March 12, 2008 – 5:11 pm
I have had this MillersFalls Jackplane for probably 4 or 5 months now. I bought it off of ebay for around $25. I have never been a big fan of hand tools ’cause they are slow and, well, they take some effort to use. But I thought that it looked kind of cool and “Old Timey”so I bought it anyway. I picked it up the other day just to see how this thing worked. I scrubbed this baby across a board that I had laying in the shop and I wasn’t too impressed. Click on the above photo and you can see why. The shavings that it produced were just plain sorry. Granted my technique is sorry too but this just sucked.
Well, when I bought this plane I had also purchased a book on planes so I could figure out what’s what. It is “The Handplane Book” by Garrett Hack, published by Taunton. I honestly tried reading that book in the past but the only thing that it accomplished was me seeing Mr. Sandman a little earlier than normal.
After my bad experience with the handplane I thought that I would give the book another go at it. I read the part about tuning handplanes and sought out to make mine work a little better. I have to tell you, I do not have an elaborate sharpening station nor do I have any fancy equipment. What I do have is a granite block some sandpaper and a Veritas Hone Guide. (I guess the Veritas is fancy) I believe this set up is called the “Scary Sharp” method but I’m not sure about that.
The first thing I did was grind that sucker on some 180 grit self sticking sanding pads that I snagged from work. That defined the angle pretty quick. The Veritas angle thing worked really well.
Next, I ran the blade over some 600 grit wet/dry sandpaper. I opted to go the wet route. I also honed the blade cap thing (excuse me if I don’t know the technical terms) to flatten and smooth the edge that meets the blade. The first time I used the plane, I had pieces of wood jammed in between the two and messed everything up.
Then I did the same thing again but I used 1200 grit paper. I did this until I had a nice little burr forming on the back of the blade then I turned the blade over and polished the burr down.
I put everything back together and adjusted everthing the best way I knew how. Then, by using my table saw as a reference, determined the high and low spots of the board by rocking it back and forth. I worked on those high spots until everything was level and as you can see, my shaving are a hell of a lot better than when I first started.
So after dogging the handplane book as a boring read, I have to admit that it does a good job of showing someone like me how to tune a plane. Now I just need to read the technique section.
Oh, and about using handtools. I can’t wait to get some more!
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