u/pad_woodworking

Am I crazy, or do other people have a hard time with this? I've been woodworking with mostly hand tools for the past two years, and I feel like I've gotten pretty comfortable with a hand plane. I have a sweetheart 62 that's well tuned with a sharp blade. It planes plain wood just fine, and I know how to take an aggressive cut for dimensioning vs a light cut for smoothing, but I have the hardest time planing away paint.

I have a bunch of painted soft maple panels that are leftover from a kitchen remodel that the previous owners of my house did. It's great lumber, but when I try to clean the paint off, my plane just wants to slide over the surface. I have to advance the blade really far to get it to do anything at all, and subsequently, the wood winds up tearing out like crazy. I also get a ton of paint dust. As a sanity check, I also tried with my block plane. Same trouble.

Is this normal?

I'm working on an acacia salt cellar. I'm wondering if shellac is durable enough to finish the inside with. Normally I would just use BLO and call it a day. However, I used some CA glue and sawdust to stabilize some small checks, and I'd rather not have the salt come in direct contact with the glue. Given how abrasive kosher salt can be, I don't want little bits of glue getting scraped into my food. Will shellac last in an application l like this, or will the salt cause it to flake away?

Maple and padauk, finished with boiled linseed oil. I have a wheel marking gauge that I use, but I'd been wanting to make my own traditional style gauge. The wheel one is great across the grain and for small marks along the grain, but I think I'm going to prefer using this for striking lines along the grain on longer boards. As a fun challenge, I used only a chisel to shape the wedge - no abrasive tools. To shape the palm side of the fence, I did use a shinto rasp and file. The result is really ergonomic. This was a fun tool to make, and I'm psyched to use it on my next project!

I made a set of Paul Sellers' style dovetail guides in padauk and what I believe to be soft maple. 100% hand tools. Finished with boiled linseed oil. It was a fun exercise in precise marking and sawing. The method of masking off part of the middle piece before the glue-up in order to saw away the waste was pretty cool. This was my first time using padauk - it's a beautiful wood to work with. It makes such nice curl!

I'm having trouble with my saw de-tensioning

I received this coping saw as a gift recently. The knob and lever system make it easy to get the blade nice and tight. I tighten it until plucking the blade gives a nice high pitched note. For the first few strokes, the blade is nice and taut and cuts through the wood like butter. But after just a few seconds, it loses tension and gets stuck in the wood. I've already snapped a blade. It's basically unusable.

Am I doing something wrong? Or does this sound like a manufacturing flaw? Anyone else experience this?