“A smoothing-plane. It is used to polish off the board after you have taken off the rough,” replied Corny Minkfield.
“Hardly to polish it, though I understand what you mean. We don’t polish wood with a plane: we simply smooth it.”
“That is what I meant,” added Corny.
“If polishing various kinds of wood were not a part of the cabinet-maker’s business, I should have said nothing; but we must learn to use words that correctly convey our meaning, when we can just as well as not. The smoothing-plane is used after the rough has been taken off the board. This is the next plane in the series,” continued Mr. Brookbine, taking up the longest of the three.
“That’s a short jointer,” said Jim Alburgh.
“You are rather old-fashioned as well as myself. We call it, in modern times, simply a jointer. When I was a boy, we had a long and a short jointer; but the former is seldom seen in a shop at the present time. This jointer is twenty-two inches long, and they are made up to thirty inches. The long jointer was three feet and a half and even four feet long. Have you any idea what the use of this plane is?”
“It is used in making joints,” answered Thad at a venture.
“Not very definite. Carpenters are sometimes called joiners, and the reason is plain enough. If you were going to lay a floor, it would be necessary to joint the edges of the boards; and this plane would be used for that purpose. In a word, the jointer is needed to get a straight edge on pieces of wood more than a foot or two in length. If two boards are exactly straight on the edges, they will make a good job.
“Here is the last plane we shall consider now. It is the shortest of the four, and it is made of steel or iron. It is called a block-plane, and can be used only in planing across the grain of the wood. When you have sawed off a piece of work, this plane would be used to smooth off the end of the wood. It is quite different from the others. The first three have double irons, while this one has only a single iron.”
Mr. Brookbine took up the block-plane, and removed the iron from it. “This is called the iron, though it is always made of the best of steel,” he continued. “The slant made by grinding off the end of the iron, so it will be sharp, is called the bevel. In the first three planes, the bevel is on the under side when the implement is