Hand planing door bevels is quite time consuming,especially if you have to do 100 of them and they are 10' long oak stiles 1 3/4"thick. You can pay for a power plane in no time. This was not uncommon in commercial construction years ago. Now they are ordered premachined from the door company.Not the same tool, Tom. You can't just carry a lunchbox planer up to a 12' plank and clean up an edge. Or dress down a sticking door edge (or put a slight bevel on it for that matter.
The handheld planer is closer to a jointer than a planer. I've had one for donkeys' years but I hardly ever use it; I'd rather hand plane.
The side fence rotate up and you can use it to plane flat planks like the hand plane. My Dad had one made by Stanley that was a router attachment. He could use the old r-100 "Domey" stanley router in it with the special helical cutter to plane doors or joint boards,and also to flat plane boards.I've always thought of it as a tool for doors. But if it's only one or two doors, I'd rather use a hand plane. Not on my tool wish list.
No curls just slurry,used with water. Similar to a grinder except has depth guide on front and shue on the back to set precise depth. The cutters are heavy diamond impregnated wheels."Seen the cement masons planing brick pavers and concrete with ones with diamond cutters."
-Herb
New one on me; never seen that done. Does it act more like a grinder?
I'm trying to picture removing 'curls' of masonry...![]()
When I get back on my wood lathe I'll see if I'm brave enough to try your method of balancing bowl blanks Theo.Power hand planes definitely are not a precision woodworking tool, not as all as precise as a chainsaw say, but they do have their uses.
When I had my wood lathe, and put an out of balance piece of wood in, I didn't crank it down slow, and use a gouge to take it down. Nope, take the plane and run it back and forth a few passes, and you get that wood in balance, fast. Loads of fun too, noise, lots of wood flying, can't beat it. I've also got some old wooden beams, about 12"X12", that I'll be making Tikis out of. The plane will do a great job of smoothing them out, and rounding the front two edges, fast, and doesn't matter if the wood isn't perfectly flat or round, because they'll be Tikis. I made one or two carving mallets in my lathe too, using the power plane to shape them. It worked, but boy those mallets turned out consderably thinner than planned. If I were to do that again, I wouldn't freehand it, I'd have a board in the back, to rest the front of the plane on, and give me a lot more control.
Before I tried balancing a rough piece of wood in the lathe, got told by a number of people that it wouldn't work, it was dangerous, the blade would catch on a knot, and so on. But I thought about it, then did it. The blades in the plane spin at a bunch of RPMs, and just blast thru a knot like it wasn't there. That plane wasn't catching on anything. I do think things thru before I do them, and do cancel out some ideas, but wind up doing a lot more - with no issues.
Yup!