Difficulty planing pine

[morro217]

Has anybody had difficulty in planing softwood (pine) from a timber merchant? Most of what I've bought planes easily with my sharpened hand plane. There is however, one length that will not plane successfully. The piece has a sort of mottled effect on its surface. I'm wondering if it's too wet? or perhaps holding too much resin (if that's possible)? I'm new to woodworking and would appreciate any feedback. regards Morro217

 

[MMUK]

Are you planing in the right direction along the grain? Sounds silly I know but I find that if I plane in the wrong direction the surface can become "ruffled". Not so much a problem with more expensive timber but I find this 99% of the time with cheap pine or spruce.

 

[morro217]

Thanks for the reply. Yep, I've tried both directions.

 

[dm65]

Can you post a picture of the timber ?

 

[morro217]

Sorry, I can't do that. Thanks anyway.

 

[PAC1]

It might be resin try wiping it over with some white spirit and then plane it

 

[Fromey]

I find pine the most difficult wood to work with. Some pieces are a dream, whilst other are a nightmare of tearout. Pine is also very difficult to work with for housings, dovetails, etc. because it's so soft and the knife lines bruise so easily. Because it's cheap, it's tempting to use for beginners, but actually I found it leads to more problems. My preferred wood these days is beech.

Back to your question. Use as sharp a blade as you can get (invest in a strop if you haven't already). Try to plane as much as you can on a skew. Set for a fine cut with a tight mouth. Better to do many fine passes (taking time) than to try a deeper cut that will tear out and just give you more work to clean up (in the end taking more time). You may need to plane with a jack or try and get tearout at first to get a board straight and flat and then tidy up the tearout with a smoother later.

 

[Jacob]

Has anybody had difficulty in planing softwood (pine) from a timber merchant? Most of what I've bought planes easily with my sharpened hand plane. There is however, one length that will not plane successfully. The piece has a sort of mottled effect on its surface. I'm wondering if it's too wet? or perhaps holding too much resin (if that's possible)? I'm new to woodworking and would appreciate any feedback. regards Morro217

Practice practice! Especially if you have a difficult bit - it's useful to know how things fail, so pine is excellent stuff to practice with.
Sharper, finer set, candle wax, all can help but it may be impossible to get a flawless surface. In which case you stop (if it's good enough for the intended use, flaws and all) or go on to machine sanding.
It is possible to hand plane a perfect surface on very difficult woods but the effort and cost involved (expensive novelty planes, "tuning", crazy sharpening etc) may not be worth it in practical terms.

PS if you look closely at almost any traditionally made bit of woodwork you will see flaws all over the place. The main issue is how to deal with them, leave them be, or fill etc. Some apparently perfect surfaces on posh pieces may well have dabs of filler in carefully concealed holes, tear outs, etc.

 

[Eric The Viking]

+1 for Jacob's comments above.

Even pine has grain that reverses direction, too, especially around knots. And the structure around knots tends to be much weaker than elsewhere. I've found that when my planer's knives go 'off' a bit, it much prefers to pull lumps out around knots than plane them properly! A hand plane just stops in those circumstances.

Is your plane trying to tell you something, that it needs sharpening, for example?

E.

PS: do squiggles with candlewax on the plane sole often. It's amazing how much it reduces friction.

 

[Jacob]

I forgot to add - beginners have been known to make the mistake of trying to plane up before cutting to size. If you cut out all your components first (with an allowance for planing say 6mm oversize depending on variables), you can select the better pieces for where most visible, and/or cut off the knotty difficult bits etc. and only then plane to size. Basic good practice in fact.
Similarly when choosing a piece from your stock, if there is a choice, you should choose the worst piece which is just good enough for the purpose. Basic stock control.

 

[custard]

Pine can be a pig to work. The radically different hardness of early grain and late grain, knots, sticky residue on your tools, cloggy shavings, and the way scraping or high cutting angles rarely seem to work. But just as you're about to chuck it all away you'll find a board that works as sweetly as can be and then remains more stable than quarter sawn teak.

Funny stuff, wood.

 

[JustBen]

Whilst on the subject of softwoods, is it just me or is there a significant difference in new to old softwoods.

I've got planks of old pine/spruce etc (can't tell/don't know the difference) and it's so much stronger and denser than new softwoods.

 

[Jacob]

There are hundreds of varieties of softwoods. Many varieties which were used 100 years ago are not so available as they were. Not that choice came into it - it was often bundled together with no selection. That's the biggest difference between old and new. Stuff of the same species and origin would be much the same 100 years later.

 

[JustBen]

Ah ok. I wasn't sure if it had anything to do with them forcing the trees to grow faster etc.
I'm sure I've heard or read that somewhere. How true it is, I don't know.

 

[Eric The Viking]

Softwood is a crop.

Nowadays the species most planted are those that grow fastest. It's also grown in places that once were deciduous forest. In better soils conifers grow faster too. The characteristic of older softwood is mainly closer growth rings.

It's interesting though that it doesn't appear to weaken timber much structurally. There's an edition of The Woodwright's Shop where Roy Underhill compares old growth American white oak to plantation grown. The old growth is denser and has much closer growth rings, but he showed it to be a weaker timber. I don't know how much that translates to softwoods though.

The other thing is that conversion is more efficient nowadays. More of the tree gets used, including heartwood right at the centre that would have historically been regarded as waste. That stuff isn't very strong.

 

[Jacob]

.... The characteristic of older softwood is mainly closer growth rings....

Closer growth rings means grown in higher latitudes or altitudes, as far as I know. Then as now, nothing to do with age.
I've been replacing 1874 7" redwood floor boards with new swedish 5ths which seem to be identical.

 

[MIGNAL]

The slowest growing softwoods (tight grain) are at high altitude, above the snow line. The mottled appearance that the OP refers to may be similar to bearclaw figure.

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Ah ok. I wasn't sure if it had anything to do with them forcing the trees to grow faster etc.
I'm sure I've heard or read that somewhere. How true it is, I don't know.

Wood does harden to some extent with age, and it's likely your perceptions were partially affected by that as you worked old or recycled softwood.

There is also the question of the basic stiffness and hardness in recently felled and processed trees compared to the same qualities (characteristics) in trees of the same species felled perhaps 100 or 200 years ago. In some species, faster grown trees (widely spaced growth rings) are stronger than trees of the same species that have grown slowly (closely spaced growth rings); in others, the reverse is the case. The rate of growth is controlled by a great many factors, e.g., climate, soil, nutrients, open grown or forest grown, etc, with too many variables and nuances to discuss in detail in a short post here.

The way boards are milled out of a log and subsequently seasoned prior to use also have an effect on both hardness and stiffness, e.g., growth ring orientation as viewed from the end of a board may affect strength significantly, or not, depending on the species, and drier wood is always stiffer than wetter wood. Slainte.

 

[Fromey]

There's an edition of The Woodwright's Shop where Roy Underhill compares old growth American white oak to plantation grown. The old growth is denser and has much closer growth rings, but he showed it to be a weaker timber. I don't know how much that translates to softwoods though.

It was in this episode that Roy says rapidly grown hickory is stronger and better timber than slow grown. I believe this is the case for softwoods as well but it's the opposite for hardwoods. Not sure now where I heard/read that.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2172600552/

His explanation starts at about 13:45