how important is weight in plane?

[Nelson Howe]

In reading the discussion about iron/bronze planes, I found the observation that weight in a hand plane is a good thing. With relatively little experience here, I'm guessing that the added weight brings the benefit of inertia to move the plane through a point of resistance in a cut. Is that correct?

This, of course, leads to another question. I'm in the middle of making three Krenov style planes--a rock maple jointer, and two cherry smoothers with thick maple soles. I realize I might have done better to reverse my wood selection, but these were some old scraps that worked better this way. If added mass is good, would it make any sense to drill a couple holes in the cherry smoothers before glue up, and fill them with lead? This seems a bit silly and overthought to me, but, what the heck, I thought I'd ask anyway.

Now for what it's worth, David Fink describes maple and oak as likely choices for a plane blank, but writes that cherry is not heavy enough for the smaller planes (why couldn't I just listen?). With the smoothers coming in at less than half a board foot of material, and using some suspect information I found off the internet (I'm away from home now--no library), I seem to come up with a rough difference in weight between maple and cherry of 5 oz. (maple 1.7675 lbs/cherry 1.447 lbs).

I have a walnut (another no no, I know, I know) smoother I made last year. I like it a lot. If I can only get the mouth tighter on these...

[David Gendron]

I don't know if it is that importent, but some weight is sure a good thing... I think it's the reason most planes are or were made out of Beech, and white oak. I think White Oak would be my first choice and beech my second Why? I don't know... I realy like working with beech so maybe i should make it my first choice... Anyway, that's an other topic! I wouldn't worry about puting lead in them, I don't think it's that importent, just put more of your weight on the plane when using it!

[Larry Williams]

...I'm guessing that the added weight brings the benefit of inertia to move the plane through a point of resistance in a cut. Is that correct?


My experience is that, generally, when I hit a "point of resistance" when planing it's because of some feature like grain reversal that will cause tear-out. When I get into a difficult situation I prefer to finesse my way through rather than try to ram my way through. I sure hope my truck is never in a tight parking lot when some of the proponents of heavy planes are negotiating a tight parking space.

I sort of doubt many of those who claim an advantage for heavy planes actually use their planes for much. Maybe a couple smooth plane passes following a planer but not standing at a bench using planes for a couple hours or more. That's fine if that's the way they want to work but I think they're missing out on the overwhelming majority of the capability of hand planes.

An interesting exercise I did once was to go through all the old plane patents (http://www.datamp.org/displayIndex.php?start=0) from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. It's interesting that one of the most common patent claims for metal planes is that the particular patent resulted in a lighter plane. Other than two flooring plane patents, I can't remember a single patent claim that a design involved making a plane heavier. If anyone finds a claim for a heavier bench plane, I'd like to know about it.

[Wilbur Pan]

After having used heavy and light planes, the main reason that I see where having a heavy plane helps is that you can keep planing with a duller blade for a longer period of time.

Of course, then you have to deal with the issue of what your board looks like after being planed with a less than sharp blade.

Overall, I go for a lighter plane if I have a choice, and if I am running into resistance, I sharpen the blade.