Basic Woodworking Planes That a Woodworker Need to Know

Woodworking is an easy work, but it is not easy when you don’t know aboutit because they are the most widely using material in every woodworking projects.Woodworking planes are also known as the hand planes. It is still in use by many woodworkers even with the advent of power tools of today because it can do the same works faster.

How the Woodworking Planes Used?

Before you going to study about the basic types of woodworking planes, it is important to know how they are used. It is to plane rough boards’ smooth, start with the jointer. Its long bed rides over the board’s hills and valleys and knocks them down as it goes. Continue planning until the board is dead flat. Once you're there, switch to your smoothing plane and give it a few light passes to get everything nice and, well, smooth. When any ridges left by the jointer are gone, you're done.

What the Part of Woodworking?

The important parts of a woodworking plane are

Stock

The body of a wooden plane is usually referred to as the stock.

Iron and wedge

The iron is held in place by a wooden wedge. Unlike most metal planes, wooden planes do not have adjustment mechanisms for setting the position of the iron – instead, the woodworker uses a hammer, or mallet, made specifically for this purpose.

Strike button Some wooden planes have a strike button – an area on the top of the stock, forward of the iron – which is hit with the hammer to adjust the blade upwards, or remove it altogether.

Handles

Some wooden planes have quite distinct handles, while others have no handles at all – just the wooden stock.

Types of Woodworking Planes

Jack Planes

It can take over from where the scrub plane leaves off, being used for shaving off smaller amounts of wood to reduce a piece to the desired size and for initial smoothing. It is longer than the smoothing plane, so is better suited to taking off the high points along the length of the wood rather than following any undulations, giving a straighter edge.

Jointer Planes

The jointer plane is a woodworking tool designed for planning long edges square, straight and true. “Jointing” is the term used to describe this process, as it is generally done to prepare a board to be joined to another board, so that a single, wider board is created.
Some other planes may have their blades honed to a slight arch, or the corners rounded, the blade on the jointer would typically be ground square. This ensures that the edges of the boards being jointed have the best chance of being square, ensuring an even, tight fitting join.

Smoother Plane

It is the shorter version of the steel jack plane. It is used for general work such as smoothing short pieces of wood. It is lighter and smaller than the jack plane. It is generally slightly smaller in length than the Jack Plane – typically 9-10inches long, with a blade width of around 2 inches, and is the last plane to be used to finish the surface of your wood. Many fine craftsmen will use the smoothing plane as the tool which gives the final finish on their job – with this woodwork tool finely tuned and wielded by experienced hands.

Block Plane

Block plane is perhaps one of the hand tools most commonly overlooked by hobbyist woodworkers. While many hobbyists associate the humble block plane with the easing of sharp edges normally carried out at the end of a furniture project, one that’s well-tuned can tackle much more than that.