This is one long topic, but what is a scrub plane? All I have gathered is they do not require electricity.
How Necessary is a Specialised Scrub Plane?
- Thread starter Andy Kev.
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Am I right in thinking that with “fail to deliver” you mean that beginners can’t use L-N planes properly? I have experience of only one L-N plane but it is excellently made and most certainly delivers.
Jacob
Pint of bass, porkpie, and packet of crisps please
Some can't - or never get around to it perhaps. Certainly plenty of mint condition ones on ebay.
Glad you like it - I hope you don't give up and feel that you need to ebay it!
Time you widened your horizons.
Just rereading Nicholson and was pleased to find my long 26" woody is technically called a "long plane".
I posted earlier about planing 14' long stuff.
I work by hand, jacob. I have read small parts of the nicholson text because someone referred me to it and told me that I was using the term try plane incorrectly (24", they deemed it a long plane - it's in between).
The bulk of what I mentioned here has nothing to do with reading anything, it has to do with buying, trying and comparing things side by side to find a sustainable way to build by hand efficiently and accurately enough that accuracy is never part of the discussion. Even in routine work.
Talking about planing things 14' long is irrelevant until you start matching things people are actually doing here. There used to be a member on SMC when I posted over there where every time I talked about wooden planes and making them, she would try to correct what I was saying because I wasn't including japanese planes. Nobody over there was using japanese planes for serious work, and she was using them, but not for serious work - she was playing.
However relevant her experience with japanese planes may have been, she had no good advice for someone who wanted to work entirely by hand making cabinetry.
If someone came on here and said "what should I do if I want to build 14' long stuff for a house, I would tell them to build a longer bench and do the bulk work with a power planer - nobody is doing it. I've jointed stuff similar to that in length to strike mouldings, but that's a small amount of work compared to stuff like this for cases.
I'd give the same advice to anyone coming here with a big chub for japanese tools wanting to use them all the time - make things with the wood the japanese use and in their style, because if you want to make case work in boston, philadelphia, english style, etc, with hardwoods, you're peeing into a breeze.
I can say for sure I've never worked wood more than 7' long unless it was being prepped to make mouldings (and in that case, for my kitchens). Moulding length needed to wrap around a case plus 6" or so would be the max elsewhere.
You're grasping at straws when it comes to most of the things people will want to attempt with hand tools. If they play with beams, they'll only do it once. Even at that, there is a lot of exposed structure work where I grew up, and I've never seen any that was planed. It was all finished with axe or adze. If the work had been finer and still exposed, I'm sure some was planed (i'm sure some of what remains in williamsburg was hand planed, including the hand rails, etc).
But what does it have to do with woodworking at a bench to make furniture?
My only point about nicholson in regard to texts is that I saw a lot of woodwork suggestions made for fairly ugly mid 1900s work and with people who claim to have mastered hand tools. It didn't add up in working from rough, and I was smart enough (and perceptive enough) to know that they were either starting with the assumption that new limited tools were the only real option (perhaps due to teaching classes) or that they just weren't doing very much of what they talked about. Some of them do very fine work, but when they write books, I think they do more book writing and class teaching than they do work.
Nicholson's text was written at a time when the workmen were doing work, not writing books. The advice in it is better. It proves out. Much of it seems to be architectural, so I've never bothered to read anything from it other than coloring wood, french polishing and bench planes. For that, it's awfully good if one is working by hand. studio furniture era and arts and crafts stuff, not so much.
From the point of view of someone who can make a tool that's within or better than LN's specs, they are spectacularly good for their price. All one has to do is sharpen them and perhaps round over the tip of a cap iron.
Their fitness for use isn't the reason they're not used. The companies (both of them) are stellar. What they teach in video is for their markets, and they are more than courteous.
I can make a plane that's within their spec (I used their bronze 4 as the mark to beat for feel with infills), but to be able to do it at their wholesale cost? Not a chance. Not even in most parts of the USA - LN is an anomaly of craft and modernity mixed due to where they exist (maine), which is a separate culture.
They are almost singly responsible for the sudden notion that clifton's standards and customer service from afar aren't suitable for premium tools.
I won't lie and say I use their planes at this point (just sold off my last two at covid anomalous auction results), but I do recall as a beginner that I didn't get a refinished stanley that came close to them ...really, ever. Those standards aren't necessary for someone who can make a plane work to their standard, but for a beginner who just wants a tool that works, they're unmatched.
Blackswanwood
Still Learning
Jacob
Pint of bass, porkpie, and packet of crisps please
To my knowledge, except for a small group of reproducers and repairers, there's not much of a need for *any* planes in the real world.
Which makes getting advice on working by hand to standard pretty weak these days.
Working by hand to standard and selling the product without writing books or teaching classes is a pretty big hill to climb. I'm aware of a single person who did it for a while, and no longer does because he couldn't keep up with his order list.
This kind of reminds me of something I read early on when I thought my direction was to a sliding table saw vs. going to hand tools (that just happened by chance). A bunch of bubbly folks looking to spend four to five figures asked what was really tested and useful in industry, and the response was that except for odd one off work, sliding table saws are outdated and not used.
There's one group to beware of though, and that is folks who write more than they woodwork who do a project and write a book, do a project, write a book. Pace and efficiency aren't a very big deal if 85% of your time is spent editing and promoting media.
