St. James Bay scrub plane.

[Jim Koepke]

My beat up #5-1/4 being used as a scrub has been mentioned previously. Here are some pictures:

The work is held one way with the end vise and a piece of scrap and some wedges are used to keep it from moving sideways. Usually the wedges do not have to be tightened any more than a squeeze of the fingers.

Driving the Wedges.jpg

This plane was a bad deal on ebay, but when you have lemons...

Bad Mouth.jpg

Note the cracks at the sides of the back of the mouth.

For small stock the small size of the #5-1/4 works great for me:

Chips A Flying.jpg

This goes pretty fast for getting rid of the saw marks and the cupping. It was followed up with a #5-1/2 and then a #4-1/2. Any other combinations are likely to end up with similar results.

The small blade on the #5-1/4 make it easy to push though a thick shaving. A wider blade would likely increase the effort needed.

jtk

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

The 5 1/4 always seemed like an ideal size to me for some of these jobs. Maybe I'll start to keep an eye out for one again. Thanks, Jim.

I've just been using my BU, LN jack with a heavily cambered blade for these tasks, but I've been lately swapping blades in it seems like more of hassle. I've been working almost exclusively with borg poplar lately, though, so I haven't been doing much heavy surfacing. But I've got a couple of projects in mind that mean getting "real" wood, which means working from rough again, so maybe trying something new is in order.

[steven c newman]

Have two jacks set up with the cambered iron. I also have that little HF Windsor #33 set up as a 3" R cambered scrub plane. About the same size as a #3 plane. It is about like a #40, that one can buy for $10.

The 5-1/4 I have gets used like a long #3 smoother plane. Very little, if any, camber to the iron. The Sargent #414c, and the Corsair C-5 are very good jack scrub planes. Corsair has a "Schwarz" 8" camber, the sargent a little less.

Seemed to work quite wellDSCF0035.jpgJunior jack in the middle. Ohio Tool Co. 05c in front..