planing vs sanding

Re: planing vs sanding

Frank D. in Montreal

>Here's one side (you guess: sanded or planed?)

Re: planing vs sanding

Frank D. in Montreal

>Here's the other side:

Shellac

Frank D. in Montreal

>Shellac, side by side:

Conclusion

Frank D. in Montreal

>Answers:

first pic, planed

second pic, sanded

third pic (shellac): planed on left, sanded on right

The sanded sample, the bottom part, with BLO seems to be more blotchy than the planed sample, but the grain was steeper at that end of the board, so darker from most angles (my test is far from scientific obviously).

IMO there was no noticeable difference in the 2 samples, looking at them from various angles. The minor difference in the shellac pic is also due to the different angle with respect to the camera. There really was no significant difference in depth, clarity, or color.

One significant difference that I did see was that the planed side, to my surpise, was a lot rougher than the sanded side. I did not sand between coats, but the planed side sure needed one after the finishing; the grain was raised a lot more than on the sanded side, so much so that it caught hairs on my cloth. The last pic shows the difference in surface smoothness, planed on the left, sanded on the right.

So finally I won't stop sanding my surfaces like I normally do before I finish. If anything sanding presents advantages (less fussiness to preserve pristine surfaces untill assembly is finished) and a smoother surface with an equally nice appearance.

interesting

Gary B in Central NY

>I watched garrett hack perform a demo at the rosewood studio about two weeks ago. He maintains that almost all woods can be planed to an excellent finished surface. His point was it is extremely effiecient to plane boards because it is flattening and finishing in one operation. He planed a rough piece of very curly maple with a 604 and had a finishable surface in seconds. it was nice to see. while there may be no difference in surface quality, which one will get you there faster?

Re: Conclusion - same for me

Alan Bierbaum, near Denver, CO

>Interesting. In the past, I compared flat sawn hard maple, red oak, hickory and alder for finish comparisons. I planed half and sanded half to 120/150 with a ROS. Some were stained and/or BLOed; some left natural. I top coated with shellac and lacquer (different samples - not combined). I do sand (320 grit) a couple of times between coats of finish to smooth raised grain out. If I had not labeled the samples; I could not have told which was which after finish. I spray my finish; so had a fairly heavy coating (compared to a wiped finish).

I will have to check and see if I still have the samples somewhere.

Alan

Re: Conclusion

Brent Smith

>Frank, I would think that a planed piece of wood would take in more moisture than a sanded piece, therefore causing the grain to raise more. A planed piece leaves the pores open while a sanded piece, by the very nature of sanding, tends to clog the pores and create a barrier to moisture entering.I'd be interested in seeing the results after the pieces were scraped. The planed piece would have the pores slightly closed and the sanded piece would have the pores somewhat opened.

A very interesting thread. I look forward to reading the conclusions of those with more experience than myself.

Re: interesting

Paul Kierstead

> ... while there may be no difference in surface quality, which one will get you there faster?

I was also there to see Mr. Hack's performance. However, I think it was possibly a little misleading. Getting such perfect surfaces in the 'real world', where grain is reversing, etc. is possibly but will sometimes require a lot of farting about with your planes; his one little strip of curly maple is a lot friendlier then a full table top. I am all for planed surfaces when it works, but I am not gonna fight it when it doesn't.

Re: Conclusion

Joel

>none of this suprises me.

Historically the goal of the cabinetmaker was to create surfaces in decent enough shape so that the finisher wouldn't have much prep to do.

In the early 19th century when shellac and French polish were used the process of french polishing was essentially using an abrasive to work the finish and leave the wood leveled and filled. Earlier Spirit varnishes were finished in essentially the same way - but a good planed surface was rubbed out with something. Burnishing wood can help too.

A good careful finish planing will make life much easier for the finisher and I think is part of a good prepped surface. If you surface wood with a jointer you know that lots of sanding is required to take way the uneveness of the planer waviness and also raising the grain is an important step. These steps take time. A quick thin pass with a smooth plane can easily save a lot of that work and reduce sanding to a bare minimum.

If you totally mill wood by hand a tiny bit of sanding before and during finishing will even out minor changes in planing surface.

Carved surfaces of course aren't planed or sanded. here a clean cut with the tool is important, but using some sort of abrasive to level a surface is pretty much the way it's been done since abrasives have been available because it's the easiest way to create a uniform surface.

Re: planing vs sanding

Derek Cohen (in Perth Australia)

>Hi Frank

Thanks for the time taken to compile all this interesting info.

The results are similar to those in the recent FWW article. This type of information is extremely important in the context of building/finishing strategy - should I do this, can I do that?

