How many people finish right off the hand plane?

[Greg Berlin]

I was wondering how many people apply their finish right from the hand plane vs sanding before finish? I've tried both, but I can't decide.

[Daniel Hartmann]

I usually aim to finish off the plane, the less time I spend sanding the better. Usually though I just end up keeping the sanding to a minimum. I'll plane, the scrape then quick finish with 220.

[Frederick Skelly]

I've been going right from my smoother to the finishing table, unless Im using water-based dye. Sanding pretty much required then.

[David Dalzell]

Depends on the wood (or my handplane skills?). I try for a finish with a plane. If I am not satisfied then I sand until I am satisfied.

[Stan Suther]

Most of my work is in walnut. I plane, scrape the gnarly spots, then even things out with a light sanding with some 220-320. Looks good enough to impress friends and relatives.

[paul cottingham]

Finish from the plane. Little flaws dont bug me at all, and I hate -hate- sanding. Flaws add character.

[Kees Heiden]

Usually I try, but often need some scraper work or light sanding. But the days I would go outside and pester the neighbourhood with the screeming noise of the ROS are long gone, luckily.

[Warren Mickley]

I stopped sanding in 1978 when I realized that the surface I got from the plane was superior. I had stopped using a scraper a year or two earlier. I use water stains almost exclusively. There is no need to sand after using water stains if the surface is nicely planed.

[Prashun Patel]

I am surprised and intrigued that people use all three methods together. I can understanding not being able to plane perfectly, requiring correction with either sandpaper or a scraper, but why both together?

On narrow parts that receive little raking light, like aprons or drawer fronts, I am comfortable finishing off the plane. But for broad surfaces, track marks continue to plague me and are harder to detect until final finish, so I prefer to sand after flattening - from 150 or 220 and up as the specific case demands.

[paul cottingham]

Cambering plane blades will lessen track marks. I really like the look of soft undulations on the wood left by the camber. Clipping the edges of the plane blade with a file helps as well.

[David Weaver]

I try not to sand, it doesn't always work out, but I try not to when I can help it. I don't stain anything except replacement stuff for the house (trim woodwork where the color is already set) and then I sand that, but I don't have a whole lot of regard for stuff that stays in the house.

If I can't get away with planing, I'll scrape, but then I do a light scrape to a whole piece to try to get it uniform. There are two schools that I can think of, and one is the planed surface school, where some minor imperfections are tolerable, and the other is the sanded school where the entire surface is supposed to look as uniform as possible, though at the cost of some of the life that the wood shows when it's planed.

There are also supposedly definitive tests by magazines where they say "no difference between a planed and sanded surface", but that just isn't the case. One of us on here, whether it's me or someone else should take a 2 foot stick of rather plain looking wood and then finish it with shellac, take a picture and then take the same stick and scrape off the finish and sand the same surface to something like 320, vacuum out all dust and then shellac and finish it again. There is an element of depth that exists in the planed surface that the sanded surface doesn't have, but it comes at the cost of perfect uniformity in the surface. you can't really have both, at least in my opinion, unless the wood you're using is absolutely perfect wood with no variation in it.

[Daniel Rode]

I've been sanding before finishing for many years. It's what I know and it works well enough for me. I dislike the dust but I want all the surfaces to have the same texture before I finish. Having one part planed, another scraped and a third sanded probably doesn't make much difference but I don't like the inconsistency and it looks different to my eyes.

Planing and scraping reduce the amount of sanding I need to do significantly. In fact, I mostly just use 220 lightly after planing or scraping. Perhaps with time and confidence, I'll do some without any sanding.

[Tony Shea]

I hate to be a snob but for the last 3 or 4 years I have been doing very little sanding and when I do sand I hate every moment of it. Most of the success with a hand plane is due to the wood I end up using. My shop has turned into a 90% hand tool shop therefore most of my wood dimensioning is done by hand. In order to work this way I have been doing a lot with mild grain wood. Even with an iffy spot in the wood I will change planes to something that will give me the surface I'm after. Curved edges is where I end up scraping and sanding, I have no planes that can smooth large curved surfaces glass smooth.

