How To Use A Scrub Plane
Though the word wood projects mean carpentry in the simplest sense, it is a trade that calls for a vast experience and engineering skill and an impeccable knowledge of a wide range of tools used in the wooden works. The tools consist of both conventional hand tools and modern power-operated tools. While some stick to the former, the later entrants are particular about employing the modern tools. Here, the use of scrub plane, an old-type hand tool used to do flattening and leveling wood works for fitting on window and door frames, is discussed.
A scrub plane
A scrub plane, a woodworking hand tool is meant for use to flatten or level up boards that are very wide to use a joiner. In practice, joiners are generally 6a€ to 8a€ wide. Hence, a wider plane is handy for leveling wider pieces of wood boards. For using a plane on one side of a wood, the wood needs to be flat. So, manual flattening of that side is to be carried out if the wood is very wide.
Many methods
Though a scrub plane is not sufficiently wide in order to flatten a wider piece of wood, it is necessary and also convenient to work on the width of the wood stock such that you can effectively cover the area of the joiner. When your wood stock is 1a€ much wider for the planer, and you are to remove the extra inch, use a scrub plane which is much faster and smoother than when you use a hand saw. A jack plane does the leveling job of the wider wood faster due to its larger surface area.
When you execute the roughing work using a power plane, the scrub plane does splendid work for leveling out the surface before you send it through the planer.
Customarily, the scrub plane is used back and forth in various angles diagonally across the wood grain. By this technique, you can cover both the length and width of the surface in the same breadth. One trick is that when the diagonal suffers tears, you can run the scrub plane repeatedly over the area at ninety degree angles. When leveling this way is complete, you achieve the required degree of flattening. If needed further, you can follow it up with flattening with tooth blade or jack plane.
One hint is that when you use a scrub plane, choose a piece of wood for the work in question with a wider area so that on finishing, giving allowance for the end area chips to be discarded, the residual area available fits your use.
With the help of a scrub plane, you can make tight fitting of the wooden sheets on door and window frames. Embellishing walls with wood is somewhat difficult. As the walls are mostly non-flat with small protrusions and dips, fleecing off thin layers of the moulding with it is a time-consuming and cumbersome job to make a clear fit. However, you can position the trim board over the wall and record the areas with a pencil that warrant sanding or seasoning. Using the trim tool, make the wall perfect for your wood-cum- wall works.
Of late, the practice for many woodworkers is to thin down the width of a wood piece with the use of a scrub plane. This involves to simply clamp the wood piece on your workbench and run the plane right from top to bottom area until you have fleeced enough layers for your work. Though the result would not be a perfect level edge, it would be reasonably smooth. A few carpenter-designers deliberately leave the slightly wavy edges as such, as a show of fashion.
