Top Five Planes

Looks like alot of folks buy S4S

Bob Hackett

>When they buy lumber.Either that or we have alot of tail aprentices nobody`s owning up to.

I have more than one scrub just because they`re fun and are an easy way to add texture to a surface.

Mainely,Bob

Re: Top Five Planes

Ross Canant - NE Texas

>Smoother -- #4 1/2, Norris, Knight

Shoulder -- Record #71, etc.

Jointer -- #7, #8

Jack rabbet -- #10

Block, low angle -- #60

Re: Top Five Planes

Joe Rogers, Northern Virginia

>Good to hear from you RJ. I'm glad you still check in from time to time.

Regards,

Joe

It comes down to

Wiley Horne--Glendora CA

>how you want to work. I like roughsawn lumber, because if I buy s4s, I need a lot of 5/4 to maintain thickness for tops and sides and drawer fronts.

But if you've got a pile of roughsawn in front of you, one of the first things you want to do is get a fix on figure and color, so you can start visualizing which project parts are going to come out of which boards. That's an exciting time in the project life--when you start opening up the boards. It really doesn't enter my mind that I want to take a scrub plane and start flattening boards. I want to run em through a thickness planer first to see what I've bought, plus knock the very worst ripples and twist out of the board.

Once they're lightly 'skinned' to where the figure and color are visible, then I start marking the boards for where the various case parts and drawer fronts are coming from--this is an extremely important part of the job, and takes me quite a while to do. It takes a long time because it's complicated--you're having to juggle figure, color, and your estimate of finished width and finished thickness all at the same time. And all of those things depend on where you crosscut the boards. Once that's settled and you have all the equations solved in your mind and the boards are marked in crayon, you can do the rough crosscutting. The rough crosscutting tremendously simplifies the flattening operation, and preserves board thickness. If you make the crosscuts in the right places, you can take a board that in its full length would yield maybe 11/16" final thickness and 6-1/2" width, and make, say, two 13/16" at 7" or three 7/8" lengths at an average of 7-1/2" or 8" wide out of it.

Anyway, getting back to handtools, by the time I get em skinned and rough crosscut, they're ready for a heavy jack plane. My favorite is a 65mm Japanese jointer (what they call a jointer) which is actually 15-1/2" long. It's mouth is opened up to about 1/16" from lots of flattening. That thing will rip off thick woody strips very handily, plus you get pretty fair face jointing as you go. And it'll do it for 45 minutes or so before resharpen.

I'm not saying this is what everybody needs to do. All you folks should do things the way you like. But in answer to Don's question, whether a scrub plane makes the top 5 depends entirely on how you do the initial preparation. Just from my own viewpoint, the most compelling argument for a true scrub plane was the one Larry Williams stated a few weeks ago in relation to trim carpentry.

Wiley

Re: I make it six!

Roger Nixon

>The original list had a scub but no jack. I'd hate to take off scrub marks with a block, smoother or jointer.