Welcome to spring semester CAS 138T, and the continuation of my Passion Blog. For the next 7 passion posts, I will be steering away from adhesives and moving toward several unique tools and machinery I have used or plan to use for building projects. These will range from large woodworking machinery to tiny fine adjustment hand tools, and my experiences with them and their history.
I am going to begin this blog series with planes.
No, not the ones in the sky. I am talking about hand planes and electric planers, and how these tools can be used to turn raw wood into beautiful furniture.
Planes are extremely important tools when it comes to precise furniture making and construction. Flat, consistent surfaces ensure that markings or cuts are true and that only the essential amount of material is used. These tools are used to thin out rough sawn lumber into thin boards. They can even add bevels or chamfers to edges, which is why every piece of wood in your house has soft edges and not sharp corners.
Shown above is a diagram of a simple block plane. I found one of these that once belonged to my grandfather and took it apart to service and understand how it works. On this tool, the iron (blade) can be moved in or out of the sole (flat bottom). This changes the cutting depth, or the thickness of shavings.
The blade is set to protrude slightly more than the rest of the sole, and when you move the block plane over a piece of wood, the blade catches bumps or imperfections, and the material caught between the gap is sliced away. The now flat material slides along the rest of the sole. Once the piece is flat, then the plane can take more passes to thin the material to a specific thickness.
To plane a twenty-three-foot piece of walnut in this way would take many hours, so more efficient machines exist to scale up the planing process
When I interned at a woodshop, they used planers that were much more terrifying and expensive but ate through wood in a matter of seconds. These work horses could take a piece of wood and make the sides parallel using a different style of cutting.
The internals of an industrial planer remove the one large blade of a hand plane and replace it with many small, carbide tipped teeth. These are spiraled around a metal cylinder, which spins at very high RPM and takes many cuts on a board as it is fed through by rollers.
Instead of adjusting the blade height like a hand plane, the entire metal bed of these machines can move up and down to a desired thicknesses. When a piece of wood is sent through, a step in the blade cylinder tears through wood that is too tall to pass the set height, giving the piece a new thickness. These tools can be calibrated to make cuts precise to the thousandth of an inch, and in a majestic and obnoxiously loud way, they get the job done.
Please let me know of any interesting tools or experiences you have with them in the comments! I also invite builders and non-builders alike to tell me how well I did explaining these tools, and how I can improve the blog.
References:
Picture of Tools: Woodworking tools – Bing
Block Plane Diagram: Block Plane Basics | Wood (woodmagazine.com)
Planer Cutting Head: helical cutting head planer – Bing images
