page 94
Use of the Jack Plane: Nicholson in the Jack Plane description mentioned two things I didn’t discuss on the prior post. First, that the corners of the iron must never touch the wood or the plane may clog. This isn’t actually the case, but it’s not a bad policy to set the jack so that the plane is not cutting the full width of the iron. If the corners dig in with some depth, you’re tearing or scraping the top of the cut out on two sides. This will burn through your lunch fuel in a hurry – don’t do it. Second, Nicholson says the cap iron should trace the profile of the iron arris. It should rather trace the profile of the plane sole – I’ve not seen a benefit to having the cap iron follow the iron contour – it seems ideal unless you think harder about the thickness of the shaving at each part of the iron. There’s no need for relief and doctoring the jack plane cap iron in a wooden plane could cause serious fit problems.
In the entry after defining the jack plane, Nicholson goes on to say that stock should be laid in line with the bench and planed along its length. He describes planing to extend arms. Leaning and extending arms is good technique, but you don’t need to put your arms out like you’re holding an attacker. Just use the momentum from leaning to extend an amount that doesn’t tire your arms before the rest of your body. It will end up being almost full locked out extension, but it won’t quite be that. Experiment and figure it out by seeing how easy you can make it seem to plane the same thickness and length. Do this now and again to make sure you’re not making things hard. Making planing feel hard is usually a sign of too heavy of a cut, or more often, generating power from the shoulders to the hands – instead of initiating with a lean or a twist at the hips and shoulders. Facing the direction of planing vs. twisting is a better idea with dimensioning. Your lean should be subtle and not end with you dropping down to shoulders at board level – the last thing you want to do is push a 5 pound plane and end up bending up and down as if you’re picking something up off of the floor. You’re also leaning down and into the plane, not trying to get under it or work with a high bench and push it in front of you. The high bench concept is modern nonsense if applied to more than fidgeting with planes.
OK, I added a lot of this discussion, but you will need it. Your goal is to figure out how to plane efficiently and in rhythm, and with relaxed legs that are straight or almost straight. No squatting, no rigidity. Your hands will have a grip but not be white knuckled, and they’ll be your means to make an adjustment.
Back to the board – you have your board in line with the bench, and Nicholson says to start planing the section your on until it’s how you’d like it to be. Then move and repeat.
There is one caveat here – if you’re planing a lot of thickness off of pieces, you’ll need to do some at a time, and that’s about what Nicholson suggests – plane off sectionally and then move back the length of the board and do it again. If you’re not planing much off and just facing a relatively flat face with saw marks, you may need to do this only once.
It’s at the end of this that Nicholson says to remove “protuberances”. The average person will prefer removing the high spots from a board first instead and then proceed with the rest. It allows you to get to full cuts sooner.
Use of the Trying Plane: wider but thinner shaving than the jack of course, but used much the same. My edit to this is if you’re using a 22-24″ try plane, you should finish with overlapping through strokes on the work planing in the board’s length. I think this will be covered in how to face a board. And then check flatness. There will be precious little to do with a smoother after this if you’re accurate, and using the cap iron, you should be accurate even if you don’t think you’ll be as the plane will not be removing varying thicknesses of wood due to tearout.
Nicholson mentions that the planing effort is about the same with the jack and the try plane.
The long plane and jointer plane are described without additional fanfare about method until later sections about making straight matching edges and facing boards.
I’ll post a separate post about that.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
One thought on “Nicholson on Planing with Bench Planes”