Scrub plane? Maybe? Perhaps?

[chook]

About two days ago I used a bit of a jig and a planer bit in my router to make my flat work bench very very flat. It was a bit of fun and easy to do. So yesterday I thought I would try the same trick on some camphor laurel slabs, just some short bits for a bit of a knock together table. I have about a cubic metre of the stuff in the shed and this little table is the first object made from it. The rest is destined to become a kitchen over Christmas.

Anyway, I didn't like doing it that way at all. It was noisy. It put dust and bits of wood chip everywhere. There was little skill involved. That sort of thing is not why I go into the shed. I don't mind using machinery, but not like that. I like a bit of peace and quite. The high pitched whine of a router is okay in small doses but I soon tired of all the fever pitched action and noise.

But that still leaves a great pile of slabs sitting looking at me. Now a lot of it will finish up as narrowish boards for door frames and draw fronts. But some of the nice wide slabs with wild grain deserve better.

Normally I flatten wide boards with a Stanley no 7 jointer but given that some of the boards want reducing in thickness a bit perhaps the jointer is not the tool to use as a first plane.

I have been doing some research on scrub planes and there seems to be two schools of thought. Use them, they are great and leave them alone because they leave great unsightly gouges across the boards which take forever to remove.

So what do I do? I suppose I am secretly looking for an excuse to get another plane but I do not want to waste a lot of money.

[thumbsucker]

I just watched Coarse, Medium and Fine with Christopher Schwarz.

In short a Veritas® Scrub Plane / Stanley 40 1/2 or Lie-Nielsen 40 1/2 is a house Carpenter tool for narrowing stock say by a 1/4" on the edge.

A Scrub Plane sole is to short for cabinet work.

He recommends something with a 14 - 18" sole like a No. 5 Jack Plancane. Wide open mouth, heavy camber to the blade, he says that a scrub plane sole does not be flat because the shavings are so thick & coarse. So any junker will do.

He showed off an old woody and a transitional Stanley with a wooden sole as possible candidates.

As for gouges Schwarz says cross grain, then move to the medium plane. Schwarz says that most of the work 50% plus should be done with the coarse tool, then 45% with a medium tool then only a small 5% amount of work with a fine tool.

[IanW]

I have been doing some research on scrub planes and there seems to be two schools of thought. Use them, they are great and leave them alone because they leave great unsightly gouges across the boards which take forever to remove.

So what do I do? I suppose I am secretly looking for an excuse to get another plane but I do not want to waste a lot of money.

Chook, I have a 12 inch planer/thicknesser, which I don't hesitate to use to get rough wood ready to work on. It does a reasonable job, but is limited to the maximum width of its bed, & I sometimes need to flatten wider boards. I also can't be bothered wheeling it out of its corner & hooking it up to the dusty if I only need to flatted a couple of short lengths. So my scrub plane gets plenty of use, and I love it! Scrub planes can remove a huge amount of wood in a hurry. Yes, they leave gouges across the surface (that's what they are designed to do), but by altering the exposure of the blade and/or the curvature, you can set one up to give a final surface that doesn't take all that long to clean up. Put it this way, using a scrub followed by flat or near-flat bladed planes is about 10 times quicker than tigering a rough, twisted board down with a jack or jointer alone.

Now here is the part you may not wish to hear. You don't have to drop a wad of cash on a dedicated jointer. If you have a #4 and a spare blade, you can grind a curve on the spare blade (about 70mm radius worked well for me), set it up so the chip-breaker is clear of the edge, and set the frog back as far as it will go to give the maximum mouth opening. You may be surprised at how well that works. That's what I used for about 20 years, until I had a few spare $s & a rush of blood to the head & decided to buy a LV scrub. I will say it's a bit of an improvement on the old #4, but not all that much, the main difference is the extra length makes removing twist a bit easier. The modified #4 approach at least lets you try a reasonable facsimile of a scrub plane to see if it really is for you.... :;

Cheers,

[seanz]

Try a 2ndhand 'German' jack plane. If you don't like it or it doesn't suit, you'll be out of pocket no more than $20.

[chook]

Okay no more mucking about! What I want are reasons to get another plane. All this good advice is going in entirely the wrong direction

[Fuzzie]

You can also use a hand held power planer to do much of the heavy work. I have one that I use instead of my scrub plane when cleaning up old, painted, dirty or really wide boards, but I do have more fun using the scrub plane. I've cleaned up many meters of old painted and dirt impregnated boards and I'm amazed that I haven't had to replace the TC inserts in the blade holder yet.

[chook]

I can see that a scrub plane might be the thing to get then. I nearly got one a month ago but splurged on a big Makita router instead and I have been looking for an excuse for a while. My planer will go 310 mm and my jointer 150 mm. Some of the slabs are about 700 mm wide and are just too nice to split.so some sort of plane seems a good idea.
so then the choice comes to
an old Stanley but these seem hard to get and expensive
Veritas or LN: both good and between $175 and $210
A plane by a company called Emmerlich which are much cheaper but unknown entirely to me.

