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The stuff I write about Stanley’s metallic scrub planes always gets me in trouble with the people who use the tool to dress the faces of rough lumber. You can find my stories here and here. You can find the floggings on any of the forum sites (just search under “Schwarz”+”pin-headed mouth-breather”).
In any case, I think it’s lovely if you use one of these planes to dress the faces of your lumber. But I really like using it for edges, a use that seems to be supported by some documents and chats I’ve had with an older union carpenter. The tool is a tracheid-chomping monster on edges, a fact that I was reminded of yesterday.
I was faced with making a panel out of some Eastern white pine for an upcoming story in Popular Woodworking on gluing up panels. The long edges of the boards were really waney. I was going to have to remove 1″ of width on each edge to get to the good material. So I marked out my scribe lines with a panel gauge, grabbed my scrub plane (instead of a hatchet or drawknife , other good options) and went to work.
Using short, choppy strokes, I could hog off more than 1/16″ in a pass. Each edge took less time than Lucinda Williams took to sing me one of her new songs off of “Little Honey.” Within about 12 minutes, all four edges were done and ready for the jointer plane.
Sure, I could have used the Powermatic 66, but I don’t like missing a minute of Lucinda.
– Christopher “numb as a flounder” Schwarz
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