Planing

In the 4th week of school, we finally got to do something with a piece of wood.  We started by tuning up our hand planes.  A hand plane has a flat bottom (the 'sole') with a small slit (the 'throat').  A blade (the 'iron') sticks out of the throat a very small amount.  When you run it across a board that is not flat, the sole rides along the high points and the iron cuts them down until the whole surface is a uniform width.  Of course, since the iron sticks out through the bottom, it is possible to go too far, so you have to be careful.

  After we had tuned up our hand plane they gave us a piece of wood that we had to flatten.  Wood can be warped in 3 basic ways.  Cup is a bend across the width of a board.  Bow is a bend in the length of the board.  Twist is when the two ends turn in different directions.

We had to start by checking for cup.  We put the arced side up so it would sit stably and shave wood from down the center of the board.  After taking out all the cup we checked for bow and shaved off the high spots, trying not to mess up the work we just did to remove the cup.  When that is done, we check for twist (which should be pretty well gone at this point.)  When it is all finished we had to hold a straight edge across it and hold it up to the light.  Anywhere we saw light we had to put a piece of paper under the straight edge.  When we pulled on the paper, if it moved the straight edge it was close enough, but if it slid out we had to keep working.  That means the whole board had to be flat to 3/1000th of an inch.  Then we had to square and flatten both edges and both ends and make the final face parallel to the first.  And we had to finish it all by the end of the day, because if we left the board over night it would release and/or absorb moisture causing it to warp. Here is my finished board with my plane on it:

Everyone was SO proud of their board when they were finished, but knew that if we showed it to someone they would say, "It's just a board, so what."  Trust me, it was a lot of work.  I am glad they started letting us use machines to do this work once we proved we could do it by hand.