Processing rough sawn lumber starts by addressing the reference face.
One way to mitigate wood movement that can occur after planing is to not plane the wood to final dimensions right away. This is often referred to as skip planing, and it’s a technique can aid in keeping wood flat whether working by hand or machine.
All boards are warped to some degree. Usually, starting with the saw is more efficient than starting with the plane.
If you have a power jointer, and flatten board faces on it, you might think that knowing how to do this task by hand is useless, antiquated knowledge. However, there are several reasons why I recommend you learn this valuable skill.
A few posts ago I talked about dealing with a badly warped blade from a wooden bodied hand plane, and then addressing issues with the bed of a wooden plane. These posts might suggest that wooden bodied hand planes are not as reliable or as functional as their iron siblings and that they’re not worth the effort to bother trying to use. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
Several folks have asked about it, so I put together a set of project notes for the chestnut coat rack.
Sometimes, tuning up a wooden hand plane requires a little more than sharpening the blade and flattening the sole.
WARNING: If you are a sharpening purist or a flat back Nazi, stop reading this right now, go to your safe place, and watch a few cat videos. If you ignore this advice, understand that what you are about to read is guaranteed to trigger you in ways that you’ve never imagined. Continue at your own risk.
Here’s the final video of building the American chestnut coat rack.
Applying finish to the parts of a project before assembly of the piece solves some problems that can occur when finish is applied after assembly.
Match planing is a method whereby two boards are placed face-to-face and their mating edges are planed simultaneously. If you aren’t familiar with the technique, allow me to present you with a crash course.
I have wanted to play with a sliding dovetail plane that I acquired last year, and this project seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so.