Handplanes-Their History and Use

Learn the intricacies of hand planing from our instructors. We offer this hands-on workshop on tuning, sharpening and using traditional bench planes. Our instructors will also demonstrate the use of a variety of other hand planes used in woodworking, including rabbet planes, shoulder planes, block planes, panel-raising planes and low-angle planes as well as molding planes. Though we provide the hand planes and related equipment, we encourage students who want to restore their own hand plane or fine tune their new one to bring them to the workshop. Through hands-on exercises developed for this class, each student will master the skills of traditional hand planing using bench planes.

Most woodworkers rely heavily on machine methods to trim and finish their work, yet despite this increased dependency, the quality of work produced by using hand-planing methods still far exceeds modern machine methods. A vast percentage of power sanding, planing and trimming can be eliminated by simply developing basic hand-planing skills. We show you how to do this through this one-day workshop of short lectures and craftsman demonstrations.