[Greg Berlin]

That's what I figured. I have a project I'm working on with some reversing grain, but I hate sanding. I've rectified some of that by scraping where I got a little tear out and I was planing using my BU Smoother with 50 degree blade in it, but the tearout, while minor, has been inevitable to some degree. I've pretty much scraped the entire surface and I don't plan on sanding it. I'm hoping it will come out nice. Finishing is like the bane of my woodworking. There's too many options and I can't decide on a method I like. It seems like the minwax wipe on poly has worked well for me on projects in the past. The wood I'm using is a african walnut (Dibetou) which has been pretty good to work by hand. Probably similar to sapele. I might hit that with a little tung oil or something and then finish with wipe on poly to get the grain to pop hopefully.

[Daniel Hartmann]

I plane until I can't make the surface any better. Sometimes that's good enough other times scraping is required. If I scrape some areas I blend it all in by sanding with 220. In that case all three are used and not superfluously. And, in my opinion that's the fastest route as opposed to sanding alone.

[Jim Matthews]

I sand everything, regardless of how good it looks straight from the plane.

I can't see well enough to detect the inevitable flaw,
filled in by sawdust. I also start with Shellac as a finish
and sanding seems to encourage better coverage.

I scape if and only if I absolutely must.

[David Weaver]

Is that scape like man scaping?

[Phil Thien]

Do you guys that finish w/o sanding, how do you break your corners/edges? Do you use a plane for this? Or maybe you don't soften your edges?

[paul cottingham]

Block plane.

[Brian Holcombe]

Do you guys that finish w/o sanding, how do you break your corners/edges? Do you use a plane for this? Or maybe you don't soften your edges?

Spokeshave.

[Frederick Skelly]

Do you guys that finish w/o sanding, how do you break your corners/edges? Do you use a plane for this? Or maybe you don't soften your edges?

Block plane too.

[Phil Thien]

Do you guys w/ the block planes break the corners before assembly? After assembly a block corner would reach into corners, will it? Or do you have block planes where the blade is right at the tip or something?

[Tony Shea]

Do you guys w/ the block planes break the corners before assembly? After assembly a block corner would reach into corners, will it? Or do you have block planes where the blade is right at the tip or something?

Lol. I typically break my edges before assembly whenever possible but is not always the case. On something like a frame and panel door I will dry assemble the frame and mark where I have to stop and break the edge as close as I dare with a block plane or spokeshave. On final assembly I will get in the corner with a safe edge file (one that I ground the edge myself as factory safe edges aren't that safe) and then I will blend that with some 320 grit paper. It is all a matter of how I like to work, which is going to be completely different than the next guy. I would suggest doing what you feel comfortable with and try new things when you dare. I originally drifted away from sanding due to the environment of my current shop, a bedroom just off of the living room in my apartment. Sanding dust is not something I want to deal with outside the shop so I forced myself to get surfaces 90% off a handplane. I don't ever see myself not having sandpaper in my shop but the more I can limit its' use the happier I am.

[David Weaver]

Do you guys w/ the block planes break the corners before assembly? After assembly a block corner would reach into corners, will it? Or do you have block planes where the blade is right at the tip or something?

If it's not possible to break an edge with a plane, I still sand. It's not like someone is going to look for a tiny facet.

What I don't do is to break an edge much. It takes extremely little to make an edge lose its ability to cut or scrape hands. Sanding a bunch off and making something look a little rounded, though, makes things look nasty common.

[Phil Thien]

If it's not possible to break an edge with a plane, I still sand. It's not like someone is going to look for a tiny facet.

What I don't do is to break an edge much. It takes extremely little to make an edge lose its ability to cut or scrape hands. Sanding a bunch off and making something look a little rounded, though, makes things look nasty common.

