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I've been trying to use hand planes more often this past year. I decided to use one system to get consistently good at sharpening and picked up a certified flat stone and use wet/dry paper 220,320,500,600,1200 than 4000 grit water stone. It's working pretty good, it actually didn't take too long to get my yard sale planes to be pretty useful. So, after sharpening a blade tonight, I got to wondering what is considered a poor, good or excellent shaving?
What do you guys say?

I am able to shavings as thin as .001" with my planes. I too am getting into planes and hand tools for my joinery and am loving getting blades sharp and seeing how small of a shaving I can get.

Using David Charlesworth's videos from Lie Nielsen I was able to follow his instructions and square the edge of a maple board to one face. He always uses blades that have a camber to them, rarely does he use a straight blade in his planes. So all my planes have a chamber to them.

I would say that these are pretty good shavings.

Mike

Check out this video http://www.timberframe-tools.com/tools/good-plane-advice-good-physics/

Interesting video. I'll be taking a look at my setup with new insights. Thanks

Like everything in life, their are shavings for show, and shavings of real life. In other words, your question requires, "It depends".

A Scrub plane, such as a Stanley #40 or #40-1/2 or a re-make from Lie Nielson https://www.lie-nielsen.com/search?q=Scrub+plane is designed to take a thick shaving at a 45 degree angle across the grain of the wood. It's purpose is to remove wood quickly and efficiently to bring it closer to it's desired thickness before calling in the Jack plane.

Your Jack plane too, is designed to take off a thicker shaving, albeit not as thick as a Scrub. However, like a Scrub plane a Jack's blade is slightly cambered (or should be) for this process. The Jack is good at removing the ridges left by the Scrub and preparing the work for surfacing with the Bench plane.

I can get shavings you can see through with my Bench planes, although I have never measured their thickness. Some people obsess about this, I don't. I am trying to surface the lumber so I don't have to scratch it with sandpaper before finishing it. Remember, a plane is shear cutting the surface the same as a skew chisel on a lathe turning. Such a cutting leaves a surface that cannot be duplicated by any other tool. In other words, as smooth as a baby's behind. If any additional clean-up is necessary to remove tool marks, I bring out the scraper planes.

Well said WmZiggy. I love listening to a true craftsman. Unfortunately, there are a lot of obsessions on this forum concerning a bunch of subjects. I and those like me appreciate your words of wisdom and knowledge of what is important and what is not.

moggymatt wrote: I got to wondering what is considered a poor, good or excellent shaving?
What do you guys say?

From what I've read and seen about planes is that you want an even shaving. That is to say the shaving should be the full width of the board and the thickness should be the same across it. Yes it wood be nice to be able to take a 0.001 thick shaving, but is it necessary for the job at hand?

WmZiggy wrote:Like everything in life, their are shavings for show, and shavings of real life. In other words, your question requires, "It depends".

A Scrub plane, such as a Stanley #40 or #40-1/2 or a re-make from Lie Nielson https://www.lie-nielsen.com/search?q=Scrub+plane is designed to take a thick shaving at a 45 degree angle across the grain of the wood. It's purpose is to remove wood quickly and efficiently to bring it closer to it's desired thickness before calling in the Jack plane.

Your Jack plane too, is designed to take off a thicker shaving, albeit not as thick as a Scrub. However, like a Scrub plane a Jack's blade is slightly cambered (or should be) for this process. The Jack is good at removing the ridges left by the Scrub and preparing the work for surfacing with the Bench plane.

I can get shavings you can see through with my Bench planes, although I have never measured their thickness. Some people obsess about this, I don't. I am trying to surface the lumber so I don't have to scratch it with sandpaper before finishing it. Remember, a plane is shear cutting the surface the same as a skew chisel on a lathe turning. Such a cutting leaves a surface that cannot be duplicated by any other tool. In other words, as smooth as a baby's behind. If any additional clean-up is necessary to remove tool marks, I bring out the scraper planes.

Exactly!!!!!!!

EDIT: I meant to say some of this was already mentioned but still worth repeating.

I'm far from an expert but I use my planes a lot and the following made a bit difference when I finally started following it and not trying to take shortcuts.

The bench planes work as a set. Chris Schwarz put out a video at some point called "Coarse Medium Fine" - only one of his I've seen but it was really good. While the title sums it up perfectly and it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, watching it made me actually follow it and not try taking shortcuts.
Use different planes for different cuts.
I flattened a very rough, wavy and twisty 14" by 3" by 65" piece of douglas fir by hand. It was cut on a mobile sawmill that needed a lot of work and I had to take it down to 2 1/2" thick to take out the waves and wind. That was a huge amount of work. It actually took me weeks of a bit here and a bit there.

For the second one I strickly followed the concepts and it made a HUGE difference. I took the thickest shavings/chunks off I could with a deeply cambered scrub plane first. I followed by taking lighter but still substantial shavings with a 2 foot long wooden plane I made for the purpose. Lastly I used a jack transitional plane set to take very light shaving to finish smoothing the surface. This last was just a matter of using what I had.

The second and third boards together took so much less time than the first and ended up flatter and with no unecessary thickness lost.

In addition to using planes in the right order, letting the planes do the work of finding the areas to flatten.

About sharpening: Another thing that made a big change for me was making it so I didn't have to break out and set up my sharpening setup each time. Being able to just walk over and sharpen as needed, with jigs already set up properly or using dowels in a board to set how far the blades protrude from the jig, with the paper glued down already - much better than having to pull out everything, measure the angles and jigs, hold down the paper one grit at a time because of too little space... BIG difference.

More recently I've been using small (SMALL - credit card size) diamond stones mostly freehand and loving it. I got them for something else but now know I'll eventually get big ones.

The latest "AHA" moment (as in "why did it take me so long to try what everyone else knows works?) was making a strop. Now I can quickly get an edge back and super sharp without going through all the grits - just keep it sharp as long as I can.


I hope this helps some. Nothing new here, just the stuff I wish I'd listened to sooner.