Wood River planes mn65 steel blades

[george wilson]

I have been researching this steel. It apparently conforms to 1566 steel,which has only from .60 to .70 carbon in it. Rather disappointing carbon content. A carbon content that low is not going to have a lot of wear resistance. Years ago FWW published a study of chisels. At the bottom of the heap were Craftsman chisels made in Holland,with only .50 carbon. That's about as low as tool steel can get ion carbon and still harden. The Craftsman chisels did not retain sharp edges well. O1 steel has more like 1.00 carbon(or a bit more). 1095,commonly used on boutique saws these days,has .95 carbon. W1 also has about 1.00 carbon,but none of the other alloys of 01.

I could be wrong about my findings. Anyone else want to take a stab at it?

I see I typoed blade,and can't change it.

[Chris Vandiver]

What are bklades?:)

[Jim Foster]

I recall a study (FWW I think) where the manager at Sear's mentioned the problem with their chisels was not that they could not make a good steel, but that their buyers would use the chisels for things like opening paint cans and other tasks better accomplished with screw drivers, etc..., and they did not want to incur the liability that would come with putting a good chisel in the hands of a very general audience.

[Jim Koepke]

I recall a study (FWW I think) where the manager at Sear's mentioned the problem with their chisels was not that they could not make a good steel, but that their buyers would use the chisels for things like opening paint cans and other tasks better accomplished with screw drivers, etc..., and they did not want to incur the liability that would come with putting a good chisel in the hands of a very general audience.

Sears missed a great opportunity to market paint can openers with concave ends sized to the different size paint cans.

Maybe we need laws to prevent law suits brought by idiots who get hurt doing stupid things.

jtk

[george wilson]

Well,at the time of the FWW study of the chisels,everyone else was using better steel. The study I mentioned was many years before any general thought of making softer chisels was in the air. It wasn't a softness issue,anyway. It was a wear resistance issue. .50 carbon steel will get hard,just not enough carbon to be wear resistant (to say nothing of other alloys).

[Matthew N. Masail]

The blade on my woodriver no.3 takes a fine edge and holds it very well. so 0.65 or not it's a good blade.

[Adam Petersen]

Matt, I think the #3 and other bench planes have a different metal. The only one that I know of that's marketed MN65 is the chisel planes and the side rabbet.

[Matthew N. Masail]

ohh.... sorry. I bought a spare blade that came marked "carbon steel" so maybe it's more like O1. At first I thought it might be A2 because it's color is brigher
than any other O1 I've seen.

[george wilson]

I just saw an ad for their new Preston style shoulder plane that said MN65 was used in the blade. Don't know about the others.It would be o.k. for a shoulder plane,which doesn't see steady or heavy use.

Matthew, "carbon steel" can mean anything from mild steel to high carbon steel. It tells you nothing,except the metal has some carbon in it. How much is the question.

[Matthew N. Masail]

got it. one of the reasons I dislike marketing. but their plane blades are pretty good.

[Mike Cogswell]

George: The Woodriver bench planes have A2 steel blades per their website. I can say from first hand experience with three of their V3 planes that they hold an edge very well, as good as my Lie-Nielsens. Their website doesn't mention the steel, but their block planes also hold up well.

Also, this reference <http://www.castingsqd.com/products.htm> shows Chinese 65Mn to be ASTM1065. Still only 0.60-0.70 carbon though.

[ian maybury]

My recollection is fuzzy George, but 65MN seemed maybe to suggest manganese present which acts in a manner quite like carbon to promote hardening. As does silicon.

Chrome, vanadium, molybdenum, cobalt and the like also promote hardening, but with added toughness - they mess with the behaviour of the carbon in the steel and tend to be the basis of alloy steels which are tougher than carbon steels. A2 and the like seem to be in this space, and the extra toughness is why they are harder to sharpen and more inclined to form wire edges. Very broad they are eventually designated as HSS when the alloy content gets high enough.

A quick dig suggests that MN65 is similar to SAE 1566 which taking the high values may have up to about 0.7% carbon, 0.6% silicon, and 0.9% manganese.

There are formulae for calculating the carbon equivalent to predict weldability and hardening characteristics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalent_carbon_content The basic form adds 1/6 of the % content of both the silicon and manganese to the carbon. So the carbon equivalent of the steel is 0.7 + 0.6/6 + 0.9/6 = 0.7 + 0.1 + 0.15 = 0.95% carbon equivalent.

Which should harden nicely - although perhaps not quite to the degree of an 01 tool steel.

Could be though that any more carbon without the bit of chromium that's in 01 would start to get a bit more brittle and inclined to chip than is ideal - the Japanese white steel chisels seem only to go a shade more and can be brittle. The tougher Japanese blue steel has more carbon, but again some chromium in it.

It looks like the silicon and the manganese in the 65MN may also have some beneficial effects in terms of making the hardening process less sensitive (it reduces the cooling rate required to produce a given degree of hardening), and the unhardened steel a little more machinable...

ian

[george wilson]

I knew it was like 1566,and has manganese. Glad to hear that the bench planes have A2 irons. I wonder why they are using a cheap steel in the shoulder plane? Maybe because,as I stated,shoulder planes don't get that much use.

[Casey Gooding]

I had to replace the blade in my WR #5. It would crumble after just a few strokes, no matter how I sharpened it. Not a well made iron at all.

