Wood That I Could

Today I learned something disturbing about hand planes.

A while back, I found that I had the ability to hand-sharpen stuff with remarkable accuracy. I proceeded to fix up the blades of my old hand planes. I made edges that were either perpendicular to the length of the blades or, in the case of a blade that was originally sharpened way off perpendicular, nearly so.

I was happy. The blades looked pretty good, apart from the gouges my early efforts made, and they were literally like razors. I planed with them and felt great joy.

Then I saw this guy.

His name is Richard Maguire, and he goes by “the English Woodworker.” Good luck getting a trademark on that in the USA.

When I watch him, I keep expecting Eric Idle to pop out of a refrigerator.

He uses hand tools and does lots of neat work. He makes a living making workbenches. He knows a great deal about weird old tools.

A week or so back, I heard him say something about “cambering” plane blades. This means that instead of a straight edge, you create a convex arc. When you put the blade in the plane, the center is slightly lower than the edges, so it hits the wood first.

I waved my hand and decided to write him off as an eccentric. Because I had done so much work on my blades.

Today I was reading up on planes, and I read some credible stuff that said that it was necessary to camber plane blades. Not optional. Not optimal. Necessary.

The problem is that if you don’t do this, the corners of the blade will be level with the center, and they will cut just as deep. Where the blade ends, the cutting stops, so you get a tiny rabbet. Not the kind you surprise your kids with at Easter and then turn loose in a park when no one is looking because you’re tired of cleaning the cage. A rabbet is a straight cut in a piece of wood with a 90-degree wall.

I guess calling a miniscule gouge a rabbet is an exaggeration, but you get the point. You’re trying to make a piece of wood smooth, and you leave long scratches in it.

Today I removed my vise from my bench so I could flatten the top a little. There are six boards in the top, and the third one in was pretty warped. I started planing it, and I saw the scratches, and that’s when I started reading up.

Then I read up on how to put a camber in a plane blade. Some people call plane blades cutters or irons. I am not that particular.

It turns out that if you sharpen by hand, using whetstones, you have to push really hard on one side while you sharpen it, and then you push really hard on the other side. Over time, the sides get cut more than the middle, and you get a very wide arc.

So I spent like 3 hours resharpening my blades. I found that once you start to get close to the arc you want, you can perfect it by switching the pressure from one side of the blade to the other during each stroke.

You can buy jigs and machines to do this stuff, but then you’re a loser and a girly man, and I wasn’t having that. And I don’t want to have to drag the woodworking equivalent of the Electrowhocardioshnooks out every time I want to do something.

So here is the bench now. The last two boards are covered by important woodworking tools such as my computer monitor and CNC lathe, so they’re not flat yet.

My big project for the weekend is to put the vise together. I am hoping UPS came through on its promise to deliver the acme screws and nuts today.

I also ordered some holdfasts. These are bent pieces of wood, like the hooked ends of crowbars. Dang…I just realized I could have bought crowbars and sawed them in half. Anyway, you drive them into holes in the top of your bench, they get wedged in, and pads on the ends of the hooks hold your wood down.

I will have to make holes for these things. Unfortunately, the bench top is only 1.5″ thick, and that’s half an inch too thin for holdfasts, so I will have to attach a board under the bench to make the holes deeper.

Once this is done, I will be able to hold wood down properly while I work on it instead of sitting on it or holding it down with my face.

The bench is getting surprisingly nice. You wouldn’t want it in your living room, but stuff no longer rocks when it sits on it. I could build a new top in two days, but I like doing modifications. It allows me to get practice without screwing up anything expensive or important.

I plan to use the holes for bench dogs, too. These are little cylinders of wood that sit partway in the holes, held up by friction, and keep wood from moving sideways. You can put a vertical thing in your vise’s moving jaw, put a piece of wood against it, and tighten the vise until it drives the wood into one or more dogs. This holds it in place. You can also use a bench dog, a holdfast, and a batten. But I am too lazy to tell you what this means.

I have learned an amazing thing, which I already suspected. Human beings have the ability to detect things their senses can’t really pick up.

For example, when I was sharpening the blades, I was creating deviations from straight that amounted to maybe four thousandths of an inch. To be really sure what was happening, I would hold the edges up to a machinist’s square and look for light between the rule and the blades. But before I put the blades up to the square, I already knew, pretty much, what I was going to see.

When I was planing, I had a carpenter’s square, which I used to check the wood for flatness. But I found that when I ran my hands over the wood, the high places, which were maybe five or ten thousandths high, felt positively swollen. They were very obvious.

Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t.

Let’s see. What else?

I made a router plane. A router plane is a tool with a blade that projects down from a flat body. You use it to even out the bottoms of dadoes, which are like two rabbets facing each other. In other words, a dado is a slot with vertical walls and a flat bottom.

There are a million router planes on the market, and none are cheap. I was very confused when I shopped. Then I saw this guy.

That’s Paul Sellers. He is merely AN English woodworker. To be clear. Anyway, he says you can make a working plane by driving a chisel through a board. So I bought a chisel and gave it a shot. But I found that making a chisel sit level in a round hole was iffy, and on top of that, I expected the hole to open up quickly with use, so I decided to make a board with a flat hole through it.

In order to do that, I had to make a slot half an inch wide, at 35 degrees to horizontal. Then I had to fill the slot most of the way with a piece of wood half and inch thick. The finishing touch was a set screw, which I made by cutting a quarter-inch lag bolt in half. I can move the chisel back and fort to adjust the depth of the cut, and the screw holds it in place and forces it to level itself against the flat bottom of the hole.

I cheated in the worst way possible. I used the milling machine to make the slot. Doing it with woodworking tools would have been a nightmare. I finished with planes, butchering the wood in the slot pretty badly, which proves my point.

I almost killed myself making this infernal object, but I did finish.

Does it work? No idea. I don’t have any dadoes at the moment. That’s not the point. I wanted to make it, and I did.

Now I may have something that will function while I either choose or make a real router plane.

I know you find this fascinating. Let me just say this: you’re welcome.