Wood-working for Beginners: A Manual for Amateurs

by Charles G. Wheeler

Plane.—A plane is in principle (roughly speaking), as you will readily see, nothing but a chisel stuck through a block of wood or iron. Small or narrow surfaces may be smoothed to a certain degree by the chisel, the knife, or even the hatchet, but for large surfaces something is needed which can be more exactly controlled than the knife, ax, or chisel, held in the hands. So, to hold the chisel firmly in one position and to apply force to it more advantageously, it is firmly fixed in a block of convenient size and shape and becomes a plane.

A very short block will prevent the chisel cutting deeper at one point than another, but the tool will follow the irregularities of the surface and, though it may make the surface smooth, it will not make it level, or flat; so the block is made longer, that it may not go down into all the little hollows, but plane off only the higher parts.

The two essential parts of a plane are the iron and the stock. The bottom surface of the stock is called the sole or face (ab in Fig. 621), the wedge-shaped hole where the iron goes is called the throat (c), and the slot at the bottom through which the edge of the iron projects is called the mouth (d).

Fig. 621.

Bear in mind that the shape of the cut made by the plane will be a reversed copy of the shape of the cutting-edge. If the edge is rounding, the cut will be hollowing. If the edge is hollowing, the cut will be rounding. If the edge is straight, the cut will be straight. If the edge is nicked, ridges will be left on the wood.

If buying new, you will do best, as a rule, to get iron planes, though very good ones can be had with wooden stocks, but with the convenient appliances of the iron planes. Some workmen still prefer the old wooden planes, but it is better to buy iron ones.

Fig. 622.

The jack-plane is used for coarse work and to rough off the surface with large shavings, ready for the other planes. Fourteen or fifteen inches is a good length. The edge of the iron is not ground squarely across, like the chisel, but is rounded slightly so as to cut deeper in the middle (Fig. 622). Heavy shavings can be cut and the rough outside of a piece of wood taken off quicker and easier than with a more squarely ground iron, but it does not leave the surface smooth, as the strokes of the jack-plane form a series of hollows and ridges (Fig. 623, exaggerated). After taking off the rough surface with the iron projecting considerably, you can of course set the iron finer, and by going over the work several times you can take off the worst of the ridges, but without a great deal of labour you can never get a really smooth surface with a plane that cuts hollows. A common use of the jack-plane is for "traversing," or planing across the grain, which is often the quickest and easiest way to reduce a surface to the desired shape, and for cleaning off where pieces have been glued together. If you should use a jack-plane to do the work of a fore-plane, have it ground more squarely across like the fore-plane.