Can a hand plane joint boards better than a planer and table saw?
Check out this video where I pit a jack plane against thickness planer and table saw sleds. If you don’t have a jointer, this video is all about finding the most effective alternative!
As many of you know I don't have a jointer and instead I use a combination of sleds with my planer and my table saw to do a similar function. But the question's been asked, Hey, so why don't you try using a hand plane? So I'm gonna put that thought to the test.
So my methodology for this is pretty simple. I've got two pieces for my bedside tables that I'm making from the exact same board. This one's a little bit gnarly here, so I'm actually going to give an advantage to the hand plane by putting this one through the planer and the table saw. But this one down here, we're going to use the hand plane to get it smooth. Before we go any further, I wanna know which you think is going to win. So pause the video, go down into the comments, leave your guess and then watch the rest of the video to find out how it goes. I like you all too much to subject you to the poor audio quality of this particular clip. So let me just summarize what I am so Animatedly telling you, basically I think that there are going to be certain aspects of the milling process that it may be worthwhile to use a hand plane over my normal machine based process. And so I'm going to end up breaking down the time for face jointing and edge jointing for each plus give you a total time so that you can pick and choose if you want to and you want to experiment with this where your time is best spent with a hand plane and where it really isn't.
The first step in my milling process is to get one face flat enough so that it doesn't rock on my work bench. So that's what you see me doing here. I'm going back and forth between the table saw, which I know is a flat reference surface, seeing where it is that it's pivoting and then I'm just trying to plane out those high points until I get a nice flat surface. Once I had that, I checked to see if there were any peaks on the other side of the board. And here you see me trying to plane that out to get it so that the board side to side is fairly even.
There was a lot of back and forth here between checking, seeing if there's any light anywhere, which shows that there's high spots and low spots and then planting out the high spots until no more light shows through. I used a combination of the sole of my plane and then also used my winding sticks just to mark the high locations so that I could plane them out like I'm doing right here. Once I'd gotten rid of all of the cupping that I could see, I then used my winding sticks to check for any kind of twist in the board and went back and did this a few times until finally I got to this point here, which you'll see, I'll show you right here as I'm going down, both of those red marks on the back winding stick disappear at the same time. So I use a little fish to mark everything done. Okay, so that was the face got one face, got the bottom level enough so that I could actually keep it flat on my workbench. Got the face jointed and now we're going to joint an edge. One thing I will already say is while everyone seems to think that hand planting is cleaner with my electric tools, I have things that are collecting the dust and on this I do not, which is honestly really annoying.
Okay, grain's going the other direction. I've gotta say that having easy access to some sort of wax to apply to the sole of the plane is absolutely essential if you're gonna be doing this a lot. I worked up quite the sweat doing all of this, but the wax made it so much easier to push the plane. There's this little thing here I want to get rid of, so we're gonna plane down and then we'll get nicer once we're past that. I think it's funny that all YouTubers seem to have some Woodpecker tools and so I splurged and I bought myself a $29 Canadian woodpecker square just so that if anybody asks do you own anything from woodpecker? I can say yes, I do. Yeah, the edge closest to me is high, so I've gotta fix that. Now at this point here, using a jointer would actually be done. And what we would actually be into doing at this point is I would run this through my planer this way to get this surface coplanar with this surface. And then we've got this surface here that we just jointed as well. And then I would run this against the fence going through the table Saw. Now to finish this whole board by hand I would actually need to cut this to my final dimension, which I'm not ready to do at this exact moment. I think what I'm going to do here is I'm going to say that this is the end of the hand planing.
If you've stuck with me this far, I hope it means that you're finding this content useful or entertaining. So if that's the case, it would really mean a lot to me if you would go ahead and click that like button. And if you haven't already subscribed, be sure to subscribe. even click that notification bell. It really helps me out and it'll make sure that you see more of these videos in the future. If you're curious how I made this edge jointing jig for my table saw, I have an entire video on the process, I'll put that in the card at the top. And the great thing is that I show you exactly how you can make one too. So at the end of it all, I've got two boards. I've got this one here, which was jointed by the planer and the table saw and I actually went ahead and did both edges here and one face. And we have this board here, which was jointed by the hands plane and on one edge. And so what you'll see is the planer and table saw combo took this long and the hand plane took this long.
So really the, the important thing to note is use a hand plane if you want to, but you're not saving time. Whatever your preferred method is, just have fun with it. I'm glad that I have been using some hand tools, but I can't say that it's going to replace the machinery that I've grown accustomed to using. I can't imagine spending an hour and 20 minutes to do two sides of every single board in this project. What I will say though is the finish on the hand planed boards is beautiful and I can totally see myself going after the planer and just doing a quick kind of run through with the hand plane. I think that would be really good when things are really quiet outside and I don't want to make a lot of noise for the neighbors that could also see that being a time where I'd use hand planes. But otherwise, yeah, do what you want, but I'm I'm not a complete hand plane convert. Though I still think you should have hand planes. It's, it's pretty fun. If you enjoyed this video, I've got more like it on the way. So be sure to subscribe and click the notification bell. And then after you do that, why don't you check out a few of these videos. I think that you'll really enjoy them.