On a related matter, this camphor laurel is hard thing to hand plane with a smoother. The grain goes in 20 different directions at once. My expectation is that after attacking it with a scrub plane that at some point it is going to need sanding with a random orbit sander or worse still a belt sander. I have done this in the past with Camphor but would avoid it if I could.

If I owned a powered planer I might try it instead of a scrub plane I suppose.

[chook]

You can also use a hand held power planer to do much of the heavy work. I have one that I use instead of my scrub plane when cleaning up old, painted, dirty or really wide boards, but I do have more fun using the scrub plane. I've cleaned up many meters of old painted and dirt impregnated boards and I'm amazed that I haven't had to replace the TC inserts in the blade holder yet.

A powered planer never occurred to me. Given the amount of timber I have to work on this is worth looking into.

[Fuzzie]

I've just got a cheapy AEG which does the job. Light is good in my estimation, with some of the 'pro' planers I think you need to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to handle them. You still make a lot of noise but less than with a router but it's quicker and the chips are easier to catch from a planer dust port.

For twisted or bent boards I also find it beneficial to attack the high spots with the hand held while the board is sitting on supports before trying to feed it into a stationary machine. I just eyeball the hogging off using a couple of winding sticks, just like using the scrub plane, and don't try for a fine finish, that's left to the jointer either handheld or power depending on the job.

[RossM]

Ian is correct about grinding a spare blade. You can do same with a #5 to get extra sole length. The extra mass of the #5 is an asset as well.

The other thing to note is the plane does not have to have a flat sole for this purpose. So any beat up old #5 from a garage sale or elsewhere will be just fine - as long a the sole is not obviously deformed (from a cursory look) it should be OK.

Grind the blade to about a 5" radius, and set the frog back as Ian describes. Derek Cohen had a post somewhere about grinding the camber using a belt sander & a home made template.

If you are using a beat up old plane dedicated to this, you could also file open the mouth a bit more if needed.

Finally, a heaver blade will help. You don't need to spring the big bucks for a Hock, Pinnacle or similar although these would be wonderful), McJing have thicker replacements for about $30

[planemaker]

You mentioned at the start of your post you wanted to avoid power tools due to the excessive noise and mess involved. A wooden jointer would do the job well. A tapered iron is preferable as its much thicker at the base than most parallel irons offer. Grind your camber as mentioned earlier. A 1/8 inch mouth clearance in front of the blade should suffice. Use winding sticks to gauge your progress to a flat face surface. All the best with what ever option you choose to work with.

Stewie;

[derekcohen]

I rarely use a scrub plane. Not unless a board is very thick and needs to be reduced in size significantly. Even then I would remove most waste with a bandsaw, if possible. If the board is twisted a great deal, I will first look for a replacement.

When I do need to remove a moderate amount of waste to flatten a face, I use a jack plane with a 8" cambered blade. I have two, a woodie I built and a newly-restored Stanley #605. Both have the same camber. Compare with this a scrub plane, which has a 3" cambered blade - it simply takes off too much waste and leaves too rough a surface for the average board. The jack is also longer (15"), and this makes it easier to maintain the coplanar.

For reference, the woodie has a very thick blade, and the Stanley has its original, then blade. They both work well, but the thick blade is D2 and is better for local WA timber, which is abrasive.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Planes/My%20planes/BuildingaJackPlane_html_ma7dc66e.jpg

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Restoration/Stanley%20Bedrock%20605/Bedrock605-8_zps92c79e8d.jpg

You can more easily follow a jack with a #7 than a scrub plane.

Is it my imagination or are #5 planes less common in Oz?

In the USA they must be the most common plane around, but I struggled to find one here, used a #5 1/2 instead for many years. The #5 1/2 is too wide and too heavy. I was curious about a #5, never having used one. I looked on eBay Australia for a good while - the only ones available for poor and over priced. In the end I decided to get one off USA eBay, where they are cheap. Since the shipping costs would be the major portion of the purchase, I instead picked up a Bedrock #605, thinking I can more easily flog it here if I did not like it.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Fuzzie]

For comparison my scrub is a light weight European woodie with a 33mm wide blade. At a guess I would say it's cambered on a 1" radius. The blade looks more like a big fingernail grind. The last time I used it was to even out a somewhat wedge shaped board on my sewing desk build. It easily hogged off the wide edge side and it was simple to clean up the remaining grooves with a 4 1/2.

You can easily see the depth of the grooves in this pic and it really is fast waste removal, not designed for finesse.

http://www.woodworkforums.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=310586&d=1397716868

[Twisted Tenon]

For comparison my scrub is a light weight European woodie with a 33mm wide blade. At a guess I would say it's cambered on a 1" radius. The blade looks more like a big fingernail grind. The last time I used it was to even out a somewhat wedge shaped board on my sewing desk build. It easily hogged off the wide edge side and it was simple to clean up the remaining grooves with a 4 1/2.

