Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 4
Last night I got a leg up on flattening the bottom of my benchtop. When I was gluing up the beams, I tried to align the tops of the beams as best as I could. The top side looks pretty good, but what this means is that all the misalignments show up on the bottom side of the bench. Since I’m using a Roubo design, the legs are going to be mortised directly into the bottom, so if the bottom surface isn’t flat, the shoulders of the leg tenons won’t be in the same plane, and the legs and lower stretchers won’t be square.
I forgot to take a better “before” picture, but you can get an idea of how much unevenness there is between the bottom surfaces of the beams here. In many places, there were 1/8” discrepancies between the beams.
I put an even more aggressive camber on my jack plane than I had been using — about equivalent to a 10” radius. This allowed me to take off really thick shavings, close to 1/64”. This meant that theoretically, 8 swipes of the plane would level a 1/8” discrepancy. Being able to take down this much wood at a time, the majority of the unevenness was gone after only 30 minutes.
Look at the mess I made! Not bad for just 30 minutes of planing, I think. I was pretty surprised as to how quickly this went. You can get an idea of how thick the shavings from the jack plane were at the front by the jointer plane. The jointer plane is just there to give a sense of scale for the size of the benchtop. I didn’t use it last night, but I’m sure it will be put to use pretty soon.
At this point I realized that I hadn’t made winding sticks yet to check for twist, so I called it a night.
Shannon Rogers needed to plane an 18 foot long beam, and came up with this tool selection:
So I’m grabbing my jointer plane and I’ll bring along a block plane and a card scraper in case I need to do any spot work clean up.
Of course, I might have considered one of these.
Woodworking Media – How Do You Learn Best?
Great observation from Bob Rozaieski on his experience learning how to do some sleight-of-hand tricks:
The simplest of tricks seem to be really complicated when they are written out in a book. However, actually seeing the sleight explained by someone who is practiced in the effect all of a sudden makes it much clearer to me. It makes my practice time that much more focussed and productive instead of clumsy and confused.
This got me wondering, is it me, or is it just that this particular skill is not easily taught in print? I then began to wonder the same thing about woodworking.
Woodworking is full of tacit knowledge — knowledge that is hard to pass on via writing or talking, but instead is learned by doing. There are some aspects of woodworking that can certainly be written about. But there are other things, such as what a truly sharp chisel is capable of, what cutting with a really good saw is like, or what a well set up plane can do, which are quite hard to describe just in words or pictures. One of the seminal events of when I started woodworking was when my back door neighbor, who is a tremendous woodworker, showed me what a Stanley #4 plane can do. In an instant, I knew and understood. I would have never been able to understand this just by reading.
Which is why my usual advice to people looking for a start on hand tools, Japanese or otherwise, is to go find their local woodworking club, find the hand tool nut (believe it or not, in my club, it’s not me), and hit them up to show them what hand tools can do. There’s a lot of great information on the internet, but some things need to be experienced in person.
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.)
Not too bad! And easier than trying to put an eight foot long 4x4 back on my jointer. Not to mention the lack of dust and noise.
My beam is eight feet long, as I said. I can work on a 2 foot section at a time, so 4 rounds of this and I have the whole beam squared up.
Building a Cherry TV Cabinet with Hand Tools
Jay Speetjens builds a TV cabinet from curly cherry, but doesn’t know that you can’t use Japanese planes on hardwoods:
At this point the real fun begins. I sharpened two hira kanna, Japanese smoothing planes, a 55 mm Ishihisa and an old 65 mm kanna that I picked up on eBay. In the first video below you will see me planing both faces of the panels with the 55 mm kanna….
Ideally the grain direction is consistent over the entire surface but this is rarely the case. Figured woods can be particularly deceiving as to the correct planing direction but this material by and large planed quite well.
Smile and Wave
Chris Hall discusses Japanese plane setup, and has a different take on Toshio Odate’s article:
[T]he article is entitled Tuning Japanese Planes. I’m quite sure that Odate is skilled at doing just that. I’m also fairly sure he did not do the illustrations for the article, and it is in those illustrations that I found something curious, something which, if I may speculate, likely escaped Odate’s attention. At least I hope so.
This looks like the first of a series of articles Chris plans to write. I’m looking forward to seeing what he has to say, especially about the set up for a Japanese plane for truing a surface.
And although he is much more skilled at woodworking than I am, as can easily be seen by even a very quick look at his blog, which is well worth the time to read, we seem to have this in common:
Actually, there are a lot of nuances to shaping the sole of the wooden plane and obtaining optimal performance, I can tell you right now that I have not reached anything like mastery with a kanna. Still, I know when I see something that’s wrong and I have managed through various misadventures, wrong turns and blind alleys to pick up the odd bit of useful info along the way, and I’m happy to share that information here.
An illustration from Toshio Odate’s 1993 article in American Woodworker showing the differences in the set up of the sole of a Japanese plane for truing and for smoothing. This diagram is much nicer than the one I cobbled together, but the point remains the same.
Toshio Odate on Japanese plane set up
In a previous post, I wrote about trying to understand the difference between the setup of the sole for a Japanese plane for smoothing operations and jointing/truing operations, and relayed information that Toshio Odate told me at Woodworking in America. Recently, Frank Vucolo sent me this article by Toshio Odate from American Woodworker in 1993 explaining this in more detail, including this on the setup of the sole of a Japanese jointer plane:
Planes set up for truing are for making surfaces straight and flat, usually before marking out joints. When you prepare a plane sole for truing, the object is to relieve the sole so the plane block contacts the work at two places — the front and back. The cutting edge is set at this same height. Since these three points are even, the plane can create a perfectly flat surface, because it removes only the high spots of the wood. Of course, nothing is automatic — you need skill and practice to plane a flat surface.
It’s good to know that my memory still seems to work pretty well, even though there was some concern that Odate’s information was not understood correctly.
(Thanks to Frank Vucolo for the article.)
