The craft of cabinetmaking is all about fitting small things to bigger things. Fitting drawers inside carcases, fitting doors inside carcases, fitting boxes inside other boxes, fitting drawer sides to drawer fronts. To do that successfully and to a high quality demands great skill in the use of good old fashioned hand tools. A tenon saw, a dovetail saw, chisels and marking knives, marking gauges and last, but not least, planes.

A cabinetmaker may have half a dozen planes at his disposal but will probably only be using one for most of the time. That would be a bench plane. Most of the cabinetmakers in my workshop tend to use a medium length number 6 or number 5 bench plane for almost all of their work. We try to machine and dimension components so that with literally one shave they will then push into place so the bench plane becomes a tool of fine accuracy. If it cannot produce a shaving of 0.10 mm then as far as I am concerned it is not much use. 0.10 mm is not a very fine shaving, it is a pretty reasonable cut so it is not as if I am asking the earth. What I want to talk about this month is how a perfectly ordinary plane can be set up for fine workmanship of this kind.

I can well remember the frustration of buying my first plane nearly thirty years ago. The planes in the school woodwork shop had worked so well, we only had to push them along the wood and out from the throat of the plane came this silky shave about 1 inch wide and as long as you could make it. When I got the chance of finding a long enough piece of wood I used to love seeing if I could make a shaving the entire length and then rolling it up to

take home and show my mother. She wasn't, incidentally, very impressed. What she wanted to know about was my progress in mathematics. The plane I was received for my thirteenth birthday was rather different from those that I had previously known. It was made in metal, it had an adjustment and it was much shorter than the big wooden planes in the school workshop. At first I thought this was a very superior piece of equipment until I tried to make it work. I tried following the instructions which told me rather briefly how to sharpen the iron and I got it to work, sort of. However, I never got those yard long silky smooth shavings because I didn't really know how to set the thing up.

Two or three times a year I see people in my workshop, new to the craft, struggling with a brand new bench plane, essentially dealing with the same problems that I was dealing with all those years ago. The problem is basically that a plane straight out of the box will not work. To make it work in even a very crude manner demands a certain amount of setting up. To make it work to the best of its capacity may demand a couple of days of very careful fettling. Though there are several operations in the process of fettling, almost all of them are not included in the instructions provided by the manufacturers. This is an oversight which I feel is unforgivable, if they are to produce a tool that needs attention to make it work properly, they should at least have the courtesy to tell you how to do that work.

Don't get me wrong, I have great sympathy for the manufacturers of bench planes. Like them, I am working in a material which is constantly moving about. Timber is notorious for its capacity to twist and bend once flattened. It is less well know that cast iron also has this infuriating property so plane makers mill the soles of their planes to plus or minus 1.5 thou and then the plane turns itself into a steel banana that would never pass the 1.5 thou test. I am also aware that a bench plane is used very differently by different people. The chap who wants to whack an eighth of an inch off the side of his kitchen door when it jams in the winter is very different from the site ehippy. Now the chippy also doesn't want to spend a lot of money on a plane because he carries it with him on site and he must expect periodically to get tools nicked. However, he is on piece work so he will be wanting an efficient tool that takes off good big shavings of wet softwood without too much fuss. Both of these gentlemen will be fairly adequately provided for by the products of the modern manufacturers though it could be argued that they would be far better served by one of the modern portable electric planes that are capable of reducing a front door to a pile of shavings in less than ten minutes. The final category is a person like you and me. We want a plane that will be a bit more accurate, that is capable of working in dry hardwood and is capable of occasionally working wild or curly grained wood. What I am about to describe for you is the process that will enable you to turn your steel banana into a precision instrument.

first published in The Woodworker Magazine by David Savage in the series CRAFT OF CABINETMAKING 12