Handplane Basics DVD – A Review
I ordered Chris Schwarz’s Handplane Basics DVD with no thought that I would learn anything. I’ve been using handplanes for some time and I’ve read pretty much everything Chris has written about handplanes. If his advice hasn’t sunk in by this time, I doubt Chris could do much more than shake his head in disgust at my errant ways.
No, I ordered Handplane Basics because the most common questions I get have to do with handplanes and handplane use. Everybody, it seems, wants to know about handplanes and some don’t want to read Chris’s Handplane Essentials book to learn it. I wanted to see if this DVD would provide a single source discussion on how to use handplanes so I could recommend it. In the back of my brain I also heard Tony Robbins, the motivation guy with the big teeth saying, “If I get one thing from every book I read I’m satisfied” and so I was hoping I’d learn at least one new thing.
And the DVD delivers on both counts. While many point to Chris’s writing skill for his success in the woodworking world, to me, Chris’s most powerful skill is cutting through the crap and presenting what a person needs to know to do whatever he is teaching. This video demonstrates this skill very well.
He presents the various types of bench planes, discusses their parts and their uses. But he doesn’t drag this out into what could have become a long discussion of vintage and maker differences in frog type, adjusters, etc. He knows that would only obfuscate the message. Instead he quickly moves to his “System of Three” approach to board preparation, stepping the viewer through the use of a fore plane (jack plane) to remove wood quickly, a try plane (jointer plane) to flatten the surface, and a smooth plane to prepare the surface for finish. In a clear and concise manner he both describes and illustrates the reasons and methods for truing up all surfaces of a board.
Along the way he covers blade camber, both the reasons for it and how to create and sharpen them. He describes techniques for setting the blade on each of the three types of planes. And, he shows you that you can do this entire process of board preparation while talking, the notion that hand tool wood prep requires superman strength is dispelled. In short, with the exception of actually acquiring a set of planes, this DVD covers what you need to know to use them effectively.
I highly recommend the DVD to anyone either struggling with their hand planes or wondering how to get started using them. If you have been working with handplanes for a while and have read Chris’s book, you might not find much here that you don’t already know. But I did learn that Chris cambers his fore plane irons much more than I do with mine so I did learn something.
Cheers — Larry
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I have Chris’s at the top of my list of WWing books to buy. How much does the DVD add to it?
The Handplane Essentials book is really a compilation of a bunch of articles Chris has written about planes and plane work over the years. As such, it’s a fairly complete treatise on the subject. So, the short answer to whether the DVD adds anything is “no.”
That, however, isn’t exactly true. The advice you find in the DVD is scattered across many of the articles in Handplane Essentials. You may or may not put it all together the way the DVD does if you’re a rank beginner to handplanes. On the other hand, if you have some experience with handplanes, you’ll easily identify all these important points in the book and how to use them.
The DVD does bring something that no book can bring. If you’re trying to figure out how to use handplanes, why yours don’t work like people claim they should, or you’re sweating like a pig in the Oklahoma sun when you plane, there is no replacement for the ability to observe Chris actually use these planes as he trues all four surfaces of a board.
That’s a long way of saying “I don’t know” as the real answer to your question would be more a matter of what kind of information you need.
Cheers — Larry