?'s for ECE Scrub plane owners

Re: ?'s for ECE Scrub plane owners

dirk wright

>I have one of these planes. They are very simple. The blade is hollow ground and needs to have a sharp curved edge on it. Just place the plane on a flat surface, put the iron in bevel side down, put the wedge in place, give a it whack with a hammer and test it out. They aren't for accurate work, just rough sizing the boards.

Re: ?'s for ECE Scrub plane owners

Christof Hartge

>Hello Wendell,

even if you would learn this nice mother-language of mine, these sheets arn't too explicate, to say the least.

First to the blade: The back of new ECE blades often looks somewhat serrated, as you described it, but in my experience they are nevertheless flat and it is not much work to polish up, a work you should do second.

First try the plane as it is. It should work. What Dirk described is the first method to adjust a wooden plane. Works good. When the iron is too deep, give the plane a whack on the back button, when it is to high a soft tap on the iron. Hold the plane during this operation on it#s side, so the iron ccan't slip through the mouth, and damage the floor, your feet or itself.

Second method, a little more tricky, but quicker and more precise. Hold the plane, sole up, free in your hand, protrude the iron as far as wished, fit the the wedge with your thumb, give it a tap with the (wooden) hammer. That's all.

Christof.

Thin cuts

jim_reed@marietta

>I have a LN scrub, but some of the rules are the same. Set your blade so that only a portion of it is exposed. Scrubbing is hard work and too much blade makes it harder. Start thin and work up to thicker. Let your sweat and trembling legs be your guide. Good luck. Scrubbing is fun because it is so hard to make a mistake.

Re: ?'s for ECE Scrub plane owners

Jack from Maine

>I just got one of those about a month ago and I love it. I got out a piece of rough cherry I had and clamped it down .Then I set the depth on the plane by tapping with a LV brass plane hammer til it took a nice shaving without digging. Then I proceeded to attempt to take a very obvious twist out of that board and all it took was a couple minutes. A few passes with a #5 and the board was flat and smooth enough for finish. I've never used a scrub before and I didn't touch the factory edge. I don't think I'll mess with it either til it gets dull. I sent you a translation of those instructions. Thanks to Andreas Winkler,a fellow wc poster who translated them for me. If anyone else is interested I can email you a copy. ---Crackerjack

Re: ?'s for ECE Scrub plane owners

Alan Hamilton

>Wendell,

I'm another satisfied ECE scrub plane owner. You're really going to love this plane.

As someone else said, the iron should be sharp enough to use right out of the box. But that doesn't mean it couldn't stand some work. I try to get my scrub's iron just as sharp as all my edge tools. However, I also make sure I maintain its steep bevel angle. If I sharpened it to a shallower angle, the edge wouldn't last. So sharp enough to reduce the effort required, but a bevel angle to make the edge endure.

I know lots and lots of woody users set their irons with a hammer tap. I shy away from that, though. I try to get it as close to right as I can before I set the wedge. Then, usually, I can fine tune it with taps on the heel or toe of the plane. Remember your high school physics, as in "a body at rest will remain at rest..." So a tap on the heel propels the plane forward; but the iron tries to remain still; so, relative to the plane the iron "moves" back (and up, because of its angled bed) hence withdrawing the edge some. A tap on the toe moves the iron the other way. If it absolutely needs a tap on the iron, I use a wooden mallet.

Alan--once again going on way too long.

Not quite responding to your questions

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

>1. Short, choppy strokes (think karate movies - I sometimes have to hold myself back from grunting "huh!" with each stroke) often work best for serious stock reduction.

2. Go at an angle to the grain, even at 90 degrees if that will work better.

3. Closely watch your gauge lines and don't get too close - it's really easy to get into a frenzy and wind up planing little Dead-Sea-way-below-sea-level divots in the work if you're not continuously conscious of those lines. Listen to this voice of experience.

4. On some woods, you can take really delicate cuts with the grain at the end to trim off little bits of wood, but this is usually the province of a regular bench plane with a cambered iron.

Truly amazing tool, seems like it almost died out for a while there but seems to be receiving its due again.

Thanks for all the help

Wendell @ Murphy, TX

>Lots of good information. I especially like Allen's physics description of adjusting the iron by tapping the heel or toe of the plane. I found some good information on sharpening radius blades on the Lie-Nielsen web page for their scrub plane. Thanks again.

Wendell

Re: Thanks for all the help

Charles

>Listen very closely to Bill's post. It is so, so easy to remove too much stock with a scrubber. Working in certain species and with enough blade projection you can easily remove 1/8th of an inch per swipe of the plane. That's scary.

It's a great tool. If you find yourself using one in a sweat dripping frenzy you are bound to remove too much stock. Remember, the other side still has to be made parallel. If you don't leave yourself room to do this you're in trouble.