It is all in the setup and choice of plane.
The longer the plane the flatter you will get your work. The blade should be sharp(very sharp) and not protruding too far. The amount of blade exposed is what controls the amount of wood removed.
Then lots of practice.

Okay that is what I feared, just about the time I get the touch, my counters will be finished. I have been keeping it pretty sharp by using a sander to sharpen it as I have seen on HomeTime or Old House or one of those, I do have just a scant protruding; though I have noticed, just a very slight change still makes a big difference.

My plane is short(6"), bought a better brand but then not a long one to save money. Do you think it is worth going to get a longer one?

Thank you for your response, I'll keep practicing!

Back in the 50's I grew up working with hand tools but it wasnt until the early 80's that I really became fascinated with them.

If you are attempting to edge seam with a hand plane your first problem is that you have the wrong plane. A 6" plane is a block plane, which is good for triming end cuts but in order to edge join you need a "Jointer Plane" such as a Stanley #5 or preferably a Stanley #7. Jointer planes such as those will have an overall length from 14 to 20".

Your next problem is that you are not getting your plane iron sharp enough. Properly a plane iron needs to be almost surgically sharp.

To properly sharpen a plane iron you will need a super fine grit sharpening stone such as a hard arkansas stone. I prefer to use a japanese water stone that is 10,000 grit.

After the plane iron is sharpened you need to hone it on a leather strop to polish the edge and remove the microscopic burrs from the stone. To make a strop you can glue an old piece of leather on a wooden paddle with the smooth side of the leather down and fiberous side up. You then run the leather with a piece of "Jewelers rouge" to charge the leather and hone the blade by drawing it across the leather away from the point of the blade. This will polish the face of the cutting edge and leave the metal as sharp as it is capable of being.

When edge joining two boards you clamp the two boards side by side and plane both edges at the same time to get a perfect match.

Run a google search for "Garret Wade" and you will find their website. They are a specialty supply house that primarily deals in tools and supplies for high end wordworking.

In addition to listing all their products, their catalog is a treasure house of fine hints and kinks.

Aha! Thanks I will go looking at their hints and tools.

I would highly recommend a good book on handplanes. I like Garrett Hack's book: "The Handplane Book". The Lee Valley Veritas handplanes are quite nice for a relatively reasonable price (they'll be double the price of Stanley handplanes at Home Depot, though). Of course it depends on what your objective is - if you're not particularly into handplanes then you might be better off using a belt sander. But learning and using handplanes can be extremely rewarding and sometimes they're best tool for a given job.

If I understand correctly, you're just tring to smooth the countertop surface after gluing up the boards. You might consider using a cabinet scraper instead of a plane for that job. A cabinet scraper is just a rectangular piece of thin spring steel, the edge of which you file and burnish to create an almost microscopic hooked edge. It's cheap (under $10) and (I think) has a shorter learning curve.

Planes often suffer because they seem intuitively simple; just looking at one or watching one used makes you feel you understand how they work, but they are very subtle little machines that demand careful tuning and finesse. To work well they have to be sharper than any blade most people ever encounter in everyday life; it's no good to tell the average person "it's got to be really sharp" because they are unlikely to have any clear sense of what that means. The blade of a new plane is pretty dull to start with. The chip breaker (unless this is a block plane) probably doesn't meet the back of the blade too well either, so shavings probably will jam under it. The bottom of your average plane (Stanley, Record) is not likely to be truly flat, either. Unless you're buying particularly fine tools, such as Clifton or Lie Neilson, you should consider your brand new plane to be a kit from which you can build a functioning tool -- not ready-to-go from the box.

At the risk of giving you a second watch, (and this assumes your interest in planes extends beyond your current project) I'd suggest two japanese water stones: one that is around 800-1200 grit and a second that is 3000-4000 grit. Such a pair is plenty sufficient for almost all plane work. The super-fine stones do indeed make a finer edge, but they are expensive and a diminishing-returns dynamic cuts deeply into the payoff of the zillion-grit stones. It's also nice to have a hardware store carborundum stone (for flattening the soft water stones as they wear), a piece of plate glass and some silicon carbide sandpaper for lapping both the back of the blade and the bottom of the plane flat. A strop charged with rouge is great for carving gouges, but I stay away from them with plane irons and joinery chisels, both of which fuction better when the backs of the blades are kept perfectly flat; the strop is prone to round it over a bit.