[ian maybury]

This all based on about 5min of Googling just now - and trying to infer exact properties from metallurgical composition is probably a bit risky. i.e. It's hard to get info on the more subjective aspects of the properties of some of these steels that emerge in use.

Some of the knife/sword making guys seem to rate MN65/SAE1566 quite highly as a material for single steel blades. (they may of course just be selling stuff made from it) John Deere it seems use it for (don't know how widely) combine harvester (?) blades too where a mix of toughness and wear resistance is probably advisable.

MN 65 it seems hardens (tempers?) to around HRC 62, which seems (?) to be similar to 01. Maybe not having any chromium in may leave it a little more brittle/less wear resistant? Seems like it's probably slightly cheaper option than 01, but against that it's likely that poor control of the tempering and excess heat put in during manufacturing might in instances (as in any tool steel) reduce its performance...

ian

[Matthew N. Masail]

I had to replace the blade in my WR #5. It would crumble after just a few strokes, no matter how I sharpened it. Not a well made iron at all.

Most likely it was a defect. we heard way too many good things for that to be common.

[Jeff Heath]

It's a shame, to me, that weekend woodworkers are getting sucked in to buy low quality tools from the likes of Wood River. For every person touting their Wood River plane or chisel, I hear of 3 or 4 mentioning serious problems. A friend of mine who is a beginning woodworker thought he was doing himself a favor by purchasing one of their smoothing planes a couple years back. He brought it over to my shop one night because he couldn't get it to work like some of the tools he'd used in my shop before (his words). After a quick examination, the mating surfaces of the frog and bed were all way off, the frog was canted at an angle, and you couldn't adjust the iron to be square in the mouth to save your life. After all that, the iron would not hold an edge, and kept rolling off, even in a wood as soft as cherry.

Thankfully, Woodcraft gave him a refund.

I would hope that Woodcraft would start carrying a higher quality tool to peddle, but I think they need to stop importing their tools in from the far east before that is going to happen. The days of walking in the door to a cabinet of Lie Nielsen or Clifton bench planes is gone.

Jeff

[Matthew N. Masail]

Not that I want to depend them too much, I don't like the fact that the planes are knock-offs, but I think a few years back they were selling the V1 and V2 planes. now it's the V3. I heard they had trouble the the early types, but I havn't heard much bad about the V3 anywhere on the net.

[Mike Tekin]

Jeff,

I agree with the fact that Chinese tools for the most part, are questionable and there is a higher chance of getting garbage, however, your friend bought the tool and it was his decision to save money. It also sounds like he did have a V1 or V2 version because the newer V3 line is better and quite frankly a "great" value - have you tried them? I would have one or two along side my Lie Nielsen and Veritas planes, however the totes don't feel right to me.

Yes, I agree that Woodcraft shouldn't import from China, but I personally believe it was the customers that encouraged it and created the market for a mid level plane, in this instance for it. This isn't always the case because corporations can be blamed in other instances of bringing crap to market, such as Nicholson but purchasing Woodriver is a personal choice. I don't think he was sucked into it.

Finally, Lie Nielsen and Veritas are here and won't be disappearing anytime soon - Veritas has a backlog on their new chisels and steel and Lie Nielsen is happy with their company size as well as volume. Woodriver just attracts different buyers

George, I am not surprised with your findings and thank you for posting this

[Mike Henderson]

It's a shame, to me, that weekend woodworkers are getting sucked in to buy low quality tools from the likes of Wood River. For every person touting their Wood River plane or chisel, I hear of 3 or 4 mentioning serious problems. A friend of mine who is a beginning woodworker thought he was doing himself a favor by purchasing one of their smoothing planes a couple years back. He brought it over to my shop one night because he couldn't get it to work like some of the tools he'd used in my shop before (his words). After a quick examination, the mating surfaces of the frog and bed were all way off, the frog was canted at an angle, and you couldn't adjust the iron to be square in the mouth to save your life. After all that, the iron would not hold an edge, and kept rolling off, even in a wood as soft as cherry.

Thankfully, Woodcraft gave him a refund.

I would hope that Woodcraft would start carrying a higher quality tool to peddle, but I think they need to stop importing their tools in from the far east before that is going to happen. The days of walking in the door to a cabinet of Lie Nielsen or Clifton bench planes is gone.

Jeff
Actually, it was LN who dumped Woodcraft. They wanted the Woodcraft stores to have a bench with wood so that potential customers could try the LN planes before purchasing them. But that was just not possible for most stores. Space was a problem and an employee would have to be available to help the customer try the planes out (and keep the planes from walking out the store).

There are a few Woodcraft stores that still carry LN plane, for example, my local Woodcraft, in Stanton, CA still carries them. The owner told me that he was one of only a very few Woodcraft stores that were allowed to carry the LN planes without the demo area.

Mike

[Mike Holbrook]

Steel is a complicated subject, as evidenced by how many threads get posted on woodworking and knife forums on the subject. As I understand it there are multiple, often opposed objectives which have to be balanced in the making of steel edged tools. Hardness is one criteria but certainly not the only one and some submit that it is over rated as "the test" for how good a steel is. A jack hammer, at one extreme will totally destroy a very hard steel, as the impact nocks off pieces of steel rapidly. A knife designed to cut relatively soft objects can afford to be much harder than one designed to be forced through hardwood by impacting it with a hammer or mallet. The overly hard edge, viewed under magnification will reveal a jagged edge due to pieces breaking off the edge. The overly soft steel edge tends to roll and fold over easily also resulting in a dull blade quickly. New innovation in steels produce steels made from powders. Powdered steels tend to have a finer grain, less/smaller chunks of impurity in the edge, which may be less subject to pieces separating from the fine edge. I think forging tends to concentrate and reduce the size of particles on the edge. There is also how the steels chemical composition interacts with air, moisture, chemicals, work materials....

