How many people finish right off the hand plane?

[Greg Berlin]

I was wondering how many people apply their finish right from the hand plane vs sanding before finish? I've tried both, but I can't decide.

[Daniel Hartmann]

I usually aim to finish off the plane, the less time I spend sanding the better. Usually though I just end up keeping the sanding to a minimum. I'll plane, the scrape then quick finish with 220.

[Frederick Skelly]

I've been going right from my smoother to the finishing table, unless Im using water-based dye. Sanding pretty much required then.

[David Dalzell]

Depends on the wood (or my handplane skills?). I try for a finish with a plane. If I am not satisfied then I sand until I am satisfied.

[Stan Suther]

Most of my work is in walnut. I plane, scrape the gnarly spots, then even things out with a light sanding with some 220-320. Looks good enough to impress friends and relatives.

[paul cottingham]

Finish from the plane. Little flaws dont bug me at all, and I hate -hate- sanding. Flaws add character.

[Kees Heiden]

Usually I try, but often need some scraper work or light sanding. But the days I would go outside and pester the neighbourhood with the screeming noise of the ROS are long gone, luckily.

[Warren Mickley]

I stopped sanding in 1978 when I realized that the surface I got from the plane was superior. I had stopped using a scraper a year or two earlier. I use water stains almost exclusively. There is no need to sand after using water stains if the surface is nicely planed.

[Prashun Patel]

I am surprised and intrigued that people use all three methods together. I can understanding not being able to plane perfectly, requiring correction with either sandpaper or a scraper, but why both together?

On narrow parts that receive little raking light, like aprons or drawer fronts, I am comfortable finishing off the plane. But for broad surfaces, track marks continue to plague me and are harder to detect until final finish, so I prefer to sand after flattening - from 150 or 220 and up as the specific case demands.

[paul cottingham]

Cambering plane blades will lessen track marks. I really like the look of soft undulations on the wood left by the camber. Clipping the edges of the plane blade with a file helps as well.

[David Weaver]

I try not to sand, it doesn't always work out, but I try not to when I can help it. I don't stain anything except replacement stuff for the house (trim woodwork where the color is already set) and then I sand that, but I don't have a whole lot of regard for stuff that stays in the house.

If I can't get away with planing, I'll scrape, but then I do a light scrape to a whole piece to try to get it uniform. There are two schools that I can think of, and one is the planed surface school, where some minor imperfections are tolerable, and the other is the sanded school where the entire surface is supposed to look as uniform as possible, though at the cost of some of the life that the wood shows when it's planed.

There are also supposedly definitive tests by magazines where they say "no difference between a planed and sanded surface", but that just isn't the case. One of us on here, whether it's me or someone else should take a 2 foot stick of rather plain looking wood and then finish it with shellac, take a picture and then take the same stick and scrape off the finish and sand the same surface to something like 320, vacuum out all dust and then shellac and finish it again. There is an element of depth that exists in the planed surface that the sanded surface doesn't have, but it comes at the cost of perfect uniformity in the surface. you can't really have both, at least in my opinion, unless the wood you're using is absolutely perfect wood with no variation in it.

[Daniel Rode]

I've been sanding before finishing for many years. It's what I know and it works well enough for me. I dislike the dust but I want all the surfaces to have the same texture before I finish. Having one part planed, another scraped and a third sanded probably doesn't make much difference but I don't like the inconsistency and it looks different to my eyes.

Planing and scraping reduce the amount of sanding I need to do significantly. In fact, I mostly just use 220 lightly after planing or scraping. Perhaps with time and confidence, I'll do some without any sanding.

[Tony Shea]

I hate to be a snob but for the last 3 or 4 years I have been doing very little sanding and when I do sand I hate every moment of it. Most of the success with a hand plane is due to the wood I end up using. My shop has turned into a 90% hand tool shop therefore most of my wood dimensioning is done by hand. In order to work this way I have been doing a lot with mild grain wood. Even with an iffy spot in the wood I will change planes to something that will give me the surface I'm after. Curved edges is where I end up scraping and sanding, I have no planes that can smooth large curved surfaces glass smooth.

[Greg Berlin]

That's what I figured. I have a project I'm working on with some reversing grain, but I hate sanding. I've rectified some of that by scraping where I got a little tear out and I was planing using my BU Smoother with 50 degree blade in it, but the tearout, while minor, has been inevitable to some degree. I've pretty much scraped the entire surface and I don't plan on sanding it. I'm hoping it will come out nice. Finishing is like the bane of my woodworking. There's too many options and I can't decide on a method I like. It seems like the minwax wipe on poly has worked well for me on projects in the past. The wood I'm using is a african walnut (Dibetou) which has been pretty good to work by hand. Probably similar to sapele. I might hit that with a little tung oil or something and then finish with wipe on poly to get the grain to pop hopefully.

[Daniel Hartmann]

I plane until I can't make the surface any better. Sometimes that's good enough other times scraping is required. If I scrape some areas I blend it all in by sanding with 220. In that case all three are used and not superfluously. And, in my opinion that's the fastest route as opposed to sanding alone.