With all the super-tuned, high-angle planes on the market today, you might think that scraper planes are a vestigial organ of the pre-bevel-up-plane era.

After all, once you get a handplane's pitch up above 60°, tear-out tends to be a non-issue, right?

Well, not in my experience. I've found that high-pitch planes are indeed a great weapon against tearing, but there are still times when nothing but a scraper will fix what ails you.

This weekend I'm finishing up construction of the first reproduction of a walnut Shaker sitting bench from the White Water community in Ohio. The bench is simple in form, but difficult in size. The original is more than 13' long and 12" wide. The seat itself is one solid piece of 1" walnut.

Thanks to the kindness of others, we managed to score enough walnut for two copies of the bench, which we'll be donating to the Friends of White Water Shaker Village, the caretakers of this historical treasure.

The walnut for this first bench came from a farm about 10 miles away from the Shaker village, which is a nice codicil to the project. While the wood itself dropped into our lap, working with it has been a challenge. This walnut tree must have had a difficult life. Along the 13' length, the grain reverses dramatically at least six times. There are knots to deal with, and I would guess that the tree must have grown at an angle – there is some definite tension stored up in the grain.

So getting the components roughed out to size has been arduous. The wood wanted to crook something fierce. The wider pieces also cupped. Today I started surfacing all the parts and found that the grain was too wild for even a freshly sharpened 62°-pitch plane with a tight mouth. And things got worse after I glued the aprons to the seat – leveling the seam between the aprons and the seat gave every handplane I own fits.

So I picked up my small scraper plane, which is based on the Stanley No. 212. I love this little bugger. I have no idea why the original Stanley plane is so rare. I have found the plane to be robust, easy to adjust, comfortable to use and ultimately effective against tearing.

And, true to form, the little scraper cleaned up all the messes that my handplanes had made. One of its biggest assets is its small size – it's like a smallish block plane. That means it will get into small hollows and scrape them with ease. But unlike a card scraper, it won't leave a dished surface that will look ugly once you put a film finish on it.

And, most importantly, the little scraper plane kept me from having to grab the pneumatic sander, which someone in our shop had left lying out in plain view. I felt the yellow DA sander mocking me while I was cursing the tear-out scattered like buckshot all over my work. But who's laughing now, windbag tool?

— Christopher Schwarz

On Friday afternoons, I always try to end the week with some work in the shop that improves my working condition. I do a lot of sharpening, fix a hammer or just put tools away.

This Friday was a day I have been looking forward to for seven years now.

My long-awaited-for hollows and rounds came from Clark & Williams. I'd ordered the half-set nearly two years ago, and had been saving up the money for them for many years before that. And 10 years ago, I'd built the tool chest to hold them.

My tool chest is a somewhat-crappy Kentucky copy of Benjamin Seaton's 18th-century chest. I'd built it in 1999 for publication in the magazine, but I needed to build it in a certain way to make it buildable for the power-tool woodworker. That meant finger joints instead of dovetails. And no interior plane tills.

But I did get to add a little bit of English flair. I veneered the main toolbox till and the saw till. And I used curly maple drawer fronts (though I really wanted to do the banded drawer fronts in the original). I always vowed to re-do the toolbox like David Nelson did.

But the toolbox works fine, and I already have a list of things to build that exceeds my 8-year-old's Christmas list.

So on Friday I fitted the interior with a rack for all my moulding planes, including the new hollows and rounds. It is the simplest sort of till I could manage that would allow me to see each plane's profile and keep them handy.

Essentially, it's just a piece of cherry that's 3/4" x 4-1/2" x 34" and is screwed to the sides of my toolbox and is wedged below the runners that my tool till slides on. I dressed the cherry by hand and put a 3/16" bead on the top edge.

The way it works is simple. The cherry board makes a compartment that is about 1/8" bigger than the toe section of the hollows and rounds. They simply drop between the toolbox's front wall and the cherry. And you can see the profile of the sole.

And because moulding planes are all about the same dimensions, the single board fits all the moulding planes (though not the joinery planes that have knobs and nickers that ram into this board).

After screwing the board in place, I felt better about the toolbox. Perhaps I've not totally redeemed myself, but installing this little rack ended my week on a nice note. When I return on Monday, all my hollows and round will be waiting patiently to get started on the next project at hand.

— Christopher Schwarz

Lost Art Press now has 300 copies of my new book "Handplane Essentials" in stock, signed and ready to ship. This 312-page book is a compilation of many of the things I've written about these fantastic tools during the last decade for Popular Woodworking, Woodworking Magazine, The Fine Tool Journal, Lee Valley Tools's newsletter, my blog at Woodworking Magazine and my blog at Lost Art Press.

To be honest, if you have followed my work closely for the last 10 years you won't find anything shockingly new in this book (not that there's anything "new" in woodworking anyway). But I have tidied up the text, organized it so it makes sense, added a bit here and snipped out a bit there. And it's collected all in one nice volume: hardbound, printed on nice paper with a full-color dust jacket. The book was produced entirely in the United States. All production occurred in our offices in Cincinnati. The book was printed at a plant in Ohio.

You can also purchase this book from my employer, F+W Media, and even get it for a discount from Lee Valley Tools starting in September. So why should you buy it from me?

A cool drawing of a sock monkey.

I have signed all of these 300 copies of "Handplane Essentials," and my 8-year-old daughter, Katy, helped. Katy is learning woodworking and helps me on many projects. She signed most of the books, each with a unique little drawing. There are chickens, some smiley faces, a couple turkeys and even one very nice rendition of her beloved sock monkey.

If for some reason you don't want a copy signed by Katy, just let us know on the order form. We have a box of books that are signed by me alone.

The book costs $35, plus $4 shipping anywhere in the United States. You can read more about the book or place an order by clicking here.

As always, thank you for your support. Lost Art Press wouldn't exist without you.

— Christopher Schwarz

Unsolicited Testimonials for 'Handplane Essentials'

"I have several books on hand tools, and the hand planes, written over the last 50 years. My woodworking library is bigger than any Barnes and Noble, Woodcraft, etc. I love books. I consider your book on Handplanes to be the definitive book on the topic."

Lost Art Press will be offering signed copies of "Handplane Essentials" as soon as the book becomes available the first week in August.

The book, a 312-page hardback, is a compilation of all my writings on planes during the last decade from Popular Woodworking, Woodworking Magazine, The Fine Tool Journal, my blog at Woodworking Magazine, my blog here at Lost Art Press and the writing I have done for other web sites and the Lee Valley Tools newsletter.

Honestly, if you've kept up with all the publications and outlets above, you won't find much new in the book. In putting the text together I eliminated some redundancies, filled in some potholes and generally recast some of the articles so that everything made sense. I think it's a very good introduction to sharpening, bench planes and joinery planes. I didn't get into the moulding planes so much – I'm still not confident enough there to really write about it with any authority.

So I'm generally pleased with the result. The interior is going to feature sepia-toned photos like Woodworking Magazine (if you want a full-color version, we will sell you a box of crayons as well). The book's paper will be nice, as will the cloth-bound hardback cover and dust jacket. I'm also pleased to tell you that we negotiated hard to get this printed in the United States (in Ohio, actually).

Here's how the pricing and availability will work. Lost Art Press will lose some sales by telling you all this, but I'd rather just be honest with you.

Lost Art Press will be selling the book for the full retail price of $34.99 with free shipping. It will be signed by me (and by my daughter Katy as well if you please).

