Planecraft - Hand planing by Modern Methods

By C.W. Hampton, E. Clifford, Edward Hampton, Charles William, and Clifford

Book Overview

The pride of craftsmanship which has distinguished all woodworkers since birth of the Craft is undoubtedly traceable in a great measure to the intimacy which must necessarily exist between the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0918036003
• ISBN13: 9780918036001
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Woodcraft Supply Corp
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Plane old woodworking

Power tools seem to cause amnesia - once someone has gotten used to routers and table saws, they seem to forget the hand tools that did the same jobs for thousands of years. This book comes from the end of that era, not so many years ago. Originally (and still) a how-to book for the tool user, it's also a reminder of how things used to be done. When someone thinks of a plane today, it's probably a simple block plane or maybe a longer jack plane. This book goes way beyond that, to planes specialized for end grain, ploughs for cutting grooves and dadoes, planes planes concave or convex curves, shapers, rabbeting tools, tools for fiberboard, and lots more, profusely illustrated with photos and line drawings. The drawings are quite legible, but some of the photos have suffered in reproduction - still, I'd rather have this book with poor reproduction than not have it at all. In order to explain some of the more elaborate contraptions, the authors describe woodworking projects where each feature becomes useful. Much of the book's content is well beyond the introductory level, even though the authors are careful to address the needs of students and their educators. (It seems quaint now that students were always "boys.") Throughout all that, this is largely a 250-page ad for Record woodworking tools. Except for a few references to planes in history, back to the Greeks and Romans, every tool is identified by its model number in the Record catalog. The writer was careful, though - the only way to get readers to sit through such a long commercial is to give something of real value in return. The authors do that so well that even now, more than 70 years after the original edition came out, the book is still in print and still useful to today's woodworker. Planes aren't as central or diverse an element of the modern toolbox as they once were, but they're still useful and perhaps deserving of more use. This book does a lot to encourage that. //wiredweird