Another trade off in steel design weighs the hardness of a tools edge against commonly available sharpening gear. A steel that holds an edge 10% longer may not be a good choice for a person with sharpening gear that will take 50% more time to sharpen that steel. If one researches posts on this forum regarding the purchase of sharpening gear, looking for responses by professionals like Stu at Tools From Japan. The first question posed to these posters often concerns what kind of steel they will be sharpening. Many of the standard stones and abrasives available are not designed to cut modern hard or even some older forged steel. I believe many of even the large edged tool manufacturers have their steel blanks made one place while shaping, heat treatment, cold treatment, forging.....may be done at another. Tracking where the process failed might not be an easy task, allowing significant quantity of defective end product to slip by. I try not to buy bargain steel cutting tools that require a hard or tough steel.

[David Weaver]

Actually, it was LN who dumped Woodcraft. They wanted the Woodcraft stores to have a bench with wood so that potential customers could try the LN planes before purchasing them. But that was just not possible for most stores. Space was a problem and an employee would have to be available to help the customer try the planes out (and keep the planes from walking out the store).

There are a few Woodcraft stores that still carry LN plane, for example, my local Woodcraft, in Stanton, CA still carries them. The owner told me that he was one of only a very few Woodcraft stores that were allowed to carry the LN planes without the demo area.

Mike

There were quantity issue, too, and LN themselves have discussed their philosophy that they don't necessarily want to grow a whole lot more. If you can recall from back then, if you had a local store, there would often be nothing of use in terms of LN tools in the store. An entity like WC wants to have access to stock, but LN probably doesn't want to be stuck in a situation like that. Where WC can just start making demands in terms of turnaround and quantity when LN doesn't really want to have to adapt to run their operation like that.

Catering to a large customer is a lot different than selling your own duds or dealing with 10 small retailers who never have the ability to change your production numbers by more than a little bit for each one.

There was a little static at the time that WC was going to make a domestic plane, then they were going to make a domestically assembled plane but I guess that fizzled out.

[Mike Cogswell]

It's a shame, to me, that weekend woodworkers are getting sucked in to buy low quality tools from the likes of Wood River. For every person touting their Wood River plane or chisel, I hear of 3 or 4 mentioning serious problems. A friend of mine who is a beginning woodworker thought he was doing himself a favor by purchasing one of their smoothing planes a couple years back. He brought it over to my shop one night because he couldn't get it to work like some of the tools he'd used in my shop before (his words). After a quick examination, the mating surfaces of the frog and bed were all way off, the frog was canted at an angle, and you couldn't adjust the iron to be square in the mouth to save your life. After all that, the iron would not hold an edge, and kept rolling off, even in a wood as soft as cherry.

Thankfully, Woodcraft gave him a refund.

I would hope that Woodcraft would start carrying a higher quality tool to peddle, but I think they need to stop importing their tools in from the far east before that is going to happen. The days of walking in the door to a cabinet of Lie Nielsen or Clifton bench planes is gone.

Jeff

It seems to me that most of the people bad-mouthing the Woodriver bench planes either don't own one or had one of the older ones. As for your " hope that Woodcraft would start carrying a higher quality tool to peddle", they have. It's called the V3 bench plane.

I own three of them and as far as I'm concerned they are hands down the best value available today in a bedrock style new bench plane. Lest you think I'm just a Woodriver fanboy, I also own nine Lie-Nielsen bench planes. I have no problem saying without hesitation that the LN planes are better. But the difference in price far out weighs the difference in quality. The LN has less backlash, the smaller ones are available in bronze, most give you the choice of a 50 or 55 degree high angle frog and LN has many more sizes. However, comparing a V3 to an iron LN, the V3 is very close, but my WR V3 #6 cost me $151.99 on sale versus a LN #6 for $375. For that kind of money I can put up with a little bit of backlash. I've had my WR V3 #4 for over a year and have used it extensively for a wide variety of projects. It was my goto smoother until I got a LN 4 1/5, and it's still my smoother away from my shop. Better the Woodriver than my bronze LN bouncing around in the truck. I recently used it to smooth a large maple butcher block island counter top at my daughter's house (after using a LN jointer to flatten it) and it did a great job. Other users and major magazine reviews of the V3 planes seem to agree with me. They are a very good plane and the best value.

I can't speak to all the Woodcraft products. I have a couple of the V3 block planes and am equally satisfied with them, but others like the shoulder plane that prompted this thread I've never touched. I do think it's to Woodcraft's credit that they gave your friend a full refund and that they also apparently agreed that their early bench planes weren't up to snuff and stop selling them until they re-engineered them into an acceptable product.

I also note that Lee Valley and Veritas items are now showing up in their catalog and stores.

[ian maybury]

Must say that while i've no axe to grind (beyond that it'd be terrible if cost cutting and our inability to resist a cheap deal was to drive good quality product off the market as happened before) that it'd be nice to see more posts setting out actual user experience with mid range and similar planes, and with the MN65 (which from the metallurgy seems like it should be able to deliver a pretty decent edge?) and the other steels used in them.

