You Probably don’t Need a Plane Made Less than 60 Years Ago

This is the first in a series of posts where I’ll address what makes you productive if you’re working by hand. This often draws people who use mostly power tools and cut joints and smooth plane some wanting to discount this advice. It may also conflict with what you will hear from the gurus who never really work by hand in the first place and who may run classes where using something that’s not ready to go would be catastrophic. Those classes are fine for starting out, but you don’t want to be a beginner forever, and at some point, you’ll realize that most of the older tools are more appropriate if you’re working entirely or mostly by hand. If you’re one of the minority who wants to have the physical satisfaction and the same feeling you’d get from a brisk walk – the mental and physical pick-you-up, as well as the skill development that comes from actually roughing wood (no kidding, getting good at the rough work makes the fine work intuitive), then you have to tune out the self-appointed experts. Those experts will usually tell you about edge retention based on the tool (you are the key to edge efficiency in the cycle of work, not the types of stones you use and not the alloy of the steel), and perhaps include their comment that you are wasting your time working by hand. If you take their advice, you’re really wasting your time.

The Case for Tools that Will Be More Efficient

Planes that get you instant success and plans that get you to be physically efficient (where work is predictable and your energy is spent on removing wood vs. making friction or lifting heavy tools) aren’t really the same. The first wooden plane that I purchased had an ill fitting wedge – very ill fitting. I incorrectly assumed that wooden planes were probably always a bit loose and difficult to use and maybe they came from an era where wood was soft, very straight and easy to work. I was wrong about that – fitting the wedge properly and understanding the use of the cap iron were key, but so, too was getting some familiarity with lots of little nuances. It’s almost impossible to hand-work wood efficiently with metal planes doing the rough and middle work. No matter how much of it you do, if you experiment in measuring your output over a set period of time, the slight increase in inclination needed to use wooden tools for the rough and middle work is the only direction to go. How big is the difference in your output (not to mention, your fatigue). Somewhere around 1.5 or 2 to 1 in volume of work done with a wooden jack and try plane vs. a metal jack and metal jointer. The more you move toward heavier metal planes, the worse your output will be. Premium metal planes are generally fine for following power tools and doing limited work, and they’re great for giving you a feel for how well a plane can work, but if you’re doing significant work by hand, they’re toxic.

This is a real bummer to me, personally, as I’d built 4 infill planes before finally recognizing that they’re not an upgrade for an experienced user. And even beyond that, if you work backwards to planes used around 1900, you’ll find most infill smoothing planes are closer to a stanley plane in weight than they are to whatever’s being marketed as a super heavy, super flat “improved” plane. I still have a love for infill planes (and still have about a dozen of them), but they’re not on the bench for long in a volume of work. I simply have them because I like them, but they become intolerable if you’re dimensioning wood and any more than a very small amount. Keep the wax handy and bring a canteen!

What then is an efficient set of planes for dimensioning and smoothing?

• An English style jack around 15-17 inches with an iron 2 1/8 -2 1/4 inches (continental style is fine, too, if you like that – avoid adjusters, though).
• An English style try plane around 20-24 inches (I’ve seen 24 inches referred to as a “long” plane) with a 2 1/2″ iron (or perhaps a quarter narrower if you find that too hard to work – but persist before you decide you can’t handle a 7 pound wooden plane with a 2 1/2″ iron). Continental is fine here, too – avoid the adjuster again.
• A Stanley 4 (or 3 if you like) smoother (in comes one metal plane – if the try plane does its job, smoothing is spectacularly quick and this is the one case where you’ll find the adjuster useful). Common pitch, stock iron and chipbreaker – you can replace those but if the stock versions in your plane are good, thicker/harder/more carbides – none of those equate to more work done, but may equate to less. If you feel they do, you need to work on your sharpening cycle time. More on this in another post – but safe to say, an experienced user won’t find any benefit with increased abrasion resistance in steel.
• Stanley 7 or 8 – For the occasional poorly selected wood or prissy jointing work where you want a very fine joint, a sized bailey pattern plane is nice. You don’t need a 10 or 11 pound jointer, and in the case of wooden planes, I don’t think a 28″ jointer is favorable. They generally have a long nose and you won’t use them much, so the efficiency of the wood contact is lost. Interrupted cut trashy wood will also hammer your wedge loose. You’ll find in general that once you’re good with the try plane, you’ll be able to make unseen glue joints without resorting to tissue shavings (which can be a waste of time when they’re not needed), and stock large enough to need a longer plane will be uncommon. If you have a little trouble at first, the metal jointer can be helpful, just as it’s helpful in wood that really won’t tolerate a jack plane at all (such as knotty wood or wood dominated by grain runout in every direction).

