Getting my Neander legs...

[Bay Area Dave]

Got the smoother this morning. Polished the back and honed the bevel a bit and proceeded to try it out. Then I noticed a bit of embedded (very tiny speck) of metal at the end of a piece I was planing so pulled the blade and found a bunch of small nicks. Got out the Veritas honing guide and reground the blade and got back to work with it. I got those full width wispy shavings Chuck rhapsodized about! I couldn't stop. I tried some poplar, oak, fir, cherry. The cherry is a bear! The full width shavings from oak show why it's useful to use a pore filler for a smooth finish. The shavings are FULL of large holes. The poplar shavings are like paper. The cherry is another story...

Thanks to all who guided me towards a satisfying and useful purchase. I'm indebted to all you for sharing your ideas with me.

Question: Is there a way to read the grain of maple (or any other wood for that matter) BEFORE planing, to prevent (reduce) tear out? I don't know what I'm looking for. When I use the thickness planer, I know about the cathedrals, esp. in oak, but I can't "read" the maple like I can oak. All I can do for now is try it one way and if there is tarot, then of course I plane in the other direction.

dave

[Bay Area Dave]

:) spell checker ran amuck: should be "tear out".

Bay Area Dave wrote: snip

[Ken Muldrew]

Look on the edge and plane in the direction of the rising grain.

Ken Muldrew [e-mail] (remove all letters after y in the alphabet)

[Leon]

Take a look of the edge of the board and see which direction the grain goes there. Plane in the direction from the lower to the higher grain.

[Scott Cramer]

On 21 Nov 2003, Ken Muldrew spake unto rec.woodworking:

All other things being equal, this rule of thumb applies:

Pith side, plane with the points.

In other words, if the growth rings on the end of your board are more or less concave, you are planing the side of the board that was closer to the middle of the tree - the pith side. The grain on the face will show some "points", more or less, and you plane in the direction they are pointing.

On the bark side, with the rings convex at the ends, you do the opposite - plane against the points.

Some boards will change direction unexpectedly, and some won't be nice no matter what you do. Holding the plane at an to the direction you are pushing can sometimes help.

Scott

[Scott Cramer]

On 21 Nov 2003, Scott Cramer spake unto rec.woodworking:

Oh god, I'm doing a Dave -

Make that "at an angle to the direction"

[Tom Watson]

Yer a man who lives close to the water And perhaps just like me you've a daughter Who rides on the waves and makes them her slaves Neither giving nor taking no quarter

But if you will notice your bright little lotus Does flops when she goes 'gainst the wave And thus it is so when a wooddorker goes 'Gainst the grain Ole Bay Area Dave

Now if you imagine yer wood has a pattern That looks on its edge like a wave Yer plane must go by from the low to the high If from nicks yer poor wood you would save

I hope that my patter will save you from chatter From nicks and from everything sad I welcome you well to our neander hell Oh man we doth sometimes call BAD

Regards, Tom Thomas J. Watson-Cabinetmaker Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania

[Wood Butcher]

What's with the metal? Weren't you going to try corn?

Art

[Bay Area Dave]

THANK YOU, Scott!

Very clear explanation. I'll take a closer look at that piece of maple in the morning see if I can spot the pith side, etc. cool.

dave

Scott Cramer wrote:

[Bay Area Dave]

:) My, you do have a way with words. Thanks, Tom

dave

Tom Wats> >

[Bay Area Dave]

I STILL don't know what was in the wood, it was a very small piece of metal that I didn't see until I'd run the plane over it a few times. No harm done; the nicks were so small that my DMT Medium removed them.

Are we still telling corny jokes, eh??

dave

Wood Butcher wrote:

[Bay Area Dave]

thanks to all. Seems like there is no argument amongst everyone that if I look at the EDGE, I plane TOWARDS the rising grain, and AWAY from FALLING grain. My public compliments to Scott for a very informative addition to our "knowledge base" for us planer newbies.

Thank you, gentlemen!

Tomorrow I'll check out that maple board I was struggling with and see if I can tame it.

dave

Bay Area Dave wrote:

[Silvan]

That usually works, but what do you do when you can't tell?

I have some "flamey" maple... Hmmm... How to describe this... I think it's what you call "flame." There are concentric "pointy" sort of wavy figures that look sort of like flames. Anyway, the edges of this board look quite strikingly different from the faces, with what looks vaguely like birdseye.

What it boils down to is that I can't make heads or tails of which way to plane this from looking at the edge, which looks like wood dotted with freckles as much as anything else. Experience seems to be plane the flames from the pointy side toward the flaring side, but I'm not getting a super smooth surface either way I go.

[Leon]

I deal mostly with more boring woods. But for some woods like Birds Eye Maple and Lace it is advised to wet the surface with water before running through a power planer to minimize tear out.

[dave]

Try dragging the edge of your thumbnail both directions and see which way it catches more. It'll emulate the action of a plane and give you a clue with out messing up the wood.

Dave in Fairfax

[Jeff Gorman]

"Bay Area Dave" wrote

: Question: Is there a way to read the grain of maple (or any other wood : for that matter) BEFORE planing, to prevent (reduce) tear out? I don't : know what I'm looking for.

Please look at my web site - 'Planing Notes' - 'Grain'.

In theory at least, the shape of the vessels can indicate the lie of the fibres.

Jeff G

-- Jeff Gorman, West Yorkshire, UK Email address is username@ISP username is amgron ISP is clara.co.uk Website

[Luigi Zanasi]

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 21:39:19 -0500, Silvan scribbled

I think what you have is fiddleback maple. Beautiful stuff, but a bitch to plane, almost impossible to avoid tear-out. Time to get the belt sander and scraper out.

Doug Stowe has a beautiful fiddleback maple jewellery box in one of his books, and he recommends surfacing it with a thickness sander. I am currently making a version of it with a flame birch board I bought one time, having been told it was red oak. But no thickness sander.

Same problem, but not as bad, with the birch. A bit of tear-out despite using brand new blades on the planer. But nothing that can't be hidden or scraped off.

BTW, I did get the planer snipe issue solved as a by-product of planing short pieces. I built a sled (ackshally just a 12"X48" piece of MDO) with two 1" thick pieces of spruce screwed to the full length of the long edges of the ply and a stop about 6" in from the end. The short pieces are carpet-taped to the sled, resting against the stop. The spruce edges get planed along with the birch, and they get the snipe. Luigi Replace "no" with "yk" for real email address

[Bob N]

At a recent demo at the local Woodcraft store, the rep from Lie-Nielsen had a nice flame maple board as a sample for us to try out their planes. With a VERY light cut and holding the plane skewed a bit, it cut smoothly and effortlessly, with no tearout. The problem is now I'm analyzing how to take a second mortgage to buy a few L-N planes...

[Silvan]

I can imagine. I looked at their site, and once I saw the price page I closed my browser. No use even dreaming about those.

These things sure get expensive. I just looked through my list of Planes I Really Need(tm), and came to almost $1,000 if I buy them all new, even staying well away from the likes of L-N. It's getting harder to convince SWMBO that my doing this stuff by hand is going to save money. :)