The nominal specification/labelling is one thing, but the achievement of consistency of quality seems likely to be the real challenge/acid test of a maker and a fairly complex matter in the case of something like a plane.

Stuff like accuracy of composition/recipe of the steels, control of the casting, forging, rolling etc processes by which the parts are formed, stress relieving, accuracy of heat treatment, precision of machining, heat input during machining and sharpening etc etc all have the potential to make or break a given example of a product.

Chances are that when it comes to producing a mid range product to a high standard of quality that it may be that much of the cost and many of issues lie in some of the above - which presumably have fairly major implications for the choice of the suppliers, manufacturing processes, skills and systems used. Corner cutting could mean quite a degree of variation in quality between examples of a given make and model - the sort of thing that has tended to be a feature of low cost machine and tool imports.

On the commercial side of the equation. Given that competition of this sort is a fact of life the likes of Lee Valley and Lie Nielsen (the high end plane makers) will be very aware that they need to take care. In that while there presumably will always be a market for premium kit, it's important that the functional ability and quality of the product remains sufficient to differentiate it from the mid range stuff in the eyes of a sufficiently large segment to generate the income needed to support what they do.

If in order to chase volume they were to drop to relatively lower prices they could find themselves threatened by the emerging mid range guys. In that it could compromise their ability to maintain the required quality/product differentiation. It'd get messy too if the mid range guys turned out to be able to make the required quality off a lower cost base, or that the premium guys couldn't maintain a recognised advantage in performance/quality to justify their pricing.

The strength of the brands would help initially, but would eventually leak away .....

ian

[Larry Frank]

When you heat steel up to red hot in transforms into austenite and then when cooled quickly enough transforms to martensite which is typically tempered to reduce hardness slightly to reduce brittleness. In 0.50-0.60% steels, this will result in hardness values around 60 Rc.

The tools steels with higher carbon and other things in them, cool to form very hard carbides and martensite which is tempered. This is like a mix of two different materials with the carbide being very hard and the martensite inbetween the carbide being somewhat softer. This gives you some very hard particles which will hold an edge better.

The metallurgy involved in these grades and how they actually achieve the hardness and properties takes a lot of study.

Trying to compare the properties of the steels and tool steels is difficult at best unless one understands the underlying basics. It is easier to compare O1 to A2 than comparing either to a 0.60% C steel.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

Does Woodcraft have great sales on the Woodriver tools that I'm missing? I just looked up a couple prices, and none of them scream "great deal" compared to similar offerings from Lee Valley or Lie Nielsen. A Lee Valley bevel-up jointer is cheaper than the Woodriver number 7; and looking at something like the rabbet plane - the 30 bucks difference between WR and LV, or even the 45 between WR and LN doesn't seem like that big a deal when I'm already saving up 140 bucks to spend on a tool that I'm hoping will last me the rest of my life.


EDIT: I just saw the #4 price; I guess that deal looks a little better than the jointer and rabbet planes I originally looked at.

[george wilson]

Yes,Larry,which is why I have put decades of study into steels. .65 carbon is not going to make a good grade of tool steel. I can't say I blame them,as little money as they get for their products,but the Chinese will do anything they can to save a penny or 2 on something they sell. This is why my Jet wet wheel grinder breaks down: They used literally beer can thin metal to make the press on wire connectors for their circuit board. They crack being assembled at the factory,and soon break loose,causing many of them to not work right out of the box(I'm told by different dealers. A lucky few seem to have had no problems. Likely depends upon the soft touch of the teenage girl who assembled the unit.). A whole lot of that sort of thing goes on. In the end,we cause the problem,demanding products at 1950's USA prices.

[Ryan Baker]

Actually, it was LN who dumped Woodcraft. They wanted the Woodcraft stores to have a bench with wood so that potential customers could try the LN planes before purchasing them. But that was just not possible for most stores. Space was a problem and an employee would have to be available to help the customer try the planes out (and keep the planes from walking out the store).

There are a few Woodcraft stores that still carry LN plane, for example, my local Woodcraft, in Stanton, CA still carries them. The owner told me that he was one of only a very few Woodcraft stores that were allowed to carry the LN planes without the demo area.

Mike

Actually, having a LN test bench in Woodcraft stores sounds like it would be a really bad thing for LN most of the time. There's no LN rep hanging around to take care of things. In most stores, the blades would be poorly sharpened, if at all. Customers would use and abuse them. A poorly sharpened and poorly adjusted plane at a premium price is a poor marketing device. It just doesn't work like a LN hand tool event. Besides, pretty much anyone in the market for LN level products can easily find their wat to the website and don't go to WC looking for those products.

[ian maybury]

Hi George. Just trying to understand this.

As before managanese and silicon will cause the steel to behave as though it has more carbon than 0.7% - borne out by the data sheets which specify similar hardness of something over HRC 60 for tempered 01 and 1566 (MN65) steels. This surely is well into the (hardness) territory of decent chisel and plane blades?

Are you saying that despite this that there is likely to be some major practical difference in the performance of blades made from the two? The 01 will presumably be a bit less brittle and more wear resistant because of the chromium, but that isn't necessarily a show stopper/winner on its own.

Even excluding alloying elements like the chromium it's clear that depending on the exact composition and heat treatment that as Larry said there's quite a few variations in the structure of simple carbon steels that can arise (i was trained in metallurgy, but so many years ago that it's fuzzy and anyway it's hard to predict exact properties given that so many iron/carbon compounds and variations on these are possible - ferrite/pearlite/martensite/cementite etc ) - so it's not a case of arguing anything one way or another.

