Hand Planing for Purists

Bill Tindall: The most astonishing discovery I have made on the hand tool forum is the that there are people that don't sand their projects before finishing them. This approach was so foreign to my way of woodworking that it has taken me some years to even consider its merits.

I was about to assemble another Krenov style wall cabinet. It's the typical small affair and tame grained, so I decided to give this planing approach a try. Instead of sanding I sharpened up the 5½ and smoothed the parts' surfaces. Removing the power planer ripples and glaze went well but dulled the iron enough to require resharpening before a good final finish could be had. I think I could become convinced that planing out these ripples is more convenient than sanding them, at least for small projects with tame grain. It also became clear that a rapid, not just an effective, means of restoring the iron's edge to perfection is needed to satisfy my need to get on with a project when it gets to its final steps.

Then I encountered an obstacle I don't see how you deal with. Between the time I planed these surfaces to silky smoothness and the time it came to apply the finish, the piece acquired a multitude of scuff marks that I could detect in the right lighting. Once assembled there is no way to plane these surfaces again. I intend to give the whole piece a light sanding before finishing. How do you all handle this scuff mark problem if you don't sand? Alternatively, how was this problem handled in 1750?

John Jesseph: Nothing wrong with a bit of sandpaper here and there. I am a big fan of scrapers, that would work too. Abrasives were used historically, just not in sheets from 3M…

Norman Ottawa ON: Perhaps a light pass with a scraper would do it. I tend to use a hand scraper for surfaces which cannot be hand-planed easily. Or even a light pass with 400 grit sandpaper.

Jack Guzman from Maine: A card scraper is great for touching up little imperfections and evening out the surface. The problem with sandpaper touchup is you have to sand the whole area to get it even. A scraper you only scrape the uneven part.

Darrell in Oakville: I use sandpaper for finishing, not for stock removal. A plane or scraper is much faster than sanding with coarse paper and then having to work through the grits to get to a smooth surface. I plane and scrape to get to a smooth surface, and then all I need to do is some light hand sanding with a fine grit to prep the wood for finishing. In some cases I don't sand at all, because either the planing and/or scraping left a perfect surface, or the surface isn't one that needs perfection.

Warren in Lancaster, PA: Generally you want to smooth plane (clean) the surfaces as late in the process as possible. When it is time to glue up you think about what parts will no longer be accessible and give them a light planing. A typical scheme is dimension stock, then joinery, then smoothing, gluing, and finishing. Accessible parts can be cleaned just before finishing. I think the joint making phase is hardest on the surfaces so save your smoothing until the joints are complete. The smoothing should remove negligible material.

Chico (HK Sakman): My breakthrough came from using 6 or 8 inch HSS jointer or planer blades as scrapers. Sophie introduced me to this and it works awesome. Just knock off the sharp corners and keep the regular sharpening geometry. No need for hooks and carbide hook burnishers etc.… Try it, it's unbelievably convenient and works very, very well without the need to resharpen this scraper often! Hand plane blades and chisels work equally well. Jointer and planer blades need to go to a sharpening service (due to the hardness of HSS) but they last a very long time. I got sick and tired of re-hooking scrapers. They simply don't last. 25 or 30° bevel works well and provides better control in my opinion (it works in wider range of angles).

Jack Guzman from Maine: I'm a carpenter. This hand tool stuff is relatively new to me. I hate sanding. I hate the dust and the tediousness of it. I built a small end table and never touched it with sandpaper. When I attached the top I set it on a bench to screw it down. The table top was directly under a light and at eye level. When I happened to look across the top I was amazed at the surface. No finish, this piece of walnut shone like glass. Sandpaper would have muddied it. I avoid sandpaper wherever I can now. I'll use it when I have to but it's nice to know it's not necessary. I'm still working on perfecting my planing experience and I'll be happy if I never use a piece of sandpaper again (my random orbit sander hasn't been used in almost three years).

David Barnett - Venice, Florida: It all depends on the wood and what you want. Some wood won't scrape. And walnut, for example, often benefits from iterations of wetting, drying, and a brisk ripping loose of the now-extended fibers with wool; steel, bronze, synthetic, or an old knit hiking sock (gunstock finisher tip). For old methods there's rubbing with silica bearing reeds and grasses, shagreen (which actually refers to the rump hide of the wild ass—great for stropping, by the way—rather than stingray or shark, which are actually nominal shagreen substitutes), various flaxen cloths, and so on. These transition to papers and hard felts neat, or with compounds, usually earthen, such as tripoli. Then you have hard burnishers; agates, jaspers, hematite, polished metal, very hard woods, and the list goes on. Get the wood hot enough just at the surface and you can harden and seal it by melting the outermost cellulose fibers (best for small areas such as edges).

