[Q] How to make a thinner plank of wood with only hand tools?
Fromey
| Posted in General Discussion on
I have a simple shed workshop and so no room to install machinery such as band saws, planer tables, saw tables, thicknessers, etc.
All I have access to are basic hand tools; hand saws, hand planes, chisels, etc.
Thus, if I have a plank of wood, let’s say 1 inch thick and so wide by so long, how does one cut that down to a plank of the same dimensions but, say, 0.5 inches thick? There must be a way because it must have been done in all the years prior to electric tools. Surely one doesn’t simply hand plane away half the wood!
Many thanks in advance for any advice.
Alex
Replies
Assuming that the 1" board is
Assuming that the 1" board is already 4-square, then you use a marking gauge to lay out the 1/2" thickness on all the edges. Then take a sharp rip saw and saw leaving the line. Then you finish by planing to the marked line. The other board would be about 1/4" thick when it were planed smooth. You would get a good workout sawing, but with enough practice it could be a routine task. The saw could be a panel saw or a bow saw.
There slips that prevent this ideal from happening. For example, it is quite likely that the boards would warp when resawn. There are often stresses that would be released by the sawing. The likeliness of that happening means youi would have to leave enough extra thickness to be able to plane out the warp. The assumption that the 1" board was square on all four sides isn't often found, so that when you get the board flat and square enough to resaw you may have lost enough thickness that there would be little left after a resaw operation besides the one board you were sawing out.
Thicknessing with hand tools
Alex, this is generally done one of two ways. If the piece isn't too large, the least wasteful way to do this is by clamping the piece securely in a vise and using some kind of hand saw—I've used a rip saw—to saw the piece lengthwise in half or slightly less than half. Be warned that this is very labor intensive. There are descriptions on how to do this available on the internet if you search for them. The advantage to this method is that you end up with two bookmatched pieces of wood, which is great for making panels for matching cabinet doors.
Another way to do this is by using a scrub plane, but in the example you cited, you end up reducing half the wood to shavings, which is a waste of wood. If you were reducing the thickness by, say, three-eighths of an inch, this method is much better. Begin by using the scrub plane to take deep cuts across one face of the board. When you're about a sixteenth of an inch fatter than you want to be, switch to a jack plane and start planing diagonally across the board until you've flattened the worst of the gouges made by the scrub plane, and then finish up by planing with the grain down the length of your board, finishing up with a smoothing plane if you have one. If you don't have a scrub plane and don't use machines, you really need one. They are readily available used at a reasonably inexpensive price.
Whichever way you choose, both methods require you to scribe a line around the edges of the wood to indicate the final target thickness. If you're sawing, I would make the line a bit over your final thickness and begin sawing at an angle at one top edge of your board, then do the same at the other top corner until the two lines meet. Then set your saw into the resulting line across the top edge, keeping your saw parallel to the top of the board and saw down more or less halfway across the length of the board. Flip the piece over in your vise and repeat the procedure from the bottom on the board until you meet the kerf that you sawed from the top.
Like so many things in woodworking, this is easier shown that described.
Good luck and have fun.
EDIT: I see Steve posted while I was writing. Don't mean to be repetitious . . .
Long ago...
Long before before power tools came into use for furniture making, shops still either purchased their wood cut to the rough thickness they needed from water or steam powered mills or, if sawn planks weren't available, they would have sawn the planks close to the thickness needed from larger blocks with big coarse toothed saws often worked by two men. By the time a plank actually got into a shop it would have been close the thickness needed needing only minimal planing to get a smooth surface and the final thickness.
Only under desperate circumstances would a shop go through the trouble of trying to reduce a 1" thick plank to 1/2" with planes or by resawing a plank with an ordinary handsaw, it can be done of course, but it is very labor intensive and inefficient.
Great question
Come on guys; no pictures ?
I am always writing posts that are too long so I will be brief. Some thoughts that came to mind :
How does one get that many tools and not have seen some books and pics and stuff about resawing by hand. Must be someone elses tools.
Why do people hate to read so much. Guess it just doesn't work for some.
If the reading thing doesn't work out why come to an on line site where one has to read the answers? Brevity.
OK I better be brief and provide something besides words.
Also what came to mind is:
Just tell him to buy a band saw and spare the guy all this time and torture he is about put himself through.
Bandsaws are expensive. Yes but purchased used in the right place at the right time could be a few hundred dollars. Figuring time to make the saw(s) (there is always that "better" hand saw just over the next catalog page).
Doesn't have room for a bandsaw:
Takes about four square feet of floor space.
I once had a bandsaw in my kitchen. In the old days the craftsman worked in the house; in the "living room".
You think you have space problems try living in Japan.
So here is my Odessy:
I had to refile the blades on the long frame saw and the Japanese saw and the carpenter handsaw. I could not find the Japanese saw I wanted (a huge CLUE that I nimbly stepped right over ) and filed that sucker from a general purpose tooth profile called ibara-me (for cutting logs and stuff at angles other than crosscut or rip ) to a rip tooth profile for hardwood called nezumi-ba.
this isn't amature time but good luck finding someone to do this for you if you are going to use a handsaw. When I start adding up self education time and saw making time etc. and figure my labor costs per hour . . . not to mention time spent sawing ALLOTTA . . . well that few hundred dollars or a thousand or what ever is looking awful good.
Learned right off the long framesaw is a huge waste of time unless you got somebody on the other end watching that line WE are sawing to. That is Frank Klausz and his brother. Thanks guys at least at that point I had a clue. Enlist girl freind to help. Yah RIGHT.
