In my typical distractable fashion, I tend to have 2 or 3 (or more) projects going in my shop at a time. I’ve been *pretty* good about knocking out the ones that have been lingering around lately all as part of cleaning up the shop and keeping it that way.
So…it’s time to screw that up. I got distracted from making some dovetailed drawers (as further practice before ruining good wood) by making something for the upcoming (virtual) Lochmere investiture. Given that’s less than 3 weeks away, it may be a little ambitious, but I have next week off work, so I am still optimistic I can complete it in time.
I’ll get into what it is later, but it required me to glue up several panels because no one can afford 14″ – 17″ wide boards (if you can even find them). I recently acquired a stack of 20 or so walnut boards that are 6-1/2′ long and 6″ – 9″ wide. So that’s what I am using.
Walnut is a beautiful wood, dark color, complex grain, relatively strong and light. But, that beautiful grain? That’s because the crap is changing direction all the time making planing it a bitch. In addition, this walnut was milled from some yard trash tree so it’s full of defects and stresses you wouldn’t have from one harvested from a forest. Including a couple of .22 cal bullets!
So it took milling up 12 boards to get enough stock to piece together the panels I needed. All primary milling is done with power tools, (my) life is too short to dimension shit with a scrub plane. But, from there I wanted to use only hand tools.
Which brings me to trying to plane this crap. If your plan fu is strong, your plane iron very sharp, and the mouth set tight you’ll be able to plane against the grain some and only tear out some fibers. And you’ll be touching up that iron after every board.
Cleanup up from that requires a card scraper. A properly sharpened card scraper is magic. You can tart up the worst grain with it like an eraser. Thinking about that I realized I had a cabinet scraper I kept from one auction lot of tools because it was worth more to me (in theory) than I could get for it. But it’s hung on my wall for lo these many years. I thought to myself, “if it’s called a ‘cabinet scraper’ and you are making a cabinet, it might be time to give this one a go.”
So I spent 10 min on YouTube watching a video on sharpening and setting one up and then 15 min doing that before hitting the boards.
And it works great. It’s easier to sharpen than a card scraper and lasts longer. With the handles, you don’t get as tired and it’s a great way to scrape off the excess glue.
If you do handwork, get one of these, they are cheap ($20-$30) on eBay, easy to set up, and it works like a charm. And you don’t need a respirator and ear protection like you do if you just sanded it. Plus it’s a better finish.
The one I have is a Sargent No. 54, basically a copy of the Stanley No. 80. And since it’s not as “collectible” as Stanley tools are, I couldn’t sell it for much and kept it. And I am damn glad I did.
Other early 20th Century makers also made similar clones. Any of them are fine. The only part that matters is the blade. Sometimes you get them with card scrapers in them instead of the correct blade. The right one is almost twice as thick as a card scraper (around 0.055″). If necessary, aftermarket or extras are readily available for cheap.