Right now my employer, F+W Media, is offering the book at a pre-sale discount until the end of July. It's $27.99 plus free shipping. Click here to get to their store.

Starting in August, F+W's price will return to $34.99 (plus free shipping) for six months. Lee Valley Tools will then be carrying it and will (almost certainly) sell it for less than full retail.

Amazon.com, Buy.com and other retail outlets will not be carrying the book until at least January 2010. Their websites might say they are going to carry it and discount it, but they are in error.

In any case, thanks for all your support. No matter where you buy the book it will help support the work we do and show there is a solid base of support for books on traditional tools.

As a way of saying thanks, you can download a copy of the introduction to the book, which will give you a flavor for its look.

HPE_FrontMatter.pdf (1.36 MB)

All the best,

— Christopher Schwarz

When I teach classes about handplanes, the climax is a contest where we see who can plane a 3/4” x 6” x 12” board to perfection – both to the try square and to the eye.

Last year at one of the classes, one of the young students in the front row took the contest to heart. When he brought his board up to me to evaluate he was out of breath and as wet as a Louisiana underarm.

I thought he had dunked his head in the toilet and was playing a joke on me. Or perhaps he was having a coronary event.

Neither turned out to be true. He was ragged out from planing. It’s a common complaint among readers: Planing is hard work. However, I can generally work all day in the shop without increasing my heart rate beyond what it is during a horror movie. You might think it’s my age (I’m 40), but I think it’s more than that. Over the years I’ve developed some habits that allow me to work steadily all day. Here are a few:

1. Make sure your bench is low enough. A high bench requires you to use the shorter muscles in your arms that tire rapidly. A lower bench allows you to use your legs and abdomen more. When I finally lowered my bench to 34" it made a huge difference in my work.

2. Step forward during your planing stroke. When planing a longer board (36" or more), I begin the stroke with one foot in the air and step forward. The act of dropping my foot begins the stroke. This puts gravity on your side. It looks funny (like a Monty Python Silly Walk). But boy does it work.

3. Traverse as much as possible. Planing across the grain allows you to remove more material with less effort. I'll traverse with my fore plane and my jointer plane. Then a few diagonal strokes with the jointer plane and I'm off to the smoother. The longer I can traverse, the longer I can work.

4. Plan your work around fatigue. One of the great things about hand-tool woodworking is that you can work in short bursts at different tasks and use different muscle groups. For example, I'm building web frames this week. I'll jointer plane the components. Then cut the tenons. Then the mortises. Then I might smooth plane them and assemble them. Then I'll move onto the next web frame.

5. Wax your tools. Paraffin wax on the sole of your tool (or a wipe with a non-drying vegetable oil such as jojoba oil) can do wonders. It reduces the effort to push the tool. And – if you apply it to your tools between each board you plane – you also get a short, breather.

6. Sharpen. I’m always amazed at how a sharp tool is easier to push than one that is approaching dull. Sharpening is also a break that can allow you to recover.

7. Pick different secondary woods. For the internal guts of your project, consider using Eastern white pine or basswood instead of using poplar or lower-grade boards of your project’s primary wood (i.e. don’t use rock maple for your drawer bottoms).

8. Don’t smooth plane the inside components. When I plane a carcase side or some internal components, I typically stop with the jointer plane. Sometimes I’ll stop with the fore plane (such as on the underside of a large tabletop). Only the surfaces that show will be smooth-planed. This can cut your planing time dramatically.

9. Always use the coarsest tool possible and take the thickest cut that does not cause tear-out. One 6-thou-thick shaving saves time and effort compared to 12 half-thou shavings. If your wood is mild, take a thick shaving.

So how about you? Any suggestions (besides indenturing an apprentice or buying crystal meth) for increasing your working time?

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor’s note: Dean Jansa is a dyed-in-the-wool traditional hand-tool woodworker who helped ignite many of the ideas behind my book on workbenches. At our request, Jansa gracious agreed to let us post some of his hand-tool tutorials he prepared for a Google Group. This first tutorial coves some of the basic strokes when sticking a moulding by hand.

— Christopher Schwarz

I was making a simple molding for a chest I am working on and thought I'd document the process. If you want to watch someone who really knows what they are doing I recommend Don McConnell's DVD "Traditional Molding Techniques: The Basics."

I've followed the same steps he outlines in the DVD, but Don does a better job of describing the steps than I probably will.

The first step, after deciding on the profile, is to lay the profile out on the edge of the stock and cut a series of steps with a fillister that will later guide the hollows and rounds.  Note: It appears that I am cutting the steps on the edge of a large piece of stock. I'm not.  That rough board is just used as a makeshift fence to turn my entire benchtop into a long sticking board.



It is a good idea to build your bench as long as you can. My bench is just a bit longer than  8’, and I stick the molding on a piece as long as I can fit on my bench. When creating moldings by hand there will be natural variations in the profile along its length. If you stick the profile as one long piece you can then wrap the moulding around the entire case and have profile match at the corners. The profiles, over the short distance needed to cut the miter, will match. So build a long bench!



Here you can see the resulting steps left by the fillister. There’s no need to worry about a little tear-out, the hollows and rounds will remove more stock and they are pitched higher than my fillister, which reduces tearing).



Next I cut the concave portion with a round plane.



Then the convex portion with a hollow plane.



Finally, cut the last bit of profile on the top of the molding with a hollow. (I didn't take a photo, sorry.) Here is the resulting molding.



Finally, wrap the moulding around the case. First cut the front molding from the middle of the long board, then cut the sides from the pieces cut from the left and right of the front molding. Here it is on the case.

— Dean Jansa

During the last 12 months I've taken on a lot of extra freelance work. The money probably should be going into my children's college fund, but instead I decided to spend a chunk of it on a traditional beech plow plane from D.L. Barrett & Sons in Barrie, Ontario.

Dan Barrett is a 25-year veteran of the trades and has been teaching woodworking and making handplanes for a long time. His sons, Kyle and Jeremy, are both involved in the business. Kyle has been building planes while Jeremy has been doing some machining.

I first stumbled on this family business while judging the toolmaking contest run by WoodCentral and sponsored by Lee Valley Tools. Kyle, who was 18 at the time, built a Mathieson bridle plow plane to enter in the contest. In my opinion, the plane stole the show.

Not only was it stunning to look at, it worked extraordinarily well. Some tools have a break-in period where the user and the tool circle each other like sharks. The results are inconsistent. The adjustments are difficult. The tool feels out of place in your hands.

Not so with this plane. When I picked it up during the contest, it was like I had owned it my entire life. With two taps of a mallet I set the iron and began making a beautiful groove in a maple board in the Lee Valley boardroom where we were judging the contest.

We awarded the plane first place in the craftsmanship division, but in my comments I declared the plane to be the "first among equals."

After the contest I was stunned to learn that the maker was just 18 years old. I sent him an e-mail and asked him to make me a bridle plow. I didn't ask the price because I didn't really care.

A couple weeks ago the Barrett family dropped the finished plane off at my office while they were on their way down to Florida for a vacation. The plane they delivered – my plane – is somehow even better than the one in the contest.

Here you can see the iron, skate and depth stop of the plow plane.

The plane comes with a full set of eight A2 irons (1/8" up to 5/8") and they are gorgeous pieces of work in and of themselves. Perfectly tapered. The faces are all flat.

