chipbreaker or cap iron?

[Noah Wagener]

The hand tool guru at my local woodworking store said it is really not a chipbreaker pointing out that block planes do fine without them. And the Roy Underhill school offers a class where you can make a single cutter plane. here's a video on the subject from a Japanese university:http://vimeo.com/41372857

[David Weaver]

Yikes. Bill Tindall has taken to calling it a shaving bender. It definitely works the shaving when it's set properly to work (when it needs to be set properly).

I guess anyone who looks at a block plane and then says "it's not a chipbreaker" on a plane of a totally separate design is probably lost in the weeds.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

If you search, it's been discussed here a bit - there's actually a thread on the first page (http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?186631-Kawai-and-Kato-microscopic-video-on-planing-with-subtitles) right now linking the same video. There's a couple other recent threads discussing it as well.

I think the that might be agreed upon is that set properly, a chip breaker can be one way to help get a better surface, but it's not the only way, and it's not necessarily needed for a plane to do it's basic job.

[Jim Koepke]

Chip breaker, cap iron, blade stiffener, second iron and a host of other names have been given to this piece of plane hardware.

Cap iron works for me because it is less letters to type.

jtk

[ken seale]

cap iron works for me because it is less letters to type.

:d:d:d:d:d

[Chris Griggs]

Pretty much what everyone else said. Its a chip-breaker if you set it close enough to the edge for it to affect the shavings. It is not a requirement to have it on all planes, and even on planes with a cap-iron/chipbreaker it is not a requirement to use it as a chipbreaker. Single iron planes and bevel up planes work beautifully, but just because a CB is not a requirement does not mean it does not have am impact. Higher angles of attack, tight mouths, sharp blades also mitigate tearout, but setting the second iron/cap-iron close enough to the edge that it actually breaks the chips is a great way to control tearout on plane old stanley/bailey style plane.

[Sam Takeuchi]

Yikes. Bill Tindall has taken to calling it a shaving bender.

I don't mean to disrespect for the man, but every time I see that term "shaving bender", it just makes me think "why do you need to call it something else when there are already numerous names for the stuff?". In the end, what you call it isn't that important, coming up with another name for the sake of being correct for what it does, might as well call plane a "wood shaver". As interesting as all this has been, I'm getting a bit tired of it. I know I don't have to read it, but you know how it's like. When it's there, you have to click it and see if there's been interesting discoveries or something. Come on, David, take pictures and make a video, entertain me! No I'm just kidding :)

[Chris Griggs]

Come on, David, take pictures and make a video, entertain me!

+1 on this comment... Dave could be the next big name is woodworking podcasts. His show could be called "The Shaving Bender"

[David Weaver]

Haha...sam, one of my most disappointing results so far with all of this has been pulling out the sub blade (yet another term for it) and trying to put it in a smoother made by takeo nakano. Unfortunately, the pin will not allow the sub blade to go all of the way to the edge of the iron, even when the sub blade is completely flattened at the corners. I do not know who made the dai (it's not signed).

What a downer!

I still have another smoother to try, though, a mosaku. It's definitely not as easy for me with the separate sub blade as it is for a single blade and cap iron assembly that's fastened together and then put in the plane. That dai is signed, I can't remember the name of the maker but the imprint is something that looks like a little snowman. I expect since it is signed by the maker, it will have the pin in the right place to allow full travel of the subblade, where as the other one was confined to the ura.

Making a video that is coherent and makes sense is a difficult thing to do. It would require me cleaning my shop, and while my cleaning skills are lacking, the ability to make and edit a video is totally beyond me, especially on something that requires the ability to see something subtle.

A lot of other people seem to be tired of talking about this, too. It's funny this came out just a little bit after I started bugging people about it, like maybe a week, and it came from through Bill (at least to me), who at that time, and probably still, only used planes to fit joinery. He thought we were nuts for wanting to finish the surface with it.

Because of his work, and because he's a sandpaper fan, I give him a pass for calling it whatever he wants to. Shaving bender, chicken tender, chrysler fender ...whatever he wants to call it when he digs up something so good.

