That is amazing!
Thanks for the video Kazuma, and thanks for sharing Mako.
Pretty inspiring. It makes me want to sharpen a handplane
I did a board last year with minimal use of the planer because I was worried my a-hole, summer house, neighbors behind me were going to complain to the city. Other than skinning the blank and a pass or two to get the thickness down I did the rest with a very sharp low angle block plane, a surf-form and my sanding blocks. A good razor sharp bock plane is a very effective and accurate tool. Other than a lot of extra elbow grease it was more precise than using a power planer. You’re just making a lot of passes removing 1/64th" at a time. The razor knife trick he used to take down that first rail band was pretty slick.
True hand shaping. No mechanically generated electron flow involved.
Nice find mako.
Very interesting. One of the things I noticed is that was counting his strokes with the plane, sanding block, and screen so that they were the same on each side as worked. The key to symmetry. Also, I love the zipper sound of the plane on the stringer. It’s almost musical. Thanks for posting.
I liked when he dropped the planer. It gave me a “even the pro’s do it” moment. At the end, he shows a closeup of the tail with two gashes taken out of it. How would you go about fixing those up?
Toward the end, when he is showing the finished blank, notice the irregularities that are disclosed by the side lighting. If you have a practiced eye, it will jump out at you.
…the shoe of the electric planer (or a big big one hand planer) is to efficient have clean smooth passes; is not totally accurate with this other tool as Bill is remarking; plus he has those shapes etc in the rack walls without proper rests.
Hi Bill - With all due respect, if you check the Youtube video directly, the shaper himself admits to it being a rush job, no template, etc… I think he did a pretty good job of showing what can be done without power tools.
“I just shaped myself a new board using only 4 basic hand tools. Why? Because I can. Opposite of what the media tells us, shaping a professional level board does not take technology or special tools. *No I would not give this product to a customer, to make it perfect it would take me 4 hours of measuring and whittling to get it perfect. At the end of the video, I double check the symmetry and I think you will be surprised at how exact a no measurement shape can be.”
Can you go into more detail about what you said regarding the shapes etc in the rack walls without proper rests? Thanks.
…hi Monkstar1, is in order to have the shapes in the walls racks (even more in the glassing steps) supported on a plane. Do this with 2 points in one rack and 1 point in the other.
It’s serendipitous you posted this Mako224 - in about a month or so I’m intending to make a board in EPS using pretty much the same tools as in the video; a couple of my grandad’s old handplanes, a small finger/razor plane, and sandpaper (a few different grades over some pads of varying stiffness). Great to see some footage of someone else actually doing it 
I was thinking of putting together a hotwire to do the rail-band cuts, but the stanley knife used in the video seems to do the job ok (wish there was a more close-up view of how clean those railbands he cut were to see just how good that technique is). Come to think of it, you could do the railbands using the sandpaper all by itself too (just more elbow grease required).
The one thing I’d worry about with using the stanley knife to do the railbands is getting a foam tear. I got some scraps of the EPS I’ll be using to practice on, so I’ll have a bit of a play with that to see what the risk factor there is.
Bill (Thrailkill), what irregularities did you spot in there? After watching it a few times I thought I could see a little bit of asymmetry in the tail outline (a few very slight bumps and straights where I’m guessing it was mean’t to be smoother), but I couldn’t say anything really leapt out at me, nor in terms of the rocker, rail and bottom contours.
Mind you I’ve by no means a practiced eye, and I’d like to educate it.
Cheers all!
Matt Kinoshita is a seasoned pro shaper. He’s got a lot of years of doing boards. I think his message is that it can be done. I also think that it’s very important to know that he knew what he was doing and what he wanted to create.
The tools you use don’t always make better end products, they make it easier to get there. You can make very good products with manual hand tools, it just takes a lot more of your energy and time. I’d bet that if he did this slowly, he would have ended up with a really good board. I think this was just him having some fun and showing off a little.
Either way it was a cool video, lots of people shaper with little to no power tools.
Starts people thinking, makes the process less intimidating. Now im determined to get into the school shaping space a few lunch breaks this week and make a bit more of a dint in the recycled boards we have going in there. Working around the limitations of a stripped back board, has been a challenge. May have to start a thread.
Matt Kinoshita
A great guy, shaper and showman
Freely gives up tips via instagram and youtube.
Check out his cordless planer!
Good call. I’m thinking that the likes of Tom Parrish wouldn’t be contracting some slouch to do ghost building.