They say a good workman never blames his tools, but I think it should be allowed if the tools were dodgy to start with :)
I bought a wood planer as suggested, to plane down the bottom of a door. It was only £18 and I didn't expect the world, but it was bloody crap.
As you can see from this video
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the guy gets nice big scraps coming out.
My simialrly sized blade was giving me tiny scraps and was totally random/uneven.
So I want to take it back to the shop and get a refund on the account it wasn't really fit for the purpose (sale of goods act i guess) - any ideas on what I should say?
It could just be that I didn't do it properly - but its hardly rocket science, I could tell that the blade was rubbish anyway.
I take it you are talking about a manual plane here and not a powered one?
Planes need a certain amount of setting up first to get a decent cut. Once setup they need a certain amount of skill (hence practice) in use to get good results. Also bare in mind that planing the bottom of the door, you have probably got two sections of end grain to plane at either edge. This is never as easy to plane, and you wont get nice planer shavings from those bits.
If you get a budget plane you can expect the finish to be a bit rough in general, and you will probably need to do lots of work on it to get it to a truly usable state. By way of example read this:
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blade will almost certainly need a good sharpening - and not on something like a bench grinder which will leave the sort of finish on the blade that yours probably has now. If you want a technique, do a quick web search on "scary sharp" e.g.:
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will also need to play with the cap iron position etc to get a decent shaving.
Good hand planes that are usable out of the box are seriously expensive these days:
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(finding a nice 40 year old Stanley or Record plane second hand can work out a much cheaper way to get a decent plane)
Not really, to an extent you got what you paid for by the sounds of it. With a bit of setting up you will probably be able to get good enough results from it to do the job.
If you had bought a £18 electric plane then the chances are it would have done the job without much hassle, although it would not be a particularly refined tool.
Depends on the dealer. Some will refund without much hassle since it is worth it to keep their customers happy, even if they think there is no real case to answer. Where did you buy it? Places like B&Q will usually take stuff back.
As John says, the setting of the blade is very important and something you usually need to do yourself.
Looking at the video, the wood being planed was knot-free and looked as though it had started out planed smooth to start with - in other words it was an ideal demonstration piece. Finally, I think I would find it very hard to use a plane of that design anyway.
If a skilled person can get the desired results with it, you can't claim it is not fit for purpose. At best, you can say you can't get on with it and would like to return it for a refund, if at all possible.
It's a wood plane with a couple of dowels either side of it. Chinese craftsmen are excellent so you would expect the sample video to show up well. However the work-piece did require some work before he got nice big shavings.
I have a wooden plane but not the stick shoved through it type -which would give it a draw knife or spokeshave effect. Without examining the plane it is difficult to say how to adjust the blade.
With a British one you just wedge it in tight and then tap the top of the blade down forcing the cutting edge far enough out the bottom to suit your style. Ditto for the angle. You adjust that with a hammer too. (Actually you should use a small mallet.) A scrap of wood will do, you just need to tap it little and often.
It takes a short while to get the hang of it but once you are there it will grow on you. Mess around with some scraps of wood until you find yourself smiling. If you rub the base with candle wax it will run so smoothly you will have difficulty getting a feel for the wood.
The British design is easily as good as an electric plane and I imagine the same is true for the oriental type. The thing is, you have to set up the door a lot more securely than is needed with an electric one. I use chocks. Cut one out of a 2 ft length of 4x4 or 3x4. A 1 1/2 " deep slot in the middle with an angle to suit the wedge you cut out of the top.
Put the one end of the door in the slot and tap the wedge in to hold it fast. Work from the other end. To plain the top or bottom, work over the chock and plane down as far as you can; then turn the door around to suit if needed.
I've not looked at the video, but the bottom of a door has both across as well as along the grain bits and you'll not get even shavings from that with anything.
Working with wood always requires some skill which I'd say you haven't yet acquired judging by the post.