[Sam Takeuchi]

That would be Nashiya, and snowman looking thing is calabash.

[David Weaver]

Sam, thank you for clearing that up. I got that plane used and the seller didn't relay anything about it.

I noticed online at daikudojo (i don't know where they get their list of makers or what determines who is on it) listed nimura as often coming with mosaku. I have a dai signed by nimura, a full stamp (it is well done) and a dealer gave it to me on a plane (yamamoto cutting steel, 65mm, not an expensive plane, but a good inexpensive plane) for $180 for everything. I could hardly believe it. That was only about 3 years ago, but the days of seeing prices like that are long over (I still like yamamotos philosophy, and am thankful that the dealer gave me a full stamp nimura dai because I had ordered a special angle - and he charged me no extra for the trouble).

The mosaku was not as cheap, but I noticed a search of completed auctions last week that a 65mm mosaku kanna that did not look like it had seen much use sold for $173 or something. It wouldn't have if I'd have seen it.

(a little off topic, but it's nice to talk to someone who knows something about stuff I have, because I know little about it).

[Kees Heiden]

Chipbreaker, chipbreaker? That thing doesn't do anything at all. The video is a fraud, clearly manipulated. And now I'm going on a holliday and hope the camping has no wifi. I won't pester you for a few days anymore.

[Mike Allen1010]

+1 on this comment... Dave could be the next big name is woodworking podcasts. His show could be called "The Shaving Bender"


Chris, you made be laugh so hard I spit coffee on the computer!I too think David has a big future in podcasts - personally I like "The Plane Whisperer" LOL.


David, I'm with Sam, please entertain us! Not like you to give up when faced with technical challenges -- your audience is calling!


All the best, Mike

[Bill Rittner]

The hand tool guru at my local woodworking store said it is really not a chipbreaker pointing out that block planes do fine without them. And the Roy Underhill school offers a class where you can make a single cutter plane. here's a video on the subject from a Japanese university:http://vimeo.com/41372857

It is a cap iron. It's original design purpose was to stiffen the thin irons used in iron planes of the day to minimize chatter.

[Chris Friesen]

It is a cap iron. It's original design purpose was to stiffen the thin irons used in iron planes of the day to minimize chatter.

This is still a matter of some debate. While this is a theory that may be applicable to the western world, it is not necessarily the case in the far east.

[robert dankert]

I can't figure out why someone would want to take a plane and then use it on wood to make chips.:confused: And once you get the chips out, what difference does it make if you break them or not?:rolleyes:

[Noah Wagener]

Sorry to start a thread that's been done to death. i just got into woodworking (so all this is new to me) when i found an old block plane lying round and used it to strip varnish off my mom's floor as sanding belts were clogging. I really enjoyed the feel when it worked right and wanted to learn more.Thought the video was pretty cool.
as far as teh man being lost in the weeds; he is not comparing apples and oranges. block and bench planes are both basically chisel jigs that also hold wood down in front of blade. Based on the video i do think he is wrong though. I also think you can not know how something works and still work it well. For instance, saw maker Mike Wenzloff has a trick for setting saws evenly. He over sets then puts the blade in vice jaws. He puts paper on said vice jaws saying that paper does not compress and that the teeth will then be set at the thickness of the paper. If paper does not compress then he is just making his jaws that much thicker and the teeth would be bent back even with the plate. The paper would need to be put below the teeth so that the teeth are squeezed to a point even with the paper and not the plate. I think what happens is that the teeth are bent even with the plate but then spring back to a point somewhere between where they were initially set and flush with the plate. But im sure saws he tunes work beautifully.

sorry to go off topic but the topic is redundant apparantely.How about frog adjustmnet on Stanley bench planes? I have my jack set up as a roughing plane with the cambered blade. but the mouth is not open enough for the largest chip i can muscle through. If i back the frog with the adjustment screw in the back of it then the blade site on the sole rather than the frog. what is that screw for? for after lapping the sole a lot so the frog lines up with the back of the mouth? Sorry in advance as this is probably an oft repeated topic as well.

[David Weaver]

What blade are you using on the stanley to make a rank cut like that?

