I am not sure how you feel about the term scrub plane but I know I see it
very differently now than when I first started using one I used to see as this
plane, just hugged off material it got down through the rough levels to a
more smooth level and then I finish it off with a regular plane I've got two
planes here they look identical side-by-side from the top but when you
look on the underside there were planes made specifically called scrub planes
what we've done is we've adapted one plane and made a scrub plane from it and
you'll be able to see that on one of our videos but right inside
here I can see I've got this one dead straight across and this one I've got a
curvature to it and I've also opened up the mouth on this one to make it into a
scrub plane but I don't refer to this as some kind of Bulldog of a dog that just
roughs its way through I see it as a refining plane that gets me nearer to
where I need to be saves me time and it gets me to a point where I can use my
regular smoothing plane more quickly let me give you a couple of examples so you
can understand it typically this plane was developed to get
through some of this these rough bandsaw marks circular saw marks it's just come
out of the kiln it's got cups and divots in there it's got all manner of
things going on in this in this surface and rather than taking the smoothing
plane which might take me forever to get down we go with a plane where we've
opened up the mouth we've set the cap iron away from the cutting edge and we
have got a blade that protrudes quite considerably so what we do now I'm
planing some mesquite here that's just about almost twice as hard as oak well
watch what happens first it seems like I was doing nothing but we're getting
through those high spots and we're getting into the lower region and we
through that quite quickly now we need that because we're not resorting to belt
Sanders and power-planers we're just using our hand tools so look what's happened here already I see those
lines just disappearing as if I'm erasing them with an eraser and that's
where we got to so we got this beautiful grain under here one of the neat things
about this plane is I can actually leave this with the undulation in there and
that will look like a vintage piece of furniture that it's 150 or 200 years old
so that's what I might use it for I might use it as a texturing plane to
give me an old surface feel to it so that's where we would normally use it
you can tell I'm a little out of breath this is a good workout for me what about
something like this here is a chocks that I hold my my saws in and I
might want to get nearer to the edge and I might want to put a bevel on here so I
just take my plane with a heavy set and I see the bevel that I want on this side
I go to this side like this so I put a bevel on there which worked perfectly
that enables me to get tightness right by the saw gives me access with my
fingers around the file going towards the blade okay
what about this one let's say I've got this thick piece of wood and I want to
reduce it to this thickness so I want it this thick what I can do with my scrub
plane now is mark this perimeter now imagine this I'm going to show you one
thing on this but then try and imagine a variety of other things you might need
this for let's say I take this edge down here
like this okay let's say I take the other end down, this is
why I love this plane, you must get one of these, do you have to buy a second
plane no you don't you can just actually take a blade and have a second blade and
use that in your existing Stanley you just don't have the open throat for it.
Isn't that beautiful so what am I doing here I'm using a very common crude scrub
plane to create a chamfer on here so this should just as easily be a raised
panel that's not really what I'm doing right now but it can be used for that so
this is the versatility go along here, like this, get down to
your depth like that so I've got a raised panel that's not what I'm doing as I
said this is me getting this board thinner down to the thickness I want but
yeah so I'm gonna go with a heavier set even to make this a little bit quicker, we've got a video that
shows you how to get this plane in the zone and get it to where I've got mine
but watch this now I've got these outer edges down why did I do that so I can
scrub across here and take the mid section down without chewing up that
outer edge and I just work across my wood like this get the bulk of the waste
down I keep going until I got down but
partway through here I'm going here like this and I'm going down very
quickly so when you look at this surface now what I see on this surface I can see
the undulation of the plane it's up to me now whether I want to keep this
undulation or whether I want to go with my smoothing plane my smoothing plane
will give me a pristine surface like this but I might want the textured
surface again so those are elements of using this what about this what if this
was a rail and I wanted a 45 degree bevel on here how about that does that
work or not let me go around this way same on this one top of a new post top
of a fence post anything like that I want to declare that this is a very
versatile plane and should never be under underestimated I use it all the
time if a board is out to square how to parallel I'll use it to make the board
parallel and I just love it so there is a my chamfer all the way around chamfer
around here it works the same way let's say this board this board is actually
parallel let's say it's not parallel or it's got a wavy edge on there I take
this put it in the vise take my scrub plane like this and I hug off the thick
end like this then it goes down very rapidly then I elongate my strokes like
this I can't do this I can do it with a regular smoothing plane I can do it with
this plane but because it's a finer set plane it take
me much longer so these are my ways of speeding up my work in the everyday of
life and that's what I have for you you get one of these you'll be in the zone
you'll love using one and you'll have it for the rest of your life which is what
I want