I’ve made three observations.

1. I found that when I worked perpendicular to the grain I got some fairly nasty tear out. I’m not sure if I should care at this stage in the process, but it bugged me. Working on the diagonal with the grain I seemed to get less tear out.

2. I’ve been struggling with flattening for a while and it seems that somehow (I’m not sure how) this plane makes the job a lot easier. I don’t mean faster, I mean easier. Working with thinner shavings I seemed to spend a lot of time struggling to get the planes to remove material where I thought it needed to be removed (straightedge says bump but plane won’t cut), or trying to figure out where the material needed to come off. But with this plane the process seemed to happen almost by magic. I spent much less time puzzled about what to do next.

3. After 3 boards I can see light reflecting off the edge, indicating, I assume, that it’s not as sharp as it could be. This seems like a pretty short blade life. How sharp does a fore plane need to be? (I have a tendency to put off sharpening much longer than I ought to.)

While we’re at it, I like the idea of doing this with a template, so the camber on your iron is consistent when it’s time to grind. Do you have suggestions as to what radii would be good starting points for my #4 smoother (always slightly cambered) and #7 jointer (I have one iron with camber, and one I keep dead straight)??

Regards,

Tim

With a blade ground straight and square, there are two ways of performing this operation. One is to tilt the plane left or right to plane down the high side of the edge, but then you lose the tactile reference of the sole of the plane on the board. The other is to fiddle with the lever that controls the angle of the blade, but that approach is time consuming, particularly if it involves trial and error. Neither approach is suited to mass producing accuracy, say in planing thousands of feet of boards for floors or wainscotting.

With a long plane and a curved blade you can keep the sole flat on the edge of the board. If the edge is high on the left, move the plane to the left so that the centre of the blade takes the deepest cut where it is needed most. If the edge of the board is high on the right, shift the plane to the right, and once again the blade will take down the high part, always with the sole riding firmly and consistently on the wood.

Old oil stones generally are lower or thinner in the centre and higher or thicker toward the edges. This configuration may not be a sign that the old time joiner could not be bothered to lap his stone or that it went through a generation of misuse by the joiner’s careless son who used it only for sharpening a pocket knife. It may be that the worn stone was perfectly suited to sharpening a plane blade with a slight curve. Like other tools the stone worked better after it had been worn in.

Sometimes the problem is the solution.

I’m not interested in getting a cheap old plane and trying to make it perform well. (I tried that once with an old Stanley.) And for that reason, I think I had blinders on when it came to the subject of the fore plane. The key point is that a fore plane doesn’t have to be tuned to work well. I can probably get something suitable for less than the cost of a new blade.

Of course, if I want the A2 that Chris recommends then it’s not so clear. Maybe it makes sense instead to get a second blade for the bevel down jack plane that I have. It’s only 12" long, though, not the recommended 14"-18". My bevel up plane has a longer sole. That was my reason for thinking I might use it for this.

The names of planes are confusing. It depends on the culture and the time of the writer/tool manufacturer.

The fore plane is always a roughing plane and it appears first in the historical record.

The jack plane appears later. And it has many uses, including: an all-around carpenter’s plane, as a roughing plane, as a short jointing plane, as a long smoothing plane, as a plane used on a shooting board.

So a jack plane can be a roughing plane, and you could rightly call it a fore plane then.

However, you can’t really call a fore plane a jack plane — because it has so many other recorded uses.

Bottom line: You can call it whatever you like and be basically correct. But if you want to make a roughing plane that works like the historical example, use a Stanley No. 5 or No. 6 because they are the correct length.

I hope this helps (and doesn’t make it works).

Chris

David in Raleigh NC

A jack can be configured many ways, including the two you suggest. Also, I keep a dead straight iron in my bevel-up jack for shooting, at which it excels.

Chris

Thanks!

I think Chris made a great point. Don’t get me wrong, I love my bevel up Jack, and I went with extra blades, ground to different angles. And I’m sure I could convince it to do something like this. But I think that there’s a limit to just how many things I want to try to teach this plane to do. The bevel up craze only goes so far, and there’s more to life than overgrown block planes.

Between the cost of an extra iron (unless you want to grind back and forth. ugh!) and the cost of time invested, I’m not sure that the savings over an old #5 still exists. There are so many old jack planes on ebay, and they go for so little, that I think it’s worth getting a regular plane, and fettling it properly.