Planes are essential to good woodworking for they can perform many tasks far more simply and often better than machines. Learning to use them effectively will improve your efficiency, accuracy, and above all your enjoyment of working wood.

Building any piece of furniture involves many different hand plane skills, the ones we will focus on, from flattening surfaces and smoothing them to a polish, cutting end grain, jointing long grain edges such as for joining two boards, fitting joints, shaping curves and simple molded edges, working to a pattern, fitting a drawer face to an opening, and cutting some useful details.  And of course we’ll talk about sharpening and tuning your planes so they work as effortlessly and accurately as possible, and even about how to integrate planes in your process.