How to adjust hand planes?

Re: How to adjust hand planes?

Paul Kierstead

>Is your symptom this:

You try (nothing), adjust a little, try (nothing), adjust a little, try (nothing), adjust a little, try (huge bite).

If so, *my* guess would be (considering the groz planes), that the sole of your plane is convex, specifically higher at the mouth then the ends. Once you get the blade projected enough, it catches and pulls the plane down to the wood, taking a very heavy cut (as you had to get the blade projecting enough to catch). If this is the case, you can probably get a little cut at the ends of the board but nothing in the middle in the above scenario just before the last adjustment which does you in.

I'll also note that a dull-ish blade against the grain can also exhibit a lesser version of this. If you have a local woodworking club or the like, you might want to meet up with them and compare sharpness.

Err ... "concave" not "convex"

Paul Kierstead

>Well, it is all your point of view, but when you flip over the plane and look at it, it is concave....

Re: How to adjust hand planes?

Denis Ch�nard, Orl�ans, Ont.

>Paul's explanation is a good candidate, there's another possibility that's a lot more simple, more on that later...

You haven't mentioned what you did to your planes for preparation, but if you used them right off the box and only sharpened the iron, then you're asking for trouble. For a (western) plane to work well, the sole needs to be flat, and the frog must be sitting securely on its bed (a flat face, where the the iron sits, is a good idea too). Basically all Stanley planes, whether antique (good quality, but they need to be "revived") or new (lower quality) need that treatment. Groz planes absolutely need to be tuned up. I had two #5, one needed about an hour of sole lapping before it was reasonably flat, the other took like 5-10 minutes, but it needed to be done. Only with planes from Veritas or Lie-Nielsen (and up) can you expect to be able to use the plane right off the box with no more than honing the blade.

The other possibility happened to the fellow at the bench behind me when I took a course at Rosewood Studio. We were doing a planing exercise, right after having sharpened our irons. I had my back to the fellow, but I could hear the sound, nothing, nothing, nothing, BIG DIG, made me cringe every time. An instructor heard the sounds too, came over, tried the plane with the same results. So he took the blade out and checked the frog. Ended up being that the frog screws were loose... Probably not the problem you have, but just in case you might want to check the frog screws...

DC

Re: How to adjust hand planes?

wilbur

>Just to add more information, which hopefully will not be too confusing, Japanese planes are set up differently as far as the sole is concerned. What you want to do is have a strip across the front end of the plane be coplanar with the small area right across the front of the mouth of the plane. The wood in between is relieved by a small bit, so that as you pull the Japanese plane, the only points of contact with the wood are the front end of the plane and the area right in front of the throat.

Re: How to adjust hand planes? *LINK*

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

>What I say below isn't intended to contradict other posts; they may well be right. But, before you start machining your planes, try:

1. You should make sure your planes are clean (I use warm water and SOS/Brillo pads, followed by WD-40 to absorb the water, followed by a wipe-down with paper towels; don't do this in your kitchen sink unless you're single and live by yourself, as it's messy) and the operating surfaces waxed (furniture wax, available in hardware stores and big orange or blue boxy home centers; one can will last for years).

2. When adjusting, I flip the plane over and sight down from the front, starting with the iron retracted. I then advance the iron (note that planes differ on what direction turning the knob moves the iron) until I just barely see a thin bright line of iron. Then I try it on the wood.

If your wood's at all rough or out of plane, which it almost always is, your first strokes with produce only intermittent shavings. That's one of the points of a plane: it's designed to produce a (theoretically) planar surface on wood that isn't planar to start with. So you're knocking off the high spots. As you proceed, your shavings will get longer and longer, until they're continuous the length of your stroke. This doesn't necessarily mean the wood is now planar, as there are all kinds of ways to do it wrong, but at least the surface describes a line or arc rather than a stock chart.

3. Books have their virtues: you might buy "Planecraft," available from Woodcraft for about $10 last I looked (and from online book sale sites for only slightly more); and "The Handplane Book," probably most affordable on one of the online book sale sites. They'll give you a more comprehensive look at the art of handplaning.