I'll admit to preferring the look of broken edges, but I'm always eager to see the work of others. I'd like to see some actual Krenov and Maloof pieces up close, I think especially Krenov, just to see how they handled stuff like this.

[Brian Holcombe]

Look at maloofs early stuff to see how it did when it was just him cranking through work. The later years (70's and on) he had full time staff that were there for finishing and they sanded everything. That's where the California round over really came about.

Look at Nakashima's early stuff if you want to see how he broke the edges when it was him and only a few and they used almost entirely hand tools at the time.

[Prashun Patel]

There exist chisel planes and bullnose planes for this. I found both hard to use and prefer a regular bench chisel or sandpaper. If your wood is softer like cherry or walnut, i have even used a block of hard maple to crush and burnish the edge in the corner. Like david said, it doesnt take much. Dont break for your eyes, break for your fingers.

[Frederick Skelly]

Do you guys w/ the block planes break the corners before assembly? After assembly a block corner would reach into corners, will it? Or do you have block planes where the blade is right at the tip or something?


I break my edges after assembly. Outside edge and corner are easy obviously. Inside the corner, I get as far as I can reach with the block. Then get the last half inch or so with a chisel. But Im only knocking off 1/16" or so when I break my edges. If I was doing more than that, Id need a better approach to keep things looking uniform. Ive read some people use a bullnose or a chisel plane, but I havent tried them.

[Warren Mickley]

I use a smoothing plane for a slight corner chamfer. There is no problem with getting into corners. For places that would be inaccessible after assembly we, of course, chamfer before assembly. We also smooth before assembly if access is a problem.

It seems like some people want to use the same methods and same order of operations for hand work that is in use for machining/sanding technology. In hand work we are not wedded to these 20th century conventions. The same is true finishing techniques: we are not confined to the techniques of the machine and sand culture. There is no problem finishing right off the plane, figured wood or not. In general finishing is easier with a hand planed surface than a sanded one because the surface is smoother and cleaner.

[Brian Holcombe]

For many of my low-impact projects around the house I generally just apply wax right over a planed finish. The finish right off the plane is usually very nice to look at and has a certain shimmer to it that is pretty tough to achieve with sanding.

Depends on the wood, I find some woods just really difficult to get an excellent finish with a plane, others are fairly easy. White ash truly spoils me, I can usually get a nice finish right off the jointer, and two-three cuts with the smoother and it's like glass.

[bridger berdel]

right now I'm finishing a door to match existing. I surfaced the boards for the jambs by planing. I made some extra for stain samples. the stain I'm using is watco danish oil, blended for color matching. the wood is alder. I found a clear difference between a surface sanded to 220 and a surface planed- the sanded surface accepted more stain. I didn't try sanding any higher than that, and the planed surface has a smoother and brighter surface than the sanded surface, but the difference is clear. for this project I'll use a sanded surface, as that is what better matches the existing once stained.

[Paul Murphy]

I'm in the hate-sanding crowd, but still find myself planing and then scraping to correct tearout, then sanding for uniformity. I hope to be able to improve my planing results to reduce scraping and eliminate sanding, but that will require a higher angle plane & cambered blade that I haven't yet purchased.


One thing I've noticed on figured wood is that scraped surfaces reflect light differently than planed surfaces, even if the entire surface was then sanded for uniformity. I suspect the scraper might be burnishing the surface, but am not sure what the cause really is?


I wonder if the surface produced by a high angle plane is any different than the surface produced by a standard angle plane? To me the surface produced by a standard angle plane really is special, but I'm not sure how much of that differential remains after the finish is applied?

[David Weaver]

The surface off of a high angle vs. common pitch plane depends on the wood. On softwoods and softer hardwoods, there's a fairly substantial difference, but you'd have to have two pieces beside each other to really tell any difference, I guess.

On stuff like oak and harder, the difference is less. I don't see much difference on hard maple.