While I do use sandpaper where needed, I much prefer to avoid its use partly because of the hazards of dust. So I persevere with mastering the art of shaving figured wood into shape. I am sure that there are times when I should have gone earlier to the sandpaper and saved myself some disappointment, but I am just a "Gentleman Woodworker" who delights in the shavings and gets no fun from the dust.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Grain Raising

Warren in Lancaster, PA

>The quality of a hand planed surface is much dependent on the skills of the worker. On a cleanly planed piece of wood there is no "grain" (torn and disoriented fibers) to "raise". You can wet the wood or stain with waterstains and maintain a slick surface with no fuzzing up. It needs no sanding prior to finishing. A clean planed surface treated with liseed oil will need no sanding ever.

Re: interesting

Frank D. in Montreal

>The question for me is: which one will get me there when I need it to. I plane with great care and aim for a glass-smooth surface. The problem is that by the time I glue up and assemble, I've got glue, scraper or chisel marks, scuff and scratch marks, dings, and a little dirt here and there to deal with. I can't plane a piece once it's assembled, so what I usually do is, after ironing out the dings, I sand lightly by hand only with 220 or so just to even everything out and clean everything up. I don,t sand at all to get things flat, nor to hide tearout. I just wondered if I was missing out on something after reading about the virtues of "hand planed surfaces only". For me sandpaper will never replace the fine work of a smoothing plane, but as far as I can tell sanding doesn't muddy the surface or anything like that (I didn't think it did but this was the first side-by-side test that I've tried).

I also usually sand between coats of finish but I didn't want to do the same thing as the guy in FWW (as I recall many people said that sanding between thin coats would in effect "erase" the planed surface).

Re: Grain Raising

Frank D. in Montreal

>I have no idea why the grain raised, I was quite surprised. The surface was as smooth as glass, my plane was still sharp when I planed the board. Shavings were under a thou.

Re: planing vs sanding

Frank D. in Montreal

>Hi Derek,

I'm quite like you, I sand as little as possible, only once a piece is assembled to clean surfaces up and even them out.

Re: Conclusion

Thom D

>I see the same results in my work. I use a lot of wood that I cut myself, and while it is excellent often, it is a bit sobering to see the kinds of trees one has to fell to get the average good wood used in cabinets. I use as much as I can of the stuff I cut and it often is not condusive to planing through to the finish, not to mention efficiency issues.

I would add to the excellent work done, that results do vary with the materials used On the wood front, some will show the results of sanding quite badly some softwoods, and some tropical woods. But then the other side of that is that one isn't limited to 220 grit, and some power sanding is so efficient one can sand to grits that glow even on the raw wood.

I'm going to email you Frank to give you the latest PP tidbit.

Oops,

Frank D. in Montreal

>When I say "even them out", I mean give an even surface texture (scuff), not levelling off wood.

Re: Oops,

Norman (Ottawa, Ont.)

>I often lightly hand scrape (hand held scraper) the assembled surfaces after handplaning the surfaces and assembly. This restores the hand-planed surface somewhat if there was any scuffing, dirt,etc. damage to the wood.

Sometimes a quick , very light pass or two of 220 sandpaper is the only sanding I'll do, otherwise it messes up the mirror-like handplaned surface.

I find there is quite a skill in leaving a smooth, track free planed and scraped finish to a surface, a skill which I strive to develop.

As others have mentioned, heavy sanding is also out for me, forever, except for a light pass or two with fine grit in the later stages.

I don't understand why there was any grain raising after handplaning, if planing is supposed to shear the fibres off cleanly

so there isn't any compressed fibre left to rise. I can only assume it has something to do with grain reversal.

Having said this, I finished a piece recently, planed and scraped and had the fibres rise after applying shellac. After repeated steps of levelling, I have it down to a mirror-like finish once again.

Not quite clear on why this occured with this particular wood (European Beech). A cherry piece of mine had no grain raising whatsoever after applying shellac.

Also, wanted to add that the planed vs. sanded finish really only

has a bearing if a penetrating finish is used, one which retains the texture of the wood. A film finish such as lacquer will obscure the wood surface texture defeating the gains made from handplaning or scraping in my opinion.

The film finish then becomes another layer above the wood which needs to be levelled to a gloss or satin finish.

Norman

to answer your question.......

bill tindall

>which is faster? After you have built a few pieces of furniture, as opposed to board demos, and encountered the real life realities of exchewing sand paper, you will have the answer to your question. The thousands of cabient and furniture shops across the land have not come to the wrong conclusion.

It is not surprising that a finish with a build masks any difference between a properly sanded piece and a planed one. In this case one is mainly seeing the reflections of the finish, not the wood, and scatter of micro fibers is greatly diminished by refractive index properties of the finish.

If the test piece was stained the differences would have been dramatic. A planed surface is like a sponge while a sanded one is burnished, more or less and it therefore takes stain less aggressively.. Personally I have an easier time controlling stain on a sanded surface, but that could be a result of more experience with staining sanded surfaces.