Just of wondering (and in the restricted case of the MN65 versus a carbon or low alloy steel like 01) - that if hardness isn't the whole story then what are the other issues/performance characteristics in play?

ian

[Mike Cogswell]

Does Woodcraft have great sales on the Woodriver tools that I'm missing? I just looked up a couple prices, and none of them scream "great deal" compared to similar offerings from Lee Valley or Lie Nielsen. A Lee Valley bevel-up jointer is cheaper than the Woodriver number 7; and looking at something like the rabbet plane - the 30 bucks difference between WR and LV, or even the 45 between WR and LN doesn't seem like that big a deal when I'm already saving up 140 bucks to spend on a tool that I'm hoping will last me the rest of my life.


EDIT: I just saw the #4 price; I guess that deal looks a little better than the jointer and rabbet planes I originally looked at.

Yes, Woodcraft does have sales on their tools from time to time. Some OK, some good, some great. My #5 was on sale for $125 last Spring when I bought it (the block planes were on sale for $69 at the same time) and they had a 30% off sale on the bench planes late last Fall when my #6 was only $151.99.

[Charlie Stanford]

Actually, having a LN test bench in Woodcraft stores sounds like it would be a really bad thing for LN most of the time. There's no LN rep hanging around to take care of things. In most stores, the blades would be poorly sharpened, if at all. Customers would use and abuse them. A poorly sharpened and poorly adjusted plane at a premium price is a poor marketing device. It just doesn't work like a LN hand tool event. Besides, pretty much anyone in the market for LN level products can easily find their wat to the website and don't go to WC looking for those products.

Agree completely, when I read the earlier post none of that bit made sense to me at all unless L-N has come up with self-sharpening irons and self-adjusting planes that never make a bad pass on wood.

I also wonder at what point in L-N's relationship with Woodcraft was Woodcraft NOT a high-volume retailer? Never, comes to mind.

[Mark Baldwin III]

To the average engineer, tool steel is tool steel. That's my experience in tool design/fabrication, anyway. A2 is the appropriate steel for a particular application, but Mn65 sounds cooler (is cheaper, easier to get, insert random reason here), so they put Mn65 on the drawing. If you've got a good engineer who knows tool steel, you still have to deal with a bean counter who might say, "well a mill run of this other stuff is cheaper, so we're going to use that." The second scenario is probably more likely than the first. (but I never miss a chance to pick on engineers :)) When I visit various machine shops that I work with, some of the tool steels that are required on the prints just make them shake their heads.
As for L-N selling at Woodcraft. A lot of that has to do with product placement as well. You simply don't market a $350+ bench plane next to a $150 bench plane. People's perceptions of products can be affected merely by the placement. That is why the owner of my local WC told me that even though they would be selling Lee Valley again, I likely wouldn't see certain products on the shelf. Same goes for L-N. The perception of the product can be diluted if it is marketed along side other products of lower quality and price point.

[george wilson]

Hardness can be obtained even with .50 carbon,but it is also necessary to have wear resistance. That's why Craftsman chisels in the FWW test years ago fared so poorly at only .50 carbon.

Mark,engineers designed the seats in my 1990's(ish) Ford Taurus station wagon. One day I got into the car and the seat collapsed because the undercarriage broke. The steel was at least 1/8" thick,but it was folded 90º at a perfectly SHARP angle. Anyone who knows metal at all knows you do not bend metal to a sharp angle. The steel broke at a neat 45º miter joint. Good thing I hadn't gotten into an accident in that car. My daughter had her neck broken when she was struck in the rear in her Toyota. The seat fell back flat. She recovered,but has pain all the time. I found out they had had a recall on the Escorts for the same reason. While they were welding the seat back,I looked at the next year's model,and saw that the seat's part had been bent on a curve like it should have been. What kind of stupid engineers was Ford employing,anyway? I traded the car and got the newer model.Later,I moved to Honda.

Another gripe I can recall was buying a tool box with studs to fit into the square holes in the set of sockets that came with the box. No way would those sockets fit those studs. What kind of engineers are we graduating? Not all GOOD ones,apparently.

If an engineer doesn't know one tool steel from another,he'd best make it his business to find out about tool steels. I doubt it is ignorance that leads Chinese manufacturers to choose cheap steel. It's money.

I'm certainly not attacking all engineers here. Just a few!!:) I hope no one gets worked up and tells me I should have been happy with my badly designed car seat!! Sorry,I knew better than that in high school.

[ian maybury]

For sure there's quite some difference between the metallurgy data/spec sheet properties, and the highly nuanced and often very subjective differences that surface with lots of user experience.

To be fair to engineers it's a bit of a never the two shall meet sort of deal. Your average product engineer of any nationality (who is very unlikely to have been hired for his/her woodworking skills) is unlikely to have the sort of user experience needed to 'get it' on the subtle performance differences in use between steels, but there equally don't seem to be too many users that know enough about metallurgy to point to the very specific differences in composition and heat treatment needed to deliver what they feel they need.

The other point is that these (tool steels) are all commercially produced grades. They are not produced with woodworking specifically in mind - it's more a case of testing what's available to see how well it works in woodworking applications and choosing accordingly.

It's hard not to have great admiration for the Japanese makers who have really been able to bridge the gap between user knowledge and metallurgy, and likewise for the one man plane making businesses who probably come close to this too.