As for HSS scrapers, yeah, Chico's tip is great if you have machine knife from the Dark Side. If not, you can get something called a cut off tool bit from Enco (about 5 or 6 USD) that's about 6" long, 3⁄32" thick, and maybe 5⁄8" high. I'd score and snap this (don't try this unless you already know how) so you'd get a 4" length and a 1½" or 2" scraper. You can tape or grind one long edge to make it safe enough to grip with fingers, or much better, kerf a piece of wood for a handle. The square (actually 5° beveled) edge will work plenty well—but don't burnish the arris! Harbor Freight sells a set of HSS tool bits for $2.99 US that has an unbeveled 4½" x &frac12'" x 1⁄16" cut off bar and four other short pieces of HSS that make good micro lathe tools. Kind of narrow, but it'll work.

And there's no shame in sanding! Depends on the wood and what you're after, of course, but I often end by running through a few grades of those superb 3M polishing papers (400 to 8000 grit). And I also like a wet-sanded (320 grit and oil) on some woods, such as canary wood, sometimes followed by a final rubdown with the 3M papers.

Dan Clermont in Burnaby BC: I hate sanding and avoid it as much as possible. I always prep my surface with a smoothing plane. After the glue up I will then assess whether or not it needs a light pass with paper. If you prep your blade properly you won't need to sand. Also have to be careful with glue and it sometimes helps to oil or finish the project before assembly I always start at 220 grit or higher if needed. Can't stand the noise, dust and time it takes to start sanding at 80 or 100 grit.

Ed Mulligan, Cape Cod: My usual sequence is to hand plane to remove machine marks, then scrape to remove hand plane marks, tearout etc., then sand. My goal is a flat, smooth, tear-out free surface that will accept stains and film finishes evenly. When staining is part of the finishing sequence it is important that all show surfaces are treated the same so stain is accepted uniformly. If one surface is sanded, they must all be sanded with the same grit sequence. If a bit of scraping is needed to remove tearout on one surface, all surfaces need to be scraped.

Wiley Horne--Glendora, CA: To answer your question directly, I like very thin scrapers after assembly, because they make less mess than sandpaper. Very thin because they're easy to use and flex one-handed, so that you don't run the risk of having a corner dig in. Plus they give you a real light touch, because they're just skimming the surface and you can feel exactly what they're doing and how deep a bite you're getting. I like to use Japanese saw blade material (DAMHIKT) or else the real thin hard scrapers than Lee Valley sells. You can get these things really sharp. The edge doesn't last as long as with a heavier scraper, but then you're not doing heavy work with them.

Another thing. I don't know what others do, but once I have gotten through the joinery and the various fitting up stages that you do with one-off projects (which all of mine are) so you can see what it's gonna look like, and then final plane the pieces—I like to prefinish right there, prior to glue-up. Get the thing dyed if it calls for it, and get a couple of coats of thin shellac on it, or else do the wet-sanding-with-oil thing. So at that point, you've protected the freshly planed surface, and any further smudging during glue-up and clamping—or just plain glue squeeze-out—is gonna be on top of finish, and will be much more easily wiped off or scraped off than if it gets ground down into raw wood fibers. I'll generally do further finishing steps once the piece is assembled, but the prefinishing makes the final cleanup easier.

Sgian Dubh: I find it interesting, Bill, that you're only now discovering some of the advantages of hand planing previously machined wood over sanding. Hand sanding out (in particular) the ripples from planing machines is quite a long and tedious task for small parts such as framing, flat surfaced legs and rails, et al, whereas a pass or two with a sharp plane usually does the trick quite quickly.

Hand sanding machine planer marks is difficult in part because the hammering effect of the knives—which are not always perfectly sharp—can penetrate deeper than the obvious surface ripple leaving bruised wood below the surface that can show after the polish is applied.

I can't recall the number of times I've witnessed workers sand a part almost to destruction due to a fear of handplaning even with power sanders and still not remove all the thicknesser or surface planer marks. Additionally they often end up with local hollows and rounding over leaving the finished article looking muddy or the edges unevenly rounded over or smudged.

Large panels can present more of a problem for hand plane only polish preparation operations as the grain on one plank can reverse on you causing tear-out, and adjacent boards can have grain rising from one direction and the other causing tear-out whichever way you plane.

