the most basic plane question

[collinb]

I've been wondering something for a while about planes.
A power planer is easy to understand.
The blades are as wide or wider than the material, allowing it to smooth the full width.
But a hand plane ... that I am having trouble getting a grasp of.
If the blade edge is always lower than the bottom surface of the plane then it is always removing material.
How then does one actually smooth a piece of wood?

It would seem that one is always taking out a channel.
Or is it "more art than science" (as Teb said in Galaxy Quest)?

[RichardA]

   It's a little of both, mostly it's feel.

[Tony Wilkins]

Slightly cambered/curved blades take off little or nothing on each edge. Overlapping gives a perceptively flat surface. What you imagine is something to be avoided called 'plane tracks '.

[Gilgaron]

If you start with a scalloped surface it makes more intuitive sense.  So take a scrub or cambered jack with the iron out and make some diagonal furrows.  Then take a fore or jointer and level that surface straight down the board and you can feel how it is only cutting on the tops of the peaks.  Once it takes long cuts stop and pull out your smoother.  You can see that it is short enough to get into some of the furrows that the jointer skated over.  Until it is flat, it too won't take a full length shaving.  Because the smoother is going to be set to take a fine shaving and irregularity it brings on its own is going to hopefully be invisible and irrelevant. 

[TerryMcK]

You can take very thin shavings with a hand plane without those washboard undulations that a rotating blade on a power plane leaves.

With a finely tuned plane you can get half a thou to 1 thou shavings that are like tissue paper. You are still removing stock when using a finishing plane.

[collinb]

Gilgaron's explanation makes the most sense to me.

Thanks all.

[JerseyG1960]

My first experience using a handplane years ago was to smooth the mating surfaces on two-piece, hollow construction duck decoys. My initial reaction, before startng, was "There's no way this is going to work. There will be gaps and it will leak". But after a little practice, and no instruction, it did indeed work. Plane a little, check with a straightedge, plane a little more and it was sufficiently flat. I soon became proficient and fast enough that I abandoned my plans on buying a power planer. Almost 30 years later, as I get serious about other forms of woodworking, I'm considering a planer, but the handtool passion that carving instilled in me is continuing to pull me in that direction. My dovetail and mortise/tenon work is improving but the prospect of bringing longer pieces of rough lumber down to size still seems a bit intimidating. Getting one face of a decoy blank flat seems sooo much easier than getting six faces of a board both flat and squared up. We'll see what happens.

[Tom King]

Look at old woodwork in houses built before 1920s or even some later, and you will see the telltale texture on finish boards.  Each of the numbers of planes is for a specific purpose, and has it's own variation of camber.  Part of our work is matching these plane "textures".  You often need a strong side lighting to be able to make it out.

 

This picture is taken of a set of entry steps on an 1828 house.  The wood is painted treated Pine, air dried for years, milled to 1-1/8" thick to match all the other original finish boards on this house, and textured with one of my no. 3 Stanleys with the iron cambered to match some of the original cambered plane marks.  The shavings were a little less than 3 thou, and not the full width of the 3 iron.  A low afternoon sun highlights the texture more than it appears to the eye any other time.  It feels a lot smoother than it looks in this picture.

 

This is my coarsest smoothing plane.  The finest cutting is a 4-1/2 Record that takes a full width camber a little less than half a thousandth of an inch at the middle to nothing close to the edges.  It's set up to cut figured wood, and does a fine job of it.

 

There are 7 of these steps and risers 8' long on that set of steps.  It took exactly a half hour to do the planning, including walking a hundred yards to get the owner to come look at the last piece being planed.  The pile of shavings would have filled a bushel basket loosely.  The original 01 iron didn't need sharpening any time during that time, but I did hit it before wrapping it, and putting it back in the "Smooth" waterproof toolbox.