face had been dubbed by a lazy sharpener. Within two hours, all seven cutters were polished, ground, honed and ready to use. That's a record (no pun intended).

This reminded me of a chapter from one of my favorite books about toolmaking: "Memories of a Sheffield Tool Maker" by Ashley Iles. Iles made two statements that have stuck with me to this day: "You sank or swam on your hardener; his reputation was always on the line, and he knew it." Iles then recalls a chisel maker that went out of business after one batch came back soft. And later in the chapter, Iles states: "Blessed are the grinders." He says it's from Ecclesiastes chapter 10, but I can't find it.

Both statements are so true. Even if your steel is great, it's no good if it's heat-treated, tempered or ground poorly. During a test of new chisels about six years ago I set up almost 100 chisels; probably more than half were warped so that the face was bellied. We've forgotten something.

One last post-script. The Record 044 is an excellent tool. And the nice kicker to the story is I had bought it from Ashley Iles's son, Ray Iles. Ray always has a few of these tools in stock. You can visit his site and drop him a line for details.

— Christopher Schwarz

I sometimes shudder to think about all of the chisels and plane irons I've set up in the last 10 years. Every review has involved hours and hours of setup time, most of that flattening the back, unbeveled side of the tools. I've worn out a half-dozen diamond stones, several coarse waterstones and even a fine polishing stone (it was a very thin King stone, by the way).

But this weekend marked a new milestone. I brought home three Veritas bevel-up planes to set up for a forthcoming review – the jack and the new smoother and jointer. Normally, this would be five hours of work to flatten the backs, polish the backs and hone the cutting edge. But I was planning on using David Charlesworth's "ruler trick" to slash that time considerably. The trick, in a nutshell, is to position a steel ruler on your polishing stone that elevates the iron. This polishes a small back bevel right at the cutting edge, saving time.

So I got out an old steel ruler. But before I began in earnest, I took a couple swipes with the iron on my 1,000-grit stone. The unbeveled side of the iron was dead flat. Most of the machining marks on that unbeveled side were gone with that little bit of effort. I took a few more swipes for good measure and then went to the 4,000-grit stone, anticipating trouble. No trouble found. Ten swipes and I was done there. Same with the 8,000-grit stone.

I thought I had gotten lucky with the first iron. So I did the other two irons. They were all perfect. I set up all three irons (and the planes, too) in less than an hour. This is a far cry from the effort involved in setting up an iron from Vertias or Lie-Nielsen in earlier days – and don't even get me started on Stanley, Record or other imported tools (A test of jack planes a few years ago required more than 50 hours of setup time on my part). Both of these premium plane-making companies have made steady progress on improving their irons, and both are now making tools that are virtually ready to go when you open the box, which is how it should be.

Some fans of vintage tools often chide me as an apologist for the modern plane makers. But you know what? I've served my time (and it was hard time) setting up a lot of messed-up old tools. It taught me a lot about plane mechanics, but it also took me away from my true love, woodworking. If you enjoy the metal filings, the drudgery of hours of lapping soles and the Lazarus-like satisfaction of resurrecting an old tool, I won't stand in your way when we reach for the same tool at the flea market. But if you like the smell of freshly cut wood, luminous planed surfaces and building furniture, there are new tools out there just for you. They work perfectly, precisely and predictably from the get-go. They are worth every cent.

As of Saturday, my friends, we are officially in a new golden age of hand tools.

— Christopher Schwarz

My boss at my last job had a test he gave to all job applicants. He simply asked them: "How many hours do you sleep at night?" If they answered "seven" or anything less, then you were hired. Here's another one: Among trim carpenters in Chicago, simply knowing what a scrub plane was could get you a job.

Yesterday Carl Bilderback called me to share some of his thoughts about the intended use for a scrub plane (see my earlier entry about this tool below). Bilderback is a long-time trim carpenter and noted tool collector who specializes in saws. As a trim carpenter in Chicago, Bilderback always kept a scrub plane handy for fitting mouldings against irregular plaster walls. The scrub plane could remove large amounts of material from the backside of moulding so it would sit tight against the plaster.

Bilderback also was a primary supplier for scrub planes among trim carpenters in the region. He'd pick them up at flea markets and resell them to his co-workers and buddies. During one job, Bilderback said he had to hire 75 carpenters for a huge job that involved seven miles of moulding. One of the problems of the job was finding enough good carpenters to work on the project; Bilderback was going to have to hire people he didn't know personally.

So when the job applicant came down for an interview, Bilderback had a scrub plane sitting out. He'd ask them: "Do you know what that thing is?" If they answered "scrub plane" then he hired them. So now there is one more reason to make sure you know what all the planes are – it could help get you a job someday.

— Christopher Schwarz

The first handplane I ever bought was a Popular Mechanics block plane I purchased one night at Wal-Mart. There was no blade-adjustment mechanism. No adjustable mouth. And the iron was so soft that it might actually have been made of iron (instead of steel). The tool was a bona-fide piece of junk.

As I set out to use the plane on a project I expected to be frustrated. (That’s the way the story usually goes, don’t you know.) But surprisingly, the plane actually worked, and I can remember clearly using it to trim some apron pieces flush on a low sitting bench I was making. One of the shavings was like gossamer; and at that moment, I was hooked on planes.

Like many woodworkers, I became as obsessed with creating those shavings as I did with the tools that made them. No matter what plane I bought, I fussed and fussed with it until it made those magical .001”-thick shavings. My Stanley Type 11 jack plane (a $12 flea market special) got souped up with a new iron and I worked the sole until the plane was perfect. Same with my jointer plane. And even my rabbet planes. And on and on.

It took me a few years to realize what a huge waste of time a lot of that tuning was. With all my planes set to take fine shavings, it took forever to get anything done – further cementing the myth that hand tools are slow. Then one day I had my second epiphany with handplanes, and I remember it as clearly as my first.

I was smoothing up the side of an entertainment center and there were some serious low spots. I worked the piece for almost an hour before I started thinking about buying a belt sander. Something clicked in my head. I put down my super-tuned smoother and picked up my jointer plane. I set it to take a thick .006” shaving. In two passes, the whole side was true. Then I picked up my smoother again – still set to take a fine shaving. In two passes, the whole side was shimmering and gleaming and perfect. Right then my world turned upside down. Instead of focusing on tuning a tool to take a fine shaving, I focused on tuning my coarse tools to take a thick shaving without chattering. I started using my coarse tools more and my fine-set tools less. And I became a much faster builder.

So many woodworkers I know are obsessed with fine shavings. It seems proof perhaps that we are masters of our tools because we can make them perform this parlor trick. If this sounds like you I encourage you to try something. Take a board fresh from your powered planer. Flatten it with a finely set smoothing plane and count the passes you make to get it ready to finish. Now flip the board over and set your jointer plane to take a thick shaving. How thick? As thick as you can take while still easily maintaining control of the tool. Flatten that board. Then come back with a smoothing plane. Count your strokes.

— Christopher Schwarz

Could this roughing plane be a jobsite tool for house carpenters? We investigate.

How to reduce or eliminate those annoying ridges left by a hand plane.

One of the accessories that makes a miter plane easy to use on a shooting board is a "hot dog" handle — a cigar-shaped metal casting that is impossible to find. Until now.