Jacob doesn't like being jacobed - I don't think we're talking about "best", we're talking about "necessary". If you're going to work by hand, it's necessary to do the things the way they were done or you'll quit quickly. a scrub plane isn't necessary - maybe richard's advice was the best given here (in my opinion, a scrub plane followed by a large power planer tends to erase the trouble that the scrub can cause - but even that could be avoided for the folks looking to "knock ears off" by getting a decent power planer and dust remover. I'd have solved that for myself (not instantly clogging a fein vac) if I had customers and enjoyed it (it makes economic sense and the person pushing the power planer around instead of any manual plane won't be tired and could work a full day).
Jacob
Pint of bass, porkpie, and packet of crisps please
I've used them consistently for more than 50 years, earning a living, as and when needed, which is often. No big deal. Couldn't manage without them.
Talking of long stuff I also had 10no 14' chapel windows to replicate, which entailed 20 3x3" 12' long stiles. Easier to straighten on one or two sides by hand and the other sides through the machine.
I use both. A long sliding table (on a combi machine) was one of the most useful things I ever bought.
It's a waste of time telling me I'm doing it all wrong - I really do know what I'm doing and another 1000 words wouldn't make the slightest difference!
For swan above, this is where things went sideways. It's bad advice - we've narrowed it down to potentially wet wood or 14 foot beams.
I'm a little bit reactive to the comment because it comes up almost instantly any time someone uses a scrub plane on a test piece for the first time.
"hand toolers.... PSA - you "MUST" get a scrub plane...just tried one on a test piece!!!"
Jacob later confirmed (unintentionally) that he's removing less wood per stroke with a scrub plane than someone would typically remove with a jack plane (at least someone of my physical size - about 200 pounds).
can you get a scrub plane?
of course.
Jacob
Pint of bass, porkpie, and packet of crisps please
Getting into such a business here is a good way to go broke. I don't know what woodworking business is really palatable here other than repair work supplemented by pension, or woodworker supplemented by attorney or physician spouse - I've seen the last two done
Sgian Dubh
Established Member
I'm sure you're aware that I don't do bloggery, as you call it. I'm not the least bit interested in selling a method for modifying a smoothing plane to work as a scrubber. I just happened to have a smoother that was a bit of a dog, and a job where a scrubber might be useful, so roughly half an hour's tinkering modified the dog into something that worked passably well to scrub up wood quickly before I got at it with either my jack or try plane, or it might have been both - can't recall.
My electric hand held plane, by the way, doesn't clog up the extraction hose at all - I just let the chips fly, usually outdoors, which does result in quite a bit of sweeping up I suppose, ha, ha. Slainte.
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took you a lot longer than me. I hit it days ago.
Sgian Dubh
Established Member
Jacob, I don't claim that my modified smoother is better than a genuine scrubber, but it does a reasonable job.
As to blunting the blades of my electric hand plane on all the rubbish and hard stuff found on the surface of some rough wood that's perhaps been lying on gravel, concrete, or whatever, that doesn't worry me in the slightest because I just turn the existing blades over or stick in some new blades, which might take all of five minutes if I'm goofing about a bit, and the blades are not overly expensive at about £2 per pair of usable edges. Slainte.
billw
The Tattooed One
So now I've reached this point in the thread and lost the will to live, the conclusion is that a scrub plane is useless.
Richard, not aimed at you at all. I'm aware that you've done quite a bit of woodworking for a living, and that this is a one-off kind of thing for you, not a typical method of removing material.
You hit the nail on the head for me and my small planer. I suspect because I have a cheap chinese copy of a good planer, maybe it's just me (as ron white says). It'll work fine if I let it blast chips everywhere, but factoring in changing clothes and cleaning things up messes up the time balance. There must've been something I was planning to work on quickly to initiate the purchase of the thing, and it was a real bummer to find that even a fein wouldn't have the gones to pull the chips through.
My dad never did fine woodwork, but my mother profitably made kitsch for 40 years, and my dad's job was material prep. He wore out two bandsaws and three belt/disc combo sanders. I can still remember seeing him standing outside on a nice day with a breeze, just living up the excellent conditions to work without a mask and without cleaning anything up. He would dutifully work for a gigantic stash of backed up material for 5 or 6 hours like this, leaving the garden looking like it had snowed over a wide area (most of the kitsch was white pine). A couple of dew cycles or a rain and it was either brown or gone.
If I were planning to work 8 or 10 hours today, and tomorrow, and the next day, I'd still use the power planer and make the mess. One of the benefits of this being a hobby is if I have to dimension 100 or 150 board feet of wood over a couple of weeks, I can tell doing the same thing for too long would lead to injury. Doing the same thing with an electric planer would just lead to mind wandering and maybe a minor backache.
I don't want to name all of the bloggers and book writers I'm thinking of, but someone who has primarily made their living doing woodworking off of the internet and DVD scene is out - you're too qualified!!
productivity when used by the deceased or those near it is fairly poor!
I ought to have pointed out that my one and only LN is the 507 Rebating Block Plane. It is wonderfully well made and its performance is only limited by the skills of whoever is wielding it. I've no doubt that if I had e.g. an LN No 5, I would be as happy with it as I am with my Veritas LAJ.
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