Calling on Experienced Hand Planers and Bench Builders

Yes, definitly do your best to keep all of the grain going in the same direction. This will make hand planing a much easier task.

There was a video posted/linked to here last summer showing a gentelman planing his bench top. It takes a little time and is a good workout. You will be extremely pleased with the surface produced.

Step 1, go from front to back, 90 degrees to the grain. This makes rough shavings about the width of each board. Once you get cuts consistantly across each board going this way switch to

Step 2, go 45 degrees to the grain, from one corner to the next, going with the grain. Do this from both corners that you can do it while maintaining the with the grain direction. Then

Step 3. Go with the grain, skew the plane a little but push in the same direction as the grain.

Step 4. Smoothing plane with the grain.

This breakdown skips all of the checking for high points and focus work that you will need to perform which the video demonstrates well. Just a basic list of the steps to take. Get the high areas down first then do the full bench in these steps.

have fun, and if you get frustrated or want to hurry, go in side and do something else.

I think you would have trouble getting all your grain lined up the same way because within each board you will find grain asking to be planed in both directions due to the natural curve of grain. Besides, most of your planing to get the bench top flat will be across the grain until you get to the jointing and smoothing. Perhaps by that point you could just take fine shavings with minimal tearout.

I’m also new to hand planing and found that adding a very small back bevel to the plane iron helps minimize tearout a lot. You should also take out really thin see-through shavings.
I add the back bevel by taping on a thin 1/8” piece of wood to the plane iron and then sharpening the back side. The back bevel should be really small. Anyone else do this?

more important at this point, is to look at the end grain of each board and try to organize them for gluing, every one in the oposite direction to the next one (the rings), so your top will keep straight for the long run. Im a Handplane adict, but for a laminated Top like this, I would take it with a shop with a big Drum sander.

I used the router sled with my bench (here), it leaves a nice surface that can be finished nicely with a shrp scraper.

-- Francisco Luna, San Francisco Bay Area.

Langski, sounds like you are pretty far along with your bench, but Chris Schwarz has a great book about building workbenches, covers lots of great info, might be worth looking into if you get stuck and covers a lot of what March describes above.

Cmaeda, I don’t use a back bevel on my hand planes, if you sharpen them correctly, you really don’t need it.

-- "You get what you inspect, not what you expect"

Thanks for all this great feedback. The bench I am building is similiar in design to the trestle style table at www.Charlesandhudson.com I wish I had a decent bench to build this one and the shop is getting a bit crowded with two benches right now. I’ll post a picture when its done.

Rob I think you are right about the wood movement issues, which is one of the main reasons I wrote my question. Moai, your photos of the router sled technique are very clear. I wonder if I could get a good result by switching grain direction every two boards? Every course of two pieces would present a surface of 2 3/8” being wide enough for my smoother without striking the surface of a piece going in the other direction.

Cmaeda, I have a back bevel of about 1 degree a’la Lie Nielsen suggested method.

-- Langski, New Hampshire

I just made a new bench top out of 2” X 2” beech boards that were used as dunnage in a shipment of metal coils. After jointing them square, , I ran them thru my 12” planer and then edge-glued four or five boards together, making three assemblies 8” to 10” wide. Then I passed these through my 12” thickness planer. Now, with three sections edged and planed, I proceeded to glue them together to make my 28” wide bench top. It saved a lot of work, and it was easy to level off the minute differences in height of the joined sections with a light touch of hand planing. Then I gave the whole top a once-over to remove any chatter marks and snipes from the thickness planing. By skewing the plane relative to the direction of your strokes as others have suggested really does minimize tearout, and I didn’t pay much attention to edge grain orientation because I knew I’d be planing in all four directions.

-- If Stradivarius was alive today, he'd be using Gorilla Glue.