Feeding a rabbet plane

[Sam Stephens]

is it just me or do rabbet planes like to nip and bite fingers? I try to be good and feed it wood regularly, but once it gets a taste for human finger tips, mine seems all to eager to take a few more bites.

[Matthew N. Masail]

try some bloodwood, might cure it.

[David Weaver]

Rabbet planes, bullnose planes and shoulder planes lead to tiny fingertip bleeders that you don't feel and you don't notice until the drops of blood have soaked into unfinished wood.

[James Taglienti]

My most bloodthirsty planes are my LV side rabbet and the nickers on my 289.
The side rabbet usually cuts me on its way out of the toolbox, before it even sees wood!

[phil harold]

need to get a rabbetstop

[Jim Koepke]

It is all in the care and handling. Handled carefully (and lovingly) most rabbet planes will purr through wood and not be hungry for flesh.

jtk

[glenn bradley]

Rabbet planes, bullnose planes and shoulder planes lead to tiny fingertip bleeders that you don't feel and you don't notice until the drops of blood have soaked into unfinished wood.

What he said . BTW, a little steam can help lift the blood stain out if it happens (as always) to drop right in the middle of a show panel.

[Derek Cohen]

http://www.inthewoodshop.com/Furnitu...atePlanes.html

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Jim Matthews]

I took a class with Matt Bickford in the proper use of hollows and rounds for moldings.

It was months before the moon shaped scars cleared.
It's the requirement of rabbet planes to have an iron that's sharp on three edges -
that's what makes them bloodthirsty.

They're the mosquitoes of the hand tool world.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

I still knick my hands on the skewed rabbet occasionally. If I'm going to use it for any length of time, sometimes I put on a thin pair of leather gloves because I know I'm an idiot and I'll probably not pay attention and knick myself. It's that very sharp corner that gets you . . .

Looking at Derek's post/link, I've got another reason I like my wooden filletster plane - the blade isn't exposed on the non-working side, so no matter how thick the fence is, at least I know I'm not hitting myself on one side of the darn thing!

In all actuality, sometimes the worse cuts for me, when using a rabbet plane, is when I've got my fingers wrapped around the bottom to act as a make-shift fence while starting the cuts, and actually slice up my fingers on the wood and not the steel. Splinters, too, on something stringy like oak. Since it's going to get planed away (and I don't need to ride my fingers so tight on the stock once the cut has begun) I usually chamfer the edge slightly. Cuts from wood (which I seem to accumulate more often than cuts from edges - I put a huge gash in my palm from a piece of S4S mahogany bringing it home from the lumberyard once) are worse than cuts from steel - they heal a lot slower.

I work in a clean room semi-conductor fab, so I'm wearing rubber gloves constantly, it seems like the sweating and the impermeable gloves does something to my ability to get callouses, so my fingertips cut more easily than I'd like compared to how things were when I was younger. I need a thimble more when sewing, that's for sure.

[allen long]

As Derek had warned in his LV PM-V11 chisel review, rabbit planes are not the only thing that feed on flesh. Of course, I didn't believe that the flats were sharp (if my high school music teacher could hear me now . . . ) This is actually a single wound:


When I crank my fingers in chisel guiding mode, the marks precisely measure 1/2" apart. Why is it that these type of shop badges of dishonor seem to hurt longer than when you cut significantly deeper - or so I have been told.