Part Three The Sharpest Tools In The Shed

The final part of our series on sharpening woodworking hand tools focuses on the various commonly used hand planes and their blades.

- Tobias Lochner

Sharpening hand-plane blades is essentially the same process as sharpening chisels and other edge tools. Your aim is to create the finest arris you can, at the highest abrasive grit possible.

They might look similar but, no, hand planes aren’t all the same – the different types perform a wide variety of functions. A smoothing plane, for example, will have an entirely different blade-edge shape to a scrub plane. When compared to a router plane, a shoulder plane has a completely different angle of attack (called the pitch), and the pitch geometries of standard angle hand planes differ substantially to those of low-angle hand planes.

The table below shows a list of the most commonly used hand planes. Whether the plane is a smoother, jointer, trying or apron plane, it’s important to understand the difference between ‘standard-angle’ plane beds and ‘low-angle’ plane beds. All standard-angle plane beds (known as frogs) are manufactured at 45°, and low-angle plane beds are usually milled at 12°, as part of the body of the plane. Standard angle plane blades all sit in the ‘bevel-down’ format while low-angle plane blades sit in the ‘bevel-up’ format.

The most cost-effective way to change your plane blade’s pitch is to start with a low-angle version of the plane you need and then have a few blades sharpened at different bevels specifically for that plane. This approach will provide you with a few different planes in one, all at a much lower cost than having a number of planes each with different frog pitches. Another bonus of going this route is that almost all low-angle hand planes feature adjustable mouths, which can be advantageous in your work.