If it's an older stanley, the mouth may just flat out be tight no matter what, but you can try the thin stock iron if you're not using it. If it's a newer one and you're using a replacement iron, you can either file the mouth or go back to the stock iron. You don't want the bevel resting on the sole and then suspended above the frog, you'll have less mouth room than you would if you could set the frog just so the bevel of the iron wasn't touching sole/casting.

[Chris Vandiver]

That would be Nashiya, and snowman looking thing is calabash.


Nashiya dai are nicely made. They're quite popular with the Kezuro-kai folk.

[David Weaver]

I can't figure out why someone would want to take a plane and then use it on wood to make chips.:confused:

Well, what else are we going to eat in the shop?

[David Weaver]

Nashiya dai are nicely made. They're quite popular with the Kezuro-kai folk.

It is an all around nice plane to use, after examining the dai a little closer tonight playing with the second iron, it is absolutely perfectly made to function with the second iron. I'm glad someone had the foresight to order it and then sell it on ebay at a substantial loss to them :) I'm usually on the other end of those deals.

The steel is *incredibly* hard, though. I don't have a shortage of tools that spec high hardness, I guess, but this iron is particularly hard (it is supposed to be plain white #1), the hardest of any of my planes easily.

[Chris Vandiver]

It is an all around nice plane to use, after examining the dai a little closer tonight playing with the second iron, it is absolutely perfectly made to function with the second iron. I'm glad someone had the foresight to order it and then sell it on ebay at a substantial loss to them :) I'm usually on the other end of those deals.

The steel is *incredibly* hard, though. I don't have a shortage of tools that spec high hardness, I guess, but this iron is particularly hard (it is supposed to be plain white #1), the hardest of any of my planes easily.

David, It may well be that your particular blade is just exceptionally hard at the very edge of the blade and will settle down once you've gotten into the blade a ways. I believe that Mosaku still uses charcoal for forging and tempering so there will be some variation in hardness with those types of blades. There are many people who really like his blades and you certaily can't argue with their artistic quality.
By the way, the quality of the dai is often overlooked by western woodworkers. It can make all the difference in the world as to how the plane will perform and stay in tune.

[Bill White]

"Shaving bender, chicken tender, chrysler fender ...whatever he wants to call it when he digs up something so good."
Sounds to me like we'v got a RAP star amongst us.
BOOM-BOOM.
Bill

[Derek Cohen]

I don't mean to disrespect for the man, but every time I see that term "shaving bender", it just makes me think "why do you need to call it something else when there are already numerous names for the stuff?". In the end, what you call it isn't that important, coming up with another name for the sake of being correct for what it does, might as well call plane a "wood shaver". As interesting as all this has been, I'm getting a bit tired of it. I know I don't have to read it, but you know how it's like. When it's there, you have to click it and see if there's been interesting discoveries or something. Come on, David, take pictures and make a video, entertain me! No I'm just kidding :)

Well, I'm probably to blame. Bill was complaining .. ""Chip breaker" is misleading in terms of function. "Cap iron" or "double iron" doesn't provide any clue as to its important function, but at least it isn't a misleading name". Earlier I had written that I was no longer prepared to use the term "cap iron" since this conveyed the impression that its main duty was to stiffen the iron/blade, which now could be understood as an oversimplification. In reply to Bill i offered him two choices, Shaving Bender or Chip Bender. I preferred the latter. Obviously he preferred the former.

One thing is for sure - we will not look at it the same way anymore.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[george wilson]

Why would they go to the trouble and expense to stiffen a thin blade with a cap iron,when it's MUCH easier(And takes LESS metal,which was VERY expensive because it was hand processed) to just make the irons thicker??????????????? I think the original purpose WAS to serve as a chip breaker.

[David Weaver]

RAP star amongst us.


gahhh! definitely not! :)

[Jim Koepke]

Well, I'm probably to blame. Bill was complaining .. ""Chip breaker" is misleading in terms of function. "Cap iron" or "double iron" doesn't provide any clue as to its important function, but at least it isn't a misleading name".

