My ongoing hand plane and hand tooling adventures has brought up questions I have not seen asked (I think).
While working with a some 3' long pieces of douglas fir to play around with, I thought I had a nice flat 2×8 face…by feel. I used a scrub plane at 45 degree angle to make things level. Proceeded by a #5 to knock things down. And then by a #7. I never had true start to finish even shaving with a #7 across the face. Maybe you are not suppose to with a #7. Running my hand across the face and by eyesight, looked pretty flat to me. But then I ran my #5 at 90 degrees on it's side to gauge the flatness with a light source. There were some high spots I ran a #4 over, which solved that high spot but then made high spots as well, I would guess in the range of 0.005-0.010'ish. Only a tremor of rocking across the face when using my aluminum winding sticks.
Got me thinking. On areas that will have no additional aspects done to them (such as mortise/tenon or another piece mated to it, etc), I assume it's not critical to reach that Uber flatness as long as it looks flat to the eye and touch.
But then to the remaining high & low spots… do you try to achieve no light gap whatsoever for the critical areas?
Wish I took a picture while thinking of this.
I was using my Stanley #5 which I have flattened the sole and thought I flattened the sides. Maybe it was not enough to give distorted high/low visual spots.
While working with a some 3' long pieces of douglas fir to play around with, I thought I had a nice flat 2×8 face…by feel. I used a scrub plane at 45 degree angle to make things level. Proceeded by a #5 to knock things down. And then by a #7. I never had true start to finish even shaving with a #7 across the face. Maybe you are not suppose to with a #7. Running my hand across the face and by eyesight, looked pretty flat to me. But then I ran my #5 at 90 degrees on it's side to gauge the flatness with a light source. There were some high spots I ran a #4 over, which solved that high spot but then made high spots as well, I would guess in the range of 0.005-0.010'ish. Only a tremor of rocking across the face when using my aluminum winding sticks.
Got me thinking. On areas that will have no additional aspects done to them (such as mortise/tenon or another piece mated to it, etc), I assume it's not critical to reach that Uber flatness as long as it looks flat to the eye and touch.
But then to the remaining high & low spots… do you try to achieve no light gap whatsoever for the critical areas?
Wish I took a picture while thinking of this.
I was using my Stanley #5 which I have flattened the sole and thought I flattened the sides. Maybe it was not enough to give distorted high/low visual spots.