If you're dealing with large panels such as table tops there are other difficulties to deal with too. It's probably not perfectly flat, and the face you are planing is slightly concave. How this is dealt with usually incorporates scattering a line of shavings along the centre of the workbench under the centre of the panel followed by cramping the edges of the panel down so you can get at it. There are plenty of other dodges too, and scrapers come in handy.

But how many people polish straight off the plane? Given enough time it can be done, but there's always the question of what to do with the edges and corners. How is the edge arris removed by users of planes only? A wee bit of 150 grit sandpaper on a block knocks off arrises very effectively, especially at corners where three edges meet. How do hand plane only users effect this three directional rounding over? I must admit I don't know the answer.

If you've got your surface pretty good off handplanes and scrapers and you're dealing with some scuff marks a bit of sanding with 150 or 180 grit will do for open grained woods like oak that are to receive a film forming polish—the pores are bigger than the grit, and you can go up to perhaps 220 grit for fine grained woods like maple or cherry.

At the final polish preparation stages I find it useful to have three or four smoothing planes set up ready to go, with settings like fairly coarse, less coarse, fine and very fine. You just pick up the plane with the setting required rather than fiddle about adjusting.

When using this number of planes in tandem it's pretty essential to have a very efficient sharpening system, and I feel if it takes more than three or so minutes to take apart a plane, touch up the edge, re-assemble and be back in action then probably a swifter sharpening method needs to be found.

I admit that I'm not a handplane only purist being one of those makers that will use any tool to get a job done fast. If there's a large surface preparation job of several panels then I'll usually turn to oscillating thickness sanders and hand held power sanders and so on to do the job at a commercially acceptable speed, but there's almost always a use for hand planing techniques in the smaller parts. You can generally get away with murder on vertical surfaces and edges anyway on large furniture items, which you can't do as easily on small items that can be lifted and viewed from all angles. What always catches the customer's eye on large pieces are flaws in the money surfaces, i.e., top horizontal surfaces, such as table tops.

Purism:

Adam Cherubini: Scuff marks? What is this scuff marks you speak of?

Seriously, I have no idea what you are talking about. I can say two upcoming Popular Woodworking articles I'm working on reference overhead fluorescent lighting and how unacceptable and disadvantageous it is for hand work. The only marks I ever encounter are those left when I stop planing in the middle of a surface. Otherwise, once planed, you do have to be careful of primary surfaces.

On the other hand your keen and analytical eye may be detecting surface imperfections that would have been acceptable 250 years ago. I'm unconvinced of the widespread use of abrasives in early shops. Extant pieces are of no help since the surfaces that would have been candidates for abrasive use have all been meddled with.

In my opinion, purism, despite having a negative connotation in the modern lexicon, is the answer to such questions. Furthermore, and maybe I should be ashamed to admit this, I'm suspicious of hypotheses from people who aren't purists. This is just to say two things- 1) I appreciate your word choice, Bill 2) I think you have to just try it again before looking for answers elsewhere. This has been my approach, born in frugality, and nurtured in stubborness. Knowing you, I think you'll find a way to make it work for yourself.

David Barnett - Venice, Florida: Adam... What exactly do you mean by purism? Do you mean by it dedication to purely historical tools, methods and materials? In other words historical authenticity? Does your purism support or refute a pragmatic eclecticism? Do you infer an unfocused approach to craft? I'm not being testy. I'm dead serious. It's an interesting question and I wrestle with it continuously.

For example, outside woodworking, in my attempts at replicating a certain texture on my pate de verre pieces, where powdered glass frits are carefully packed in layers along mould walls during multiple firings, I keep considering incorporating asbestos into the investment mixture as Gabriel Argy-Rousseau did, producing these silky elusive finishes. I've tried other refractory fibers, such as certain talcs, but I keep coming back to the asbestos question. Not for historical authenticity, mind you, but to achieve that superb silky texture on my glass castings. For so proposing, I've been called purist by others who find such unsafe practices taboo. As for forming wire in the ancient manner, I draw instead of beat and roll. I've piddled with the latter, fusing with a blowpipe over charcoal (many advantages) instead of a jeweler's torch. I'm not sure what I learned beyond just how damned hard it is to roll wire as it was done several thousand years ago. In this sense, being called purist is less perjorative than before, and implies more an investigative (albeit quirky) curiosity than intractable intransigence.

