So much planing...
A Clifton 5 1/2, issued in the school tool box. A good starting plane, with a fantastic iron.
People come and go from Rowden all the time. Some people come for a short course to learn something specific - anything from between a week and a few months. Others come for the year and many seem to forget to leave at the end. As I was arriving, Dave was leaving. He had been at Rowden for a few months, working through the initial projects offered here. When I asked him how it was, he had a slightly withered look on his face, "Planing", he replied, "so much planing..."
The year-long course begins with an intensive introduction to using hand tools. On the first project, we are introduced to some essential tools - a bench plane, a block plane and a set of cabinetmakers chisels. Most people would recognise a bench-plane straight away. I have distant memories of a plane-shaped lump of iron, rusting in the shed at the bottom of the garden. It was perhaps once used to hack a quarter-inch off of a door to help it to swing freely. For the furniture maker, a plane is one of the essential tools of the trade.
The furniture maker's plane is a precision instrument, despite looks to the contrary. Weighing anything from between 2 to 5 kilos, the sole of the cast iron body is ground to be completely flat. The mouth is opened just a fraction, and the high-carbon steel 'iron' (i.e. blade) is honed razor sharp. This takes a shaving off of the wood just 0.02mm*.
Flattening a board this way takes time and it takes skill. Skill to set up the plane correctly in the first place, and skill to get the board completely flat, but this is how we get that glass-smooth finish that the highest end furniture demands. I am learning to do this accurately, but I am currently very far from doing it quickly. So for now my near future involves planing. So much planing...
-sh
*Geek that I am, I got out the dial calipers to measure this. Sure enough, it read 0.02mm. This is approximately 1/5 the thickness of a sheet of printer paper, or 1/50th of a millimetre.