Official Luthiers Forum!

Stanley 5.5 for me, 1970's vintage. fettled a little. Blade is an old Sheffield Acorn - as thin as the standard blade. Does it as good as any plane out there. So much so that a chap by the name of David Charlesworth went and copied me.
I'm not sore about it though.

I use a jointer plane and shooting board to get a sprung joint, and then I use a straight edge with sandpaper, and a shooting board to get the final surface. This has two advantages, the edge is perfect, and it is slightly rough for glue.

Shooting boards can be set up to cut a perfect joint without the sand paper, but it is easier to use the sanding board, and does not require a very accurate shooting board since the surface of the board is not being copied in this process.

I saw a vertical jig that does much the same thing, for sale. But I prefer a simple horizontal board.

Me has had 4", 6", 8", 12", and 24" jointers...in me life, or should me say "they had me."

Got rid of them all. But then me must admit there was this 6" delta that looked me straight in the eyeball and said 'pppplease take me home with you", So me did...use if for break out only.

Now me just use a # 8 Stanley, upside down, in the vise, no fence and shoot the plates by hand. Simple eh.

Oh and for those of you that uses sand paper for joining, tell me, what granular size of sand do you use in mixing up the mortar to mechanically cement the plates together with? And I'm old school... Just wondering.


Blessings
Padma

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Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


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I did my first couple plates entirely with a hand plane, which I later discovered was horribly concave... it took all day carefully planing the high spots and figuring out the exact pressure variation along the length of the boards to get it to cut straight. I found a longer, flatter plane down in the basement, but I still can't get it to cut a straight joint without a long process of selective planing. Just gets more and more convex if I shoot the whole thing repeatedly. Maybe this plane is a tad concave too, or maybe I'm not getting the pressure consistent at the ends, or maybe I take too big of shavings (probably due to lack of sharpening skill). Oh well, hopeless to plane curly hardwoods anyway (or is it?).

So what I've been doing now is hold coarse sandpaper against the plane and go back and forth, checking and being somewhat selective of how far back and forth I go, until it's nice and flat, maybe with specks of light visible due to the roughness. Then smooth it out with 100 grit until light-tight, and finally take a couple super fine shavings with the plane to shave off the roughened surface without taking enough to start developing gaps at the ends. Way faster, and gets the same quality joint in the end.

My jointer has the same problem. It's a small one, the bed is not long enough to get a perfectly straight edge easily. I run the plates through the jointer first, they always come out slightly convex. I then use the stew-mac adhesive backed sandpaper on my table saw to perfectly flatten the edges. I clamp down a 24" box beam on top of the strip of sandpaper to keep the plates at a 90 degree angle to the sandpaper and gently sand the edges of both plates at the same time. If you lift the plates off the sandpaper after sanding a bit, you can see on the sandpaper when the middle of the plates are close to contacting the paper, at that point I hold them up to the light. I do it until I get no light at all. Works great and very quick.

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Damon Wack
https://www.facebook.com/LindamonGuitars

speaking of planes, every one i own i have had to rework. i usually take them to work and surface grind the sole to get them back to square. the .010 to .015 out of squareness of the average plane is a joke. the flatness is none too good either.

has anyone tried the Lie Nielsen No. 51 Shoot Board Plane? http://www.lie-nielsen.com/catalog.php?sku=1-51 Is this overkill?

Any one of my $10.00 junk store Stanleys from any era will do the job and do it well. I don't understand the need for these high dollar planes.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

That looks pretty cool, but you'll find more use and versatility in a 5 or 5 1/2, plus a less expensive entry fee. When I was going through my initial tooling up, I thought my planes would be single-purpose tools. The 5 1/2 is more or less used for jointing and truing up the fretboard edges, but my block plane is used ALL THE TIME. I can live without my finger planes, but I'd be lost without my Lie-Nielsen 5 1/2, 60 1/2, and Model Maker's planes. These are, without a doubt, indispensable to me.

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Yeah but then I would have a sanded joint instead of a shaved one. I don't think you can tell the difference between a planed joint done with my Stanleys and ones done with the expensive ones. I get see through shavings from mine. I had to do some work to get them there. Now if I had tons of cash to throw around then I would buy one just to save the fettling time.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

I would have to agree with you here Todd. I am building after work at nights and on weekends so time is limited, therefore I would prefer to have a plane ready to go without all the set up. I definitely want to learn hand plane set up skills soon, but right now I want to work on my edge shooting skills! So I am leaning towards a Lie-Nielsen 5 1/2". I know they are far more expensive but worth it to me in the long run. Just gotta pull the trigger .

wow, that's a nice shave! I measured the sole of my Stanley block plane and it has about a 0.003+ inch belly in it. So I don't see any way of shooting a lightless plate with that plane in it's current state. Thinking about flattening the sole, and getting all the materials needed to do so, and developing those skills, sure makes me want to just get an LN and move along to edge jointing for now .

There's lot's of tools to buy and it's going to take a long to time to get them at those prices. I could be wrong. I have most of the tools I need so maybe it's time I tried one. Nah! Someday.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

I've used one of these and they're cool. Like all LN stuff, works great. It's not overkill, but it's not needed. If I had every other plane I ever drooled at in all the different sizes, and I did a lot of work all the time, I'd think about one of these, but as others have said, a good plane does the job just fine and will do lots of other things too.

And shooting boards - I too have used a granite plate with sandpaper (after much frustration, I figured out my tablesaw top wasn't flat). It works, but after I got around to building the shooting board, it got a lot easier.

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

I've struggled with convex and concave surfaces while planing, until I was coached by one of you here - sorry to say I don't remember whom. If you've got a convex surface from shooting the plane (by this I mean the join is touching at the middle, and shows gaps at both top and bottom of the boards while candling) then alter the pressure while planing, so that you are rotating the force towards the heel of the plane as you pass it along the board. If it's concave (gaps in the middle), I do the opposite. While doing this I have a mental picture of the plane as an airplane, and I'm "pulling up" to eliminate a convex join. Don't know if that makes sense, but it works for me....