Reply To: On Planes
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[quote quote=313053]In the video, is it me or is that face clearly not flat when he planes the first edge ??
Also, when he marks the reference face, track marks are clearly visible. How can the face be perfectly flat if you can see track lines !? And it follows that the edge will not be at a perfect 90° all along the face.
Actually this is quite good because having started woodworking just a few months ago, I have been wondering how flat should flat be ? How square should square be ? So when I am preparing a board as in this video and I take a look using a flat edge, if any – and I really mean any – light shows between the board and the straight edge, then I will continue working on it. Same goes with squaring up the edges, etc. Am I being a little (or way too much) too finicky. Should I allow some sort of tolerance ?
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Coming from an engineering background, I went through this exact issue. Thinking that I needed something as close to perfect as I could ever get it. I bought fancy straight edges and surface plates for ultra-flat plane soles and spent ridiculous amounts of time flattening boards to within silly tolerances. To this day, I have never found a resource for beginners on “what’s flat / square / good enough for this or that woodworking context?” At least in the Chris Shwarz video above, he somewhat touches on the subject.
For me, Paul’s frequent exclamations “that’s dead on” made the problem worse. To an engineer, such a term implies a very high level of precision, so I thought I had to achieve that in order to have good results in my woodworking. With no other context to correct me, I misinterpreted what Paul meant, and therefore mis-spent a fair bit of time chasing unnecessary levels of precision.
Sadly, I still can’t express what is “good enough”, and for most woodworking contexts, I simply don’t yet know. I can say it appears you never need to flatten to within a thou. Some joinery needs to be precise to a few thou, but there’s a great video by William Ng, where he demonstrates that box joints that are made to within 1 or 2 thou simply won’t go together because they’re too tight, so that was a big help.
Perhaps Philipp or Ed or one of the more experienced woodworkers can share their insights, but it appears to be something learned generally through experience.