The plane's stock is a single hunk of quartersawn beech with an exquisitely shaped tote. The fence is also beech with a piece of boxwood attached via a sliding dovetail. The fence slides on two ebony stems and locks down with the metal bridle. This bridle mechanism is, in my opinion, superior to a screw-arm plow. With screw-arm plows it's difficult to get the fence parallel to the skate.

This week I finally got an opportunity to sharpen up the irons and start using the plane. And once again, it's like I've owned this tool forever.

I'll be writing about this plane (and its maker) for the next issue of The Fine Tool Journal, so I don't want to spoil all the surprises. But if you're looking for another maker of fine traditional hand planes, I definitely recommend you consider D.L. Barrett & Sons.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of the most common errors when planing is to create a gentle banana shape on one face – where the ends of the board end up thinner than the middle.

The cause of this problem resides both in you and in your tool. First off, divide the sole of your plane into two regions: The infeed side of the sole before the blade (the toe). And the outfeed side of the sole behind the blade (the heel). And remember this: The blade of your plane isn’t co-planar with the outfeed side of your handplane.

This feature makes it different than your power jointer. As a result, a handplane has more of a tendency to make bananas. (By the way, you can make bananas – and wedges – with a power jointer as well).

But I think the tool’s role in banana-making is a minor problem. The bigger problem is you and where you are putting pressure on the tool as you plane. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

At the beginning of the cut, plant the toe of your tool firmly against the work. With the hand on the front knob, put all of your downward pressure right there. Your other hand (on the tote) should only push the tool forward.

As soon as the entire sole is on the work, you should shift your pressure: Use equal and forceful downward pressure with both of your hands.

As soon as the toe runs off the end of the board, release the pressure there but continue to exert downward and forward pressure at the tote.

This work, but it can be a trick to remember for beginning planers. It’s hard to get all your muscles lined up. So I tell them this simple mental trick: Just try your darndest to plane a big old hollow valley in each board by scooping out the middle.

Planing a hollow in this manner is almost impossible to do with a handplane that has a flat sole. So what you wind up with is a board that is fairly consistent in its thickness.

I cannot take credit for this mental trick, but I can’t remember who told it to me years ago. But works like crazy. And with that aspect of planing under control, you can then turn your attention to removing cupping and twisting in your boards.

— Christopher Schwarz

Somehow, during the course of about five years, I became a math dolt. When I left high school, my SAT scores for math were near perfect – far higher than my verbal score.

But after four years of studying intransitive verbs, subjunctive mood and zeugmas, my math skills withered to the point where – no lie – I couldn’t figure out the formula for the perimeter of a pentagon during a college class we all called “Math for Trees.” My wife still mocks me for this.

So I’ve always been at a loss to explain to readers the different curve required on the blade of a bevel-up smoothing plane vs. the curve required for a bevel-down smoothing plane.

The brain-dolt answer was always: The bevel-up planes require more curve to take the same shaving as a bevel-down smoothing plane. But that was about as good as my explanation got.

A couple weekends ago, David Powell explained the math to me during a presentation at the Northeastern Woodworkers Association’s Woodworkers Showcase. I retained the explanation and formula only until the next morning. (Honest: I had only one beer that night. Perhaps is was the lamb korma.)

In any case, I took notes during the presentation that are useful for the shop. If anyone wants the formulas, you can probably ask Powell himself. Powell was the founder of Diamond Machining Technology (DMT) and is now the maker of the Odate Crowning Plates. The plates are diamond stones with a curve built into them so you don’t have to use finger pressure to create the curve on the blade.

Powell’s numbers assume that the iron has a curve created by one of his diamond crowning plates. The plates are dished to mimic a 37-1/2’-radius circle. Powell’s numbers also assume you are using 90 percent of the iron of the tool during the cut.

So here goes: A bevel-down No. 4 handplane with a 2”-wide iron that is bedded at 45° will take a .002”-thick shaving if it has an iron that is sharpened with the Odate crowning plate.

Now let’s take a bevel-up low-angle block plane with its 1-3/8”-wide iron bedded at 12° and the iron sharpened at 25° (the angle of attack is therefore 37°). Powell says this plane will take a .0005”-thick shaving if you use 90 percent of the iron in the cut.

How about the very popular bevel-up jack plane? It has a 2-1/8”-wide iron and also is bedded bevel-up at 12°. If you have a 25° bevel sharpened on the iron, it will take a .0008”-thick cut. If you have a 38° bevel sharpened on the iron, the plane will take a .0006”-thick cut. And if you have a 50° bevel sharpened on the iron, the plane will take a .0004”-thick cut.

While these numbers don’t tell you how much extra pressure to put at the corners of your iron to make that extra curve, there is a good piece of data here. And here it is: Use the same curve for all your smoothing planes.

A plane bedded at 45° is best suited for mild woods. So its .002”-thick shaving is about right.

Planes bedded at higher angles are used for curly, exotic or just grumpy woods. So the best strategy is to take a thinner shaving (thinner shavings help reduce tear-out in my experience). So a shaving thinner than .001” is an excellent choice. And that’s exactly what you’ll get with a high pitch.

So all that math boiled down to this: Don’t bother with the math. Just stick with the same curve for bevel-up or bevel-down and you’ll be OK.

— Christopher Schwarz

Aside from eBay descriptions, photographs might be the biggest fibbers in the world of tools.

I’ve just finished judging a toolmaking contest sponsored by WoodCentral and Lee Valley Tools. During two days, I and two other judges examined, used and quarreled about more than 70 amateur-made tools. Our task was to award three prizes: the best-looking tool, the one that displayed the highest craftsmanship and the tool that worked the best.

As the entries came in, Ellis Wallentine of Wood Central posted pictures of the tools that were snapped by the makers (you can see those pictures here). I checked back every week or so to take a look at the entries and get a head start on judging.

Judging this contest, I thought, was going to be a cakewalk. We’d wrap it up in a couple hours and hit the Irish pub near the Lee Valley headquarters and spend the afternoon yucking it up.

It didn’t work out that way. In fact, the Lee Valley folks had to gently push us out the door after the first day of judging.

Here’s what happened: Photos are sometimes deceiving. Though some tools looked as good as they worked, other tools that looked like a million bucks in photos couldn’t cut a soggy toothpick in half. Tools that looked like they came over on the Mary Rose were so sweet they would almost do the job themselves when you went for a bathroom break.

And then there were the "ugly" tools. The tools that looked like they were made in a style that you had to wear either a black beret or Big Smith overalls (and no shirt) to truly appreciate. These tools managed to bore their way into your heart like a tapeworm in an Arkansas rice paddy.

So we argued about the tools. We almost abandoned any hope of awarding a prize for aesthetics. We were just too far apart. The craftsmanship award, however, was a little easier. There were lots of well-made tools, but some required more varied skills to make than others.

And function? That was the easy prize. When the steel hit the wood, it was quick to see which tools cut the mustard and which should be used only for resawing the mustard. In the end, using these tools radically changed my view of them. I didn’t care if the photos looked like junk or they had been professionally shot. When I looked at the pictures I saw only a tool that worked or didn’t work. As a result of all this, I was really pleased that we judged this contest in person and not via the photos. I think we got it right.

I cannot say yet which tools I personally liked or which tools I didn’t, but I’m including a few photos I snapped during the judging to break up the awful grey page generated by my typing prowess. When you take a gander, just make sure that you remember that pixels can be a crock of poo.

— Christopher Schwarz

I almost never get a phone call from the public relations people at the Stanley Works. Perhaps they are too busy selling garage door openers or thinking up double-entendre and obesity jokes to accompany the company’s line of Fat Max tools.