As for early abrasives for woodworking, I'd agree from what little I've tried—beating with phragmites, rubbing with hard-finished hides, and so on—that early shops would eschew such practices as largely a waste of time and effort. Of course, I might be doing everything wrong. The only practice I'm fairly confident of is burnishing, which can yield nice results.

Bill Tindall: Once planed, if this surface is rubbed by something, it looks different. It might get rubbed during handIing or rubbed by a clamp, etc. I called the surface scuffed, while others might say burnished. Lets just say inadvertant handling marks that may even include smudges. The wood fibers get compressed or scuffed up, or whatever. I don't mean dents. These marks may disapper when the finish goes on. It's the kind of thing that two swipes with 220 grit removes, or makes uniform.

So to repeat the question, if one does not use two swipes with 220 grit to remove handling marks before finishing, what is used? And I am not going to believe planing purists do not ever get such things!

Or to word yet another way—to remove any minor blemishes. sand paper users will give a piece a light sanding just before applying first coat of finish. What do planing purists do that would be equivalent?

Adam Cherubini: No offense intended. No one can invalidate an opinion, and I've always been an advocate of anonymity here (not in the sense of masking who you are, but maybe what you do) because I don't feel comfortable using credentials to justify points of view. I think every post should be taken at face value. So I'm guessing we're more or less on the same side of this issue.

What I would say is that I've had better luck with the information I've gotten from purists. Don't get me wrong, I listen to everybody, read everybody, but for questions like Bill's say, you have to find some purist who won't use sand paper and ask him or her how they deal with scuff marks. Guys like Norm Abram will tell you how to hold a handsaw or which planes are best, and their answers are practical and sensible. But (like so many of us here) I want the whole story—how to hold the saw, sharpen the saw, use the saw to resaw 12 by stock etc. These are things that reasonable, practical, non-purists never know or do.

I'm not sure I'm explaining this well. If you want to know the whole story on a tool like a saw, plane or chisel, you can't trust the consensus to deliver it. You need the purists.

Warren in Lancaster, PA: It isn't always profitable to think of everything having an equivalent between 18th century technique and that of today. This is a little like asking how did they make a mitred biscuit joint with hand tools or how do you cut a dovetail joint with delicate pins using only a router jig. Some things are not practical and the designs of different eras reflect that.

As a practical matter you don't really want to scuff up a piece between the shop and the customer's parlor and you don't really want to scuff it up between smooth planing and finishing either.

Moses Yoder in White Pigeon, MI: Purism? I understand your philosophy, and have to agree to a certain extent. I think probably most of the people on this forum have never used a hand plane, but we all still know a lot about hand planes. The reason we know is because we like hand planes, so we read about them. But reading and postulating from an armchair is much different from actually using a plane. So I think from now on Adam should be in charge of whose posts can be regarded as legitimate suggestions and we can put Mr. Duffield in charge of deleting the ones who are not qualified.

Adam Cheurbini: Moses, that's very unfair of you. I take great offense at your post. You know that's not what I meant. But I took your suggestion to Ellis and he agreed that in my new role as WC Purism Content Editor, your nasty posts will be deleted henceforth.

Bill Tindall: Your response should have caused no more offense than my precisely titled question.

There are some questions where everyone can have a useful opinion. For example, “what is the best way to cut dovetails?” I think some techniques are better suited to beginners. So, a beginner asking such a question might get a better answer from a recently successful student than what they would get from Frank Klauz. And given the multitude of techniques people use, there are a lot useful answers to this question. I am sure you all can think of many other such examples, and that is what keeps this Forum lively, and useful.

On the other hand, there are questions where the person asking is looking for an answer from a particular perspective( the case in point). If I ask, “what annual will do well in my flower beds (hot dry summers),” an answer from New Hampshire should be accompanied by some credentials or I will dismiss it. The New Hampshire person may have just read an article from Southern Living in which case they could have useful advice, but they should quote a source.

And, there are questions where there is a best answer and an informed expert is most likely to provide this answer. For example, I was going to ask on the other side how to best store a small gas engine for winter. I decided not to because I might not know an informed answer from an opinion, or worse, folklore.

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA: Whenever I see a thread heading in the direction of people getting attacked, I worry. This forum is the best around, and stays that way as long as we stay civil. Disagreement over ideas and opinions is fine—attacking people isn't what we should be about.

I will admit to having been startled by Adam's original purism post that started this argument, because it sounded so much like an arrogant only the truly orthodox can understand.

