The crisp, quiet sound of clean shavings peeling from the wood, the rhythm of stroke after stroke and the gleaming surface of the work all conspire to make working with planes one of the most pleasant of all woodworking chores. With a well-tuned plane and a sharp iron you can create a finish better than sandpaper could ever achieve, or cut edge joints so nearly perfect that you can for an amazing moment join two piece with mere water. For four thousand years woodworkers have experienced planes as the living link between their hands and the wood they work on, and even in the late twentieth century we've found no more fulfilling way to bond the craftsman to the craft.
Hand planes and precision are inseparable subjects, as the following contribution shows. It's a natural association, given the easy ability of a well-tuned plane to do extrordinarily precise work. When one can routinely create shavings so thin they seem to defy gravity, it's difficult not to think that measurements of thousandths of an inch are legitimately part of the discussion of a plane's performance and ideal condition. Over the years we've observed a steady current of concern, debate and publication on the subject of highly accurate after-purchase machining or hand lapping of plane soles. Figures of one or two thousandths of an inch, sometimes even less, are routinely mentioned as if critical aspects of a plane's function.
Yet woodworkers must surely know that such a degree of precision is as irrelevant to the wood they work on as the price of tea in China. We're all familiar with wood's normal and unstoppable habit of changing shape as routinely as breathing; we also know that wood is a plastic, flexible, compressible medium that can be shaped to some extent by mere willpower. Anybody who uses planes, for instance, knows that you can double the thickness of a shaving simply by leaning on your plane a little harder, and that you can square an edge just by pressing harder along the high side. A woodworker may feel the need for great precision, but wood itself suffers no such compulsion.
There's nothing wrong in principle with wanting a tool to be in excellent condition. Seymour Shortzcopft's story (below) makes it painfully clear, however, that there can be unhapy consequences when we focus so tightly on a tool that we lose sight of the work it's supposed to do. This is not to excuse shoddy work at the factory; it's certainly possible for a tool to be in such poor shape that it really can't work well no matter how good you are with it. And it's definitely possible to make almost any tool easier and more rewarding to use. As Seymour discovered, however, tools don't have to be "e;perfect"e; before a craftsman can do fine work, because it's not just the tool but the material and the user as well that make results what they are.
For those fortunate enough to be amateurs, and equally important for those who earn a living by their work, it's important to remember that you do woodworking voluntarily. It's a reasonable assumption that you choose to work with wood because it's rewarding (you might even say fun) in one way or another: the wood itself is beautiful stuff, the tools are neat, the results of your labor are immediate, tangible, and durable—there are plenty of rewards to be had, and rarely any unavoidable unpleasantness. So it's really too bad when someone like Mr. Shortzcopft gets tangled up in frustration, embarrassment and all manner of unhappiness just because a tool doesn't measure up to some arbitrary standard of perfection that turns out to be irrelevant in any event. If there's a moral to his tale, it's this: fooling around with your tools is as fine a way to pass the time as any other, as long as it makes you happy. If you find yourself burdened with notions that make you miserable instead, let's hope you're as fortunate as he was to discover a point of view that refocuses on fun.
Perfecting the Steel Plane
by Seymour Shortzcopft
The Folly of Youth
Many years ago, in the dim dark ages of my impressionable youth, I accepted as gospel a load of wisdom about steel planes—wisdom which, through a torturous twist of fate, turned out to be the most egregious nonsense, but which nonetheless brought me eventually to my present happy state. What follows is not the gospel, but merely a long-winded story about a simple idea, and how hard it was to realize how simple it was. I was told, you see, that in order for a plane to be really right (and for any gadgetophile worth his salt a tool must bereallyright) its sole must be flat, dead flat. And that from the factory plane soles did not come dead flat, but fell so woefully short of that condition as to be a perpetual thorn in the side of even the most slovenly perfectionist. And furthermore that of the two ways of making a plane sole flat, one (going to a machine shop) was for helpless wimps, and the other (doing it yourself) was for the virile square-jawed conqueror of new worlds. Purely out of curiosity, you understand, I inquired as to the proper method of doing it myself. The prescription that followed was of that class of absurdity so improbable one assumes there must be some secret reason for it—and besides, I was young and impressionable.