Do I have a lack of exposure to tools? No, I’m sure my total take from LN and LV in the last 15 years is five figures or nearly touching it. At one point, I had an LN 8 and LN 7, and bevel up LV planes at the same time. I’ve had at least fifteen planes between the two, but I no longer have any. They’re more effort to use in work, and the seeming advantage of “modern steel” in them really doesn’t hold water in anything other than ideal conditions. Again, more on that elsewhere.

This advice isn’t an oppositional viewpoint, it’s what constructive laziness will get you. Constructive laziness is an odd thing. is it more effort to dimension wood by hand? I guess that depends on what you like to do. I would find taking a lot of my shop’s footprint with stationary tools agonizing, as I would dealing with sanding dust, saw dust and a reasonable dust collection setup. I’ve skipped those. I find hand dimensioning pleasant (though it took a while to figure that out) and much like a brisk walk. If you’re fighting friction or woodworking like you’re pushing a tackling dummy or handsawing leaning over a sawbench holding your entire body up while you slash saws around, then you’re working against yourself and you’ll need a nap. Constructive laziness is about figuring out what keeps you in that brisk walk territory, using more subtle movement to create smooth constant output, and doing so in a way that’s rarely uncomfortable.

This entire idea, doing something efficient, predictable, in rhythm is why you can’t rely on advice from anyone telling you that you can’t make anything entirely by hand.

There is an Obligation, Though

You’re going to need to understand how tools work. Everything is incremental in life – anything you learn to do well. You understand little bits at a time and then they become trivial. The cliquish recommendations that you find online (though to be fair, with an equally cliquish “old tools only” counterpoint from experts who sell a lot of woo) leave you wanting to know one trivial fact after another, but those bits of advice don’t often connect and help you understand much.

The obligation is that you’ll need to understand how tools work, how you get them set up if they don’t come as nicely set up as you’d like, and how you maintain them in the cycle of work. It’s a little bit different than what you’ve read from writers who write articles for a living or teach beginners.

You are working toward the point, instead, where feel, judgement, work are intuitive and you’re going to be more influence. A simple example is the almost certain fact that when you first start, if you buy a Lie-Nielsen bronze smoother (A lovely plane, and a great idea if you’re looking for one tool that will show you what to expect from your own), it will almost certainly be easier for you to start on the near ends of boards, the plane will have a great chance of being dead flat, and fine adjustment will be easy. But you’ll eventually find it nose heavy, with lots of friction and once you learn to manipulate the Stanley at the start of a cut and it’ll be less work to use. I kept a bronze 4 for a very long time just because I admired the tool and the effort LN made to make it work so well out of the box. But in the end, it was just more effort to use than a good stanley example, and I appreciate the faster adjuster on the stanley. You might, too. The issue of being harder to start just goes away on its own – when it does, you probably won’t remember that.

Your obligation is putting in the time to get there, knowing it will become pleasant and trivial, and the skill and control and contribution to your own constructive laziness will find utility everywhere. Your obligation is to understand that you can learn every aspect of something like a stanley 4 or a wooden try plane relatively easily and then learn to manipulate them, and your familiarity with this smaller set will allow you to plane anything that can reasonably be planed (or scraped) without feeling the itch to buy a large scraper plane, or some other quick fix like that. You can go down that route (I did – curiosity and experimentation led me to have both premium large scraper planes, a stanley #112, a bunch of very steep rosewood planes – they just don’t do much for getting anything done, even though they’re fun to plane with). Doing everything by hand will quickly give you the ability to do all of those “difficult wood” tasks with your core set of tools just as a matter of trivial moderate exercise. No steep frogs, no scrapers, no specialty alloys need, and no double weight planes.