Nate Perkins wrote:

But I will not have a joiner or a planer, so I was going to use hand
planes to smooth all of my rough sawn wood. That's why the #4 was
first on the list.

Flattening and thicknessing rough sawn wood with hand planes isn't an easy
undertaking. If you are serious about doing it by hand (the neander
route) then you'll probably want a scrub plane, a jointer plane, a jack
plane, and a smooth plane.

Having come up through this myself, due to space as the overriding
consideration, with money a close second, I can say that you *can* do it
all with a #4 if your projects are smallish. You spend forever
re-adjusting it. A #4 and a #5 is better. Two of each, better still. The
advantage is in having more planes so you can leave them set up different
ways. Or perhaps an easy-to-adjust Veritas might make up for some of this.
Changing the mouth on a Bailey type is tedious, and it's better to set it
and leave it alone.

I don't have a jointer yet, but I do have a Sargent #6 that I hope to get in
service soon (as soon as I drill a tote hole correctly . I also caved
and bought a benchtop mechanical jointer because I really suck at getting
an edge *exactly* perpendicular to a face, no matter how many gadgets I
employ to help me in the process. (Shop built jointer fence followed by a
real LV jointer fence.) It's useful for getting stock consistently flat
too. This one leaves a horrible burnished and washboarded finish on the
wood, but I haven't bothered to tune it up. It saves me from the parts I
can't do very well, and then I can go back in with hand planes and make the
wood look puuuurty without screwing up the flatness and perpendicularity
too much in the process.

Not the real Neander way, and a lame excuse for Normism too, but it gets me
there. Only the results matter, right?

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
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