With a sharp, well-tuned handplane you can quickly adjust the fit of parts or joints, flatten a panel or produce a glass-smooth surface for finishing. But learning to use this classic handtool can be something of a challenge. This book offers advice on how to choose handplanes and tune and sharpen them for top performance. There is also in-depth information on specialty planes and spokeshaves.

Whats inside:

• Choosing the right bench planes
• Flattening wide panels
• Planing difficult grain
• Making and using a shooting board
• Using rabbet planes
• Tuning up a spokeshave
• Making wooden planes

THE NEW BEST OF FINE WOODWORKING series collects the best articles from recent issues of Fine Woodworking magazine. Organized by topic and fully indexed, these books make it easy to access the best woodworking ideas and information straight from the experts.

Introduction

1. Bench Planes
Making Music with a Plane
Straight Talk About Planes
Four Planes That Earn Their Keep
Three Bench Planes
Users Guide to Block Planes

2. Planing Techniques
Flattening Wide Panels by Hand
Planing Difficult Grain
Planing Corner Joints
Chamfers
Shooting Board Aims for Accuracy
Shooting Boards Aim for Tight Joints

3. Specialty Planes
Rabbet Planes Are Real Shop Workhorses
Compass Planes
The Stanley No. 55: King of Combination Planes
Japanese Planes Demystified

4. Spokeshaves
The Spokeshave
Soup Up Your Spokeshave

5. Scrapers
The Scraper Can Replace a Stack of Sandpaper
Cabinet Scrapers
The Buckhorn Scraper
Making Small Scrapers

6. Making Planes and Scratch Stocks
Wooden Planes
Wooden Chisel Plane
Simple Tools Can Reproduce Most Moldings
Scratch Stocks
Make a Wooden Scraper

Credits

Index

My first handplane almost ended my interest in woodworking. To say it was useless is an understatement. It did not plane. It hacked. I wasnt sure whether to fault the tool or the user.

I replaced the handplane with a belt sander, which performed well straight out of the box and saved my interest in woodworking. Although my skills were still primitive, the sander allowed me to complete some projects and they did not look hand hewn.

A few years later, the notion of handplaning wood resurfaced. Determined to succeed, I took a class that devoted the first several sessions to simply flattening and sharpening the plane iron. Hours and hours of labor later, my hands stained black from fine steel and abrasive particles, I was rewarded with a shockingly sharp iron -- so sharp, in fact, that it effortlessly shaved the hair on the back of my hand.

After I performed countless other tweaks to the body of the plane, I put it to wood. It performed well, slicing wood with a satisfying whish. The time spent on the tune-up was well worth it.

Woodworkers have many choices today when it comes to handplanes. The finest ones work well right out of the box. But all require maintenance eventually. Whether you have some older, lesser quality tools in need of a tune-up or simply want to get the most out of quality handplanes, the articles in this book, taken from the pages of Fine Woodworking magazine, will ensure your success. Soon you will realize why handplanes are among the most pleasing of all woodworking tools to use.

-- Anatole Burkin
editor of Fine Woodworking

Customer Reviews from Amazon

You can find some usefull piece of information in this book. The illustrations are great.

Because this book is composed of a series of articles you feel that the text is disorganized and sometimes hard to follow.
You also keep feeling that you read the same stuff over and over again, plane with the grain, tune your plane.

This is not a bad book just not my style.

I have a collection of Taunton Press books and won't stop until I get them all. Most of them are collections of articles from their magazine Fine Woodworking. Can't go wrong giving this as a gift....

I have read many books from the New Best of Fine Woodworking series and this is among the best of them. Though this is really just a collection of articles written by many different authors surrounding the general theme, there is a lot of very valuable information here. As always with Taunton, the writing/editing is excellent and the color photographs and illustrations are quite good. In my mind, this "collection of articles" approach is even more valuable than a book by a single author. The reason for this is that as you read expert advice from many woodworking pros, you get the sense that they don't all agree on everything. In my mind this is one of the most important lessons to learn... woodworking methods and techniques are an extension of the woodworker and as such there is no single "right way" of doing things.

As for downsides to this book, it can get a bit tedious to read about tuning a block plane for the fifth time if you grasped the concept the first time it was mentioned. Fortunately there is a lot of information given beyond just the basics of tuning and maintaining your planes, including actual techniques to employ in various situations.

All in all, I highly recommend this book as an excellent resource to all beginner to intermediate woodworkers interested in beefing up their hand plane skills and anyone else interested in a tool that mankind has been using for thousands of years...

Readers should note that this book is part of a series that is a collection of articles by various authors. So, as a previous reviewer has stated, you sometimes will revisit a topic from a different author's perspective. That said, I really enjoyed this book. I began using hand planes about a year ago and had mixed results. After reading 'Working with Handplanes' I had a better sense of my planes and their use. I took the advice and "tuned-up" a new plane that I was fairly happy with. The result was a plane that performed substantially better.

It seems that for most woodworkers the use of handplanes is a lost art. That's too bad because planes have been around for centuries and are still around simply because they work well. If you're interested in using planes I highly recommend this book as a starting point to have your plane work as it should.

In general, the book has good information, nice and illustrative pictures all over the place however, the order of ideas is mix since it does not follow the introduction made in each chapter, it goes back to block planes very often and the pictures in the pages do not follow the author explanation.

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