But in 2002, the phone rang, and it was Stanley.

The friendly public relations person had heard that I’d just reviewed jack planes in Popular Woodworking magazine and that Stanley had won the “Best Value” award. Could he get a copy of the review right away? And could they use it in their marketing materials?

At that moment I knew this was going to have a storyline that ended me with telling him that the tooth fairy didn’t exist.

Yes, I reply, Stanley won the award. Yes, I’d be happy to send him a copy of the review. Yes, they could use the test in their marketing materials.

“However,” I say, pausing for a moment, “I don’t think you’re going to want to use the review.”

And so I explained: When I set up our review of metal-bodied jack planes, I included all the major brands on the market at the time: Lie-Nielsen, Clifton, Record, Shop Fox, Anant and Stanley. And then, as a lark, I put a few vintage Stanley Type 11s into the test.

The vintage Stanleys in the test were about 100 years old and were bought at flea markets and on eBay for anywhere between $12 and $35. As you can probably guess, the vintage Stanley planes blew the doors off most of the new planes (except the Lie-Nielsen and, to some degree, the Clifton).

It was a fair fight. These vintage planes needed work. The soles were a bit wonky. The irons and chipbreakers needed work. The frogs weren’t perfectly tuned. But even though these vintage Stanleys should be retired to the old-folks home for cast iron, they were easier to set up than the new planes. The controls were finer. Heck the 100-year-old fit and finish was better than those on the Record, Shop Fox and Anant.

The guy from Stanley Works was perplexed by my explanation. But he still wanted the review for his files, so I sent it to him that very afternoon.

And now bear with me for a second story that begins with my phone ringing.

It is from a reader who wants help choosing a tool – the kind of call I get about five times a week. This guy wants some help buying a bit brace. No problem. I rattle off my standard favorites: The North Bros. 2101A brace and a couple from Peck, Stow & Wilcox. And I throw in a plug for Sanford Moss’s web site as a great place to research and buy the brace of his dreams.

“Um, thanks,” the guy says, “but I wanted to buy a new brace.”

Huh? Why would anyone want to buy a new brace? The best braces ever made are still littering the planet and can be had for less than the price of a tab of Oxycontin (not that I know anything about the price of illegal prescriptives).

“I don’t like used equipment,” he explains. “I want to be the first person who uses it. When I take it out of the box, I want it to be perfect.”

The reader then asked me about three brands of new braces he’d seen in catalogs. We went over the details of each one: junk, tremendous junk and crap-tacular junk. He settled on purchasing the brace that I had the fewest bad things to say. We both hung up the phone bewildered.

Sometimes I forget that there is a certain consumer that won’t buy anything that has been used. With all of the sturdy old houses on the market, they would prefer to buy something new in the suburbs that doesn’t have the same level of craftsmanship or detailing.

I used to get fairly worked up about this fact, but in the last few years, I’ve come to embrace it as a good thing. Here’s why: These people are helping expand the marketplace for high-quality new tools. They are the consumers who help ensure that Veritas, Clifton, Lie-Nielsen and other manufacturers will have a customer base.

Their buying habits have encouraged competition among makers and have exposed more of their fellow woodworkers to the wonders of high-quality modern tool manufacturing. I myself started into the craft with vintage planes and balked at the price of Lie-Nielsen (and later Clifton and Veritas) planes when I first encountered them about 12 years ago. But after using the tools, I think they’re a tremendously good value.

The whole thing is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Does the availability of quality new tools grow the interest in traditional tools? Or does an interest in traditional tools fuel the availability of new quality tools?

I’m not smart enough to answer a chicken-and-egg paradox. But I am smart enough to recognize that the world works in cycles. You see, last week I got an e-mail from a public relations person at Stanley Works….

— Christopher Schwarz

There is something deeply and dangerously engrained in our culture about the expression “going with the grain.”

Not to get philosophical, but I consider that expression to be the embodiment of our civil culture. That is, if we cooperate with the other people around us, then everything will be OK (taxes get paid, kids go to school, wooden boards get smooth). And If you go “against the grain,” then bad things happen (cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, tear-out).

Here's why this thinking is dangerous: It assumes there are only two ways to accomplish things - either you work with the grain or against it. That's ridiculous.

Some of a handplane's most awesome powers can be unlocked by working across the grain of the board. Working across the grain - what Joesph Moxon calls “traversing” - allows you to easily remove the cup out of a board. Think about that for a second. If you take a cupped cabinet side and plane it “with the grain” all across the board then you will end up with a nicely planed cabinet side that is still cupped.

Working across the grain has another amazing and distinct power: It eliminates tear-out. Working cross-grained means that your cutting edge is not going to lift up the grain, lever it upwards and tear the wood fibers ahead of your cutting edge (that's the long-winded description of how tear-out occurs). Instead, working across the grain simply severs the fibers. They don't get lifted.

Now, the resulting surface isn't ready to finish. It looks wooly and dull. But it isn't torn out. And your board will be flat.

That's an ideal place to be when you are working difficult woods. To understand why, let's look at how I worked the slightly cupped front of a curly maple blanket chest this week. First, let's plane this board “with the grain.”

Working with the grain: First take your jack or fore plane and work the high edges down so the panel is fairly flat. Working with the grain on curly maple will produce some tear-out. Then work the panel with the jointer plane to remove the rough surface left behind by the fore plane. Working with the grain will continue to leave tear-out behind over the entire surface of the board. Then take your smoothing plane and remove the tear-out and tool marks left by the jointer plane. If the tear-out is deep, you will typically need to make 10 to 15 passes over the panel to get most of the tear-out removed. Deep patches will have to be scraped or sanded.

Working across the grain: Flatten the panel with cross-grain strokes of your fore plane. No tear-out will be left behind. Now follow up with cross-grain strokes with your jointer plane. Begin to work diagonally across the grain, but take care not to work at an angle where tear-out appears. Again, done correctly, you will have no tear-out. Then follow up with your smoothing plane and plane “with the grain.” Because there is no tear-out to remove, you only have to remove the hollows and high spots left behind by the jointer plane. With my tools, that typically will be four or five passes over the board.

Working across the grain reduces the amount of work I have to do on a board and it reduces the amount of sharpening I have to do on my smoothing plane. Both are good things.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the two disadvantages of working across the grain. First, you will splinter the far edge of your board or panel. To remedy this, you can plane a small 45° bevel on the far edge, or leave your board over-wide and rip it to final width after planing. The other disadvantage is that working cross-grain tends to dull your tools faster. But this isn't as big a deal because you are dulling the fore plane and the jointer plane, which don't have to be hair-splitting sharp anyway.
 
In addition to working across the grain, here's the other weapon you should consider: a small high-angled smoothing plane. Tear-out can be localized on a panel. If that occurs, you have several choices: Plane the entire panel some more to remove the tear-out (laborious), scrape or sand the torn-out area (then you'll have to sand the entire panel to make the panel look right), or plane out that small area by working localized.

Short and narrow smoothing planes allow you to sneak into these areas without a lot of extra work. I like to use my little Wayne Anderson high-angle smoothing plane for this job (it's about as big as a block plane). You don't have to invest in a beautiful plane like this one to do the job, however. Any low-angle block plane that has been sharpened with a high angle and a curved cutting edge will work wonders.