The Slough of Despond
Not long afterward I was to be found down in the shop, brow covered with honest sweat, grinding away on the sole of my prized jointer plane. My Number 7 was my pride and joy, the first plane I'd ever learned to use even half decently and the first with which I could make invisible edge joints, shiny surface, and all those things planes are made for doing. Since my straightedge proved that my jointer's sole wasn't perfectly flat, I was transported by dreams of the work it would do after I'd gotten it really right. After hours of unremitting toil I paused for a moment and thought to check my progress. According to my faithful straightedge, a point about in inch or two behind the throat now stood a good, solid 32nd of an inch higher than the rest of the sole, which dropped off in confounding convexity toward each end. The sole was also now several degrees out of square to the sides.
Hmm, something of a setback. Upon further examination I was amazed to discover how much gray iron one could remove from so large a surface in so short a time, for the sole of my plane, though not exactly paper thin, bore little resemblance to the heavy artifact it once had been. As I calmly analyzed the situation, I realized that the method I'd been using for flattening my plane was one of the silliest things I'd ever heard of, and was in fact quite incapable or working properly within the lifetime of this universe. With a little sigh I set the plane aside and went upstairs to drown my sorrows. Time passed.
Some months later, having swallowed a great deal of my pride, I set out to find a machine shop that could make my plane dead flat. Some months after that, having swallowed a great deal of sarcastic abuse and other common expressions of negative thinking, I finally found a shop whose foreman, a kindred spirit, accepted the challenge with confidence and vowed to meet my highest expectations. So it was a bit of a disappointment that it took four visits to the shop over the course of a month before the job was done, and it came as someting of a setback that it cost exactly as much as a new jointer plane. But now my plane would be better than new, and damn the torpedoes anyway—shirk no sacrifice in the pursuit of perfection, right? Well, yes, except that this time my straightedge said the sole was hardly any worse than it had been before, only just a little more convex and no more out of square at all. So much for the supremacy of the machine, eh? At least back in those days it only cost $10 to stop payment on a check. At this point I'm embarrassed to admit that I succumbed to discouragement, put the plane on a back shelf and went off to consider more uplifting matters such as taxes and mutually assured destruction. Time passed.
Revelations
A year of two later, having recovered a measure of my equanimity and being also older and wiser, I came up with a clever idea and set out to salvage the poor old 07. I bought a $40 diamond stone (no 59¢ garden variety sandpaper formyplane, by golly), dug out my straightedge and square, and sat down on the front porch with a cold drink at hand and a gleam in my eye. With the plane lying upside down across my knees I could see exactly where my grinding work was taking place, and could check easily and frequently to be sure I wasn't getting carried away and botching the job even worse than before. I commenced by determining the highest spots on the sole by means of straightedge and square, and then set about grinding them down with the water-lubricated diamond stone, working only the high spots and conscientiously avoiding the rest. The sun shone brightly, the breeze zephyred coolly along, comely lasses strolled by to my delighted distraction, and the work proceeded most pleasantly. After just two or three hours and two or three of those cold drinks, the sole of my dear old jointer plane was close enough to flat to be called functional. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Now fear not: "e;close enough"e; doesn't mean that I'd simply given up on getting the plane really right. During the dark years of my frustration I'd used a variety of other planes, learning more and more respect for their capabilities and learning to use them better, too. Every now and then, after a plane performed a particularly fine job, I would (just for interest) check the condition of the sole—and would invariably find it grotesquely curved, twisted, or otherwise patently incapable of working at all. Had it not been for the results staring me right in the face, I'd have thrown the thing away in disgust and dismay. But the work was right! Hmm.
Comprehension didn't begin to set in until one day as I sat watching a Japanese master craftsman first carefully flatten the soles of his wooden planes, then quite deliberately hollow them slightly in several places. The work he produced with these out-of-flat tools was as close to perfect as I shell ever be privileged to witness, I'm sure. As he whipped forth joint after joint and one finished surface after another, there grew until it seemed to burst within me a sense of understanding that I'd got something essential the wrong way round very early on: the "e;plane"e; which has become the name of a tool is after all a condition one creates in wood with that tool, not a requisite condition of the tool itself. Planes exist to cut wood in a flat plane, and if they can accomplish that task then their own condition is right, really right, whatever it might be.
