wild grain, as well as knots, whorls and burls of any kind. It doesn’t take long to understand the basic adjustments, but knowing how and when comes only by experience. The best way to gain that experience is to practice on a plain board that is not part of a project.
Unfortunately, many British tool manufacturers no longer send their products from the factory ready for service. This has been the case for many decades. When craftsmen were the main purchasers and users of these tools, they knew exactly what to do to identify the various faults and how to rectify them. Today, most people purchasing these tools don’t have the benefit of a craftsman to guide them in how to adjust and use a hand plane and therefor do not have the working knowledge of how to correct the problems. Expecting the tools to be well-made and ready to use, and finding that the tool is not doing what they want it to do, they naturally think the problem lies with them and so they give up. Though ideally, hand planes should come ready for use straight out of the box, in reality they don’t. At best they will need adjusting, probably need sharpening and the sole will need flattening. Any failure in any one of these areas will cause the plane to seriously malfunction. It’s at this point many woodworkers abandon the plane and reach for some
mechanical method for surfacing their stock, but perseverance will definitely pay off. No machine can ever replace the hand plane. In addition to these problems, the type of wood, grain configuration and so on, also affect how the plane works. To work with wood you must understand its nature. In the next newsletter there will be an article entitled reading the grain. This will help you in this area.
In addition to reducing the amount of time you spend sanding, hand planing also reduces the amount of time you spend in the pothering dust caused by mechanical sanders. This in turn reduces the amount of time you spend wearing a dust mask and hearing protection. The most harmful dust is not the dust you can see, but the dust you can’t. The dust resulting from machine sanding is extremely detrimental to the respiratory system, often causing serious illnesses such as emphysema and lung and nasal cancer as well as other serious disorders, carpal tunnel syndrome for one.
Most often I use the hand plane for trimming an fitting parts for the pieces I make. Anything from squaring doors to shaving tenons, removing sharp corners and so on. I thought it might help you if I gave a fault finding chart so that you can identify the problems more readily.