He must have got that from me, I like to sit the girls down on my shaving horse and sit behind them with my hands over theirs helping to guide the spokeshave. I always ask if they can feel the wood. I like it when the giggle!
I’d think you could ask your dad for carpentry advice.
The guy is a total dork, but the information is good.
I work with a bunch of other ham handed amateurs building amateur theater sets. A master carpenter dropped by one day. Among the things he did that amazed us was to free-hand “rip” an 8 foot length of 2 x 4 into two nominal 1 x 4 planks.
I have to wonder … WHY ???
He isn’t called St. Roy in the handtool woodworking community for nothing.
When cutting tenons with a backsaw, I tend to cut them a bit fat and clean them up with my router plane. This helps ensure that the cheeks remain in parallel with the board. It also means that I need to keep my mortises square when I am chopping them out 
Several tricks and much has been written on this topic, but adding to what’s already been said.
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Using a straight edge (or sighting along the board) and a pair of winding sticks (straight, parallel sticks, just grab some scrap and make em up.) you can determine and mark the high, low and twisted (winded) areas.
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Start removing the highest spots not by planing with the grain, but by traversing across the board with a jack plane (Stanley #5) with a fair bit of camber (radius on the cutting edge) set for a fairly thick cut. Traversing has two distinct advantages. a) you can plane way deeper across the grain than with it and b) your risk of tearout is very minimal. The wood isn’t pretty, but we don’t care about pretty for a while yet.
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once you have a reasonably flat face it’s time to clean up after traversing, an often recommended method and the one I use (unless the board is really small) is to plane diagonally (45 degrees from one side then from the other, criss-crossing)with a jointer plane, like a Stanley #7, till all the traversing marks are removed. The cut can be deeper than normal but not as deep as the traversing depth.
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using the same jointer, dial back the depth and plane with the grain to remove the angled marks, when done, hit it with the smoother and that side is finished.
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Figure out how nice or parallel the none face side needs to be and do the same thing there. Only go as far as traversing or maybe diagonal, or the whole shebang if you need both sides of the board to be pretty. Use a marking gauge to mark all 4 edges at the same thickness and have at 'er with the planes again
There is a lot I am leaving to the imagination and to your Google-fu, but I hope I gave enough info and terminology to get you started.
Of course he’s a dork. He’s a 19th century carpenter.
The Hot and Handy guys were on FOX and Friends this morning. Apparently, they are getting their own TV show.
Your methods are irreproachable, but terminology wise, what you use for the initial truing of the board face by hand is a “scrub plane”. It is of course a jack plane with a pronounced camber, as you said, but "scrub plane " just sounds so much better.
The scrub plane still has its uses, even today …if you have a seriously twisted board (as opposed to simply warped) it is frequently (though not always) quicker, easier, and ensures best use of material to do the initial truing with a scrub plane rather than use the jointer right from the git-go. (power jointer, that is …)
Bones, the answer should be obvious, we needed 1" thick plank, and had only 2 x 4. Why does one cut any length or thickness of wood? because the resulting size is needed.
Sure we could have stopped working, driven to a lumber store, found and purchased a couple of lengths of 1 x 4 plank, driven back to theater, carried the new lumber in from available parking submitted a requezst for reimbursement… or we could have stood there and watched this guy make us two 1 x 4 planks in under 60 seconds. The decision wasn’t hard.
Not quite. A lot of people do use the terms interchangeably, but I am not here. A scrub plane and a jack with a pronounced camber are two different beasts. A scrub is quite a bit narrower, something like between a #2 and #3, with a huge gaping mouth and a blade with a camber that looks more like a carving gouge than a plane blade.
I have, and use, both my scrub and jack for traversing, depending on how horrible the board is to start. But for someone starting out, a true scrub is a luxury not a necessity, whereas a good jack with a decent camber will traverse, begin the edge jointing and even act as a small jointer for small boards.
