Planing and Trueing With Hand Tools

Today's task was to take some of the split maple that has been "curing" in my basement and turn it from firewood to fine spalted maple.


This is literally some pieces of firewood that I purposefully left outside for a while and then brought in for final air drying, hopefully to end up with some fine spalted patterns. The challenge is to take this highly irregular piece of vegetable matter which was formed with little consideration to my needs and impose retangularity upon it. Oh, and I have no planer or jointer.


Task one was to strip off the bark with a drawknife. This was quickly and easily done. The bark fell off in a few large sheets.


Next I decided to rip the edges to some semblance of regularity. Fortunately, I have a fine Bosch Jigsaw, model 1591 EVS. This one has a barrel grip, not the handle grip. I was successful in ripping one side reasonably straight, and then hit it with my foreplane to bring it into some sort of precision trueness, which I could use as a reference edge.

Next step was to roughly true one face with my ECE scrub plane. This was quickly done, and now having a face that was within Grand Canyon precision of being flat, I was able to scribe a line from the reference edge to the opposite edge and joint it roughly down to the line.

Now, having a piece that would lay flat on the bench and could be gripped firmly, I was in a position to plane off the last face, which was extremely rough and at an odd angle to the reference face. You can see from the picture that I am using a couple of Lee Valley bench pups. These are great and you need to get a pair. I also have the board wedged against a planing stop which consists of a piece of scrap plywood screwed to a scrap of oak board which can be gripped in the bench vise. My choice at this point was my trusty Stanley #5C. This plane is very rough. It's had a hard life. It is, however, perfectly suitable for coarse flattening. My blade is strongly cambered for deep cuts and the throat is very wide for passing thick chips.

This plane worked well and I followed it with my all woodie Jack plane, an antique that I picked up on E-Bay, but that makes a finer cut. By now, I'm ready to flip the other face up and smooth it some more. A few minutes of this and the piece is now 1" thick and relatively square. I'll true it up further when I'm ready to use it in a project.

Meanwhile, I have a basement full of this "firewood" that I've got to true up.