estebanana -> RE: What size plane for thicknessing (Jan. 14 2016 3:47:13)
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Got quite a few planes now - assorted sizes for different jobs. You will pick them up as time goes by. I have been enjoying using some of the japanese planes lately. Aside from their novelty, once you have them set up, they are a real pleasure to use. I like the fact they have wooden bodies so there is no accidental damage to wood. Sharpening the blades are the secret - you will spend longer doing this than conventional planes. I have three sizes now - 30, 40 and 60mm - the 60 is a real beast but does the job great. I'm not sure if anyone else has this one but for different wood, there is always one plane you have that works better than the rest. This can be different depending upon the wood. I might suggest some strops ( throwing a real wobbly!!) - bits of soft leather with a backing board. If you charge these with a polishing compound like rouge, they are great at removing any burr built up using oil or water stones and create a mirror finish to the blade. Haha, remember in the East Japanese planes are conventional and Western planes are oddball. Once the kanna is set up it should not take long to sharpen it. Setting it up however takes a little know how. Jason , Rather than struggle with trying to teach yourself to sharpen, go to a class or find a fine crafts person who is a high level furniture maker to teach you. Look around your area and see if there are wood working seminars you can check into. And comb you tube for sharpening ideas. Sharpening is very personal and there are a myriad of ways to do it. The confusion of conflicting advice or too much advice might not be fantastic. Sharpening is a tactile skill that is learned best by watching someone do it and then having them show you how. Setting up a plane body has tricks to it that an old hand will be able to show you. May I recommend the public library section on wood working, try to find the books published by Fine Woodworker magazine on planes. There are long detailed articles on how and why planes work, reading this material will help you learn the concepts and terms of plane set up. Then find someone to help you learn and you will be talking the same language. Prepping the plane body, and knowing how to prep each style of body, is vital and should come first in my opinion. Your blade could be sharp as hell but nit working at maximum function unless the body is tuned well. Any old swap meet, junk store, garage sale plane bodies you can get cheap will be good fodder for learning to tun up the body. That is where the plane literature in the Fine Woodworking books will come in. And don't be afraid as Flaminggrae says to dive into Japanese pull planes, kanna, right from the start. But again get a teacher a don't muck around with bad technique, learn it bang up from the start. EDIT' another thing is that modern planes from companies like Lee Valley or Lie Nielson are ready to go out of the box, those planes are tuned up more or less already, you could tweak them a tiny bit but they are mostly spot on. This is good if you want to sidestep the square checking and flattening of the plane sole. But you don't learn that skill from the ground up and thus miss out on transforming cheap old plane bodies into working tools. Lee Valley has a good line of planes if you want to go that route. I have a few myself. Getting to your question about size for thicknessing, it depends on how fast you want to go. A bigger plane will hogg out more wood faster, but a smaller plane will still do the job. I began using smallish planes for thicknessing like Stanley 220's because of the control in final thicknessing. You can work a smaller area with a smaller plane. As it is now I use a 54mm Japanese plane for tops and Cypress and switch to a Stanley 220 to flatten the waves made by the belly in the plane iron. You may as well learn the blade is called a plane 'iron' in old time speak. Then I scrape to reach a final thickness. At this point I can use the Kanna pretty fast. Fine,but for curly woods you should learn to make a toothed plane, Flamed Maple almost dictates the use of a toothed plane and many kinds of Rosewood are easier to handle with a toothed plane. So look into that idea. The toothed plane is a fail safe tool if you are working an expensive set of back and sides in a tough wood to plane out so even for rough thicknessing some woods the toothed iron is a good tool to use. It is a more conservative way of removing lots of stock but when you cannot afford any pullout on $300.00 or $400.00 set of back and sides conservative avoids heartache mistakes. Next and in conjunction with plane irons, you gotta get into scrapers. For rosewood especially fun. This is a solid book on the subject and the one I said may be in the library http://www.amazon.com/Fine-Woodworking-Planes-Chisels-Editors/dp/0918804280 There are others by good authors, James Krenov for one. Compare the info in these good books.
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