Bench Rehab

[Duncan Foster]

After reading a lot on this forum I ended up with a LV BU jack and jointer along with LN 4 smoother. I knew I slowly wanted to get into hand planes and really got a chance to use them today.
I have a 20-year-old Hoffman Hammer bench that I bought not really knowing what I was getting into. As the years passed and my interest waned the bench got used for other things (mostly to store crap on! ). Now I am back into woodworking and decided to rehab the bench. I tightened everything stripped off the vices and cleaned everything up. The bench is surprisingly pretty sturdy.

When it came time to flatten the top the planes worked flawlessly. However I must have set the plane to deep and got a pretty big gouge. A recent Fine woodworking article said to use epoxy and sawdust for small drill holes in your bench (sadly I have those too) and figured I could do one of three things: try that, use a Dutchman, or just simply smooth it out the best I can as it does not impact the overall flatness. Any thoughts?
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My second question for the group is ways to improve the bench. I've read Schwarz's workbench books and I'm going to try and laminate some maple to the stretchers and legs so that the top, legs and stretcher are coplanar. Dog holes will follow. However, I"m not really sure what to do to the top. Should I add some round dog holes and if so where? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Sorry, pics taken with IPhone and for some reason they upload rotated.
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[bob blakeborough]

My vote is for simply making it flat enough to work with and work with it, warts and all... It is a tool and unless you are collecting, and I can't imagine collecting work benches (lol! That would be a challenge!), why go to the bother of getting rid of all the little scars that don't impact working?

[Nicholas Lawrence]

Looks like a pretty good bench to me. If it were me I would find something I wanted to build and start building it. If you want a different bench after a while you can always use that one to build the new one.

[Kyle DuPont]

I say if the gouge snags, scrape it or sand it smooth. When you need a very flat area of the bench, check it with a straight edge to find the best area. Using a holdfast is nice, but that would need round holes. You could go with a plate 11 layout, or find the area in which you will use the holdfast and drill a hole. Go slow and think about each hole you drill and why. You can plug the holes, but planning is better than plugging.

ETA: Nice bench BTW.

[Jim Koepke]

Howdy Duncan and welcome to the Creek. Your profile doesn't indicate your location. If you are in the Pacific Northwest you are welcome to come see some similar scars of character on my bench.

Round holes on your bench would be good if you are using hold fasts or other types of bench accessories.

You may need to make some rectangular dogs for the holes you have.

It looks like a nice bench.

Do you have a project or two in mind?

jtk

[Brian Holcombe]

I wouldn't worry about it. Many more will come and flattening a bench is sometimes an annual routine.

[Stew Denton]

Duncan,

There are a lot of guys here who are sharper on this than I am, including some of them who have already commented, but I do have a couple of thoughts.

Looking at the gouges makes me think that I see some problems about the way you set your plane.

The following is my opinion only, and folks who are more advanced than me may have other thoughts. This is what I think works best, so it is my opinion only.

It looks like you did set the plane iron to cut way too deep on a single pass, as you mentioned. The gouges also appear to get deeper as you look from left to right in the photo. This may be caused by having the plane iron set askew, with the right side of the iron set to cut deeper than the left side. If you look at the iron, looking at how much it protrudes from the mouth of the plane, sighting lengthwise down the plane, it should just barely protrude from the soul of the plane, and as you plane you can slowly advance the iron to take a deeper bite, if that proves to be necessary. Also as you sight down the length of the plane make sure that the amount the iron that is protruding from the mouth is uniform from the left side of the plane to the right.

The edges of the gouges also appear to be rough and torn, kind of like a greatly overcharged set of plane tracks. This may have more than one cause. You should have your iron cambered a little bit, with the iron curved very slightly on the bottom with the center of the iron to cut a little bit deeper than the edges. In other words, the iron needs to have a slightly rounded profile at the cutting end of the blade so the center cuts a few thousands deeper than the edges. The edges should be set to cut almost nothing or a tiny amount at most, but I may be overstating this point a tiny bit.

