: Someone posted awhile back a type of plane which works best on strips. The
: small plane I have been using seems to really want to bite into the cedar
: strips sometimes causing chunks to rip out.Then the next time on a
: different stripit doesn't even want to cut.TIA
: Steve

The quick answer is don’t use a plane.

It is easier to give a brief answer, but this does not touch on all the reasons for making such a choice. There are many reasons each builder makes a tool choice and much personal history involved in that decision. Sometimes a person is not even aware of the influences governing the choice of a tool.

I don’t expect to change anyone’s ideas about using a plane, who have already used this method on a stripper hull. It’s only natural to defend a method that you have had success with and have invested many hours in developing the skills to master. The only reason for someone to change their work method is because they see the need.

I hope this information will help those newbies, lurking in the shadows of their monitors, to choose a method I believe is much easier and faster.

I expect that a novice builder might pick and choose methods from the many books available on strip building, along with my instructions and plans. I do caution them to take care to not get in trouble doing this. It must be “guy nature” to want to toss out the instructions and forge ahead. I’m certainly guilty. And you take your bumps for it. However, I feel I do have the responsibility (since I’m getting paid for it) to tell my customers what I think is the easiest method. AND I now recommend they stick carefully to whoever’s instructions they start off with unless they want to reinvent the wheel.

I hope you will forgive the length of the following opinion. I am currently in the process of pre-revision thinking on my strip building instruction book. I have more closely looked at and compared the work methods of other builders with my own. I now more clearly realize that techniques taken on their own from one building method and interjected into a different process have the potential of big bumps for a novice. I want to do my best to smooth the road for my builders.

A novice came to the Zen master and said, “Teach me”. Whereupon the master gave the novice a tea cup and pored tea until the cup overflowed onto the floor. “Stop” shouted the novice. “Good” said the master, “Come back when you are like the empty cup and ready to learn.”

Planing is seductive. Ted Moores and Nick talk about how wonderful and satisfying working with a plane is, in their books. I certainly agree. I’ve used planes for many years. I worked in a shop where we built reproductions of 17th and 18th century windows and doors. We planed the wood surfaces with a scalloped blade to reproduce authentic 17th century style wood surfaces. There is nothing like the sweet sound of a sharp plane cutting a curl of wood. The beauty of a planed surface and the curls of wood shavings are inspiring even to someone who has never picked up a plane.

What my plans customers pay for is my years of skill and knowledge guiding them through the strip building process in a way that is as fast and easy as I can make it. I constantly work to find quicker more efficient work methods for myself because I’m building boats professionally. I have deadlines to meet. And in the words of that immortal anonymous contractor “TIME IS MONEY”. Or was it Albert Einstein?

Amateur builders will say, “well, I don’t have a deadline” and “I want to savor the building process”. The reality is that amateur builders do have a deadline. The deadline is your patience for the project. If you don’t set a deadline for yourself or if you get involved with work methods that are not working for you, you will waste a LOT of time. You only have so much psychic energy for the project. If you waste it on slow laborious work methods early in the project you may skip or simplify important details later that could make your boat shine. I’ve seen this repeatedly. Or worse you may give up on the whole project! Building a canoe or kayak is likely the biggest project most people will ever do in their lives. I have no way of knowing how many people who buy plans complete them. My task in authoring plans is to make this big project as easy as possible. I enjoy building boats. When I no longer do, I will move on. I savor the work I do on each boat I build because I have tailored my work methods to be fast AND satisfying. After a few dozen boats the superfluous falls away.

When I hear people talk about using a block plane to fair a hull, I feel the same frustration someone who knows how to use a plane might feel watching someone work with a dull plane.

I have problems with suggesting planing as a method for fairing a stripper in my building plans, especially since I assume most people are beginners.

Sharpening an edge tool like a plane or chisel is one of the most time consuming and challenging skills for any woodworker to develop. I was trained to sharpen chisels by a wood carver. I watched him do it. I got to experience the “feel” of using a really sharp chisel in person. And yet it was still years before I could CONSISTENTLY produce a sharp edge on my own. My test for a sharp edge is to shave the hair on the back of my hand.