I am not opposed to using power tools, and quite often do, but when facing a 10" wide board and my 6" jointer, I pull out the planes rather than rip the board in half.
apologies Frank …
I had jumped to the unwarranted conclusion that your man had used a hand ripsaw for the operation …I understand now that he used his circular saw …
A key factor not really mentioned above is that if you’re cutting *with *the grain, you need a saw with rip teeth; if you’re cutting *against *the grain, you need a saw with crosscut teeth. Most backsaws sold these days have crosscut teeth, and if you’re using such a saw to cut tenon cheeks, you’re never going to be able to saw to the line. You have to look specifically for a tenon saw with rip teeth, and be prepared to pay a fair sum for it… or alternatively, have the teeth on an existing backsaw recut – and pay a fair sum for it. And even with the correct teeth, cutting to a line when cutting a tenon of even modest width is not easy, and does not come without practice.
As to using a plane, it’s not as simple as acquiring a plane and getting the iron sharp. There’s a fair bit of know-how involved in getting the plane in trim, and still more know-how in using it to true up a board. There’s nothing automatic about what the plane does. It will just as easily put a board out of true, as into true. People above have given a good description of the methodology, but it’s really a matter of lots and lots of practice. By all means have at it, but don’t expect to get good results right out of the gate.
There’s a reason power tools became so dominant, and it’s not necessarily because they’re faster. It’s because they’re a substitute for skill and experience. With a chopsaw, any random person can make a perfect 90-degree cut with minimal training. With a handsaw, not so much.
Ewww. Ick. What are they, Ken dolls? What is it with looking scraggly above the neck and looking like a piece of plastic below? Thanks, anyway.
Sorry, I’ll stop hijacking now.
I have been trying some experimental carpentry, and by that I mean I don’t really know what I’m doing. I seriously appreciate the detail you guys put into it and I’m stunned at the knowledge presented.
This is why I went with the Lie-Nielson dovetail saw, despite the cost. It comes already set for rip, whereas most manufacturers tell you that you have to reset/refile the saw they send you. I think a lot of the Asian style saws come preset for rip, though.
I never tried that, mainly because my workbench is anything but decent and flat. Sounds like a neat way of doing it.
A similar trick for planing wood is to scribble all over the board with pencil prior to each pass with the plane. This shows you where you have been, helping to even out the planing process. This is a trick that luthiers sometimes use when thinning down the boards used for the guitar top, millimeter by millimeter.
Luthiers sometimes use a toothed plane iron to achieve the same result. Create a toothed plane iron by filing a couple of small notches in the blade. When you use that blade, it will leave tiny raised stripes wherever you have already planed. Then by changing direction on each pass you can evenly thickness-plane a board. Use a regular plane for the last pass.
Not to scare people, but that’s a $125 saw. I’ve always meant to have a go at refiling teeth, just for reasons of economy. It can’t be that hard, can it? Mere dentistry.
I think we’re getting pretty far afield here. A toothing plane is only used on highly figured woods, or woods with wild and difficult grain. And it uses a specialized blade in a specialized plane. If the OP starts filing notches in his plane blade, it will only end in tears and lamentation.
Some tools are worth the extra money, I think. An old Stanley plane like I mentioned works perfectly fine without spending the $300+ that L-N wants for theirs, whereas a Starrett square is definitely worth paying more for, if you can afford it. I found an old Stanley 151 spoke shave online for $20; it’s indestructible.
It isn’t that hard. Hell, I made my first two western handsaws from scratch (well, a roll of spring steel, brass bar and a chunk of bubinga) and filed the teeth in from nothing.
You can check it out here if you wish Click to view the raggedy teeth were cleaned up in a following sharpening, but that saw has cut hundreds of tenons, dovetails and other small rip cuts and only cost me about $25 to make. It needs to be sharpened again and a $7 saw file will do that job easily.
It’s certainly easier to sharpen an existing saw, and I am no where near an expert. However, even a relatively poorly sharpened saw will cut better than a dull saw.
There are some great blogs and websites regarding this topic but I don’t have access to those links right now.
As far as using chalk on your bench, that sounds really messy, it’s not hard to use winding sticks and straight edges to find the high spots and get rid of those. As someone said up thread, planes don’t work by magic, they take some skill, but basic board truing isn’t that tough.
ETA: ChefGuy is correct on the value of Starrett tools I love my Starrett combination square.