4. Online articles can help, too: if you conclude your planes are seriously funky, there are articles here on Wood Central on plane tune-up - see the link below. I must say, though, that I've never gone beyond the steps outlined above (and sharpening the irons), and have done fine; but (a) maybe I've been lucky and (b) I did get rid of planes that weren't performing well (confession: I gave the worst, a 1970's Craftsman, to my brother, knowing he'd never really use it), so I may have just avoided learning how to do a tune up.


Handtools articles

Re: How to adjust hand planes?

Moses Yoder in White Pigeon, MI

>If everything else that has been mentioned is working, I normally adjust an iron bench or block plane while it is sliding across the wood. I adjust the iron to just before the point where it will hit the wood, then set the plane on the wood and adjust the iron downwards while pushing it across the wood. One thing to keep in mind is that your wood will not normally be flat, so as soon as you start gettting a tiny little shaving stop adjusting the blade. After you get a tiny shaving, you can check to see if the plane is taking the same thickness of shaving on both sides; in other words, adjust the iron laterally until the iron is taking a nice shaving right in the center of the iron and the same thickness shaving all the way across. Now your plane is set, and you can adjust it for a deeper cut if you are removing stock other than smoothing. Probably the best way to adjust a plane, I read this in a book somewhere but cannot remember which one, is to clamp a board on edge in a vise and use that for setting the plane. A wood plane is a completely different adjustment process than an iron plane.

the edge technique

bill tindal, E.TN

>No doubt some day I will no longer need this crutch either, but for now I set the plane up after sharpening as follows. Put a 3/8 to 1/2" piece of something easy to plane in a vise on edge. ( I keep this piece in where the planes are stored) Adjust depth and skew (would that be what the lateral adjustment would be called?) on this edge. Adjust the lateral adjuster until equal shaving is taken on each side of iron. At this point I adjust for a fairly fine shaving winding up with the adjuster screw tensioned to push the iron out. When actually planing something useful I adjust from this point according to need on the actual piece being planed. Because the adjuster screw has taken all the slack out for pushing the iron for a coarser shaving it is easy to increase the depth of cut in tiny increments as needed.

You will soon learn how much to back off the screw to go from a coarse shaving to no shaving and then in increments back to a fine shaving on what ever is being planed. I only do the edge thing after having the iron out.

If you can't go from taking no shaving to a fine shaving then something is fundamentally wrong with the plane as others have suggeested.

I never have gotten the knack of looking at the iron projection and telling anything about what sort of shaving will be made.

Re: How to adjust hand planes?

John Pappas

>Neil, what works for me is sighting along the plane sole from the back of the plane. (Looking at a light source some distance away.) Move the blade up so you see a small sliver of light reflecting off of the blade. It usually is about right, and you can adjust from there. The problem of looking at the blade from the front of the plane is that by time you see that sliver of light you have extended the blade too much. Once you have adjusted a plane to your satisfaction, look at it from the rear and the front and you will see a big difference.

Re: How to adjust hand planes?

Neil Larson

>Thanks for all of your help. The on-line artice that someone suggested from Lee Valley was of great help.

I spent this weekend finishing up some sharpening and did some lapping of a couple of my plane soles that were pretty rough. I bought a cheap (17.95 on closeout sale at Woodcraft) Japanese Smoothing plane that wouldn't cut butter. After a nice hollow gring on the iron, a clean up of the chip breaker to ensure that it sits square and using some of the techniques suggested here, it is pulling full width paper thin curls the length of some pine I have. My Baily Low Angle is working great as is a tiny pocket block plane I picked up someplace. I was most impressed by the smallest of a 3 plane set I bought off Ebay last year. It is a #4, a #5 1/2 and a # 7. They look reak nice but the soles were a bit rough and the irons were barley able to cut butter. The #4 is now a breeze to use and cuts like it was a Lie Nielsen (well, maybe not that good). Now I have to work on the other 2. Lots of working doing the soles tho I am using a variation of the Scary Sharp system (home made) and it seems to be working fine.

Thanks again for all your help/