Do You Need a Scrub Plane?

The short answer is: that depends on where you buy your wood. Last summer I bout a stack of dunnage wood that had been used to shop pipes on the railroad. The guy selling it said I could take whatever I wanted for $4/board. Knowing that if I was a bit picky I could end up with some really good oak and ash, I loaded the truck. Keep in mind that hardwoods can be anywhere from $3-8 per board foot and I was getting the entire board, 6/4, 8/4, 12/4 and even a little 16/4 for a fraction of what it would cost at a specialty wood store.

So far so good ;0). Oh the possibilities of what I could be building!!! Then you are hit with a rather stark reality, this wood is dirty. Machine dulling, make the planer smoke after a few boards dirty. It doesn’t matter how good you brush it off with a stiff brush, unless you remove that top layer of rough dirty wood, you’ll be replacing blades all day long….which rather defeats the purpose of buying cheap lumber ;0).

Enter the quest for a scrub plane. Scrub planes have a curved blade and are made for one purpose: to hog off large amounts of wood quickly and effectively. I had heard that you could convert an existing plane into a scrub plane and I set out to give it a try. I started with my no. 6 fore plane.

I had talked to a guy about how to do it and read a blog post somewhere about how it’s done, so I set out to give it a go.

I started by marking a curve on the plane iron, then grinding it out with some fairly aggressive sandpaper on the WorkSharp and progressing through all of the grits once I had my shape. Same thing on the chip breaker.

So far, so good everything was going to plan. now for the slightly scarier part, enlarging the opening on the sole of the plane. I drew my lines and started in with a cutoff wheel in the Dremel.

It got a little tricky trying to cut the remaining portion, but somehow I managed and cleaned everything up with a file.

I installed the blade and started to get to work. And it worked ok. If I were to never buy a toll again, I could have gotten by. First thing was I ground the blade at too steep of an angle and it tended to round over and dull rather quickly. Then there was the chip breaker, because I had ground through the sides, it did not have good contact with the iron at the edges. Third thing was I had a hard time retracting the blade enough. I’m sure there is someone out there who has a simple solution to this problem, but since it worked better than nothing, I got to work.

Once I got to work with it though, I realized my final problem: a no.6 fore plane is a heavy piece of iron, and if you have a stack of lumber you need to clean up, you’re definitely going to feel it in your shoulders.

No worries, I had an extra no 4 Handyman plane to try it with again. This one was definitely going to work! It was smaller, so it wouldn’t be as tiring to use.

At the end of the day, it had many of the same frustrations as the no.6 and in a moment of frustration/weakened I up and bought a Stanley scrub plane off of eBay.

And finally there was less frustration. The iron is thicker, there is no chip breaker for chips to get caught in. Right out of the box it hogged wood off a board like a dream compared to my home made versions. It’s light, you don’t have to throw around pounds of iron to remove wood, the rounded cutting edge does that for you. As long as there aren’t big gnarly knots to contend with it does exactly what it was intended to do. And that is the mark of a good tool!

So to answer the question, do you need a scrub plane? I would recommend just buying an actual scrub plane if you do. Not that adventures in plane modification can’t be fun, they just might also be frustrating :0).

Don’t forget to hit the follow button, or like my page on Facebook “Girl with a Hand Plane” for more projects and tips!