setting up a no.5 as virtual scrub

[big soft moose]

on a recent thread modernist wrote this

My existing 5 can then be set up in virtual scrub mode.

could he (or someone) explain what this means - bearing in mind my newness to hand toolage - and also how you do it and what the benefits are ?

i'm thinking that as i have two number fives and four number fours now there might be some advantage in learning to set them up for different applications

 

[Smudger]

I may well be very wrong, but I think that what he means is that if he were to grind the cutter to a serious curve and open the mouth a lot he could use it as a scrub or hogging plane, designed to take a lot of material off quickly.

I've not heard of this being done with a #5, and I would have thought it is a bit big. I have a Stanley scrub and it is closer to a #3 or #4, quite a small, light plane, which is what you need if you are working across the grain on a rough board.

A larger plane might work if you were to use it to dimension the edge, as some think the British way with scrubs was. The lack of need for a scrub in the British woodworking practice is often given as a reason why the Record 400½ is such a rare plane, with a short production run.

 

[Harbo]

Old wooden Jacks are often converted into scrub planes by regrinding the blade.
They are reasonably long 15"/16".

Rod

 

[big soft moose]

cheers smudger - i clearly have a lot to learn about planes (nearly as much as when i learnt to fly ) - so that i dont have to keep coming back with daft questions is there a book on the subject people would recommend ?

 

[Harbo]

Garrett Hack's "The Handplane Book" is a good start.

Rod

 

[Smudger]

BSM - you can't be more hopeless than me!

There is an interweb 'how to' on converting to a scrub - I'll try to dig it out.

 

[Smudger]

Here you go

 

[big soft moose]

BSM - you can't be more hopeless than me!

i wouldnt bet on it - before this forum introdced me to the "joys" of the slope my only non turning related hand tool was a claw hammer , my only plane a performance power planer, and i thought the best way to join two bits of wood together was screws and glue (countersinking heads if i was feeling posh), or a nailgun.

 

[Smudger]

You mean it isn't?

 

[Modernist]

on a recent thread modernist wrote this

My existing 5 can then be set up in virtual scrub mode.

could he (or someone) explain what this means - bearing in mind my newness to hand toolage - and also how you do it and what the benefits are ?

i'm thinking that as i have two number fives and four number fours now there might be some advantage in learning to set them up for different applications

What I meant was as follows:-

It's a 5 not 5 1/2 and doesn't get much use. I also have a 4 and 4 1/2 to which the same arguement applies but thought the 5 being a little longer would be better for making/keeping the board flat.

Basically wind the frog right back until the back of the blade is resting on the sole for support and leaves a wide mouth. Grind a significant camber on the blade with maybe a 35 deg bevel angle to strenthen the edge and see how it goes.

If I get a chance I'll do it tomorrow and post the result.

 

[Smudger]

A Stanley #40 is 9½" compared to 14" for the #5, which is quite a difference. The #4 at 9" would be better. The 4½ will have too wide a cutter, I would think.

What you want in a scrub is a plane which will follow the contours, not necessarily flatten them, and which will be happy working across the grain. Also it is a plane which requires some effort. The usual order of works was Scrub > Jack > Smoother.

 

[Modernist]

Why do you want it to follow the contours?

 

[Smudger]

To get into the hollows to hit the raised parts or to aim for the high spots. The last time I used mine was to take a very high crown off a board, and it was actually a lot like using a block plane on steroids, running at 45º to the grain.

 

[Modernist]

I'm still not with you. Surely you would want to remove the high spots/bow/wind by planing diagonally in both directions.

 

[Smudger]

Because you aren't flattening it, you are scrubbing it, taking off big lumps. You don't want to be doing that across the whole width if you don't have to.
The other question is the width of the cutter. The scrub needs to be narrow.
I've taken some pictures to show the different sizes of a #40, 04 and 05½, but at the moment Photobucket is playing games.

 

[mr grimsdale]

..scrub mode.....
could he (or someone) explain what this means - bearing in mind my newness to hand toolage - and also how you do it and what the benefits are ?....

