Turning from power tools to hand tools

[Patrick Chase]

Not sure I understand,”if the area of placement isn’t flat”?

When you use a winding stick you lay it across the board. If the board is curved or otherwise out of true in that cross/transverse axis then you'll get a bad reading. That's pretty much true of all measurement approaches, though - local variations can always muck with larger-scale measurements one way or another.

Going back to my previous post and its replies, you would be well served to listen to Warren. He has more experience than anybody else here that I know of with hand-tool-only workflows. There is usually more than one way to do any given operation, and IMO like most humans he sometimes overstates the advantages of his approaches w.r.t. others, but you can pretty much bank on the fact that whatever he suggests WILL work very efficiently and well. In your situation it's going to be a lot more useful to have such "tried and true" approaches at your disposal than to try to understand all of the variations.

[ken hatch]

Not sure I understand,”if the area of placement isn’t flat”?

Bill,

When placing winding sticks they should not "rock" on the belly of the board. Most boards will need a truing of the area where you place the winding sticks to get a useable reading.

ken

P.S. After posting I realized you might still not understand. Here is a link to a very good video on truing the face of a board:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=oEdgF8NDsB0

[John C Cox]

Bill,

I love my hand tools for small jobs, finish work, and work where the power tools are simply ill suited....

I dearly love my power tools for stock prep and hogging off material...

So for example - I would use the power planer to straight line stock - then use my hand planes to make the joint. Or the band saw to whack the end off a thick board - then square it up with my block plane and square...

Same for the drum sander.... Drum sanders are fantastic for cleaning up stock and thicknessing it uniformly... I dearly love my drum sander - and you will have to pry it out of my cold dead hands.... You can then go from there with hand tools...

Thanks

I have a Jointer, planer and drum sander SawStop to help prepare my boards for box making. I found I use my Jointer occasionally and then my drum sander to get to thickness desired. I wondered how many of you folks use hand planes to dimension? I’m thinking of selling the planer since I use the drum sander and selling the Jointer and use my LN 62 to edge joint. The 62 will do a ok job of planing to rough dimension and the drum sand to finish. I also have a LN scrub and router plane. What other hand planes do you folks use? I have a router setup in a nice table with all th Incra gear but I’m finding I enjoy handplanes. I could replace a lot of power equipment with planes and enjoy the process. Wondered how many of you build boxes with hand tools exclusively. At 74 I want to enjoy the process rather than worrying about what I end up producing. I found I thoroughly enjoy planing.

[Bill Sutherland]

Bill, When placing winding sticks they should not "rock" on the belly of the board. Most boards will need a truing of the area where you place the winding sticks to get a useable reading. ken P.S. After posting I realized you might still not understand. Here is a link to a very good video on truing the face of a board:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=oEdgF8NDsB0

Ahhh, I see what you're saying now. When I placed the winding sticks at the end of the board all was ok. I do see now where this would become a misreading.

[Bill Sutherland]

Bill, I love my hand tools for small jobs, finish work, and work where the power tools are simply ill suited.... I dearly love my power tools for stock prep and hogging off material... So for example - I would use the power planer to straight line stock - then use my hand planes to make the joint. Or the band saw to whack the end off a thick board - then square it up with my block plane and square... Same for the drum sander.... Drum sanders are fantastic for cleaning up stock and thicknessing it uniformly... I dearly love my drum sander - and you will have to pry it out of my cold dead hands.... You can then go from there with hand tools... Thanks

I understand the love affair with the drum sander. It has served me well in the couple of years I 've had it and I just haven't seemed to have needed/used the planer. I will keep all my tools and switch my stock prep to hand tools and see how it goes. My experience the last couple of days doing a complete stock prep with planes was really enjoyable. I can't say the same for ripping experience and that's why I love my Sawstop!! I do see the need for a power planer if I was doing a lot preparation. I won't be using a jointer again after doing it by hand. Very easy and really fun.

[Bill Sutherland]

Bill, When placing winding sticks they should not "rock" on the belly of the board. Most boards will need a truing of the area where you place the winding sticks to get a useable reading. ken P.S. After posting I realized you might still not understand. Here is a link to a very good video on truing the face of a board:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=oEdgF8NDsB0

I just happened to see that video this morning. Very informative, especially the part where he's marking the board and using the marked area as a reference to plane down to that level. I didn't do that and didn't even think about it but my board was not that wide.

[Patrick Chase]

My experience the last couple of days doing a complete stock prep with planes was really enjoyable. I can't say the same for ripping experience and that's why I love my Sawstop!!

If you enjoy it now you'll love it once you figure out some techniques to make it go faster.

Probably the single biggest productivity improvement for roughing is to be had by aggressively cambering the iron. You can remove a larger volume of wood per unit time by taking curved chips vs flat shavings. Your 62 needs a LOT of camber to be an efficient roughing tool because of its low angle. If you haven't already you might want to invest in a second iron for that purpose, and set it up with a ~3" camber radius (which will perform equivalently to a ~8" radius in a common-pitch #5).

The good news is that the 62 can do basically everything even if it isn't really ideal for anything. You minimally need it and 2 irons: A heavily cambered one for roughing as described above, and a much more minimally cambered one for jointing and smoothing. You can wait until later to add a smoother and a jointer (the latter only if your work is longer than ~30", if not then the 62 will be long enough in perpetuity). If I were mainly doing boxes the next plane I would add is a 3 FWIW.

[Bill Sutherland]

I do have the LN Scrub plane and it was a lot of fun to use. I even got my wife to try it and she enjoyed the exercise and results. She’s pretty strong but not very big so there was a little adjustment to get her body into it. She lifts weights so it wasn’t much of a problem for her.
I have heard the 62 is good for most everything but not great for one particular function. I may look at the LN 7 or 8 and a 3 or 4. I’d use the 62 in a shooting board I need to build.