Handplaning: From the floor up.

Lately Derek Cohen published an interesting article on his website about planing ergonomics. One thing I took from that article was how you push the plane in a heavy(ish) cut with your whole body, not just your arms or shoulders. Ideally you want to keep your elbow low and push with the forearm alomst horizontally.

So, I watched some videos from myself. I can highly endorse to shoot a video when you want to improve a physical skill. That can be humbling, but it is also very instructional. I could see that I am pushing from my legs and hips, but not neccessarilly holding my forearm horizontal. There is room for improvement, so to speak. Pushing from the legs in a heavy cut feels very natural, so I guess most people will do that automatically.

But these videos were done in the old shop with the wooden floor. I have now moved into the garage with a slick painted concrete floor, and it is very slippery indeed! I was preparing some beech blanks for a wild idea to make a plane in the near future. I was really struggling. Beech is hard stuff and I was gliding all over the place. Almost instinctively I was hooking my feet around the legs of the bench, not really an ideal solution.

Good reason to throw some money at the problem and I got an anti skid mat. Instant 100% improvement!

I choose for 60cm width and 250 cm length, bought from http://www.mattenzaak.nl.

Planing works a lot better this way. The next step up though are my shoes. I really like to wear clogs, because I can quickly jump in and out of them when leaving or entering the house. With normal shoes it is easy to drag around a lot of dust and shavings. Years ago I had clogs with an open heel and they are quite useless for planing, you just slip out of your clogs. Then I bought some clogs with a closed heel. Much better, but  they have a very high heel. My workbench is rather low, so the mat plus the clogs is pushing me up quite a bit. I'm still looking for a solution for that one.