Nothing Succeeds Like Excess
Having gotten my 07 back into good working condition I realized that all my labors had in fact materially improved the tool's performance after all, for its smooth sole slid along much more easily than it had as it had come from the factory. As the summer seemed blessed with fine weather and an outstanding crop of comely lasses wandering the sidewalks, I took myself back to the front porch where I spent a few more happy hours polishing that sole finer and finer. Gray iron won't come up to a shine the way tool steel does, but it will get awfully smooth when the breeze is right and the environment sufficiently congenial. (By the way, I suggest that you ignore any wisdom you might hear about leaving all the hardware on the plane while working on it; I took off the frog, handles and everything else within reach and found it made not a whit of difference in the end.)
When I finally put the plane back together and tried it out, it practically shot off the bench of its own accord. The effort now required to make shavings with my jointer plane had been cut in half, and I couldn't help but notice that planing had become much more enjoyable. In the light of my novel understanding of the tool, I found myself looking at it as if it were practically anything else—a piece of wood for instance—that I might choose to pick up and handle and touch and work with. I had at the time a large project coming up and was in need of a focus for my preliminary procrastination, so as if it were a piece of wood I set about making my plane a joy to hold and behold.
I began with a file and sandpaper to soften, smooth and round over every edge and corner on the plane's body (smooth'y rounded bodies being their own best reward, naturally), and worked until it was a pleasure to hold the tool in my hands. I carefully polished the surface of the frog, which the makers had ill graced with a coarse grinder, and buffed the face of the iron where it rests on the frog, with the result that even with the lever cap lashed down tight the iron could still be adjusted with delightfully smooth, gentle precision. In keeping with my new credo, I was mindful of not attempting to fix that which was not broken; when I noticed that the frog's toes were unevenly ground I was sorely tempted to make them right, but in the nick of time I remembered that the frog sat just as it should within the plane, requiring no well-meant mischief from me to keep on working as it should.
After all this work on steel, it occurred to me that the plane's wooden handles, which were not especially comfortable, were also fine candidates for a bit of tinkering. The first step was simple removal of the thick plastic finish applied at the factory. The front knob, polished fine, oiled and buffed, was soon acceptable, but the rear handle needed sterner measures. As typical fin de siècle products of Western civilization, my hands are quite a bit larger than those of my forebears for whom plane handles were first designed; though I'm hardly a giant, my little finger and the web between thumb and forefinger were both squeezed unmercifully. A round rasp and half-round wood file, wielded with vigor, soon removed enough wood to make the handle so comfortable that I moved at once to replace it with one made of rosewood, likewise shaped to my hand, polished to the gloss of a satin sheet with no finish other than its own aromatic oils.
The Wisdom of Age
Since those halcyon days I've worked on a few more planes, and have become wiser (cheaper, if you must) in my selection of tools for the work. From the $40 diamond stone I switched to a $3 combination waterstone whose coarse side cut even faster than the diamond stone and whose small size made it easy to work exactly where the need was greatest. Finally, I began using silicon carbide sandpaper wrapped around a small block of scrap wood, which seemed to work as well as anything else and cost 59¢ per sheet.
I use the grinding marks from the factory as an index to monitor my work. If the plane is flat enough to need only polishing, all I must do to keep it flat is make sure that the deepest factory grind marks still show uniformly all over the sole, and I can rest assured I've done nothing amiss. Likewise if I've become aware of a high spot or two, I'll be sure to work those spots right down to smooth iron while leaving some grind marks showing everywhere else, making the sole flatter as a mere byproduct of the polishing work. Only once or twice have I seen a sole so far gone as to call for drastic measures—though I've never done it I understand that one great craftsman recommends taking the offending thing to a large belt sander for some real discipline. A thin coat of high quality wax applied to all iron surfaces and buffed assiduously is the final step, protecting the plane from the ravages of corrosion and providing wonderfullly frictionless movement as well.
Paradise Gained
Thus, having begun working on my planes for the wrong reason and by a woefully stupid method, I've arrived nonetheless at that perfect state of practical satisfaction and domestic tranquility to which all woodworkers aspire. Based on this rewarding conclusion, I highly recommend the exercise to one and all. The successful modification of a well-liked plane helps to build a sense of physical competence, creates a tool of greatly enanced worth and sublimely improved utility, and certainly helps keep the shop clean while you're not in there working. The suntan, the friendly breeze and the comely lasses are optional, but I wouldn't do without them for the world.