— Christopher Schwarz

This week I’m deep into reading Joseph Moxon’s “Mechnick Exercises” – the first English-language treatise on the craft of joinery. Published in 1678, the “Exercises” cataloged the tools and practices of the blacksmith, joiner, house carpenter, turner, bricklayer and those who make sundials.

For the modern reader, the book can be a horrible slog. The printed English word of the 17th century seems convoluted. Sentences run on for far longer than we are accustomed to, and the sentences are interrupted by asides that wander a bit. Then they’ll insert a reminder of the original point of the sentence and swoop in on the end of the phrase.

Truth be told, you get used to it after a few pages. Then the hardest thing becomes the occasional unfamiliar word – for example, “dawks” means “hollows” – and the odd tool. My favorite example: the pricker. The pricker is a marking tool that perhaps resembles a square-shanked awl. But in Moxon’s glossary he says the vulgar term is “awl” and instead the proper word is “pricker.”

So as of today, the filthy word “awl” has been banished from our shop in favor of the much more polite “pricker.”

Every time I read Moxon I learn something interesting and useful. But what is most fascinating is how little has changed in 330 years. The tools and the methods are familiar – once you strip away the “shall yets.” Except for one important difference.

What strikes me during this reading of Moxon is his affection for the fore plane – a tool that is typically 16” long, which is shorter than jointer plane and longer than a jack plane. The fore plane has a blade with an obvious curve and is used to quickly remove material.

Moxon spills more ink on the fore plane and its use than he does on any other single plane. He discusses how it is used with its iron set both rank and fine. How it is moved across the board. How it trues faces and edges. The jointer plane gets some discussion, but not nearly as much as the fore.

And then there’s the discussion of the smoothing plane. Here is the entire entry on the smoothing plane (cleaned up a tad):

“The smoothing plane marked B 4. must have its iron set very fine, because its office is to smooth the work from those irregularities the fore plane made.”

That’s really about it. There’s no protracted discussion of the smoother and wispy shavings or strategies to reduce tear-out (though Moxon suggests that high planing angles are important in one part of the book).

Our obsession with smoothing planes might be thoroughly modern. Or perhaps there’s another way to look at this (bear with me, I know this is getting long).

Recently we had Matt Grisley from Leigh Industries in our shop to demonstrate his company’s new dovetail jigs. During our day together, he made an astute observation about hand work. I wrote it down after he said it. And it went something like this:

“What’s interesting to me is how woodworkers who love hand tools also love the heavy machinery – the big planers, jointers and table saws. And they don’t seem to have much affection for the power hand tools, like the router and biscuit joiner.”

And he’s right. I am deeply indebted to my planer and jointer. I would get rid of five of my smoothing planes before I got rid of my jointer and planer (don’t worry I’d still have at least five smoothers left).

I am obsessed with my heavy machinery like Moxon’s workmen were attached to their fore planes. For these are the tools that get the brute work done, that make woodworking possible. The finesse work stands on the shoulders of the fore plane and machinery. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to the shop to fiddle with my square, saw and pricker.

— Christopher Schwarz

I keep a short list in my head of what I like to call “The Woodworking Mysteries” – things that I pretend to understand but are really just outside my grasp.

One of the mysteries is how a tree can pump water and nutrients from its deepest roots to the furthest reaches of its branches. We have many clues as to how it works, but a complete picture eludes me at least. Another mystery is about how yellow glue (polyvinyl acetate) actually works. Again, I’ve never read a satisfying explanation.

A third mystery relates to handplanes and basic geometry. One common strategy for reducing tear-out in a board is to skew the plane as you make the cut. This strategy was beaten into my head by all my teachers dead and living. It’s repeated on the Internet by people I deeply respect and trust. And I do it myself in my work.

But if you do the math, you will quickly see how this strategy doesn’t make much sense on its face.

Let’s start with a fact that we do know: The higher the angle of attack when you plane a board, the less likely you are to experience tear-out. This is an almost immutable truth. It’s why we have high-pitch planes and scrapers in our arsenals.

Now for another fact: Skewing a plane in use reduces your angle of attack. Mike Dunbar, the founder of The Windsor Institute and a personal hero, explained this to me in the clearest way possible. When a shaving encounters a plane iron, the angle of attack is like a hill that the shaving has to walk up. If you walk straight up that 45° hill, that’s a lot of work. When you skew the tool, it’s like the shaving is walking up the hill at a lower angle. Or put another way, it’s a bit like building a road up a steep mountain. You don’t make the road go straight up the mountain, you build switchbacks so the vehicles can actually make it up the incline. Skewing reduces the amount of work required – both to plane a board and to climb a hill.

How much does skewing reduce your angle of attack? John Economaki, the founder of Bridge City Tools, published a brilliant chart that explains this on his web site page that promotes his variable-pitch plane. You can see the chart in full here (scroll down to the section titled “Skewing the Plane.”) You can look at this chart and see immediately that skewing a 45°-pitch handplane by 30° will reduce your effective angle of attack to 40.9°.

So here’s the problem: If high planing angles reduce tear-out, and skewing a plane reduces your angle of attack, then how can skewing the plane reduce tear-out?

Here’s a hint: The answer is in the branches.

Planing with no skew resulted in no tear-out on this ash board.

To explore this seeming contradiction, I did a little experiment in the shop on Saturday. I took a short piece of ash with pronounced grain direction – that is, there was no question about which way the grain was traveling in the board.

I cleaned up one face with a smoothing plane and then turned the board around so that I planed against the grain, which is when you are more likely to encounter tear-out. Then I planed the board with a bevel-up block plane, the Lie-Nielsen 102. This plane is bedded at 12° and the iron is sharpened with a 35° micro-bevel, so its angle of attack is 47°. The mouth on the plane is wide open, so it’s not much of a factor. The tool is set to take a shaving that is about .002” thick.

Planing with a 30° skew created this ugly patch of torn grain.

First I planed the board against the grain without skewing the tool. This cleaned up the board just fine with no tear-out. Then I skewed the tool by 30° (which lowered my effective planing angle to about 43°) and did the same operation. I tried skewing both to the left and to the right. Two areas of the board tore out grotesquely.

Then I cleaned up the board again and tried skewing the plane at 20°. Tear-out occurred at the same two places but not as badly. So I tried skewing the plane at a variety of angles. And without fail, the more I skewed the plane, the more tear-out occurred.

So how can skewing reduce tear-out?

You have to remember that trees are not manufactured items. They are giant cones made of fibers that grow in different directions as the tree responds to its environment: a hill, a disease, a wind storm. Then we slice them up into shapes suitable for building things, regardless of how the fibers are traveling through the tree.

In some boards, grain can change directions on you a couple times. And the grain can be at odd angles – you cannot assume that all your boards will have grain running from one end to the other – the grain may be traveling at a 20° direction along the face of the board and 10° along the edge. And the grain might be in the shape of a shallow wave.

So there are times when skewing the plane puts the edge in the right position at the right time to deal with that patch of grain.

Planing at a 20° skew created a little tear-out.

In my example board above, the two places where the tear-out occurred were at places where the grain rose quickly. So how did I deal with this board? As I encountered the areas that tore out, I straightened out the tool – no skew. When I worked the areas that didn’t tear out, I skewed the tool to reduce the effort required for planing.

So the trick with skewing takes us back to the No. 1 way to reduce tear-out: The best strategy is to select the best woods possible and learn how to read the grain so you can begin to predict how your tools will behave. Sometimes, the best strategy is to not skew the tool.

Or put another way: Because grain is irregular, sometimes skewing the plane allows the blade to encounter the grain at a non-skewed angle – and to therefore plane it without tear-out.

