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

Thanks to the maturing of my two daughters (and the waning of the “Days of Dark Diapers”), I’ve decided to teach two more rounds of handsawing classes in 2008 – two one-day classes in Sterling Heights, Mich.; and a one-week intensive class at the Northwest Woodworking Studio in Portland, Ore.

As of now, there are spaces available in all of these three classes. Here are the details and link to the schools where you can register:

Hand-cut Dovetails
Saturday, March 15
Woodcraft, Sterling Heights, Mich.
To register, send an email to: sterlingheights-retail@woodcraft.com or call 586-268-1919.

Learn to saw dovetails by hand while building a cherry Shaker silverware tray with through-dovetails. You'll learn to lay out your dovetails so they look nice, saw them accurately, chisel out the waste quickly, and fit them right the first time (plus, how to hide any mistakes). This is a great class for first-time dovetailers or anyone who has struggled to learn this classic hand-cut joint.

The Forgotten Art of Handsawing
Sunday, March 16
Woodcraft, Sterling Heights, Mich.
To register, send an email to: sterlingheights-retail@woodcraft.com or call 586-268-1919.

In this class, you'll learn to use handsaws and backsaws to track a line like a bloodhound. With a series of special exercises, you will learn to make the three different classes of sawcuts: rough cutting for dimensioning stock, standard cutting for final sizing of casework pieces and fine cutting for precision joinery. You'll learn the proper stance, grip and body motion for accurate sawcuts and receive the instant feedback and corrections from an instructor that will make you develop your skills quickly. You will also build a basic sawbench - the most important workshop appliance for handsaws.

Handsawing, Handsaws and Sawbenches
July 14-18
Northwest Woodworking Studio, Portland, Ore.

In a traditional shop, sawing was reserved for the most skilled cabinetmakers on the floor. Most anyone could use a plane or chisel, but it was the sawyers who transformed the timber into furniture with rips, crosscuts and joinery.

And though we now have accurate power equipment in our workshops, sawing by hand is still a tremendous skill that – when done properly -- can save time and effort. That’s because handsawing can be done without jigs or guides and without regard to the angle of the cut or its bevel. In short, if you can see the line, you can cut the line with a handsaw.

Honing this simple skill allows you to easily cut compound angles, angled joinery and cuts that might take hours of jig-building and test-cutting on a table saw. And, as a bonus, learning basic sawing trains your hand, eye and mind to cut any sort of dovetail joint you can imagine.

In this class, you’ll learn to use handsaws and backsaws to cut joints as precisely as any power tool. With a series of special exercises, you will learn to make the three different classes of sawcuts: rough cutting for dimensioning stock, standard cutting for final sizing of casework pieces and fine cutting for precision joinery.

You’ll learn the proper stance, grip and body motions for accurate sawcuts and receive the instant feedback and corrections that will make you develop your skills quickly. During the first part of the class you will build a basic sawbench – the most important workshop appliance for handsaws – and a bench hook – the most important appliance for wielding a backsaw.

With your appliances built and your handsaw skills in place, we’ll dive into dovetails during the second half of the week. We’ll explore both English and Continental styles of making this joint (both are valid) so you can find the approach that is right for your work. And at the end of the week we’ll build a simple dovetailed Shaker silverware tray.

— Christopher Schwarz

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

I want to thank all our customers, all those persons that tried to place orders and all those that needed patience as we started this endeavor.  We are just two months into Lost Art Press, a concept that has been years in the working. 

The idea of Lost Art Press is to make the equivalent of the Lie-Nielsen $150 block plane.   We wanted to bring back to public knowledge, the "Lost Art" of woodworking.   As Chris recently explained this concept to my sister in law,  when compact discs came into existence who wanted to know about LP albums?  When machinery came to the woodworking trade and mass production became not only possible but common, the secrets of the old timers went to the grave with them.  Remember the first time you tried a premium hand plane?  After using a number of low cost planes, the first time I used  a Lie-Nielsen plane I was convinced it was worth every penny it cost.  The thing worked!  We are trying to make the $150 block plane equivalent in the publishing business.  Our goal is to produce books and DVDs that will outlast us, that will inform challenge and provide that story of the past.

That said, we have a number of projects underway that will follow this theme.   We will update our site as they come online.

To introduce myself, I am Chris's apprentice. I have been woodworking for a number of years and thought this company would be a great fit with my woodworking passion.  Well, thanks to all of you, I have not been in the shop for months!  I have learned all about internet e-commerce, gateways, merchant accounts, accounting software, web sites and shipping!  Shipping is a real issue.  We are trying our best to keep our shipping costs as low as possible and get products to you asap! 

We will be on the road to a number of shows this year.  If anyone wants to know about the business end of things, please grab hold of me through if you are at one of these shows.  I will be glad to share.  We will be updating our site on show dates.

Lastly, I would like to introduce my wife Sharon.  She  is the one handling the telephone and most of the customer service issues.  She continues to remark how nice our customers are.  It is no surprise to Chris and me.  The woodworking community is a great bunch of people.

Thank you for your support!
All our best.

— John Hoffman
Lost Art Press

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

When I travel with some of my old-school workbenches, it looks a bit like a 19th-century British caravan to India. Since 2005, I’ve strapped my French Workbench into the bed of a tiny Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. I’ve driven it across town with its hinder hanging out the back of a Honda. And I’ve crammed the English Workbench into two too many mini-vans.

These workbenches don’t knock down flat for shipping and weren’t designed to. Society was a lot less mobile when these benches were in favor. And while I prefer these workbenches the way they are – built as one monolithic structure – sometimes you need to build your workbench so it knocks flat.

Though I discuss some bench-bolt schemes in “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use,” I didn’t cover the tricks to installing the hardware. I’ve installed quite a few of these systems in workbenches and beds.

So I’ve written an additional 10-page chapter that covers bench bolts and other systems of making your benches knock down flat into five pieces. Anyone can download this chapter here, for free, whether you’ve purchased the book or not. (The chapter is about 3.5 mb, so you will have an easier time if you do this on a computer with a broadband connection.)

The chapter discusses the pros and cons of the various ways to make your workbench’s base knock-down, including:

1. Solid-wood tusks driven into through-tenons that pass through mortises in the legs.
2. Drawbore pins
3. Lap joints secured with screws or lag bolts
4. Hex-head bolts, bench bolts or threaded rod.

Then I detail how to install the two tricky bits of hardware: hex-head bolts and the Veritas Special Bench Bolts, which I quite like. In addition to discussing knockdown workbench bases, I also discuss some of the different strategies for attaching the top to the base so you can easily remove it.

There might be a little surprise in here for you if you’ve read my book. All of benches feature very stout joinery, yet, I think it’s quite possible to really overdue it when it comes to attaching the top to the base. Most people focus on controlling racking forces when they attach the top. In a well-designed bench, you really should be more concerned about shear forces instead – and those are much easier to manage.

Dec. 20 update: Typos have been fixed in the new file below.

WB-Chapter9-appendixR2.pdf (3.49 MB)

— 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

A couple readers have pointed out a problem with page 81 of "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use" (Popular Woodworking Books).

The two columns of text on that page were transposed during the layout process, and I didn't catch the mistake before we went to the printer. All the text is there, and the story will make sense if you read the right column of text first and then the left.

Of course, that's not a good solution in my book (pun intended).

So I've prepared a corrected page that you can download, print out and stick in the book if you like. The page is in pdf format. If anyone else has any errors they have spotted, please e-mail them to me and I'll see that they are corrected in future editions (assuming that there are future editions).

NewPage81rev2.pdf (906.22 KB)

Sorry for the mistake.

— 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