For me, just calling it something so someone else will know what is being talked about is the important part of communication. If everyone else called it a cat scratcher, it wouldn't matter to me if it scratched cats or not as long as everyone knew the cat scratcher went on the back side of the blade.

One of my neighbors has his own name for everything and no one ever knows what he is talking about. At best, it is difficult to have much of a conversation with him.

jtk

[Jim Koepke]

Why would they go to the trouble and expense to stiffen a thin blade with a cap iron,when it's MUCH easier(And takes LESS metal,which was VERY expensive because it was hand processed) to just make the irons thicker??????????????? I think the original purpose WAS to serve as a chip breaker.

The original patent mentions the cap iron stiffens thin blades. For some reason Bailey wanted to use thinner irons.

The cap iron also provides a means to engage the adjusting mechanism. Maybe it could be called the adjustment plate.

As we have seen, the chip breaker does divert the path of the shaving. With just a thicker iron with a row of strategically placed holes to engage the adjustment pawl, the shavings would likely get hung up where the lever cap presses on the blade.

In reality, it is an adjustment enabling, shaving diverting, blade stiffening, tear out resisting cover plate. That is quite a mouth full when you just want to set it a hair behind the edge of the blade.

jtk

[David Weaver]

Stanley may have preferred the very thin irons to satisfy carpenters who didn't always have easy access to a wheel to grind irons.

But I agree with george, it would've been easier for them to just stiffen an iron by making it thicker if that's all they'd have wanted to do.

All of those functions that stanley added (adjuster, etc) all came about a couple of hundred years after the first mentions of double irons, though, and the first double irons that were intentionally used in planes appear to have literally been just two irons, loose, one stacked on top of the other (same way a japanese plane works, where the cap iron is definitely not needed to stiffen the iron nor to hold it in place or adjust it - not that a japanese plane has anything to do with stanley's design, either, of course).

There was a very interesting discussion about all of this on WC a couple of days ago, where folks were going through records (including old records identifying theft of tools) where in the late 1700s, double iron planes stolen were very specifically referred to as double iron planes (this is of course 75 or so years before the bailey plane), and then several decades later, the differentiation stopped being used (my paraphrased version of the discussion over there).

There's so much to know that we'll probably never get the full story about.

I still think the bailey plane design is a stroke of genius, much more so than I ever gave it credit for before this. It was relatively cheap to make, very hard wearing, accurate, versatile and nearly maintenance free.

[Chris Griggs]

Sorry to start a thread that's been done to death..

No worries. After you spend about 6 mos here (probably less) you'll see that every topic has been done to death.... This ones actually still pretty fresh, it just happens to have been covered recently.

New woodworkers are born every day.

[bill tindall]

Some history and a defense of proper nomenclature.

History- I don't plane surfaces (bear with me this is going somewhere) so I am one of the least likely persons to be involved in these discussions. I do build a lot of stuff and plane to fit parts, but for the finish schedules I use, I sand. However, I have a curiosity for how stuff works and to that end through my efforts to acquire a set of good chisels by making them (I am also cheap) I got curious about metals and made, to my knowledge, the first use of CPM 3V particle steel for woodworking tools in 2002. This effort led to finding a way to sharpen this highly abrasion resistant stuff using loose diamonds on cast iron, which in turn led me to discover Steve Elliott, who was(and is) doing impressive research on sharpening, steel for tools and planing. Steve is doing such interesting research I made it a point to keep up with him. I had a thought about coating a woodworking blade with something highly abrasion resistant, such as titanium nitride and talked to Steve about the idea for he was in a position to test the efficacy of the idea. Steve sent me a paper on a related topic authored by Professor Kato while he was on sabbatical at NCState. The paper has some interesting references to previously published papers on planing and what he called the "cap iron effect", defined as the downward force on the fibers ahead of the blade tip provided by an optimally adjusted cap iron. In the mean time Steve pointed me to some still pictures on his web site taken from the Kato-Kawai video and Steve told me of this "lost video" illustrating the cap iron effect that was "all the rage before it got lost from the Internet. That kindled my curiosity and I value Steve's work to where I would help him in any way I could. I was off on a quest to find it.

