Hand Planing A Wood Floor

Today power tools routers jointers belt sanders and power planers do the same tasks much faster relegating many old planes to the shelves of collectors.

Hand planing a wood floor.

These long hand planes are useful for trimming or straightening long pieces of wood like boards or doors. This old house general contractor tom silva demonstrates the proper way to use hand planes. A jointer plane typically has a body length of 22 inches 56 cm or longer. Time was a hand plane was an indispensable tool used to smooth shape and straighten just about every piece of wood in a house.

Now take your plane and rotate it from 30 45 and push forward. The typical carpenter lugged around a whole chestful of planes each with its own special function. You will notice that the effort is greatly reduced. Easing sharp edges flush trimming dovetails or wood plugs or chamfering elements as shown at right quicker than it takes to set up a router.

You can use a block plane to trim just about anything. If there are several parts coming from the same board draw yourself a paper sketch to remind you of the layout. Take your maple and clamp it up securely then keeping your plane in line with the direction of your planing stroke take a swipe or two. As you feed a workpiece into the cutterhead the knives remove any portion of the board below the plane of the outfeed table.

First joint a face. Longer than the final length. Work around knots cracks and edges with deep tree bark. I just plane around the knot get an idea of the direction then work up tightly.

As for the hand planer or any hand belt sander it will take forever to get done. It is more versatile than the jointer plane because of its shorter length and thus can be used to square both longboards and shorter pieces of rough lumber. The jointed surface then passes smoothly onto the outfeed table. See below for a shopping list tools and steps subscribe to t.

The advantage of using a toothing plane to plane the knots prior to hand planing is first that it will give you an idea of grain direction and secondly it will prepare the knots by toothing them so that when the plane hits it chip out is reduced. This is called skewing the plane or blade. Each successive pass removes more wood until the cutterhead flattens the entire surface of the board. It fits snugly into your hand for comfortable intuitive use.

Then cut the board to lengths corresponding to the parts.