It's presumably the extra chromium and not the hardenability per se. that makes for some difference in wear resistance between say 01 and the now moderately famous the MN 65?

I guess the Wood River stuff is not pitched as being top drawer. There's other new entrants in that midrange space too - the Stanley sweetheart line for example. None seem to have get it 100% right straight off. The question then becomes how far off they might be, and what's involved in bridging the gap to the premium stuff. Regardless of the effects of the steel spec consistency of manufacturing quality is as before (and as borne out in reviews of the mid range types) the other major issue...

ian

[David Weaver]

To the average engineer, tool steel is tool steel. That's my experience in tool design/fabrication, anyway. A2 is the appropriate steel for a particular application, but Mn65 sounds cooler (is cheaper, easier to get, insert random reason here), so they put Mn65 on the drawing. If you've got a good engineer who knows tool steel, you still have to deal with a bean counter who might say, "well a mill run of this other stuff is cheaper, so we're going to use that." The second scenario is probably more likely than the first. (but I never miss a chance to pick on engineers :)) When I visit various machine shops that I work with, some of the tool steels that are required on the prints just make them shake their heads.
As for L-N selling at Woodcraft. A lot of that has to do with product placement as well. You simply don't market a $350+ bench plane next to a $150 bench plane. People's perceptions of products can be affected merely by the placement. That is why the owner of my local WC told me that even though they would be selling Lee Valley again, I likely wouldn't see certain products on the shelf. Same goes for L-N. The perception of the product can be diluted if it is marketed along side other products of lower quality and price point.

Guarantee WC would've sold LNs beside their imported planes if they could've continued getting them. I think both of those two types would sell just fine next to each other. I think LN would also sold more planes if they were still in WC's stores, but I think that was part of the problem. Thinking (and this is just speculating) from a business standpoint, if you can make more money by just selling them from your company store, and control how people try them out by using your folks to present them, which would you rather do...sell them wholesale to a retailer and have to make more of them to make more revenue, or keep the margin between wholesale and retail for a lot more of your sales by selling them directly?

Garrett Wade and Woodcraft exposed a lot of people to LN tools who would've never otherwise been exposed, though, and it was (still all just my opinion) a bit of shafting for LN to let other retailers help them build the brand, and then just take them in house once they didn't want the market to be bigger or deal with the growing pains of servicing more orders as market share grows.

I don't really carry water for either company. LN is good, but they want too much control. WC's corporate has also done me well, but their prices on most things you can price shop on are very high. I think that's probably the cost of having brick and mortar stores, they can't undercut their stores. Rockler's not a lot different, at least WC has some things that I would like to buy. Rockler has all but abandoned hand tool users, which is a shame because there's one a couple of miles from me and most of the folks who work there are helpful.

[David Weaver]

Agree completely, when I read the earlier post none of that bit made sense to me at all unless L-N has come up with self-sharpening irons and self-adjusting planes that never make a bad pass on wood.

I also wonder at what point in L-N's relationship with Woodcraft was Woodcraft NOT a high-volume retailer? Never, comes to mind.

I'd bet 10-15 years ago, they weren't selling nearly as many planes as they were 5 years ago. Just a hunch, there was little in the magazines and blogs about $400 planes. A few blog entries and magazine articles talking about the tools being indispensible and all of the sudden premium planes are as necessary as a bench. You can see it on the used market, few of the LN planes that are out there are the older types with W1 irons with the old style chipbreaker, and it wasn't that long ago that they were selling those.

If I was a betting man, I'd bet WC's demand for planes in the late 2000s was at least double what it was in 2000, maybe more.

[george wilson]

What late 2000's,David? it's only 2013! :):):)

[David Weaver]

That's about the time that LN withdrew from the WC stores and went into price-control scenario. Before that you could get a couple of bucks off of LN tools at some retailers, which probably cut LN's direct sales. The squashed that pronto and banned retailers from offering discounts on the planes.

As far as the MN65 goes, is it safe to say that China doesn't really make any of their steel that's high quality, they buy it? I recall reading somewhere that nearly all of the steel they make in country is recycled stuff and isn't that consistent.

If they're making a plane that costs them (speculating here) $30 a unit to make, there's no way they're going to pay for $10 of imported tool steel to make an iron. From the standpoint of the retailer, though, it would be in their best interest because people can recognize what A2 is from other high quality planes, blog articles and magazines.

You see mn65 as a new user or magazine reader and say...what's that? It's Penny wise and pound folish. I can't believe they wouldn't be able to learn to harden and temper A2 in China (who knows where the bench plane irons are done?). Even LN likely went to A2 it's a lot more stable than warping, cracking water hardening steel.

Maybe MN65 is just as easy or easier to harden and temper.

[Chris Griggs]

It is pretty surprising, given what they've pulled off with there bench planes, that they used that stuff for their shoulder plane. They seem to have been making a pretty strong effort to match LN and LV on most publishable type specs. Is it possible that since a shoulder plane is technically a low angle plane that they think its a better option for that? I guess more likely its that they couldn't produce a shoulder plane to spec with an 01 or A2 blade and keep the price enough lower than an LV or LN for it to be able to compete against them in the market.

As I've said before I've always been quite happy with my WR no. 6, but I got it for $110, which was a phenomenal value. I've never had a strong opinion for or against WR stuff in general, but in all honesty I have my doubts about that shoulder plane. For the life me I can't see why someone would purchase that when an LV medium is only $30 more. I wonder how it will do. Like Josh said earlier, from a purely bang for buck perspective it (and there no. 7) just doesn't seem like as good of a value as say their no. 4 might be, considering the LV and LN options that are available in the same price range.

