A block plane is a small metal-bodied

woodworking Woodworking is the skill of making items from wood, and includes cabinet making (cabinetry and furniture), wood carving, woodworking joints, joinery, carpentry, and woodturning. History Along with Rock (geology), stone, clay and animal parts, ...

hand plane A hand plane is a tool for shaping wood using muscle power to force the cutting blade over the wood surface. Some rotary power planers are motorized power tools used for the same types of larger tasks, but are unsuitable for fine-scale planing, ...

which typically has the blade bedded at a lower angle than other planes, with the bevel up. It is designed to cut

end grain Wood grain is the longitudinal arrangement of wood fibers or the pattern resulting from such an arrangement. Definition and meanings R. Bruce Hoadley wrote that ''grain'' is a "confusingly versatile term" with numerous different uses, including ...

and do touchup or finish work. It is typically small enough to be used with one hand.

Description

Block planes vary in length from . The most common standard angled block planes have the blade angled at ~20°. Low angle block planes have the blade angled at ~12°.

Origin

According to Patrick's Stanley Blood and Gore, Stanley marketing materials describe the origin of the name of this tool as follows: "A Block Plane was first made to meet the demand for a Plane which could be easily held in one hand while planing across the grain, particularly the ends of boards, etc. This latter work many Carpenters call 'Blocking in', hence the name 'Block' Plane." Tradition also claims that the block plane gets its name from its traditional use to level and remove

cleaver A cleaver is a large knife that varies in its shape but usually resembles a rectangular-bladed hatchet. It is largely used as a kitchen or butcher knife and is mostly intended for splitting up large pieces of soft bones and slashing through ...

marks from butchers' blocks that were built with the end grain facing up. It is a common modern error to refer to older wooden-bodied bench planes as block planes, as they were made from a block of wood. Historically, the term “block plane” was not used before it was applied to small metal-bodied planes, which were designed and produced beginning in the 1860s.

Usage

A block plane is frequently used for paring end grain. This is possible because a block plane has its blade set at a shallow bed angle, allowing the blade to slice through end grain more efficiently; furthermore, for this to work, the plane is frequently held at an angle sometimes as much as 45 degrees to the direction of travel, so that the cutting edge slices the wood fibers as they pass from one end of the cutting edge to the other. A block plane has many other uses in woodworking. Typically, it is used for cleaning up components by removing thin shavings of wood in order to make a component fit within fine tolerances.

Chamfer A chamfer or is a transitional edge between two faces of an object. Sometimes defined as a form of bevel, it is often created at a 45° angle between two adjoining right-angled faces. Chamfers are frequently used in machining, carpentry, fu ...

ing (angling square edges) and removing

glue Adhesive, also known as glue, cement, mucilage, or paste, is any non-metallic substance applied to one or both surfaces of two separate items that binds them together and resists their separation. The use of adhesives offers certain advant ...

lines are some of the other uses woodworkers find for the block plane.

References

{{Hand tools Planes Hand tools Woodworking hand tools