After his follow-up post, in which he says, “…for questions like Bill's say, you have to find some purist who won't use sand paper and ask him or her how they deal with scuff marks…” I understood a little better. There are so many modern alternatives to practically any manual operation, that those of us (I include myself) who hybridize old and new may not know how someone who is using only handplanes or scrapers for the final surface would solve the problem Bill Tindall posed.

This is a debatable question—if I do use sandpaper, but I know how to guard against or correct scuff marks using classic (pre-20th Century) techniques, is this knowledge useless because I use later techniques also? But let's debate the question, not attack the debaters.

Asking, “what did you mean?” or, “did you mean by your statement XXX?” will get us further than some of the recent posts ever would.

David Barnett - Venice, Florida: Hypothetically*, what if I was asked to essentially front-load (by footnote or attribution) what might appear to be a cavalierly thrown parenthetical, say, “...shagreen (which actually refers to the rump hide of the wild ass—great for stropping, by the way—rather than stingray or shark, which are actually nominal 'shagreen' substitutes)?”

Should I include such attribution, references, vetting notes, and so on in the original post? Or should I wait until challenged with, “I'm from Missouri on that one, bub. You'll have to Show Me!” (totally justifiable), or some rather more stick-up-the-arsity expression of dubiousness? Hmmm.

Where's the line? And who draws it? Who is the arbiter of certain truth and experience? While it's certainly appropriate to question the provenance of a respondent and argue the value of any statement, it's usually easy enough to do so within the thread on a case-by-case basis, which sure keeps me coming back. There's probably little need for a hierophant of Eleusinian Mysteries, or any other mysteries, for that matter, which, in my opinion, would quash the more intriguing, fertile, albeit recherché digressions that spring up. So I, for one, will cast my lot with the sometimes Byzantine (but nearly always entertaining) snarl of truths, half-truths, out-and-out falsehoods, armchair theorisings, inanities, and occasional insanities that one can expect on newsnet, Yahoo, and other proprietary forums. Risks? You bet. There's no red-letter edition, no concordance. But as the man says, “you puts down your money and you takes your chances.” Thank goodness (and Ellis) that doesn't happen here. That's my take, anyway.

*Hypothetically, because I've not been questioned on this (which would be perfectly alright) anywhere in this thread—nor in private email, or any other medium by anyone on this forum, a place that I consider entirely congenial, noncontentious and civilised, downright happy place.

Bob Hackett: If you're going to discount any input from a source that has less than (X) hours of experience then you may not be getting all the info you need or want.

One of the advantages of being involved in this (or any) forum is that there are some folks out there who don't have minds that have been molded by the conventional way of thinking and so approach any problem from a completely new departure point. Chico's example of using HSS planer/jointer blades for scraping is an excellent example. If the person he learned this tip from only has woodworking experience that's measured in months then we lose a great tip by discounting it.

I hear folks divided by what direction the bevel in their plane faces, tails or pins, pushing or pulling everything from drawknives to card scrapers. Do we really need yet another reason to divide the camp? I say gather all the info you can and try it (that's what scrap is for). Without the freedom to discuss all approaches to a problem I would never have learned about things like leaf planes or gathered even more info to further research one of my newest directions, burnishing (thanks David). You never truly know until you try. If you don't have the time or the inclination to try it all then why are you asking for input?

Bill Lowrance in Geneva: The good thing about best practices in woodworking is that there are so many to choose from! It just comes down to the worker vs—or better, with—the wood.

In earlier times, and in the Appalachians when I was growing up, and often still in Europe, folks scraped with broken glass and burnished with scraps of silica-bearing dried horsetail rush.

Moses Yoder in White Pigeon, MI: Adam, I really didn't intend to actually offend you or make you angry. I was trying to get you to have the same reaction to my post that I think many here had to your original post regarding postings from non-purists. You often times come across very strongly in your posts, which is an interesting part of any character that is passionate about what they do. I apologize to you for offending you, and I guess expect you to do the same for offending the non-purists.

Dan Clermont in Burnaby BC: I can plane a surface perfectly smooth. Smooth enough to make it feel like glass. If I pick that board up and look at it in the light I may see some dull spots due to the iron not being uniformly sharp across but considering the shaving I took was almost full width and less then 1 thou in thickness I would have to say that surface is sanded at least to the equivalent of 600 grit.

Providing I don't have any chips in my plane blade edge where I can now see and feel a bumpy surface it is probably going to be just fine once I apply my finish. However, it would be a good idea to sand a little bit so all of the wood fibres absorb the finish equally. I am not talking about starting to sand at 80 grit here but go over it with 220 or 400 or 600 and basically burnish the surface.