This is the end of my series on planing. I hope that some part of it was helpful. Next week, we’ll probably return to the topic of (surprise!) workbenches.

— Christopher Schwarz

If you follow the conventional wisdom for setting your chipbreaker, you will hate your handplane.

What’s the conventional wisdom? According to Charles Holtzapffel’s seminal work on the cutting action of tools, you should set your smooting plane’s chipbreaker .02” from the cutting edge of your iron (other respected sources say to set it even closer than that) and to have an extremely tight mouth. The illustration shown on page 478 of Vol. II of  Holtzapffel’s “Construction, Action & Application of Cutting Tools” shows a plane with a mouth as tight as one could imagine.

This, Holtzapffel says, prevents tear-out.

This, says your neighborhood blogger, makes your plane choke like a starving man at the Chicken Bone Buffeteria.

Chipbreakers do more harm than good in a handplane. Whenever I’m having trouble with a plane (especially if the plane is choking or refuses to cut), the first place I look is the chipbreaker. Whenever I fettle a new or vintage handplane and the bugger won’t behave, the first thing I’ll do is swap out its chipbreaker with another plane that has a working chipbreaker. In almost all cases, this solves my problem.

So what is the purpose of the chipbreaker? My cynical view of the gizmo is that it became widely used so toolmakers could use a cheap, thin steel cutter and reinforce it with an inexpensive iron or soft-steel plate. This is supported by the odd names given to chipbreakers. Some early sources call them cap irons, double irons, break irons or top irons. In other words, not everyone agrees that they were designed to break chips.

Early planes had thick irons and didn’t have chipbreakers, even during the age of mahogany, which has irregular grain that tends to tear-out.

In my view, the chipbreaker’s only real purpose in a modern plane is to mate with the tool’s blade-adjustment mechanism and to aid in chip ejection. Oh, and it exists to frustrate you.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Professor Chutaro Kato at Yamagata University did an interesting study of chipbreakers and how their shape and their position on the iron reduces tear-out.

You can read the entire study here. But here’s the quick summary: The chipbreaker actually did its job when it was located .004” from the cutting edge. I have tried to set a chipbreaker on a smoothing plane to this position (using a feeler gauge as a guide), and it doesn’t work well if you have a tight mouth on the tool. My planes just clogged because there wasn’t enough room for the shaving to escape.

If you read Professor Kato’s study carefully, you’ll note that he had better luck with a chipbreaker that had a radical forward-leaning angle – 80°! This 80° breaker worked better even when positioned back a little on the cutting iron. I have yet to try this setup on a plane because the numbers don’t add up. Professor Kato is working with a bevel-down plane bedded at 40°. Do the math: Putting an 80° chipbreaker on an iron bedded at 45° with a tight mouthseems madness. (If anyone has tried this, let me know. I also used to think that $8 for a six pack of beer was madness.)

So in what position should you place your chipbreaker? I set mine back about 3/32” in a smoothing plane in most cases -- sometimes even a little further back if the mouth is really tight. All I’m really trying to do is to prevent clogging.

Which begs the question: Why did I list a chipbreaker as one of the ways to reduce tear-out? Well, I did mention one use for the chipbreaker in a modern Bailey-style plane – it mates with the tool’s depth-adjustment mechanism. This mechanism allows you to easily set your tool to take the finest cut possible, which really will reduce tear-out.

— Christopher Schwarz

I have held (and used) three of Karl Holtey’s revolutionary No. 98 planes. The first thing you notice about these tools is that they are flawless in their fit and finish. Holtey lavishes attention on his planes like Gollum on the Precious. Every surface, inside and out, is flawless.

Once you take that in, the next thing you notice is the non-adjustable mouth aperture of the tool. It is, by most tool snob standards, big enough to drive a scrub plane shaving through. What gives?

To find out, I sharpened up two planes: My trusty Lie-Nielsen No. 4 with a 50° frog and a mouth aperture between .002” and .0025” wide. Then I sharpened up the Holtey so its angle of attack was also 50°. Then I took a board of nasty, surly, almost-as-mean-as-coconut Jatoba and planed it with both tools. Then I turned the board around and planed it against the grain with both tools.

I know this board, and it’s about as bad a board as I ever want to work. Most standard-pitch planes tear it out. But both the Holtey and the Lie-Nielsen cleaned it up with no problems – both with the grain and against the grain.

This little experiment calls into question the plane snob’s obsession with tiny mouth apertures. (By the way, I’m the chapter president of the local plane snob club.) After planing that Jatoba, I had to ask myself: Do you need a fine mouth for high-tolerance work?

I think the answer is: It depends. I think tightening up the mouth aperture of your plane is just one of the weapons you have in your battle against tear-out. But I don’t think it’s the doomsday weapon.

The long-held theory about the plane’s mouth is that a small aperture is preferred because it will press down the grain of the wood as the cutter slices it. If the mouth is tight, then the cutter will be unable to get under the grain and lever it up ahead of your cut, tearing out the grain. This sounds reasonable, but there’s more to it.

The sometimes-forgotten problem with a fine aperture is that it makes your tool much more likely to clog, especially if you have the chipbreaker set closely (I’ll be writing about the chipbreaker in the coming weeks.) So a tight mouth is usually a time-consuming set-up, unless you have a smoothing plane dedicated to fine cuts only.

I start closing up the mouth of a tool only when my other efforts fail: I’ve sharpened the iron, I’ve set it to take a fine cut, and I’m using the tool that has a high (62°) angle of attack. If all those efforts fail, then I’ll weigh my choices: tighten up the mouth and face some clogging issues, or get the card scraper or sandpaper and call it a day.

Now, lucky for me, I’ve been at this a while and so I have a few smoothing planes in my toolbox at work, some that belong to be and some that are on loan. So I can set them up with different mouth apertures and pitches. Here, in brief, are the tools I’ll juggle during a project.

For easy-to-work woods that aren’t giving me trouble, I use my Wayne Anderson miter plane with a .019” mouth and a 55° angle of attack, or I’ll use my Lie-Nielsen No. 4-1/2 with a 50° frog and a .009” mouth. Both of these tools will easily pass a thick shaving, which gets the work done. And their relatively high angle of attack tames little patches of reverse grain.

When things get nasty, I have two planes set up for dealing with tear-out. My Lie-Nielsen No. 4 in bronze with a 50° frog and a .002”+ mouth. This tool can take only the finest of shavings. Anything else clogs it up right quick. The other tool is the Veritas Bevel-up Smooth Plane. This tool is sharpened with a 62° angle of attack, and the mouth is variable – it opens and shuts with great ease. If neither of these tools can do the job, then it’s time for the scraper.

So how do you measure a mouth aperture? First adjust the tool so it’s taking a shaving you would expect from that tool. Then set the tool on its sidewall and get some feeler gauges. Probe between the mouth and the cutter – you shouldn’t have to probe far before you are stopped by the chipbreaker. Start with a small size of feeler gauge and work your way up. When you encounter a size that won’t fit through the space between the cutter and the mouth, you can stop. Your mouth size is just a bit less than the size you couldn’t fit up the throat.

You don’t have to have four smoothing planes to do good work. Heck, you can have just one, as long as you are resigned to fiddling with its settings in the middle of a project. Or you can have one smoothing plane and one scraper. Or one random-orbit sander and a nasty cough. Your choice.

