giant Cypress: Japanese woodworking tool punk • Building a Roubo workbench rerun

Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 2

Some of my friends look at me like I’ve grown a second head when I tell them what I’m up to, especially when I tell them that I’m doing this with hand planes. This is probably not new to many readers of this blog, but I thought I’d share how this is really not as much manual labor as you might think.

Here’s a picture of how out of square the beam I was working on this morning was.

That’s out 1/16” over the 3-1/2” width of the beam. Boy do I suck!

Now, when most people think of hand planes, the image of a finely tuned plane making those 0.001”, wispy, see-through shavings that just float in the air immediately comes to mind for most people. We don’t need no girly-man plane like that for this job.

I have a jack plane set up with a decent amount of camber and set for an aggressive shaving. This is the shaving that I get with this plane.

Just under 1/100” thick, and it falls straight to the ground. Japanese plane aficionados like myself would be horrified at such a thing. But this is important for this purpose.

Remember, I need to knock down 1/16” to get the faces square. 1/16” = 0.0625”. If my plane takes a shaving 0.009” thick, it should take me only 7 swipes of the plane to take off 1/16” of material. This is what I got after 9 swipes. (I got excited.)