Dave: this is a workshop on "all about bench planes". We will work with all of the benchplanes starting with the scrub plane, jack, jonter and smoothers (both bevel up and bevel down styles). We will use edge and block planes to square up and miter the edgesof stock. Other tools include winding stick, marking gagues, panel gauge, marking knives, squares, shooting boards, etc. The first day is for talking about plane anatomy and looking at metal, wooden and transitional examples. We wil also cover sharpening techniques for planes. then we will use traditional technqieus to dimension and smooth up a piece of rough sawn stock to a final clean dimension. We will then learn to lay out bevels and curved surfaces on this piece of finished stock and to palne these with block and smoothing planes (useful for table tops, etc). Lastly, we will edge joint two pieces of stock for a glue up joint and talk about techniques to do that.
On the second day we will plane our glued up stock to flatness. We will then explore many ways to use bench planes to solve problems in the workshop. Part of this will be to look at different examples of grain styles and learn to read grain direction, strategies for orienting stock for planing, how to deal with difficult grain, reversing grain, etc. We wil also work on planing to flatness some mock face frames, both mitered and rail and stile formats, to learn how to plane intersecting grains. There will be opportunites to square up endgrain by hand with block planes only and also by using square and mitered shoooting boards and miter planes. Usually people do not get through everything, but pick and choose what skills they want to focus on. We will have a variety of figured hardoowd to practice planing on.
Students are encouraged to bring their planes, both to work on and sharpen, and to use in the workshjop. Most of the tools needed for the workshop will be provided by the School, however.
This workshop is a lot of fun and I have been doing this one for a number of years now.