— Christopher Schwarz

After taking a recent course in handwork, Rick Gayle, a reader and professional painter, visited our shop at the magazine this fall and looked over some of the planes in my wall-hung toolbox. He reached up to one of the cubbyholes and pulled out the Veritas Bevel-Up Smoother Plane.

"This plane," Rick said, "has made all other planes obsolete. Well, that's what my instructor said."

It's a strong statement to say that hundreds of years of handplane manufacturing have now been eclipsed by one tool, but I know what Rick's instructor was getting at. When it comes to reducing tear-out, one of the most important weapons you have is the angle of the tool’s cutter – aka the “angle of attack.” And no other tool gets you to that optimal planing angle as easily as that style of tool.

The higher the angle of attack, the less likely the wood fibers will lift up and tear out. Sounds good, right? So what’s the catch?

The only practical downside to a high angle of attack is that the tool is harder to push. And that's not much of a factor when your shavings are so teeny (see the No. 3 way to reduce tear-out for details on teeny shavings). Plus, the high angle of attack works great with well-behaved hardwoods, too.

In basic terms, this is why card scrapers, cabinet scrapers and scraper planes are the last word in battling tear-out. Scrapers cut at a very high angle – in fact the angle is so high that they actually cut the wood in a different manner and the resulting surface of the wood looks a bit different.

So what does the Veritas plane have to do with the angle of attack? After all, its cutter seems slung a lot lower than the cutter on a traditional plane. Well, the difference is that the Veritas (and some other block-plane-like tools such as the Lie-Nielsen No. 164) work with the cutter's bevel facing up, while traditional planes cut with the bevel facing down.

This makes a huge difference.

In a traditional plane with the bevel facing down, the angle of attack is almost always set by the frog (the casting that holds the cutter). In almost all vintage metal planes, this angle is 45° (new planes by Lie-Nielsen let you pick a 50° or 55° frog, however).

When you flip the cutter over, the angle the bevel is sharpened at comes into the equation when figuring out the angle of attack. Here's how: The cutter in a bevel-up plane is usually bedded at 12° or 20° to the sole of the plane. Let's use 12° for our example. So if you sharpen the cutter so it has a 30° microbevel on it, then you add the angle of the bed (12°) to the angle sharpened on your cutter (30°) to get the angle of attack (42°).

So this configuration would make a bevel-up plane behave much like a traditional bevel-down plane – or perhaps even a bit worse.

But if you sharpen the cutter at 45°, instead of 30°, then the world changes. You add the 45° to the 12° and suddenly you have an angle of attack that is 57° – that's fairly steep. And you can achieve it (and remove it) with just one quick sharpening.

So what's the best angle of attack for gnarly woods? I've found that with almost all woods, tear-out tends to disappear with a 62° angle of attack – that means sharpening a 50° bevel on your cutter and putting it on a 12° bed in our example.

So is Rick's teacher correct? Should I melt down all my other planes?

Back Bevels: Easier than You Think
Before you fire up the smelter in your basement, consider this: You can achieve high planing angles with a traditional plane (old or new) by sharpening a shallow bevel on the unbeveled face of the cutter. This, in essence, turns the bevel-down tool into a bevel-up tool.

The math is the same: Say your iron is bedded at 45°. If you sharpen a shallow 12° bevel on the usually unbeveled face, then you will have achieved the same 57° angle of attack as you did with a bevel-up smoothing plane.

Back bevels scare many woodworkers. But once you do it, you'll wonder what the big deal was. To hone a back bevel, I use the same cheap honing guide I use for the primary bevel. First I sharpen the primary bevel as per usual. Then I flip the iron over and set it back in the jig as shown in the photo.

I have a piece of wood with some shallow angles drawn on it: 10°, 15° and 20°. I line the iron up with the desired angle and then take the tool to the sharpening stones and hone a small bevel using my #1,000-, #4,000- and #8,000-grit stones. You don't need much, less than 10 strokes on each waterstone does the trick for me. (Don’t forget to put a little pressure on the corners of the iron as you sharpen so that the cutting edge keeps its curved shape.)

Then I set the cutter in the plane as per usual and go to work. With a sharp iron, thin shaving and high angle of attack, tear-out usually recedes quickly – like Joseph Biden’s hairline.

But when it doesn’t, I turn to the strategy I’ll detail next week. Here’s a hint for the “Wives Against Schwarz:” None of the strategies in this series will be “Buy a Holtey.”

— Christopher Schwarz

Most handplane geeks know that across the Pacific Ocean there is an entire culture of people who are even more obsessed with the mechanics of cutting wood with a plane than we are.

I’m speaking, of course, about the Japanese, who are prone to holding handplaning contests where participants compete to see who can make the longest and thinnest full-width shaving.

They measure the thickness of these champion shavings in microns. And the results are often affected by the weather. A wet day will swell the shavings by a few microns.

Sadly, Western woodworkers have become obsessed by creating ultra-thin shavings, which requires planes to be tuned to a very high note. What’s wrong with this philosophy is that it focuses on the garbage instead of the good stuff. The shavings get thrown away, remember? It’s the resulting work surface that we keep – unless we handplane that all away in some handplaning bliss-fest.

You want to be able to take the thickest shaving you can without tear-out, chatter or requiring you to bulk up like Thundarr the Barbarian. A thick shaving will get you done with fewer passes of the smoothing plane over your workpiece. Not only does this get the job done faster, but it also helps increase your accuracy.

Huh? Think about it. If you make 20 passes over a board with a smoothing plane, you are much more likely to plane that sucker out of true than if you used only four passes.

So how thick should your shaving be? Good question. Most people talk about getting shavings that are less than 2 thousandths of an inch thick. Or they talk about “sub-thou” shavings. Yes, it’s all very empirical, except for the fact that few woodworkers know how to really measure shaving thickness. Squeeze a dial caliper hard enough and you can make almost any shaving into a “sub-thou” shaving. Wood compresses. Metal bends.

So I go for visual cues instead.

If the wood is well-behaved, I go for an opaque shaving – that is, as long as the curvature of the cutting edge of my iron is significant enough to keep the corners of my iron from digging into my work. I’ve included a photo above of what this shaving looks like. This shaving gets the work done fast. If the surface has been flattened by a jointer plane, a shaving like this will get the work done in one or two passes.

If I get tear-out using a beefy shaving, I’ll retract the iron fully into the mouth of the handplane and extend it until the shaving looks like the photo above. Here you can see the shaving is thinner, but it is still intact except for one area.

That split in the shaving is probably caused by a small defect in the iron. The edge is probably getting dull and is ready for a touch-up. This shaving will clean up my surfaces in three of four passes. It usually eliminates tear-out more than the shaving above. But sometimes I need to get a little nuttier.

And that’s when I push my tool to get a shaving like the one above. This thing is about to fall apart. In fact, it sometimes will fall apart when you remove it from the mouth of the tool. Usually, this sort of shaving requires some persnickety set-up to achieve. I can’t get this shaving with an Anant, new Stanley or Groz plane. They are just too coarse to allow this type of shaving to pass. This is what you are paying your money for when you buy a premium tool. Premium tools will do this with little fettling. My vintage planes that I've fussed over will do this as well. A sharp iron always helps, as well.

The downside to this shaving is that you will be making a lot of them to remove the tear-out on the board. About 10 cycles or more is typical for some small tear-out. It is a lot like working.