I'd never really noticed the 'scrub' plane idea until quite recently, although it gets a mention in aunty joyce p27. It'd more or less disappeared until (I guess) it rose into fashion when LN started marketing their version;

But with hindsight I see that 'scrubbing' is something I do quite often, but with a planer/thicknesser, not a hand plane. This is because I often attempt to recycle old painted stuff.
Hard old paint blunts blades really quickly if you try to plane in the ordinary way. Instead you have to take a deep cut which cuts through the paint layer and swoops down and back up in the clean wood underneath. Similarly if it was a manky old bit of timber with grit and other debris in the surface a deep cut will take off all the rubbish in one go, still embedded in the thick shavings.
By hand a steeply cambered blade would do the same i.e. cut mainly in the clean wood underneath with narrow but thick shavings with the paint still attached. So any old plane would do - with a steeply cambered blade.
So I reckon that's what a 'scrub' plane is for - cleaning up bad surfaces. The name is the giveaway!
Straightforward rapid removal of (clean) timber etc was more often done with axe, adze etc.
Just a theory.

 

[Smudger]

Not from what I have heard/read.
The scrub is more US than UK and is used for rough dimensioning of sawed timber. It has a narrow, highly cambered blade and is used as you might use an adze but in long strokes, often across or at 45º to the grain. It takes off chips up to ⅛" thick. It is small, between a #2 and #3 in size, light and easy to use. The weight of the plane doesn't count for much, it's all arms and legs work. It is quite different from a cambered Jack.
I have heard that the reason they are so little known in the UK (apart from the semi-legendary Record 400½) is that around the turn of the 20th century most carpenters were buying dimensioned timber, so only needed a Jack and Smoother to prepare it. The other use they may have had was for removing a big lump of edge as an alternative to ripping long boards by hand. I've tried that, and I'm sceptical, though it may be down to practice.
Still can't get the pictures up...
Or Blood & Gore...

From Wikipedia

The scrub plane is a type of plane used to remove large amounts of wood from the surface of lumber, such as when eliminating cup or twist in the first stages of preparing rough stock, or when reducing the thickness of a board significantly. Scrub planes generally have a short soles, a relatively narrow but thick blade, a very wide mouth, and a deeply curved edge (of about a 3 inch radius) to make a deep, gouging cut.

A scrub plane is generally used in diagonal strokes across the face of a board, rather than parallel to the length of the board (along the grain) as with most other bench planes. In thicknessing or preparing rough stock, the scrub plane is usually followed by the jack plane, jointer plane, then smoothing plane.

The Wk FineTools website says this:

The scrub plane is unusual in that it doesn’t fall neatly into the traditional English system of classifying bench planes. Rough stock was prepared first with a “fore plane,” which is a metal or wooden plane that’s anywhere from 16”to 20” long and has an iron that has a significant curve to its cutting edge. Then you refine the board’s surface with a jointer plane followed by the smoothing plane.

The scrub plane doesn’t jibe with this English system. The scrub is between 9-1/2” and 10-1/2” long and its iron is even more curved than what I’ve seen on fore planes. In fact, the scrub plane outwardly resembles the German Bismarck plane – a wooden stock plane with a horn up front that’s about the size of a smoothing plane and is used for removing stock quickly in European workshops.One answer might be in Stanley’s 1923 catalog. It states that the scrub is for “planing down to a rough dimension any board that is too wide to conveniently rip with a hand saw….” So the scrub plane was perhaps designed instead to work on the narrow edges of boards, to quickly reduce a framing member in width before the house carpenter had a portable circular saw (an invention of Skil after World War II).

If the plane was indeed a carpentry tool for ripping, this might explain why Stanley japanned the entire body of the plane, including the exterior sidewalls. Home sites are a lot less friendly to cast iron than workshops. It also might explain why so many of the vintage No. 40s I see look like they were dredged from the bottom of the sea.

 

[mr grimsdale]

Edge trimming/splitting-off instead of rip sawing is easily done with a carpenter's axe. I've done it often. Even if you had a suitable plane the axe would be quicker and easier by far.
Not sure abt your sawn timber idea - stuff was sawn by power or by hand over a saw pit, from a long way back.
If the 'scrub plane' was an essential or often used item there'd be a lot of them still about, but there isn't as far as I know.

 

[Smudger]

I guess all those other guys are wrong as well...

 

[mr grimsdale]

I guess all those other guys are wrong as well...

If you read around they don't seem too sure of themselves on this one.