Making and Mastering Wood Planes, David Finck (book)

Making & Mastering Wood Planes by David Finck is a thorough guide to understanding, tuning and using handplanes at a high level, whatever sort of plane you use. Finck is a graduate of the College of the Redwoods (now The Krenov School).

The book is ostensibly about the laminated wooden planes that James Krenov made famous in the 20th century, but it goes much deeper and is an excellent primer on handwork itself. It begins with wood as a material, both for making a plane and for planing, then covers the basic tools and techniques needed to make planes and furniture, how to tune a metal plane and how to grind and sharpen its iron.

Building planes is covered in immense detail, and a particularly helpful section covers troubleshooting a wooden plane and getting it back in perfect tune. Finck also covers dressing edges, faces and ends of boards and specialty techniques such as planing thin stock, shooting, planing large surfaces and curved edges, and finishes with scraping with a cabinet scraper and scraper planes.

This revised edition is hardbound with sewn pages and slightly thicker, whiter paper. Published by Lost Art Press and printed in the United States.