Adding to the chip breaker-single iron debate ...

[Derek Cohen]

One of the members of the Aussie forum recently posted an interesting smoother. He collects Siegley planes and the #3 (type 7, around 1897) he showed is simply beautiful ...


http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Planes/Siegley%203/Siegley3-1_zps3fb7557b.jpg


http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Planes/Siegley%203/Siegley3-2_zpsdb1cf313.jpg


http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Planes/Siegley%203/Siegley3-3_zps5e01243f.jpg


What caught my eye was the adjustable mouth ...


http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Planes/Siegley%203/Siegley3-4_zpsc7020010.jpg


What is also particularly interesting about it is that it is a single iron plane, at the time Bailey/Stanley were building planes with double irons.


The relevance of this is that there has been much discussion over the past year about the lost art of setting the chip breaker (in a double iron) for interlocked grain when smoothing. This is done in combination with a larger-than-average mouth (otherwise the shavings will jam it).


Here we have a single iron plane (i.e. no chip breaker) that instead uses the mouth size to control tear out. I asked him what was the angle of the frog on the Siegley. He replied it was 48 degrees (I suspect it is actually 47 1/2 degrees, the same as UK infills).


The issue is that the "lost art of the chip breaker" argues that this information faded into the background only fairly recently, somewhere in the last 20 or 30 years when most of the leading educationalists (video and books) in modern times only referred to the size of the mouth or the cutting angle as methods for controlling tear out.


Now the Siegley plane represents a design that precedes these years, is smack in the middle of the Stanley chip breaker period, and yet is not following that theory/method. Indeed, Siegley were purchased by Stanley and then continued to offer this design (rather than converting it to their format, or simply scrapping it to reduce competition).


What is suggests is that there may have always been two schools of thought for controlling tear out, and both with a history of success in use.


Regards from Perth


Derek

[Kees Heiden]

Well, the Stanley was a succes, the Siegley apparently not :p

Of course there have always been three schools of thought regarding the tearout issue. High angles, tight mouth and chipbreakers. Holtzappfl describes all three in his book. You can combine the three methods too, with more or less succes. Back when steel planes were very rare, the tight mouth method was troublesome. It's not easy to realise a very tight mouth in a wooden plane without introducing clogging issues, and if you manage to do that, subsequent flattening sessions will open the mouth sooner then you wish. High angles (more then 50 degrees) have always been around, after the invention of the chipbreaker especially in moulding planes.

Nowadays the issue is pretty mood. We are literally swimming in cheap 45 degree, double iron planes. That makes the chipbreaker method the method of choice for most people. But when you want to work with high angles or tight mouths, options are plenty available too, specially in bevel up planes.

[David Weaver]

Siegleys are not uncommon enough that someone would go broke over here trying one. However, a common pitch plane even with a tight mouth is not always desirable. The cap iron always stops tearout. The tight mouth at common pitch just makes it less, but you are barred from taking something like a 6 thousandth shaving before you do your final work, because it will still be relatively rough.

Many ways to skin the cat, but the double iron seems to have been the most popular by far.

[Derek Cohen]

Keep in mind, David, I am not offering evidence to debate which way works best - choose your own poison - but just that there was likely to have been a similar debate 100 years ago over methods for controlling tear out.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[David Weaver]

Derek, since we don't really have much in writing (that I know of) comparing one to the other, I sometimes wonder when someone goes away from the norm if it is purely for marketing purposes. Some of the collector types might know the siegley story.

I had a chance to get an edwin hahn #7 sized plane for $20 last year, and left it behind only because I felt I'd be a pig if I cleaned out an antique dealer's booth near my parents. (actually, the booth had one hardly used #6 for $15 that I bought, and four #7 sized planes - the other three were stanley - those were $20 each). Of course, I changed my mind overnight and someone else had bought all of the planes between when I was there and when I went back.

The hahn plane would've given me a look at that type, but I probably would've flipped it, and I generally don't flip tools to make money. Someone else bought them to do just that, though, so it was a stupid courtesy on my part thinking they might be left to users.

Anyway, a 55 degree plane with a moveable mouth would be an entirely different story in terms of capability. It would be nice to see some ad literature or something explaining the virtues of the plane and asserting what qualities the maker would've felt superior (there must be some such thing, soft assertions of the type were made in all kinds of advertisements back then).

[James Taglienti]

The siegley lever cap plays double duty as a chipbreaker. Thats why it has two set screws that reference it off of the crossbar- so it can be perfectly adjusted. It was never sold or marketed as a single iron plane.

[Kees Heiden]

You could try to find the patent descriptions.


Edit:
Here it is. And indeed one of the intentions of the design is the height adjustable lever cap (which works like a chipbreaker).
http://www.handplanepatents.com/no-510096-bench-plane-jacob-siegley-1893/

[David Weaver]

Presume that chipbreaker is set on the plane? It looks only mildly more convenient than setting the cap iron on a japanese plane, then. When I was putting together the article on wood central, I played with the japanese planes a fair amount, too, and really wanted to like them for double iron work but on a dai with a tight mouth (which most premium planes have) setting the cap iron takes so much longer than it does with a bailey plane, and depth adjustments can affect it negatively. For practical use (in terms of time spent), cap irons that are mechanically attached to the iron are much better.

