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Thanks, Michael. Much appreciated.

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Mike

The only thing nescessary for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.

Here's a way to make a good scrub plane from a standard #5:

Purchase an after-market blade that is thicker than standard issue (LN, LV or others)
Using this blade, set the plane up as a fine smoother (frog adjusted for tight mouth, flat bottom etc. etc.)
Swap back to the standard blade, sharpened to a shallow crescent, as per a scrub, which will now operate with a wider mouth due to the thinner blade.

Set the breaker appropriately for each blade. You now have a panel plane and a scrub plane depending on the blade you use and how it's sharpened. Can be done with a 5 1/2, too, but in scrub mode you trade depth of cut for width of cut.

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Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au

Scrub planes will make quick work of it if you know what you are doing. I consider myself an "Occasional" hand plane user - I use one when it is convenient rather than as the first tool I pick up. I have a #2,3,4 (actually 4 of them),5,6,and 7 bench planes, block planes, and a number of other specialty planes. But as often as I use a handplane for thicknessing I think a scrub plane might get me in trouble. Perhaps I'll curve the blade a bit on my least favorite #4 and see how I like it.

I believe we are overthinking this.

The goal is to remove as much material as we need to as quickly and easily as possible. A real scrub plane has a narrow, highly cambered blade and when used on big stock to get rid of a lot of wood, the chips look like the Frito's. This is clearly too aggressive for the amounts of wood we need to remove.

So just take the plane you have, open the throat, curve the blade a little, adjust it, and try it on a scrap.

I have a spare Stanley 9-1/2 block plane I use for a scrub on smaller stuff, but its light weight and lack of a tote makes it a chore for something the size of a back. For that, try a #3, or my favorite - a #5-1/4 which is the width of a 3 but a few inches longer. Use what you have or buy any $10 flea market plane and it will work fine as a scrub.

For soft wood and lots of removal I will use the blade right off the grinder - try that sometime.

Gee, planing eh,

well me learned how to flatten boards back in grade 7 shop class and truth of the matter is ...me don't remember
much except to say a 4 1/2 is me go to just before shoving the sucker through the thickness sander and being done with it.

blessings

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Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


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I use hand planes for pretty much all of my stock removal, flattening, smoothing, and joining. I find that the hardest part about using hand planes for guitar wood is the fact that there aren't any easy ways to hold such thin wood down to a surface for planing (of course the type of wood can be difficult to plane as well). With thicker wood I can just put it up to a planing stop on my bench and plane away, but with thin wood under 1/8 inch thick, this is not possible, so you have to clamp part of it down and move the clamp, and clamp and reclamp (please let me know if there is an easier way!!)

As far as removing stock, I have found that there is no better way then using a toothed blade. You can get a toothed blade for a #4,5,6, or 7 from Lie Nielsen and with these blades you can remove a lot of material with one pass of the plane, and it requires way less effort to push than a radiused plane blade or a scrup plane, and it leaves no tear out, which is an added bennefit of toothed blades. I urge anyone using a plane for guitar wood to get a toothed plane. I haven't used a scrup plane since I got one.

Jonas

I wasn’t going to comment on this topic once it moved into a discussion about the type of plane to use…but I think I have something to offer:

1. For the original poster’s question, “how to determine which is the flat zero point” and to paraphrase his more general question – how to do get a flat surface using handplanes? The answer is that no plane will do this ‘automatically’ for you. You look at the board at observe how it is cupped and warped. You visualize a flat board cut from the centre of that twisted mess, then you use your hand planes to remove the high spots on each side of the board. The board is now less twisted and less cupped. You do the same thing again until you decide which side will be your reference side. You then concentrate on removing wood from that side until it is flat and not twisted. Then you flip the piece over and make the other side parallel to the first side. The most important tools here are your brain and a straightedge. The type of plane doesn’t matter, except using a scrub plane on a blank that starts out life at ¼” thick is overkill and asking for trouble on difficult woods like rosewood.

2. For Jonas’ question about how to hold thin wood when planing, I prefer to use a fixture with two fences on it to hold the piece. Below is a picture of the fixture for long but narrow pieces like guitar sides. You just clamp the jig to your benchtop (I use benchdogs and the tailvice), set the guitar wood blank on top of the fixture against the fences and then start planing. Sometimes you have to flip the blank around the other way if the grain direction is difficult. I have a second fixture that is shorter and wider which is used for the top and back. John Bogdanovich has a video showing some of his jigs and fixtures…worth watching:



John’s fixture only has a fence at the one end and he uses a clamp to hold the wood down, but I prefer having two fences and then there is no need to clamp the wood – you just use the pressure of the plane to push the wood against the fences.

When building the fixture the height of the fence is not critical - if the fence gets to be taller than the thickness of the wood you're planing, then you just plane down the fence along with the wood.

3. When the wood gets really thin and the piece is narrow you have to be careful that the wood you are planing does not buckle. When you are planing using the fixture, the wood piece is in compression and wants to buckle just like pushing on a rope. In that case it is better to put a clamp on the end nearest you, and plane with the wood in tension without use of the fence.

I have recycled a crappy yard sale plane into a scrubplane with a wide mouth and a camber on the blade .Total cost $8. ece/primus makes a gud scrub and can be found on e-vil bay or retail from traditonal woodworker or the supplier in chicago. I also luv the L/N scrub extremely well made and useful for quickly planing a board even though I have 2 thickness sanders.

Thanks!

Does anyone use a vacuum table for holding plates while planing?

Seems a good idea...once you get one side flattish....

I built one. I'll try to get some pics when I get home next week.

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Pat

Here is an old pic of mine.
Shellacked MDF.
Sized for plate halves before gluing together.
Backside gets sucked to a Granite plate at the same time.
Always wanted to get a foot switch to turn vac on and off. Some day.

No idea if it would work but I had the idea of using one of those non slip router mats.

A router mat would compress under pressure and thus not give a flat surface. That's what I'd think anyway...

I'm thinking a # 62 LN kit should cover all the bases nicely, to start....

Don't discount the high quality tools built before the second world war that are available at every flea market and garage sale for pennies on the dollar. $40 for a thick blade and it will be the equal of the $400 brand new plane. Sargent, Stanley, Millers Falls are all top notch tools, and these three built tools for Craftsman before about 1955 too, with the same quality.

I wrote that 1/2 hour ago, then I opened the December issue of Fine Woodworking that a friend lent me, and found this:

http://www.finewoodworking.com/tool-gui ... -tips.aspx

Also through the above link is a video on putting camber on a plane blade.

Perhaps time to hit the flea market next time it's open. And take another gander at my Stanley. It's weird. In order to get the plane blade square to the sole, the frog needs to be at an extreme angle. Well, fairly so...

Is the blade ground square? There is a lateral lever behind the blade hop high that will take hop some of that out-of-squareness, but it is easiest to deal with if the grind is square.

Put a square on the sharp edge to see if it is square with the side of the blade. If not, mark the back of the blade near the tip with a magic marker, scribe a square line with the square as far towards the tip as possible, push the blade straight into you grinder til you reach the line, then regrind the bevel to be square.

Should only take 5 minutes at most til you are honing again

Ed MInch

The blade is square for sure. I've a lot to learn about planes, but I can already feel myself being drawn towards shavings instead of drum sanders. At least to get the roughage off...

" In order to get the plane blade square to the sole, the frog needs to be at an extreme angle. Well, fairly so..."

Is there something jammed under the frog that is keeping it from bedding properly with the body casting?

I'll have another look....