By watching paper-thin curls of wood coming out of a plane… OK, I am. This video is a 2005 Nishiyama Ookananna planing demo that shows just how perfect the curls of wood can be coming out of a Japanese plane…
It’s just poetry in motion… Something I hope to aspire to accomplish sometime in my woodworking career.
The follow up would be how did he get that blade that sharp.
Amazing, and yes, I watched the whole thing.
OK. So, recently you introduced me to Wood Porn. Now, you’ve gone and shown me the wonderful world of Plane Porn. If you keep down this road, my wife is gonna start the “I Hate Tom” support club.
Vic –
Wait until I get you into handsaw porn… I’ll have to keep looking over my shoulder!
Hey Tom,
That is impressive.
My first plane was a white oak Japanese plane. I still have it and it performs exactly as you see in the video.
However, I think that it’s important to keep in mind what we use our planes for. In Japan, there is a whole community of guys, like the one in the video, for whom the product of the plane is a perfect SHAVING, not the perfect SURFACE. They don’t make furniture, or toys, or anything that they can sell, or hand down to their kids, they just make perfect shavings.
I have other motivations.
Tom
Tom – an outstanding observation. So often in hand tools, we get focused on the waste and not the final product. This is so prevalent, that I have seen people recoil in horror when the check out the chips that come off the wood when I hit it with my No. 26 Union transitional fore plane. “Aren’t hand tools supposed to cut finer than that?”
Not when I’m trying to flatten out the board. I get to the whispies when I work with the finishing plane.