To expect a novice to learn to sharpen a plane from directions in a book is expecting a lot! And then how will a beginner know how to adjust the plane for throat opening and depth of cut? Adjusting the plane properly is very important, so you don’t take off too much wood. You don’t have that much to work with on a stripper.

Then, given that this beginner has a sharp blade, they have to learn how to plane with the grain of a piece of wood. On a stripper the grain of each strip may be running in opposite directions. This is a rude trick to play on someone learning to use a plane. We’re talking about tear-out big time. Nick and Ted talk about trying to minimize tear-out in their books by angling the plane blade as you plane, or even by planing perpendicular to the strip length to minimize tear-out.

In the fine article on using a plane in the most recent “WoodenBoat” magazine the author talks about shaping the blade into a scalloped curve, so the corners of the blade will not cut troughs into the wood on flat surfaces. How many people do this with their plane blades? There may not be many flats on a boat, but there will be some problems with this, given the small cut a block plane will make.

Then you must deal with the concave and convex surfaces of the boat. On convex surfaces the plane works as best as can be hoped for, yet because so small an area of material is the focus of the blade how do you know when to stop. What is the objective of using the plane? Is it to take down the high ridges of the strips at the joints of each strip with the next, to round the hull? If this is the object then you must very systematically plane on only the glue joints, as you would cut only the corners of a paddle shaft to make it round. How many beginners will do this and not just take random cuts? Do you take off glue with the plane? Did you take the time to wipe off glue as you stripped, so planing the glue off doesn’t dull you plane quickly? Or do you use a scraper to remove glue before planing?

The beauty of strip building is that the builder relies on the boat forms and the natural stiffness of the wood strips to create a very close to “fair” surface from the start. If a beginner is taking random cuts then they will take their hull surface further AWAY from “fair” rather than closer to it.

On concave surfaces on the outside of the hull and the inside of the hull you must switch to a shaped sole, block plane or a spokeshave. More planes to buy for the novice. New tools to master.

Ted Moores acknowledges the problematic aspect of using a plane on a stripper hull for the first time in his most recent book “KayakCraft”. On pages 105 and 106 of this book he addresses the problems (especially for beginners) of using a plane. And finally, on page 106 at the end of the second paragraph says, “If your planking is tearing out miserably (using a plane), scraping and then sanding with a firm pad and sharp paper is the only answer.”

The need for planing, sanding and fairing rests on the quality of your stripping. I advocate taking the time to pre-fit each strip before it is permanently installed. If you use spring clamps to fix each new strip to the previous one you will see how well it fits, how tight the joint will be and how much persuasion is needed at the stems, before you commit to gluing. Each strip that does not rest firmly against the stations or is not aligned between stations will require ten times the work to make fair. Stripping well is truly an example of the old saying, “ a stitch in time saves nine.” There can be no better time spent than making certain your strips fit right. This is the basis for every extra minute, or every minute less, of work that follows. And if, after your best effort you find you have a section of strips that don’t align, you can fix it by cutting on the glue line and aligning and regluing the strips in their proper place. I don’t tolerate strips that are out of alignment more than 1/64” and use the above technique to correct it.

It may be tolerable even fun for some to plane a canoe or kayak with a block plane but what about doing this on a forty foot boat! Can you imagine someone using this method on a large boat in a professional boatbuilding shop. There is a contracter’s term for how a person using this method would be greeted “You’re fired”. Some may find it fun to plane a hull but it will never be the most efficient method to get the job done.

I believe the idea of using a plane to work the surface of a stripper comes from Ted Moores’ book “CanoeCraft”. When Ted started building strippers the sanding method used by other strip builders was a large 7-9” disk sander (like the ones used in auto body shops) to sand the strip hull. This WAS an onerous task. This tool is very powerful and required great skill to produce a smooth surface. Sanding is done with an edge of the sanding disk, which will cut very quickly, so a rippled surface could easily be the result in unskilled hands. But the worst of it is that there is NO dust removal so you worked in clouds of dust. The only sane place to sand was outdoors. You had to wear a jump suit, full dust mask, dust proof goggles and hope there was a good wind blowing. So I can understand that Ted found working the surface with a plane to be a preferable alternative.