[Mel Fulks]

I don't see any practical reason for 'low, middle ,high ' grades of steel in hand tools and don't think it could exist without advertising and hobbyists. When tools were bought mainly by guys using them to make a living there was no market for low grade . I have not seen any 19th century chisels or plane irons that are not superior to most of what is now sold.There is some superior new stuff but the same technology is used to intentionally make bad stuff. A book binder and restorer told me that the reason old paper is so good is "they didn't know how to make bad paper". There has always been a market for gentleman's tools using materials like exotic woods ,ivory, etc. But that doesn't mean those guys were the only ones who had tools that could cut wood.

[Dave Anderson NH]

It is common on both the Neanderthal Forum on on the power tools arena to bash Chinese manufacturing and quality. Wake up folks, I've got really bad /good news for you. China has the most modern manufacturing plant and the most modern machine tools in the world bar no one. Products like cell phones, iPods, desktops, laptops, TVs, and on and on we could go are produced every day of the year. The ability and desire to produce quality is there and you see and use it every day without any problems. The big fly in the ointment comes when someone decides to have a product knocked off but is unable to write good specifications or provide good dimensioned and toleranced part and assembly drawings when they bid the project out. The ultimate winner in this case is the ____ Mfg company who submitted the low bid, got the order, and made the tools. When the tools don't work properly in form, fit, and function the Chinese (or for that matter any other mfgr in the world) can legitimately still demand payment since they met the specifications and delivered product. The purchaser is then left with the choice of scraping or selling an "iffy" product to recoup as much of their money as possible. The other issue involved here is quality control. Good quality requires process control, incoming material inspection, in-process inspection, and a final quality inspection of the finished goods. Too many companies who order in any off-shore country farm out the quality function to a 3rd party firm who has no understanding of how the product is used, how it should work, etc. They only can evaluate if the tool and its parts meet the specifications. It took companies in the power tool area like Jet and others years to understand what they needed in bid packages and how they needed their own staff quality engineers and inspectors to supervise and assist their contract manufacturers. I seriously doubt that WC or any of the people who order hand tools made in any far east country have the needed staffs "in-country" and I suspect that they make at best a visit or two to the factories per year. To make matters worse, if the person making the visit isn't intimately familiar with manufacturing operations and doesn't audit the operation, the whole visit is window dressing and a waste of time. I can not count the number of times I've escorted visitors through the manufacturing areas of my day job just to have them smile, nod, and pretend to understand they knew what I was talking about. Most I could have told a laser was a waterjet and they wouldn't have know the difference.

The bottom line is this. If Chinese factories get detailed specifications on materials and a complete drawing package without errors or ambiguities. If the purchaser does quality audits and works with the maker to resolve issues as they arise. If the purchaser is willing to pay for both quality works and materials (ie a high enough price to pay for the materials). Then the Chinese will own the market and your only choice will be for Chinese made tools or tools from defunct American manufacturers. China can and will produce quality if some one is willing to pay for it.

[Chris Griggs]

It is common on both the Neanderthal Forum on on the power tools arena to bash Chinese manufacturing and quality. Wake up folks, I've got really bad /good news for you. China has the most modern manufacturing plant and the most modern machine tools in the world bar no one. Products like cell phones, iPods, desktops, laptops, TVs, and and and on we could go are produced every day of the year. The ability and desire to produce quality is there and you see and use it every day without any problems. The big fly in the ointment comes when someone decides to have a product knocked off but is unable to write good specifications or provide good dimensioned and toleranced part and assembly drawings when they bid the project out. The ultimate winner in this case is the ____ Mfg company who submitted the low bid, got the order, and made the tools. When the tools don't work properly in form, fit, and function the Chinese (or for that matter any other mfgr in the world) can legitimately still demand payment since they met the specifications and delivered product. The purchaser is then left with the choice of scraping or selling an "iffy" product to recoup as much of their money as possible. The other issue involved here is quality control. Good quality requires process control, incoming material inspection, in-process inspection, and a final quality inspection of the finished goods. Too many companies who order in any off-shore country farm out the quality functiion to a 3rd party firm who has no understanding of how the product is used, how it should work, etc. They only can evaluate if the tool and its parts meet the specifications. It took companies in the power tool area like Jet and others years to understand what they needed in bid packages and how they needed their own staff quality engineers and inspectors to supervise and assist their contract manufacturers. I seriously doubt that WC or any of the people who order hand tools made in any far east country have the needed staffs "in-country" and I suspect that they make at best a visit or two to the factories per year. To make matters worse, it the person making the visit isn't intimately familiar with manufacturing operations and doesn't audit the operation, the whole visit is window dressing and a waste of time. I can not count the number of times I've escorted visitors through the manufacturing areas of my day job just to have them smile, nod, and pretend to understand they knew what I was talking about.

The bottom line is this. If Chinese factories get detailed specifications on materials and a complete drawing package without errors or ambiguities. If the purchaser does quality audits and works with the maker to resolve issues as they arise. If the purchaser is willing to pay for both quality works and materials (ie a high enough price to pay for the materials). Then the Chinese will own the market and your only choice will be for Chinese made tools or tools from defunct American manufacturers. China can and will produce quality if some one is willing to pay for it.

Best forum moderator EVER! We love you Dave!

