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There are different types of hand planer. Which hand planer is easy to use for me? I want to use it as my DIY project tools.

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Roger Parker

My suggestion would be a Stanley, Sargent, or Miller Falls, Bailey pattern plane. A number 4 or 5 size (Smoother or Jack). The number 5 is a "jack of all trades" plane and as a first plane is a good choice. Learning to sharpen and adjust the throat of the plane is necessary to get good results with any plane. Frequently these planes can be found at flea markets and 2nd hand stores for reasonable prices.

I use a cheap block plane with toothed blade (just 4 or 5 notches cut into the blade with a dremel wheel) for most tasks. It can chew through material quickly, or take fine cuts (if freshly sharpened), and thanks to the short length it can be used in slightly concave areas, which can be useful in lower precision woodworking tasks where you don't necessarily need the whole surface to be perfectly flat. Follow up with a card scraper to remove the tooth marks.

For plate jointing and flattening of surfaces such as the neck where the fingerboard glues to, I built a 13" long Krenov style plane using a 1.5" Hock blade. It's a bit of a pain to get the blade depth set just right, but the light weight is so much more pleasant to use than a long metal plane.

The trick to plate jointing is to have a really flat plane with a really sharp blade set for fluffy thin shavings. In the beginning I struggled for hours every time and never could get it perfect, but with the wood plane I can whip out perfect joints in no time.

For sharpening, I use 8x3" extra-extra-coarse and extra-extra-fine DMT dia-sharp stones, followed by 8000 grit waterstone. The XXF is pretty coarse at first, but after a while it mellows out enough to produce a good edge by itself, so nowadays I usually only pull out the waterstone for the jointer plane where I need absolute perfection. If you can afford it, get a fine dia-sharp as well. Going straight from XXC to XXF is quick enough for routine resharpening, but for flattening the back of a plane or chisel blade it's nice to have one more grit inbetween.

The XXC can also be used to flatten the waterstone when it gets worn, and is coarse enough to use on wood. It's what I used to flatten the bottom of the wood plane (with a straightedge to check progress, since the stone is shorter than the plane).

seems like spam disguised as question. probably posting to get backlinks to his site

Yup, don't think a repair professional would need to ask.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

+1 for Clay, but good observation for turnip and Colin

Ed M

His address is in his signature. One of you Torontonians might have to stop by and check things out!

I briefly searched his name and found he recently joined -The Home Foundry.org forum - and listed his occupation as a wood worker.
There are no professional credentials required to call oneself a woodworker and I'm sure many of the woodworkers at the Martin guitar factory may not have a great familiarity with hand planes.
I will neither argue for or against the sincerity of Mr. Parker's post but at this point accept it at face value.


P.S. When I worked as a furniture repair technician I had little need for a hand plane and was one of the few who actually kept a small block plane in their kit.

Perhaps if Mr Parker gave some feedback about his possibly instrument related "DIY project" we could be more helpful?

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

In the years I worked as a finish carpenter I, like Clay, carried a block plane. I had no use for other planes.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

It looks to me like the guy in the image is planing in the wrong direction.

I've always thought 'planers' were power tools.

Pick up any planer, powered or hand and learn to use it. It's that simple. Easiest to learn are powered. Satisfaction comes from the hand planes.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!