People plane a surface because they like to, and that should be sufficient justification. It can generate less of a dust issue for many people but this factor is not the primary mover. I suspect if plane enthusiasts were Myers-Briggs typed they would all be strong "P's" (process oriented)and the owners of air driven ROS's would all be "J's" (results oriented) , or persons needing to make a living at woodworking.

moisture and grain raise

bill tindall

>I was shown recently that a planed surface can be steamed without "raising the grain". This perked my curiosity to investigate what grain raising was all about. I think grain raising is the springing back of micro fibers that result from sanding. These wiskers are made by the sand paper and still ahve an end attached to the bulk wood. Reflections off these fibers give sanded wood a duller look before finishing. It is these fibes that the sealer coat sets up to be cut off by scuff sanding before top coat application.

Any sanding dust in the wood pores would provide no significant barrier to water vapor diffusion.

Chatonyance?

Dave Thompson

>Thanks for taking the time and sharing Frank. It certainly gives more credence with two independent studies caried all the way to varnishing corroborating each other (yours and FWW).

Though in my mind, the argument for planing vs. sanding was regarding wood that show chatoyance characteristics, i.e. scratched surface from sanding blurs the optical depth characteristics in some woods that show this characteristics pre-finished, such as is seen in quarter sawn maple or maybe qswo.

Haven't gotten off my duff to do any side by side comparison, so I don't have any opinion beyond a theoretical.

Thanks,

Dave

Y'know Bill....

John in NM

>I don't really think the institutional preference for sanding amongst persons who need to make a living at woodworking has much to do with speed. I find it quickest to size stock with machinery, plane smooth, then sand if needed with a single fine grit or maybe two.

The advantage to sanding in a comercial environment is that it requires almost no skill. The first employee most shops hire is a sander. The highest turnover postition in most shops is probably the sander(s). Many professional practices and preferences tend to filter down to the hobbiests, and I think the idea that sanding is fast is one of them. Its not fast, its easy.

Just my .02,

John

Sanding in Commercial Shops

Steve Elliott

>I've worked as a cabinetmaker since 1979 and have seen the methods used by over a dozen shops, from a large union shop with 100 years in business to small start-ups. None of the shops used planes to dimension lumber since jointers and planers are so much faster. None of the shops even considered offering a planed surface as an option for final surface quality. In my experience, planes are used in commercial shops to a limited extent for trimming and fitting, and I use my planes at work on a regular basis for those purposes. The one instance I�ve seen of planes being used to produce a final surface was by a Japanese shokunin who was building in the traditional Japanese style. In addition to hand planes, he was using a power tool called a super surfacer which is similar to a planer but takes a thin shaving using a stationary blade.

While sanding is one of the first tasks a new hire is asked to do, there is considerable skill required to sand well. An inexperienced sander tends to round over edges, leave divots, sand through veneer, sand too little or too much, or just not be careful enough about the right things. Bad sanding can ruin parts that are expensive to replace.

Planes are my hobby, and I think planing is more appropriate for hobbyists who enjoy the craft of woodworking and don't have to make a living at it. A home shop with a few planes can do work that matches or exceeds the quality of work produced by a commercial shop with a widebelt sander, a large compressor and random orbital sanders. Both the lower cost of buying the tools and the greater pleasure of using well-tuned hand planes are better suited to hobby work. I don't use "hobby" as a derogatory term, and actually believe that serious hobbyists produce work that is much better than most commercial work.

I don�t see any reason for conflict between advocates of planing and sanding, since the choice is made on an individual basis based on personal preference and the type of work at hand. I like both methods and want to know how to do them both well.

non-commercial, personal preference

Dave Thompson

>Nice to have some insite as to how it's done commercially.

I'll confess, I suck with a ROS. I spend a good deal of time (I feel) going through the various grits from 120 to 320 with fresh discs of sand paper and think that I have removed all of the power planer and power jointer ridges and then some, only to find out after my varnish dries that I didn't quite get everything. I loathe this situation so much and I value my time these days such that I went as far as buying a dual drum sander for my home shop. I get no enjoyment at all using a ROS, though always with a hand plane.

For edges, I don't know if there is anything as quick or effective as a quick pass or two with a hand jointer, to remove power jointer ridges. For large surfaces though with glued up boards and changing grain direction, the fear of tearout with some wild grain woods and lack of time has gotten me in the habit of using sanders over smoother and scraper. I'll remove the slight ridges between the boards with a jointer plane, but final smoothing is with sanders.

Small single board surfaces, like for a cabinet front frame or door, I do with a hand plane.

Dave

Re: Chatonyance?

Frank D. in Montreal

>Yes, cherry does have some chatoyance but not that much. What there was seemed quite comparable. I know I've gotten amazing depth, a real 3-D effect, to curly soft maple by sanding, but I'll have to do the same test next time I use some.