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Hi gang, I'm slowly getting myself together to start my first guitar. I know that folks can and do thickness tops with a hand plane. My best plane is a Lie Nielson standard block plane. Do you think this would be suitable or should I scrounge up something like a jack plane?

thanks in advance! Bob

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If brute force doesn't work you're not using enough of it...

I'm at a similar point, starting to build, and thicknessing by hand. I just did a set of Mahogany sides (my first try) and I had good luck with a Stanley #4, and a #5 plane, progressing to scrapers and sandpaper on a large block. It takes a little elbow grease, but I had results that were WAY above my expectations.
Just have a repetable pattern, and stick to it, also, measure often! I made a thickness gauge, using a dial indicator and scrap of oak.
Mike

Thanks for the replies. Lots of good info on both counts. Looks like not many folks
are using a block plane (I suspect it's a bit small). I'll give a report if I go ahead with it.

cheers! Bob

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If brute force doesn't work you're not using enough of it...

Should be fine. I use a block plane with a toothed blade (buy a spare and grind a few notches into it with a dremel cutoff wheel... careful to keep it cool so you don't mess up the temper), alternating with a smoothing plane with normal blade to shave off the ridges left behind by the teeth.

Toothed blade helps reduce tearing, especially since I'm not an expert sharpener and don't enjoy messing up my settings to pull the blade out and resharpen very often either.

And like Mike, pretty much do a repeatable pattern, but check every few passes and shave down any high spots, and skip any low spots until you get it evened back out. Switch to scraper/sandpaper when the tearout goes as deep as you want the final result to be The repeating pattern of planing is not essential though, it's just to speed things along since it keeps things more even so less checking needed. I also use a home made caliper using a dial indicator.

The last plate I planed was a bubinga back... extremely stubborn, and it wasn't even curly, just interlocked like mahogany. Think I'm going to avoid that stuff from now on unless I ever decide to switch thicknessing methods.
It took me a long while just to get the blade to bite at all rather than sliding helplessly over the surface... probably again due to lack of sharpness. Several sharpenings later, cross grain turned out to be the direction to get it started. I just went at it with the toothed blade, without much of a pattern since this nightmare set was rather thick (about .200) so I just needed to get it down down down for a few hours before worrying about evenness. Tons of tearing and still often difficult even to get a bite, so it was still pretty thick when I was not comfortable taking it any further by plane.
My lucky stars shined that night, and I finally got a good and quickly renewable scraper edge using the non-burnished, filed edge method. So now that I could scrape faster than a small pile of dust per stroke, I got it down the rest of the way within a few more hours and the torment was over.

Thanks again. I'll set myself up with a toothed blade and I'm reasonably good at sharpening. We'll see what how it goes... .


Bob

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If brute force doesn't work you're not using enough of it...

I heard that about bubinga. Seems a lot of people avoid it because it's so tough to work. I haven't used my set yet.

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"Preoccupation with an effect gives it power and enhances the error"
from "Your Owner's Manual" by Burt Hotchkiss.

Oh, and I forgot to mention... sand/scrape the show-face to start, then plane from the back. That way, if there are any small tear-outs left when you get to your desired thickness, they will be inside, and thus not visible and not a big deal. Also keeps the bookmatch faces as close as possible on more wild grained woods.

What I haven't figured out yet is a good way to protect the show-face during planing of the back... spruce always gets dented up a bit when being pressed down onto the bench by the plane. Even when I sweep the wood chips away frequently, a few of them manage to make their way underneath. You can steam them out most of the way and then leave them for final sanding, but it does put a small amount of randomness in the final top thickness.