When you’re working with natural wood, you have to create smooth surfaces by-hand. In a factory, industrial planers shave down the surface, reducing all of the roughness and unevenness into piles of sawdust, and turning out a smooth finish.
In the by-hand workshop, the tool for this job is a scrub plane. This scrub plane is my own design, to fit my hand, and is a real workhorse!
And this is the scrub plane in-use, flattening out the base of a natural fir stump that we are using as an anvil stand.