[Derek Cohen]

I wonder if the surface produced by a high angle plane is any different than the surface produced by a standard angle plane? To me the surface produced by a standard angle plane really is special, but I'm not sure how much of that differential remains after the finish is applied?

Half the Oak board below was planed with a LA Jointer and 52 degree cutting angle, and the other half with a Custom BD Jointer and 40 degree frog with close set chip breaker.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Planes/LV%20planes/Custom%20Jointer/10_zps04c3f664.jpg

To my eyes, the low angle BD-produced surface just shaded the high angle BU-produced surface.

However, a single coat of oil (similar to Danish Oil) was applied. The result was given to both my wife and my 21-year old son. Neither could say which was better. They looked identical.

The finish removes any differences. As Dave points out, the harder the wood, the less likely the difference even without a finish.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Prashun Patel]

This is a cruel teaser, Derek. When will the review on the custom jointer be available?

[Daniel Rode]

That's about what I'd expect with a clear finish. Sanding to 220 vs 320 vs 400 is similar. Once the finish is applied, they all look the same.

However, if the wood is to be stained or dyed, it may make a noticeable difference. The stain is going to absorb differently in these surfaces. I don't stain often but it's something to be aware of.



The result was given to both my wife and my 21-year old son. Neither could say which was better. They looked identical.

The finish removes any differences. As Dave points out, the harder the wood, the less likely the difference even without a finish.

[Warren Mickley]

If you want the best surface, get yourself a double iron plane and learn to use it. Use a bed angle in the 40 to 45 range.

I am reminded of a test a man did in Vermont about 35 years ago. He took grade A maple syrup, grade C maple syrup, and flavored corn syrup (something like Log Cabin), to his local country store and had people do taste tests. The corn syrup won out and the grade A (the most expensive) was last. But of those few people who could identify all three syrups by taste, every one chose grade A as the best.

[Derek Cohen]

Heh ... Prashun ... there's more ...

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Planes/LV%20planes/Custom%20Jointer/3-jointers_zps6f72f8a5.jpg

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Planes/LV%20planes/Custom%20Jointer/2-smoothers_zps53048875.jpg

BU vs BD, Chip breaker with low frog and high frog ....

It's a lot to put together. Hopefully soon.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Prashun Patel]

Waiting with 'bated breath. Just remember to make sure that the BU jointer wins, since I just bought one...

[Winton Applegate]

I stopped sanding in 1978 when I realized that the surface I got from the plane was superior. I had stopped using a scraper a year or two earlier. I use water stains almost exclusively. There is no need to sand after using water stains if the surface is nicely planed.

Warren said it!
exactly

[Mike Holbrook]

Admit it Prashun, you just can't put your new Veritas BU Jointer down for more than 5 minuets without going into withdrawal. I think there is a hint from Derek above "To my eyes, the low angle BD-produced surface just shaded the high angle BU-produced surface." If I were you Prashun I would declare victory and go ahead and do the victory dance. Seems like there is another thread running here where you refused to put that big beast down too. Glad you like it. I have one and the guide in my LV cart. I keep promising myself I want pull the trigger until I get my Stanley #6 and my kit made 26" purple heart jointer finished (again). I keep messing with my woodies. I think there are sleepers in Derek's test that he has not mentioned preferring to divert discussion to the LV BD & BU jointers. I think there is a good chance one of Derek's hand made wood jointers will figure prominently in the final results.

I am honor bound to bring up curved surfaces like windsor chair seats. I am "honing" my skills but I have seen some amazing glass finishes produced with drawknives and spokeshaves. I have 1-5" (blade) spokeshaves now and I think they are an under rated tool. In my experience there is an ability to feel and work grain better using light drawknives and spokeshaves that is lost in heavier planes that tend to be used in the same manner regardless of the grain. I don't mind small facets in work like chair seats. I like hand work to shine through. I can see how the top of a table may be a different story but I'm not sure it has to be.