Hand Planes: Types, Uses and Features

A plane is a blade held in a jig. The sole rides on the wood, and the blade projects through an opening in it — the mouth — by the thickness of the shaving you want. Because the sole limits how deep the edge can go, a plane takes an even shaving that a chisel held by hand could not, and because the sole is flat, it planes the surface flat.

Three things decide how cleanly it cuts. The edge must be sharp, which is the job of the sharpening guide. The cutting angle — the angle at which the blade meets the wood — decides how the fibres fail, and it comes from the plane’s design, explained below. And the wood ahead of the edge must be held down: Veritas explains that a tight mouth supports the wood just in front of the blade, so a split cannot run ahead of the cut and lift out below the surface.

The tool anatomy plate labels these parts on a bench plane. Setting them — depth, lateral and mouth — is covered step by step in how to use a hand plane.

Bench planes are the general-purpose planes that do most of the flattening and smoothing. Stanley numbered its Bailey-pattern bench planes 1 to 8, and a higher number means a longer plane. Many makers still use the numbers, but a number names a size class, not an exact dimension: the table shows how Lie-Nielsen’s planes compare with Stanley’s originals.

Why length matters

A plane cuts only where its edge meets the wood, and the sole decides where that is (see the plate above). A short sole follows the surface: it drops into a hollow and planes the bottom of it, so a smoother leaves a fine surface without making it much flatter. A long sole bridges hollows and rests on the high spots, so it cuts those first and keeps cutting until the surface is flat along its length. Lie-Nielsen describes its fore plane in exactly these terms — eliminating high points while bridging low spots — and its jointers as the planes for truing joints and flattening large areas.

That is why bench planes are used in sequence: a jack to remove material quickly, a jointer to make the surface or edge true, and a smoother to leave the finished surface. A single plane can do more than one of these jobs, but the length always sets what it does best.

The cutting angle is where the plane’s design shows most. There are two arrangements, and the angle comes from a different place in each (see the drawing below).

• Bevel-down. The iron lies on the frog with its bevel facing the sole and its flat face uppermost. The shaving slides up that flat face, so the cutting angle equals the bed angle. Lie-Nielsen beds all its bench-plane blades at 45° bevel down, and offers 50° and 55° frogs to raise the angle for difficult grain. The bevel angle only has to be lower than the bed angle, so that the heel of the bevel clears the wood. A back bevel honed on the flat face raises the cutting angle by its own angle — by less than 1° for the ruler trick described in the sharpening guide.
• Bevel-up. The iron lies flat face down on a low bed, usually 12°, with its bevel on top. The shaving slides up the bevel, so the cutting angle is the bed angle plus the bevel angle. Changing the bevel changes the cutting angle, with no other part of the plane changing. Most block planes and several modern bench planes work this way, and bevel-up planes generally have no chipbreaker.

What the angle changes

A higher cutting angle bends the shaving more sharply as it forms, so the wood tends to fail right at the edge rather than splitting ahead of it. Veritas describes its 62° setting as producing a Type II chip — one that fails at the edge — and eliminating tear-out on difficult grain, and notes that higher angles take more force to push. A lower angle cuts end grain more easily: Veritas recommends 37° for end grain, which it says takes nearly three times the force of planing along the grain.

Laboratory research points the same way. In a US Forest Service study of loblolly pine cut very slowly along the grain, rake angles of 5° and 15° — cutting angles of 85° and 75° — favoured the Type II chip and good surfaces. Those angles are far steeper than any bench plane, and the study used a laboratory knife rather than a plane, so it supports the direction of the effect, not a particular setting.

Bevel-down planes have a second way to control tear-out: the chipbreaker, set close to the edge. How it works, and what the research shows, is in the plane iron and chipbreaker guide.

A block plane is small enough to use in one hand, and in most designs the iron lies bevel up on a low bed. Lie-Nielsen makes two common patterns: the No. 60-1/2, bedded at 12° for a 37° cutting angle suited to fine cuts and end grain, and the No. 9-1/2, bedded at 20° for a 45° angle suited to heavier cuts with the grain. Both have adjustable mouths. A block plane trims end grain, chamfers edges, fits small parts and cleans up joints — work too small or awkward for a bench plane.

Tear-out is the fault every plane design is fighting. The Wood Handbook describes torn grain as a surface where fibres have been torn out by surfacing, rather than cut. It happens when a plane runs against the slope of the grain: the edge meets fibres rising toward the surface and lifts them out ahead of the cut. Grain is rarely perfectly straight. The Handbook distinguishes diagonal grain, where a board is not sawn parallel to the fibres; spiral grain, from logs whose fibres grow in a helix; and interlocked grain, where the helix reverses every few years so that no straight-grained board can be sawn from the log. It notes that some interlocked species are difficult to plane for exactly this reason.

The plane can help in five ways: a sharp edge, a light cut, a tight mouth, a chipbreaker close to the edge, and a higher cutting angle. The first is sharpening, the next three are setup, and the last is a matter of the plane’s design or a bevel-up iron’s bevel. Reading the grain and choosing the direction of the stroke are covered in how to use a hand plane.

Which planes to buy first is a separate question, answered in how to choose a hand plane.