I can't look at the video and you've not said what type of plane it is. But both manual and electric require setting up. If it's a hand plane, I'd not even guarantee it would be sharp out of the box. And electric planes can be tricky even for those used to them.
You can say *that* again. I'm only just getting to grips with mine, and I've had it about a year. That'll be why my dining room door now has a big gap instead of catching the frame!
If you want advice on hand-plaing wood, try Jeff Gorman's site:
Use either an electric planer (Lidl - cheap, it'll do you), or a very good low-angle block plane. Most typical handplanes won't work on the bottom of a door - it's not the easiest thing to work
That's some of the worst planing technique I've ever seen. That's a weird plane too -- more like a hacked about Japanese plane used backwards, rather than any of the usual styles of Chinese planes.
Wrong sort of bench to use that sort of plane on anyway -- with a bar handle plane like that it's important to have it set lower, so that you can put your bodyweight _over_ it. That's a Western bench, for use with Western planes with fore-and-aft handles that are pushed.
Skilled sharpening of the blade. Skilled set up. Skilled use.
Block planes (i.e. wooden block with a wooden wedge holding the blade and cap iron) require a little more skill - than the later Stanley- type iron bodied planes.
If you've never had any hands-on teaching/coaching it can be rather hard to learn all 3 above - without considerable patience and practice.
After all that's why block planes fell into disuse with the availability of Stanley-type planes (easier and better results) - and eventually the Stanley's fell aside in the face of electric planers (much, much quicker, very, very little skill required - but generally inferior results).
Hand planes can give fabulous results - better than power planes - but much more effort is required to acquire that skill.
If you want to master hand-planing, buy a second-hand old Stanley (under 20 quid for an old No:4) and get somebody to give you some one- to-one coaching.
You would expect to need to sharpen it before use.... This certainly can't be expected out of the box.
My Lie-Nielsen planes, which cost up to an order of magnitude more, will work respectably out of the box but are not at their best until properly sharpened.
For an inexpensive plane, this is one more manufacturing step which can be avoided.
The planing technique used by the Chinese guy is not appropriate for a lot of operations anyway. He is going at it like a bull in a china shop.
It's far better to take a lot of thin cuts with a very sharp blade and to do so slowly. Using this approach, you can even plane quite comfortably across the end grain of the stiles.
No Stanley 24 that I'm aware of. Does it look like any of these?
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is it a block like this
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the base of a door, I would expect to plane inwards from one stile towards the middle, then swap ends - otherwise the end grain would split out.
On a pine internal door (which I assume it is), a razor-sharp and well adjusted plane should easily take off curlies all the way along whilst planing over the rail - but more scrunchies (technical term that!) as it passes over the end-grain of the stiles.
Possibilities are blade is blunt, blade is incorrectly adjusted, technique is incorrect, blade steel is of such poor quality it can't take an edge (I threw away a new stanley spokeshave blade for that reason recently) or the plane is so badly made it can't be adjusted correctly.
This would certainly need sharpening before use.....
You may find that you prefer one of the electric ones. These at least have sharp and disposable blades.
But.........
Take *very* great care over cutting depth setting.
Set to an absolute minimum that will produce a cut at all across the whole width. Then practice on some scrap wood for a while until you can plane accurately to a line and square.
Hand or powered a plane is not the best tool to take off the bottom of a door. Because: first the sheer difficulty of applying it to the door, second the grain change from stile to rail, third any novice would need a good deal of planing practice before he had any chance of making it work properly. It's the wrong tool for the job. Right (hand) tool would be 2 saws - tenon to get neat cut through the stiles working from both sides to avoid spelches, then rip saw or general purpose backless saw for the rest of the cut. Not for a novice however, not least because you'd still have the problem of cleaning up the edge with a plane. Right power tool a circular electric saw against a straightedge - easy peasy.
You have bought a smoothing plane, which is used for finishing. It should only produce light cuts. If you want to remove more wood and get the large curls you seem to expect, you should have bought a jack plane.
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