[David Weaver]

To be fair, in what Dave has said, if you go look at the reviews for woodcrafts V3 planes (I don't have any, so I'm not trying to defend my own purchases), they are almost universally positive.

A while ago when I was in contact with woodcraft from time to time (and found them to be good to their word, not salesy or overpromising), they told me that they'd made some changes to move them back closer to the original bedrock design and they had the bugs pretty much worked out. Internal folks there, not telephone customer service. I have not ever had dealings with anyone there internally where I felt afterward like they weren't honest with me. I can't say that about a lot of retailers I've dealt with (far and away, the woodworking retailers are better than other folks I've dealt with - I've had an especially large amount of trouble with musical instrument makers).

The guy on the ground comment that Dave makes is something I've heard over and over, from material handling (like ship and train size stuff) to musical instruments - if you are willing to staff the factories with folks in country full time, you can get whatever you want at whatever quality grade you want. Over time, the cultural differences that make that important will go away, unless China gets submarined by Vietnam and other places that are cheaper labor, and maybe the cycle will start again.

[Mel Fulks]

I have read Dave's comments a couple of times and agree. I remember when 'made in Japan' meant junk , it was mainly stuff made for our market and probably spect out by US people .The Japanese cameras etc made in Japan and proudly bearing Japanese names were responsible for 'made in Japan' now being a promise of high quality. I don't assume the Chinese can't design ,make ,and market excellent quality machines with Chinese names. Just wish they would do it.

[Dave Anderson NH]

It all comes down to money and knowledge. The purchaser, whether it is of a plane or a PC, has to have the knowledge of what they want, the knowledge of how to specify their standards to the supplier, and the knowledge of how to inspect and distinguish between poor, marginal, acceptable, and superior. They then have to find a reliable manufacturer who will offer or accept a unit price that allows the maker to provide the product to a particular standard and still allow the wholesaler adequate profit margin and a place in the market. The onus is always on the purchaser to chose the quality level they want and then moniter the manufacturer to make sure they produce to the agreed upon standard. Substandard tools produced in any country reflect primarily on the wholesale purchaser and to my way of thinking NOT on the manufacturer. If you order and are only willing to pay for junk it is junk you will get and junk is what you deserve.

[ian maybury]

That's broadly what I was being cautious about too.

I don't (a) know how MN 65 performs in practice (but maybe given the fairly decent quality of the other planes its not too bad - maybe the manganese content (?) helps with toughness and wear resistance versus a simple carbon steel - which is why some more user feedback would be interesting), and (b) i don't have a clue as to how much of the cost of a plane like that the choice of steel grade may account for. (it will probably have implications for ease of manufacturing as well as purchasing cost)

Chinese made products do from our perspective (of being exposed to stuff bought by pile 'em high western importers at minimum prices) have a tendency to cut corners on materials, and to struggle to maintain consistently high quality levels. The lesson of Japan in the 80s though was that this tends to be a short term situation. Japan was a bye-word for junk products in say the 50s and 60s - but by the late 80s/early 90s had become the benchmark. One which as a direct result of their ability to deliver pretty much perfect quality at competitive costs almost wiped out most of the US automotive and consumer electronics manufacturers.

'The Machine That Changed the World' (book) http://www.amazon.com/The-Machine-That-Changed-World/dp/0060974176 is a good place for anybody that fancies some reading on the topic to start - it's the results of a major late 80s study of management methods in the japanese automotive industry by their US counterparts. It's not light reading - but it in effect laid the foundation for the 'Lean' methods which these days comprise best manufacturing practice worldwide...

ian

[Mike Tekin]

This is a really interesting discussion. I just remembered that Chris Schwartz blogged about this shoulder plane a short while ago and mentioned he was going to test it out...it will be interesting to see what his findings are...

I for one remember him giving an honest, unbiased critique of the V1 Woodriver planes, so it should be something to watch out for

[george wilson]

AsI mentioned in an earlier post in this thread,I can't blame the Chinese. They get paid so little for their products I don't know how they do it.

Another thing someone who has lived in Taiwan,and been to some of their factories told me, the Chinese do not use many of the machines they make,and have little idea about them. This guy saw a bunch of workmen set up a sort of folding plywood workbench,and completely with Asian type hand tools,make an elegantly wood paneled office interior.

[ian maybury]

I think that's (knowing what the customer wants and expects) also a big part of their problem too George. The Japanese undertook major initiatives and have formalised the whole business of putting designers in the shoes of the customer to get around this same issue. With great success.

There's also a lot presumed when you engage with what are typically pretty highly developed potential materials and parts suppliers in the West - which isn't necessarily spoken, but which greatly reduces the risk of problems.

It's pretty much a given for example that if you buy a tool steel from a mainstream manufacturer that these days it'll be per the spec. That was much less reliably the case years ago, and I'm sure is less so in China today too. None of it is insurmountable though.

Luckily enough for all of us (as the Japanese also found, and the Germans to a fair degree too in recent times) when you do get a total grip on some major markets it's very tough to hold on to it. First off you make gazillions, but then your currency appreciates and you end up not only with all sorts of costs built in that people have got used to - but also all of the inputs you buy locally (labour, materials, facilities etc) get hugely expensive too. Plus the ethic of your workers slides. Not only that but the currency of those you sell to depreciates, so you get less money for your products.

So it becomes possible for the other guy to get back. Which I guess is why capitalism inevitably proceeds via if not boom and bust at least very pronounced cycles...

ian