Reply To: Small steps into a new world
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An hour for two boards! You’ll exhaust yourself before getting to the joinery. Strongly consider making or buying a scrub plane and / or a fore plane. Having both is ideal — you’ll find for many aspects of woodworking that the Chris Schwarz approach of “coarse, medium, fine” gets you there far more efficiently. So first the rough tool to do most of the work, then the medium tool to set you up for success, then the fine tool for that perfect result.
An example of coarse, medium, fine with sharpening stones: you wouldn’t take your chipped, rusted blade to a strop — you’d die of old age before it got sharp, right? First you go to the grinder (or coarse sandpaper, or coarse stone), then you work up the grits to the finest.
With saws: You might buck a log with a lancetooth crosscut saw, cut boards from that log with a 2-3 ppi frame saw, dimension those boards with a 10 tpi panel saw, and do joinery with an 18 tpi dovetail saw.
And with planes: A #40 will eat as much as 1/8″ of wood per pass in some soft woods. A fore plane can probably do 1 mm per pass or somewhere in that ballpark for softer woods. All the way down to your smoother, set to take less than a thou per pass.
A Paul Sellers-style, converted #4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN5QSTaVzRQ) is more of what I’d call a fore plane (light camber on the blade), but still much better than taking thin shavings with a flat iron, and you can make one easily, as Paul shows in the video. A Stanley #40 style scrub plane is amazing in how fast it can hog off material, and will leave a fore plane in the dust. Since it’s such a rough tool, it doesn’t need to be finely tuned (just make sure the blade is reasonably sharp), so it’s an easy first plane to make, or inexpensive to buy used, since, again, it doesn’t need to be in flawless condition.
The important thing: they’ll make dimensioning easy enough to where you won’t burn out, or start to dread the process. Lots of beginning woodworkers give up on hand tools because of the volume of work involved with dimensioning. Two of the least expensive planes, a fore and a scrub, will enable you to avoid that unpleasantness, and focus on learning the skills rather than recovering from exhausting workouts.
If you’re always going to be buying S4S lumber from a quality lumberyard, then maybe the Paul Sellers converted #4 (or other fore plane) is enough. A good lumberyard will generally have thicknesses from 1/2″ on up, so if you need a 3/4″ inch thick board, you can just buy one. Buying lumber very close to your final requirements means less time spent thicknessing, so you can sort of do what Chris Schwarz does in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_96gNMMc_g and be ready for joinery very quickly. If, OTOH, you’re getting very rough boards, or even logs, then you’ll be very happy to also have the scrub plane, and a wider variety of saws, too.