The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Coloring Finishing And Painting Wood
If a hand magnifier or microscope, magnifying about 18 times, is turned on a piece of so-called smooth wood, the surface which was supposed to be smooth is found to be rough; sometimes very rough, in the case of ring-porous woods such as oak, Fig. 1. A few minutes of microscopic study will prove to any one that it really takes very great care to produce a smooth surface on a piece of wood. The broken fragments of wood cells under a strong glass sometimes look like the tree trunks of "down timber" on a burnt over area on a mountainside or great plain. The coarser defects of an improperly-finished surface are easily visible and objectionable to the ordinary eye, but a microscopical examination sometimes reveals undreamed-of roughness on a carelessly-scraped or inadequately sanded piece of wood.
No surface is ready for the wood-finisher that shows marks made by the machine-planer in dressing or surfacing the board to thickness. Such marks cannot be sanded out by hand, but must be carefully removed by a smoothing plane, or scraped out by a scraper-plane; or both may be used to advantage on some woods. Sometimes fragments of fibers are torn out by a machine or hand plane leaving ragged rough spots.
Such places must be scraped out, or may be removed by a sanding-machine. Hand-sanding will not remove such defects, and only a novice will attempt such a procedure.
3. Planing the Surface by Hand.—The first operation in the preparation of the surface of a piece of wood is, usually, planing with a hand-plane, using a smooth-plane after the rougher parts have been gone over with a jack-plane. Edges are frequently finished with a jointer in order to have them as straight as possible. In school and home shops where it is not practicable to have a plane for each purpose the most satisfactory all-round plane for general use is an iron jack-plane, about 14" or 15" in length, with a 2" cutter. For children in the grades the junior jack-plane or smooth-plane may be substituted for the standard jack-plane in case the pupils are too small to use the larger plane without undue effort.