Books:
Toshio
http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Woodworking-Tools-Tradition-Spirit/dp/0941936465/ref=pd_sim_b_3
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Shoji-Toshio-Odate/dp/0941936473/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284516700&sr=1-1
Bob
http://www.amazon.com/Woodworking-Right-Technique-Practical-Job-/dp/0762102284/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284516797&sr=1-2
Heven
http://www.lagunatools.com/bandsaw-lt20
Use hand tools for everything else but get a bandsaw for thicknessing/resawing.
Great pictures.
When I first started out and I needed 1/2" stock I just went out and bought some. Could we be overthinking this for someone who looks like a new woodworker?
Why use hand tools for this?
I do use my bandsaw for resawing, especially if the project calls for thin stock, but I'd say 90 percent of my thicknessing is done with hand tools. Because I like 7/8-inch-thick stock, getting down to that from 4/4 stock isn't a big deal anyway.
Still, why use hand tools for this stuff? My answer is more psychological than political: I don't have a dog in the hand tools vs. machines fight. I'm just a mediocre furnituremaker. The more time I spend working on stock and joinery, the more I delay the inevitable sense of disappointment I often feel when I look at my finished pieces. Why couldn't the design have been better??
It's more fun dealing with technique & process—and reading Knots, for that matter—than confronting failures of imagination.
Norman
inevitable sense of disappointment
Don't be too hard on yourself. The good part is that the journey can be the joy, not the destination. The other good thing is, I have found that with time you stop seeing the mistakes you made and the piece starts to look more like a success. This has been true for me in woodworking and in film making. After completion you tend to see the parts, with time you see the whole. And you get a nice surprise... the whole looks pretty good.
Norman,
Couldn't find anything to argue with in your response. As you said, taking off a quarter inch with hand planes is not a problem and can be enjoyable if you have the right attitude, and you do have the right stuff.
Like you, I don't have a dog in the hand vs machine tool fight. I use both but generally lean toward hand tools because I find them fun, noiseless (for the most part) and dustfree (for the most part). Besides, being retired, being efficient is not important - having fun is important.
I like to mix things up when it comes to technique. If I do it the same way all the time, I don't learn anything new, so why not try a new technique.
Besides, my definition of a great woodworker is "one who can make masterpieces with someone else's tools," So I find it fun and challenging to try other people's tools. If they can use them well, but I can't, well then I have to increase my skills. I don't blame their tools.
Have fun.
Mel
Thanks
Thank you all for your replies, it's been very interesting (including the sociology of Internet forum posting!)
I figured it had to be a hard and tricky job to do, but there were some good tips in the posts that I would not have thought of until it was too late.
To answer some of the questions/address some of the points;
Yes I'm a new woodworker (I posted here rather than in the "New to woodworking" subsection because there's more traffic here).
My space limitations are a shed of 2.2 m x 2.5 m which also has to contain a lawn mower, garden tools, general house paints, childrens' bicycle, scooter, etc. Thus, there is no realistic way of squeezing in a band saw (a bench-top router table will most likely be the most I can accommodate).
I bought a load of used woodowrking tools from a friend whose father-in-law passed away and they were clearing out his workshop. I've been steadily adding to these, but lacked a workbench. Thus, my practical experience is minimal as is my library on woodowrking (my experience consists of lessons during my school days many, many moons ago and watching my father working on his beautiful 1950's combination machine).
I now have a nice sjobergs nordic plus 1450 bench (yes I had to buy one as I lacked a bench/vice to build one with; chicken and egg kind of thing. I'll be posting a review of this bench soon) and am busily sharpening and buying wood to start my first project (an arts-and-crafts kitchen shelf).
I bought some timber from a yard (Yardles in the UK) with a lot of variety, but about 1" was the thinnest dimension they have;
http://www.yandles.co.uk/timber.php
I was curious about the process and how difficult it is as part of my planning on how to convert a plank of oak that is probably a bit too thick for a shelf; should I just use it as is, plane it down a bit, try to halve it, etc.?
Anyway, thanks again.
Alex
Completely by chance today, in response to a pop-up on this web site, I subscribed to the Popular Woodworking e-mailing list and received a free back-issue of their Woodowrking Magazine as a pdf. And what was the first thing I layed my eyes on? A way to resaw planks of wood, and a quite ingenious one by stringing a bandsaw blade along a workbench. In order to not offend copyright/forum etiquette, I'll simply cite the letter;
Friar Peter Trembley. "Resaw by Hand – the Easy Way". Woodworking Magazine (Summer 2009, Issue 14) page 4.
Thin wood
Hi Alex, and welcome to the 'board'. On the front page of Knots, hidden at the very bottom is a list of woodworking clubs. Unfortunately, none are listed for the UK. My first thought is to check if there is a 'local' woodworking club (guild?) and see if anyone there can help you. The scond thought is to see if a local cabinet-makers shop would be willing to help you out 'just this one time. ' The process of marking, sawing and then planing to a line is an age-old skill, and usually assigned to the apprentice woodworker in a shop because it IS a lot of work, but is, or was, an important skill to master. Before tackling a large piece of wood, try it on a small to medium sized piece to learn how it is done.
SawdustSteve Long Island, NY (East of New York City)
That is a clever tip, but what bothers me about it is the apparent ease with which one could resaw one's fingers.
resizing wood
Check out the woodrights shop on pbs .org. It is a matter of splitting the wood with the right hand tools. A bench to hold the wood plank and shaving the wood down to size, then planing the wood flat.
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