You can easily see the depth of the grooves in this pic and it really is fast waste removal, not designed for finesse.

I too have an old woddie scrub plane (looks similar to yours) and have done something similar. It only took about 30 minutes to reduce a piece of 600x 110 radiata from 20mm to 10 mm. Then used a 4 1/2 to smooth it out. Needed to sand it before it was finished though.
319475319476 319474

TT

[Durdge39]

I love my scrub plane. It's a simple woodie I made out of an old bedrail, plus a blade cut from an old circular saw blade (pre carbide-tipped) hardened and tempered. It's no artistic piece of wooden engineering by any means but when it comes to hogging wood away it holds it own. I've been using it at work on some oregon and can take a 36"x8" board down in thickness by a quarter inch within ten minutes. Followed by the #5 (didn't know they weren't as common) there might be an additional 10 minutes to get the board flat and to the exact thickness needed.

The biggest caveat of this one is the lack of weight it has which makes heavy cuts a bit more demanding on the arm muscles, something with some substance behind it would help plough through the timber.

I say go for it and get one, or better yet re-purpose something to suit. :2tsup:

[IanW]

As usual, there's a great range of opinions, & all good!

Obviously, what radius blades you prefer boils down to how much wood you need to remove in a hurry, plus the type of wood. Some woods will tear to pieces and leave you with split-outs that are way below what you intended as the finished surface, if you use a very tight radius blade that takes deep gouges. :o

Wrt to Derek's and others' comments about the surface quality, my philosophy follows the carvers' motto: "rough out & refine". I see it the same way you use different grades of sandpaper in decreasing grit size to achieve a finished surface. And just like using sandpaper, you have to judge when to move on to the next grade (plane) so as to remove the larger scratches (gouges) without losing more wood, or wasting more effort, than necessary. So there's definitely a place for tight-radiused blades in my tool kit, along with gentler ones. Much depends on on what armaments you have to follow up with, too, which means we develop our own styles and sequences. If your planes are all in good order & you use each to its full potential, one way is probably as efficient as any other, & the final result should be the same, at least.

Something I have noticed, Derek, is that tighter radiused blades last longer (& consequently remove a lot more wood!) between sharpenings. The broader the radius, the more sensitive they are to sharpness, which makes sense to my mind, as you are using with more edge to cut with, but it also has to do with the way the fibres are being dug out of the surface, I think.

Must be something about the West. Though certainly not as ubiquitous as #4s, #5s seem to be a pretty common size over this side of the continent, though I must admit I haven't been checking out flea-markets of late.

I second Ross's suggestion of using as thick a blade as you can if converting a cap-iron style plane to a scrub. The thinner blade in mine worked far better than I expected, given the length of blade sticking out past the cap iron, but I'm sure that the better action of my dedicated scrub is due in large part to its thick, solid iron....

Cheers,

[brontehls]

For comparison my scrub is a light weight European woodie with a 33mm wide blade. At a guess I would say it's cambered on a 1" radius. The blade looks more like a big fingernail grind. The last time I used it was to even out a somewhat wedge shaped board on my sewing desk build. It easily hogged off the wide edge side and it was simple to clean up the remaining grooves with a 4 1/2.

You can easily see the depth of the grooves in this pic and it really is fast waste removal, not designed for finesse.

http://www.woodworkforums.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=310586&d=1397716868

My one is an ECE - got more miles on it than yours -but works just as well (I also have an ancient Mathiseon but it is heavier to use)

Right tool for the job

Nei

[chook]

It seems that opinions vary depending on the direction of the wind and your time zone. There are those who say that a scrub plane would be a great idea if it was not such a bad one. I have been told that I should use a metal bodied plane with an 8 inch radius unless I use a wooden bodied one with a 3 inch radius. My impression is that the consensus of opinion lies in the direction of using a light wooden bodied metal plane with a tight but large radius blade.

It seems that the only way to find out will be to face north on the night of a full moon with my modified Stanley jack plane made by Veritas and try it myself.

One way or the other I will have some fun.

[IanW]

.......My impression is that the consensus of opinion lies in the direction of using a light wooden bodied metal plane with a tight but large radius blade....

Yep, I think you've got it nailed, old gallinaceous one! :U :U

Cheers

[derekcohen]

Yep, I think you've got it nailed, old gallinaceous one! :U :U

Cheers

Hi Ian

Is there an echo in the room ... :U

Hope you're having a fun weekend :U

Regards from Perth

Derek

[IanW]

Hi Ian

Is there an echo in the room ... :U

Hope you're having a fun weekend :U

Regards from Perth

Derek

Weird, Derek - I stuttered on the 'post' button, or something - three identical posts! All good now, thanks....

Actually, not having the best weekend - been doing family stuff, which is ok, but shed-time is better! :U

Cheers,