I used a disk sander on my first stripper canoe back in the eighties. I hated it! I almost sanded right through in one spot!

When I worked in professional woodshops in the eighties Random Orbital Sanders came into use and revolutionized sanding technique. This tool combined the spinning, high speed, fast cutting, disk of the disk sander with the full flat surface pad, random sanding action of the old orbital finish sanders. And with the added dustless feature the sandpaper was more efficient and the worker came out of the clouds of dust. Every shop I worked in quickly embraced this new sanding tool. It was a no brainer for me to try a ROS on my next stripper. It worked great and I’ve never looked back.

For any strip builder and especially the novice, I believe using a paint scraper and a ROS is an easier, faster way to prepare your hull for glassing. Everyone has to sand the hull to some extent anyway, why bother with a plane? Simplify.

I suspect that neither Ted nor Nick has used a ROS on a daily basis as I did, so they don’t have the same reasons to love the use of this tool as I do. I’ve always hated sanding. But a ROS with powered dust removal (very important!) makes it almost fun.

I have never build a stripper with 1/4” thick strips. I suspect that the 3/16” strips are easier to twist and fit in place than 1/4” strips. It never crossed my mind to go at it with a plane. The sharpest plane blade in the best tuned plane, set to the finest cut would take off more wood in a second than I care for, using 3/16” strips. The pile of shavings on page 106 of Ted’s “KayakCraft” book is more wood than I care to loose from my hull.

In my instructions for beginners I advocate the use of a long handled paint scraper to ONLY remove glue from the strip joints. The blades are easily sharpened on a belt sander with 120 grit. Round the corners of the scraper blade on the sander, so they won’t gouge. The scraper I use comes with a four edge blade that allows me to shape blades to fit the bilge and other concave surfaces of the hull. This makes work on the inside of the hull particularly easy. Ted in his “KayakCraft” book devotes more time to talking about using a scraper (on pages 103 and 104) than he does about using a plane. However, the scraper he shows has too short a handle. I use a scraper with at lest a 10” handle. The pile of shavings I get with a scraper would amount to about 1/4 the size of the pile of planed shavings Ted shows on page 106 of “KayakCraft”.

The scraper cuts very fine shavings of wood if needed. The scraper can hop or chatter over a surface making small divots, but nothing like the tear out of a plane. The scraper will often cut better if the blade is angled away from the line of stroke. Laying the handle low to the hull or raising it high will produce different cutting results. There is no way a scraper can inflict the kind of damage that can be produced with a misused plane.

After scraping I recommend going straight to sanding with a DUSTLESS random orbital sander connected to a shop vac. I use only a light-weight (easy to hold for hours) 5” variable speed sander with a soft backing pad and 60 grit. This tool and paper grit makes short work of fairing. The ROS disk is used with the whole sanding surface flat against the hull. It is the nature of the ROS sander used this way, which rides on the high spots and levels the surface quickly. A simple continuous back and forth scrubbing type movement assures uniformity. The amount of wood removed is easily controlled even using 60 grit paper, because I use a low power (2 amp) light-weight (3 lb.) ROS. I have tried to sand through a 3/16” flat panel with this set-up and got tired of sanding before I got close to cutting through. If you tilt the sander on it’s edge you can take off material more aggressively. But then you must be well aware that you are making a dip.

It takes me 15 minutes to scrape a hull and less than an hour to fair it sanding. After a good wet down of the wood surface to raise the grain and close all staple holes (bottom only on my boats) another sanding with 100 grit smoothes out any remaining flaws. I finish the hull with 120 grit on a fairing board, sanding with the grain. And on to glassing.

I hope this will guide a few newbies to a smoother road.

To all you others out there with planes sharpened and lunging in my direction, I say isn’t planing fun!

All the best,
Rob Macks
Laughing Loon CC&K