Handplane Revival

If you can afford the wonderful Lie-Nielsen, Veritas, or Stanley Sweetheart planes, then you know what a joy it can be to work with these fine tools. However, many new woodworkers might wonder, "Why do I need hand planes when I have a jointer, planer and/or router?" The answer is better precision and control, unmatched by any power tool, among other reasons:

1. You can flatten and square the surfaces of a piece of lumber that won't fit through a planer or jointer.
2. You can shave thousandths or even ten-thousandths off a workpiece one pass at a time.
3. Hand planing produces significantly less sawdust.
4. You can almost eliminate the need to sand by using a hand-scraper or scraper-plane.
   

So for those of us who cannot yet afford or justify spending $300-400 for a single, high-quality hand plane, cheap knock-offs of the original Stanley, Record and Bailey planes are widely available. However, these Chinese- and Indian-made copies often require hours of tuning before they're useful because they simply aren't machined to exacting specs and the soles frequently aren't flat.

My first hand plane was a Buck Bros. #5 14" jackplane from the local big box store for around $30. It was utterly useless out of the box. The blade chattered and wouldn't hold an edge, the sole was dished and the tote (handle) wobbled back and forth. After reading several articles on plane tuning, I spent a couple hours trying to lap the sole as recommended using a glass plate and various grits of sand paper. Seeing the futility of this effort, it occurred to me that I have a JET 6"x48" belt/disc sander, so 80-grit sanding belt and 5 minutes later, voila--flat sole! You can go finer to remove the sanding marks, all the way up to a mirror polish, but many don't recommend that for the sole, as it increases friction. I hardened the cheap blade (tip), cleaned the frog mounting surfaces and opened the throat a bit with a file. Now it cuts paper thin slices like butter.

If you take this DIY approach, you might also consider upgrading the blade and chipbreaker to a thicker Hock or Lie-Nielson combination. A good use for those cheap blades is to grind a cambered (convex) edge and use them for roughing*:

1/8" camber on a jack/scrub plane - good for hogging off large amounts of wood
1/16" camber on a jack/fore plane - removing saw marks from rough lumber
1/32" camber on a jack/fore plane - general surface flattening after saw marks removed
1/64" camber on a trying/jointer plane - trying (squaring) the face of a board
Flat edge with rounded corners on a jointer/smooth plane - finishing work on the face of a board; rounded corners help prevent gouges
Flat edge on a jointer/smooth/block plane - edge jointing or finishing work

I now have a few vintage Bailey, Record and Stanley planes, but the cheapo #5 is still one of my favorites.

* This information was taken from "Plane Basics" by Sam Allen.