why i cant plane this piece of oak ?

Could be a few things ……planing against the grain? Too much set? I assume your blade is sharp……what exactly is going on when you attempt to plane?

What angle do you sharpen with and how do you know you are really sharp? Sorry about the questions in case they sound too basic, but I used to struggle thinking I was sharp when I wasn’t. My biggest challenge was some recycled wenge flooring boards so far. Nasty, but a great lesson. Made me reconsider my sharpening technique, for planes and scrapers.

Paul has some blog entries that mention that at one point it just “clicks” what sharp really is. You start to see that everything else before was really not sharp.

Hej Sagi,

My humble contribution to answering your question is that it might be the properties of the oak that is holding you back.

The two pieces of oak on one of the attached photos, I think illustrates the issue. The faces of this heartwood cut the grain “tangentially”, which exposes a lot of latewood, which in itself puts up a lot of resistance, further enhanced by the crystallised extractives of the heartwood. [According to the expertise at my local timberyard, the main advantage of quartersawn wood is that the tangential aspect of the cut ends up on the long edge (doesn’t apply to quadratic cross sections, of course)].

My approach is to begin the planing with perpendicular strokes, then diagonal ones, and finally along the grain – with scant hope of anything but the thinnest shavings. A lengthy process, frequently interrupted for sharpening.

Good luck

Send a picture of the end grain….

I didn’t believe this tip until I tried it. The thickness of the shaving is limited by how far back the cap iron is from the edge of the plane iron. The plane edge can only dig in as far as the cap iron allows it to. Especially for planing across the grain, make sure the cap iron is set back at least 3-4 mm from the edge of the iron.

And as Sven-Olof Jansson suggests, first plane across the grain and then diagonally across the grain. Use a jack plane with heavy set, or a scrub plane. You can get a slab such as in your photo very close to flat surprisingly quickly that way. Then your planing along the grain is smoothing (taking out the ridges from the passes across the grain) rather than flattening.

Sagi,

If your board is not flat, then you may experience the effect of not cutting until you extend the blade too much.

Also, the bevel of the blade should be around 25 – 30 degrees. If the bevel is too steep, then the cutting edge may not engage the wood and the plane is riding on the bevel belly over the wood.

I recently had a similar problem with a piece of a wood called cumaru, wich is extremely hard. The main problem wasn´t that the plane didn´t cut: it was the MASSIVE amount of reverse grain and tear out I had to deal with. In an area of 0.5m of wood, I oftenly had to change the direction of planing, even with my planes cutting really well.

The solution came from my father in law.He suggested me to use a tooth planed iron. Have you ever tried it? After several passes with it, using my planes on the wood was like cutting butter with a hot knife. It´s true that you spend more time by doing this, but it´s worth it. Also I keep the cap iron as close as possible to the iron (1mm may be) and as mentioned in other reply here, I would try to plane in many directions: diagonal, etc, to achieve the final result.

Hope you have fun and resolve the issue!