This cambering of the iron is generally done most severely on a fore plane, a bit less on a jack plane, a bit less on a jointer plane, and least of all on the smoothing plane. The only iron that I want to be dead square is one for planning something like a door edge, but even then a very slight camber has advantages, and even with the dead square iron I want the edges rounded back slightly.

Also, you should have the very edges of the iron rounded off very slightly so that the very edges of the iron curve up and away from the surface of the lumber. If you have a square iron, not cambered and with the edges not rounded up a tiny bit, you will have edge of the iron with sharp corners, they are going to dig in and tear away at the wood on the edges of the plane cut. These are called plane tracks. It doesn't take much curving away at the edges to stop this, maybe a 16th of an inch of the length of the iron at most.

You may also need to move the frog on the plane a little forward so that the gap between the front of the iron and the front of the mouth is smaller. One of the jobs of the mouth is to hold the wood down so that as the iron cuts it as the sharp edge of the iron slices into the wood. If there is too much gap between the front of the mouth and the front of the iron, the cutting edge of the iron can act as a wedge and the wood can split up in front of the iron instead of being cut cleanly. This splitting up will be seen as tear out.

Finally it looks like the wood is not tearing out uniformly, so some of the grain may be running against the direction you are trying to plane from. There is little you can do about the direction the grain runs. This is the one point I am least certain about. I can't tell for certain from the photos. Hopefully others can chime in on this point saying yea or nay. The reason you can do little about such, if this turns out to be the case, is that with a laminated top the grain of the different pieces of lumber may run in different directions. If I were to build a bench, I would test plane each piece to make sure I glued it up so as to be easy to plane with the grain running the same direction in each piece after glue up.

If all of the lumber uniformly tears out as I planed in one direction, I would try planning in the opposite direction to see if the tearing out stopped.

That said, I would also try to cut diagonally across the top of the bench rather than right straight across at a 90 degree angle, I would go at a 45 degree angle myself.

Another trick is to hold the plane at an angle as you push it forward instead of having the plane aiming straight ahead. Aim the plane at maybe a 30 degree angle to exact direction you are pushing it. This can sometimes help.

Final comments: If it were me, I would put a little camber on the iron, and also round the edges of the iron SLIGHTLY, make sure the iron is set to protrude squarely out of the mouth, and set it to cut a much much shallower cut. You may also need to sharpen the iron a bit. You will have best results if the iron is razor sharp.

Other folks my differ from my assessment, and may have more and better thoughts on this than I do. I certainly welcome those thoughts that disagree with mine. Hope things go better as you keep working at it.

These are pretty basic concepts, so I hope that I am not being insulting to your experience using a plane. If so I completely apologize for listing comments that are too elementary.

Stew

[Christopher Charles]

Set your beverage on the gouge while you start building :)

I have a roubo and sure flush legs are occasionally handy but not worth retrofitting in my opinion. I do find holdfasts mighty handy and if you get some then you'll need round holes, but otherwise, Keep Calm and Build On.

Congrats on a very good bench that you should be able to build on without limitation for a long time.

Cheers,
C

[Stew Denton]

Duncan,

I took a quick look at youtube, and there some on setting up or adjusting planes, and also some on flattening workbenches.

Stew

[Jim Matthews]

Your bench now has character.
What it needs is shavings and sawdust.

If you must make further modifications, attach spars
across the top of the trestles, between the uprights
to help resist racking.

I think you should only bore additional holes
if (and only if) you find it difficult to hold things.

Consider making a couple shop appliances before
undertaking any further mods to this lovely old girl.

I recommend a browse through Jim Tolpin's "The new traditional woodworker"
for some ideas that might be useful to you.

https://handtooljourney.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/the-new-traditional-woodworker-project-3-thin-planing-stop/

[Duncan Foster]

Thanks all for the input. Jim I'm in south Florida which sadly is not exactly a Mecca for wood working. I'm going to be building some small jewelry boxes (David Friedman book on box making is excellent). Stew thanks that makes sense. I actually thought about that during the sharpening and then... Didn't do it. Duh. Sounds like it's time to leave well enough alone. Fine by me. I appreciate all the Feedback