To make a plane perform the way it should, especially on harder woods like purpleheart, you'll ultimately have to make it's bottom very, very flat. The opening in front of the blade shold be as small as possible. Both faces of the blade edge should be very flat and polished to nearly mirror-like smoothness, creating that crisp intersection we call "sharp". The chip breaker should kiss very neatly against the back of the blade so that even shavings thinner than tissue can't get between them and jam. If you manage all that you'll have a gem of a tool, but it's a lot of time and care to get there; that's why so many rummage sale tool dealers have rows of rusting iron that never really got fixed up and used.

Okay, two things are now clear, first I don't have to feel too stupid or uncoordinated about my not gettting it first tries.

Secondly, planing may be too much for my one project. Perhaps sanding would be better.. . .Well I am still practicing on the underside of the countertop, I'll try a bit longer as I do seem to be getting better and the shavings are getting fairly uniform and very thin.

I don't think I have a Stanley, but I can't tell what brand, all it says is MADE IN USA. . . no other identifying marks, probably a bad sign, huh?

The cast iron bodies of cheaper planes can often be made fairly servicable with some work; the most frustrating part is likely to be the blade. Even when lapped flat and nicely sharpened, cheap blades are so soft that they lose their edges very quickly. The time lost to constant resharpening quickly wipes out the benefit of having saved money on the purchase, and there's nothing you can do to improve the quality of the steel.

I think you're going about it well. Practice on the bottom, then use the plane to get close to the final shape on the top surface and sand to finish.

Have you noticed that you can plane in one direction more easily than the other? The grain of the wood is unlikely to be perfectly straight and parallel to the surface of the board. It's like an animal's fur, which stays smooth if you stroke in one direction and stands up and gets ruffled if you stroke the other direction. Planing in one direction will make the blade want to dive down into the wood and this lifts and breaks of little shards, causing "tearout" and a rough surface. Plane the other way and the cut will be smoother and easier.

For a countertop I'd recommend belt sanding to smooth, then using a cabinet scraper as Jon recommended for the "scraped" look.

A scraper allows more tweaking to work with the grain and is less likely to tear out than a poorly tuned block plane.

Just don't burn your thumbs with the scraper. No need to ask "whaddaya mean don't burn my thumbs?" You'll figure it out...(g)

Sounds like a nice project, best of luck with it.

Jon, yes, I have noticed one direction works better than the other as far as grain tear out, also I have noticed that sometimes if pushing the plane away is not working so well, I can change sides (ie the plane continues the same direction) and pull it to me instead. And surprisingly the blade on this ??? brand is keeping a pretty sharp edge, I'm pretty sure that the fact the I am planing purple heart has more to do with the rapid wear down. . . but it doesn't seem excessive with this wood in mind. I am resharpening way ahead of true dullness too.

Mongo, I have figured out what you mean about thumb burn, I've gotten similar burns from other hand tools and I've had to scrape so much off of this house to make ready for the new. . . scrapers I have plenty, . . . not a cabinet scraper, per se, so I will go see what one is. I've been meaning to since the other fella mentioned one, but haven't made it out of the house yet.

It will still be about two weeks till I actually start making the lower cabs for the counter (I'm finishing a bathroom just now), so while I am waiting for things to set and need a break from it, . . . . .
practice, trial and error, check out new suggestions, practice some more. Hopefully by the time I turn it right side up, I'll be ready.

Hello again,

after much trial and error, the cabinet scaper was okay, but the purple heart sure dulled it fast and seems I'll have to learn a whole 'nother talent to get/keep it sharp, the longer plane still wants to grab and if I go a hair shallower, it doesn't get anything, and the belt sander runs away with me. I need more upper arm strength to control it for what I am doing.

So something one of the hardware guys said stuck in my head and I tweaked it and viola! a working solution that will also address getting the top more perfectly flat all together.

He said, when you check the flatness, use a pipe because they are always going to be flat and not warped. . . .
AHA! I have taken very coarse sand paper and with a bit of spray adhesive, attached a row to an extra piece of sewer pipe (3") which is about 24" long, and now have a sander that is accomodating wide swath, and is actually taking it faster than the palm sander, but slower than the belt sander. This also only sands where it needs sanding so I don't have to keep trying to mark, then sand/scrape it off and mark again. I am using plain ol' 40grit but I will go today and see again if a better option is available. . . maybe those sanding screens I see used with floor sanders. . . OH! maybe I should rent a floor sander and put the counter top right on the floor and finish it that way???!!!

Well I like the pipe for now.