Working with planes

There are several reasons in my mind that hand planes are superior to sand paper for flattening a large board and for final finishing. Not the least of which is the reduced noise and dust.

  Recently I have been working on some large cherry panels for a project that will be finished with french polish, and there is no better preparation method for french polish than a glassy hand planed surface.

First the boards are machine jointed (See this post for information on that) and thicknessed to rough dimension and then labeled based on their purpose in the finished piece of furniture.

They are then glued up into panels.

The panels have a fair amount of glue squeeze out that gets removed with a paint scraper.

The surface is almost ready for planing at this point.

I use a pencil to make guide marks all over the board so I can easily tell what areas I've planed and what areas need more work.

Now it's time to choose the right plane, and get to work!

A number 5 is a good choice for the first step.

I set the blade for a fairly aggressive cut and work it diagonally across the gran to remove material quickly and to do a preliminary flattening. The pencil lines remain visible in the low areas.

The result is a board that is fairly flat with all of the highest spots removed. The plane marks are clearly visible diagonally across the board.

I draw on another guide coat of pencil lines...

And switch to a number 8 plane for refining the surface to get it dead flat.

Lots of elbow grease involved here.

Once the surface is dead flat it's ready for the smoothing plane. There are some choices here; I usually go with a number 5 1/2 for the bulk of the work, and turn to a number 4 1/2 for the tough grain. the number 4 or even a number 3 is used only for the most stubborn areas.

Although the work involved in hand planing is fairly time consuming, it is much faster than the time that would be required to get an equal surface quality with sand paper - and far less messy.

The result is a board with exceptional smoothness and a texture that can only be achieved with hand planes. The surface is ready for finish as it is, but I will be giving it one more hit with the smoothing plane once the piece is assembled.