I tracked down some of the other Kato-Kawai planing papers and eventually Professors Kato and Kawai. They asked if I would like the planing video. Given the enthusiasm that Steve had for this video I made an enthusiastic reply of yes. In the mean time we had translated some of the planing papers and found out more about the cap iron effect. I was curious to know if anyone took advantage of it and posted a question of how people set "chip breakers". One of the leading WoodCentral curmudgeons scolded me that these things were not "chip breakers" and didn't function that way. OK, I stand corrected. Tongue in cheek I started calling it a shaving bender for at least this term offered a description of what it actually did. Bottom line - don't get your shorts in a knot over my use of "shaving bender" as a name for the thing whose function it is to bend/deflect the shavings. It was a joke to back off the curmudgeon and other planing snobs.

Utility of precise nomenclature- From the Forum discussion it is clear that a few knew that it would mitigate tear out. There is no evidence that anyone knew how it actually worked to control tear out, certainly not by breaking shavings. In fact broken shavings are a sign that it is not set right. There is benefit to calling things by what they do. It aids keeping in mind what they do and how they work. For those that like to understand what they are doing precise nomenclature helps them think effectively. To go back to the beginning, I don't plane surfaces. I don't care what you all call this thing but if you called it by some name that reflected its function maybe there would be less misunderstanding of what it does and what it can do.

PS Kato was(retired) and Kawai is a professor at a technical university. While much of their work is directed to improving the function of Supersurfacer planing machines, they also taught teachers how to teach woodworking trades, and in particular planing. To that end they have several papers on planes and planing that we have yet to translate. Topics include blade metal, adjusting the sole, bedding angle, sharpening, etc. Look for them on Steve Elliott's web site when we get them done.

[bill tindall]

That is the video Professor Kawai posted for me on his web site......see below.

[Jim Koepke]

For those that like to understand what they are doing precise nomenclature helps them think effectively.

The problem comes from the item in question being used over multiple generations and in many trades.

As nomenclature changes with the times, some things get stuck in the past. A century or more ago the average person who worked on wood may not have had the sharpening equipment that is so common today. It is likely they where using a dull blade and taking a thick cut to remove wood in a hurry. What came out of the mouth of a plane was probably more likened to chips than the sub-thou shavings so many of today's woodworkers are proud to produce. So it may be that carpenters (or other users of hand planes) called the shavings chips.

If you set your plane to cut as thick as you can, the shavings come up and are actually broken (bent) by the piece of metal (what you may call it) that is bolted to the cutting iron.

jtk

[Sam Takeuchi]

Another thing is that cap iron has more functions now than just directing shavings. So if someone insists on calling it "blade cantilever plate", it would be correct also. Like Jim mentioned earlier, it engages adjustment mechanism in modern metal plane, so it wouldn't be wrong to call it "adjuster plate" too. Basically calling it any of those terms would be right for one function, but wrong for the rest of function cap iron is supposed to serve. With that logic, I think it simply causes more confusion. Of course you could say original function was such and such...but there is no one of authority to pick a point in time and say "this is the point in time we base our logic on and decide on a name for this devise!". Right now, the topic of discussion is the function of cap iron at the cutting edge (or right near), hence such nomenclature may make sense, but the moment people start talking about blade stiffening effect of the cap iron, it's not a precise nomenclature anymore and it doesn't explain anything what it's doing to stiffen the blade. No one name really encompasses the full function of cap iron and I think trying to apply a name for a devise according to one of its function is rather pointless for those reasons. On top of that, as Jim pointed out, maybe "chip breaker" was the correct nomenclature at one point in time, I don't know. So which point in time do we pick and decide what to call it? I think through evidence and demonstration of how devise work, people would have gained just as much understanding even if it was called "Cow bell". In another message board, there's pretty enthusiastic discussion to dig up old text on double iron planes, also on WC, "as close as possible" seem to be the key word of the old wisdom. What I mean is that I don't think misunderstandings comes from incorrectly applied name for a devise, but sheer lack of information. Even if it was called something that reflects its function, without information or correct setting it wouldn't stop people from having misunderstanding and saying "it doesn't bend shavings."