wood to use for wooden hand planes


wintersedge

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Couple questions on wooden hand planes:

 

1. Is it best to use quarter-sawn wood? I would like to make a smoother, a jack, and jointer plane.

2. What are good woods to use? I see many traditional moulding planes made out of beech. Chris Wong has started making planes out of cherry. I would like to find woods that are native to Georgia or very close by and woods that are not considered irritant. I was thinking hickory, pecan or maple. 

3. Is it wise to use a denser wood for the sole of the plane or is using a wood like hard maple or hickory dense enough?

4. Lastly, for a first time plane is a Krenov style plane the easiest to start with?

 

Thanks

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I just spent some time with David Finck making planes. He has great book available on his website that I highly recommend. Wood planes are awesome.

The cut (quarter, flat, or rift) doesn't matter as long as it is a well seasoned and dry blank. You do want to look at the grain direction on the side of the plane and orientate it to run off toward the back of the plane. Any hardwood is good. We made planes from oak and persimmon. Beech and hard maple would be fine as well. We also added a insert at the front of the mouth made from iron bark. This is the highest wear area due to fibers raising just before the cut. If you use a softer hardwood such as cherry you should add a soul made from something harder.

The krenov style is the way to go.

Pin placement and wedge angle are important.

The book explains all that very well.

Later

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1. Is it best to use quarter-sawn wood? I would like to make a smoother, a jack, and jointer plane.

 

If you think about it, the blank for a wooden body hand plane is nearly square...meaning that quarter sawn is flat sawn rotated 90 degrees.

 

 

2. What are good woods to use? I see many traditional moulding planes made out of beech. Chris Wong has started making planes out of cherry. I would like to find woods that are native to Georgia or very close by and woods that are not considered irritant. I was thinking hickory, pecan or maple. 

 

You're on the right track:  Use whatever is close at hand.  Peter Follansbee's infamous jack plane is (by his own admission) made of firewood.

 

repair-pf-plane.jpg?w=510&h=341

 

Note the massive crack and the stylish cut nail driven in just to hold the thing together.  Any of the woods you propose will work.

 

Krenov's design is indeed a good place to start.  Shaping the components is child's play compared to other designs.  For comparison, Kari Hultman's writeup of her horned smoother will give you a sense of what else you could do.  But Krenov's practice of ripping the blank apart and gluing it back together is a very quick and easy way to go.

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1. I've made probably 2 dozen planes at this point and I do not see any difference in how it is cut.  Though I do pick quartersawn first If I have it. 

 

2. Harder is better IMO.  But I have used everything under the sun.  Maple, walnut, cherry, lacewood, bloodwood, cocobolo, padauk, etc, etc.  

 

3. Maple and hickory are hard enough.  My preference would be to use something like cocobolo or ebony all the time if I had the $$$.

 

4. Yes.  The first one will take you a week to build,  the second will take 4 hours.   I started by using plans in WOOD magazine.  

 

Have fun!  I've made two this week.

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Wintersedge, here is my most recent plane.  Its kind of hard to tell but the center section of oak twists 90 degrees from front to back.  I wasnt real concerned though, the section with most of the twist was cut out for where the iron goes.

 

gaLLVXTl.png

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After stumbling on a source for boxwood, I can see why the old planemakers liked it.  It's 2-1/2 times as dense as Hard Maple, and is so smooth that you would think it didn't have grain unless you look really closely.  So far, it looks to me that it's at least as stable as anything else.

 

I volunteered to prune a 230 year old lane of it that had overgrown to 20 feet tall. There were many standing trunks that had been dead for who knows how long.  It must be fairly rot resistant too.

 

I've used it to replace boxwood runners in old molding planes that I've been able to buy cheap because the boxwood runners were beat up, and as carriers for pieces to be milled across the end to prevent tearout.  In spite of its density, it mills amazingly smooth and easily, although will dull a chainsaw chain in a few cuts, and you have to whet a cutting edge often.

 

Too bad you can't buy boxwood any more.  I may be hoarding the worlds largest supply.

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