Can you get nuttier? Sure. If all else fails, I can set my plane to remove something between a shaving and dust. These “shavings” don’t really look like much. How do you get them? That’s easy. When I get my thinnest smoothing plane shaving possible, I’ll rub some paraffin on the sole of the tool. This actually reduces the depth of cut just enough to get the furry, dusty stuff. Beware: Taking a shaving that small will force you into a lot of work. Lots of passes. Lots of sharpening.

But when you need it, you need it.

— Christopher Schwarz

The best sharpener of hand tools I know is – hands down – Harrelson Stanley of JapaneseTools.com.

The last time I worked a woodworking show with Stanley we were in Ontario, Calif., a few years ago as he was preparing to launch the U.S. line of Shapton GlassStones. As he was showing off the stones he stopped for a moment and looked me in the eye.

“Do you think,” he asked, “if sharpening could ever become a hobby unto itself. Like golf? Where people sharpened merely for the pleasure of getting a perfect edge?”

Stanley was serious, so I paused and gave it some thought.

No, I said, I don’t think it could be a hobby for more than a few people. For me, sharpening is like changing the oil in my cars. It’s messy and time-consuming, but you must do it regularly or disaster will befall you eventually.

And besides, if sharpening alone were a hobby that would seriously downsize my job responsibilities (half of my time is showing people how to make their tools sharp; the other half is showing people how to make them dull). Dulling the tools is more fun than sharpening them.

So I’m not a sharpening fascist. I’m a good sharpener, but I don’t take more than five to 10 minutes to renew a micro-bevel (grinding a new primary bevel adds another 10 to 15 minutes to the process). But I firmly believe that a sharp iron is the second best way to reduce tear-out when handplaning a board.

This belief guides me when I sharpen my tools and regulates the attention I pay to each tool’s edge. Here is what my typical sharpening chores look like in my shop at work and home.

For me, sharpening begins at the end of a project.

With the piece of furniture complete and the deadline pressure off, I take a few hours to sharpen my tools. I always sharpen the iron of my jointer, smoothing and block planes. Then I move through any chisels that I used during the project. If I used them for more than a quick pare, I hone them as well. Then I move through the rest of the tool box. Any joinery planes (such as router, shoulder, fillister, plow and dado planes) and moulding planes that I used get sharpened. I’ll also take a look at my marking knives, jack plane, auger bits and marking gauges. If they’re dull, I’ll touch them up.

I do this at the end of the project so that when I start a new piece of furniture, everything is set up and ready to go. Anal-retentive? Perhaps. But as I build the next project I don’t sharpen my tools as I’m working unless one of two things happen: I damage a tool by dropping it or hitting a nail, or my smoothing plane leaves tear-out.

If the other tools give me tear-out, I can usually wait it out. But tear-out at the smoothing stage of a project is one of the most frustrating battles to fight. You can try a bunch of different strategies to eliminate the tear-out, but the first one should be to hone up your smoothing plane’s iron and try again.

About half the time, this break in the action fixes the problem. If it doesn’t help, it’s time to try strategy No. 3 (next week’s topic).

— Christopher Schwarz

Whenever I’m working a booth at a woodworking show, there’s a fair chance that some power-tool-only woodworkers will come down from the mountain to give me some grief. Usually it starts with a few taunts during my handplaning demonstration (“Hey buddy where do you plug that thing in?”).

But I always relish the moments when they start to ask real questions. Here is my favorite question (slightly edited to make it saucier):

“So Mr. Handplane guy,” they’d say. “Let’s say you have a hickory board that’s 8’ long from a tree that grew on a hill. The board’s in wind, and it’s got a good crook in it as well. How would you deal with that board with your hand tools?”

“Oh that’s easy,” I’d reply. “I’d start with my broad axe.”

“Axe?” they’d say, confusion spreading across their brow.

“Yup, I’d chop the board into 12” lengths and feed them into the wood-burning stove.”

I know that all this sounds like Southern hyperbole (to which I am prone), but I am serious when I say that the best way to reduce your tear-out problems (with both hand and machine tools) is through careful stock selection.

About seven years ago I had the privilege of working with Sam Sherrill and Michael Romano on a project to encourage woodworkers to use lumber in their projects that woodworkers harvested from downed or doomed urban trees.

The two guys got the attention of The New Yankee Workshop, and Norm Abram came to town to see (and film) the projects these two University of Cincinnati professors had built using reclaimed lumber.
 
One of these projects I was quite familiar with. It was a large dining table that Sherrill had built for a family using a large pin oak on the family’s property. The table was fairly nice, but the story behind it was not.

The lumber for the table had come from the enormous, Jurassic-scale branches of the pin oak. The boards were wide (like those from a bole) but they were still reaction wood. Branch wood. Junk wood.

When Sherrill and Romano went to dry the wood and surface it, the wood self-destructed. It warped, split, you name it. They told these wild tales of how it would explode (yes, explode) in the planer. They lost about 90 percent of what they had cut, according to Sherrill.

That story sticks with me to this day. When I pick my boards for any project, I stay completely tuned to the grain of the boards at hand. If the grain reverses on itself through the plank a good deal, then I am going to skip the board (to the fire with you!) or saw it into short lengths, which might not give me as much trouble.

That sounds wasteful in this day and age. But the most precious commodity in woodworking is not the wood, but the time we spend working (or butchering) it. You can make your work faster and easier just by being a lot more choosy with your wood selection.

Coming next week: The second best way to reduce tear-out.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of my favorite old tools to fix up and use are small patternmaker’s router planes. Each one of these little tools is unique, usually inexpensive and easy to get functioning.

They also can be gorgeous examples of craftsmanship, or as ugly as an Allan wrench jammed into a plate of rusted steel.

The tools are fairly common because they were made by pattermakers for their own use, according to tool collectors I’ve talked to. Sometimes the patternmaker would use a common Stanley tool as the pattern for the craftsman-made tool. And that’s why you sometimes see router planes that look like slightly shrunken Stanley router planes in bronze.

The coolest one I’ve ever seen is owned by Carl Bilderback, a retired carpenter and tool collector who lives outside Chicago. He writes for Popular Woodworking on occasion and whenever I’m up there to take photos of his work I always catch myself looking at his router plane with lustful thoughts.

It’s fancy. It has a bronze base, a beautifully knurled adjustment mechanism and tiny little turned handles. You’ll be able to see a photo of it in our February 2008 issue. Carl is using it during an article on repairing mistakes.

The router shown here is a more typical example. I bought it for $15 at a tool swap. It was sitting on a blanket with a bunch of other little bits of rusted metal.

Fixing one up is easy. I started working on this one at 4:10 p.m. and was trimming tenons before 4:30 p.m. rolled around. The irons on these are almost always soft steel, which means they are easy to hone up, but that you’ll be sharpening them often.

I polished the flat face of the tool on my waterstones during two songs on the radio (man how I love Little Steven’s Underground Garage). Then I trued up the bevel on a diamond stone and honed a micro-bevel on the waterstones. You can’t use honing guides to sharpen the L-shaped iron, but it’s easy work by hand.

The only other thing to do is to clean up the sole a bit. The oxidation on the broze base will leave nasty marks on your work at first. I clean up the base on some sandpaper stuck to a piece of granite.

If you’d like one of these tools for yourself, the best way is to join Mid-West Tool Collector’s Association and attend one of their local or national meets. You will have 20 or 30 to choose from. I’ve found a few on eBay using this search, but I like buying them in person because you can make sure that the iron can be tightened up well. There’s nothing worse than an iron that shifts around in use.

— Christopher Schwarz