[Derek Cohen]

You could try to find the patent descriptions.


Edit:
Here it is. And indeed one of the intentions of the design is the height adjustable lever cap (which works like a chipbreaker).
http://www.handplanepatents.com/no-510096-bench-plane-jacob-siegley-1893/

That is fascinating!

Whether it worked, and how well it worked, is not the issue. The issue is that it was intended to work.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[george wilson]

Derek,for some reason,I cannot access your pictures. All I get is a forum I must register to get into.

[Chris Griggs]

Derek,for some reason,I cannot access your pictures.

I can't either. Would love to take a look if there's a fix.

[Derek Cohen]

Are the pics visible now? I had linked them from the Australian forum earlier. I have since copied them into Photobucket, and linked to that.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Chris Griggs]

Yes! Can see them now. Very cool. That's a beautiful old plane. Thanks!

[David Weaver]

We have never seen much (or at least I haven't) in discussion on the various types of the siegley planes. I remember clint jones years ago selling a few on woodnet, and it was like he had to twist arms to sell them.

Is there a type study for them online? If there wasn't, it would be interesting to see their descriptions in one.

[Pedro Reyes]

Well, the Stanley was a succes, the Siegley apparently not :p



We could say the same about the amount of Furniture Ikea sells vs all this forum combined. Not a jab, I know you meant it in jest...




Many ways to skin the cat, but the double iron seems to have been the most popular by far.

... but with very few exceptions (e.g. The Beatles) popular is generally not the best. So I think it was merely convenience, just my comment, don't want to start war over best tearout, ultimately feels to me (IMHO) more analysis paralysis.

peace

/p

[David Weaver]

I guess I'd open it up to a contest for all practical planes - as in, one that you could acceptably use as part of a rotation dimensioning wood (as opposed to a plane with a purpose made .001" mouth and a 70 degree iron (or either), which would be pointless for practical use.

Any reasonable sized piece of wood that can be planed. I'll plane it with a $10 millers falls plane then and see if something else stands out as clearly better.

What I'm saying is that people using hand tools had hundreds of years to decide what's best, and making two irons instead of one (slotting an iron, and having to come up with a threaded nut and a threaded sprung cap iron) is far less convenient than making a plane with a tight mouth (which could easily be achieved by applying a steel sole to the front of a coffin smoother.

I think what prevailed was the best. It even made its way into infill planes, those being hand made with skilled labor at great cost ... generally regarded as the best.

What we have over the last 25 years is move toward making planes for gentleman woodworkers who lack skills and who lack the desire to do anything where success isn't immediate or described on a bullet point list. Thus the resistance to carving, cutting mouldings, tasteful design, etc.

Each time we depart from what was developed as a matter of incremental and studied improvement, and assume that people did lots with crap tools, we usually seem to find out why they had the tools that they had. If they had crap tools back when all of this came about, a single maker of excellent tools could've easily sold their goods with great success. And if the stanley designs had not been capable, the professionals never would've bought them (and the professionals did...in droves).

There is no ikea-stanley comparison because the stanley planes cost a premium and they were fully functional professional goods.

These were developments that occurred mostly in the late 1700s and early-to-mid 1800s when tools were used almost exclusively by professionals, and not in the wal-mart / Ikea era.

[Pedro Reyes]

There is no ikea-stanley comparison because the stanley planes cost a premium and they were fully functional professional goods.



Sorry, the point I was trying to make was about popular or success as a measure of number of sales or market presence... and if Ikea does not work, how about American vs German cars, both expensive, both fully functional.

/p

[David Weaver]

Of course, Pedro, that isn't just a reaction to your post, it's sort of a culmination of the several years of discussions we've had on here about how thorough and methodical and well thought out the old things really were. Vs. the modern notion you see these days where many of the older tools are described as hard to use, inaccurately made, soft, unstable, unfit for all but most vanilla of selected woods, etc.

We have to give proper credit to the professionals who made the decisions in those days, they were a lot smarter than we give them credit for, and perhaps in some cases had a much longer view in focus when doing their business.

[David Weaver]

Sorry, the point I was trying to make was about popular or success as a measure of number of sales or market presence... and if Ikea does not work, how about American vs German cars, both expensive, both fully functional.

/p

I can't think of a relevant comparison that gets us from single iron wooden plane to double iron wooden plane, or from single iron wooden plane to double iron iron-bodied plane. The functionality of german and american cars is essentially identical and the components are similar.

But the comparison of selling junk to mass amounts of people in large numbers and at very low prices really occurred much much later than dominance production of double iron planes.

The tone of the argument has changed a lot in the last two years. Three years ago, we'd have had this conversation and only two or three people in all of the forums would have described the virtues of the double iron. Now, the majority are either on the sidelines or have relegated specialty planes to a much smaller slice of possible work, and the die hard fanatics for single iron (Like old street tool) are far fewer. I wouldn't include derek as a die-hard fanatic, hopefully nobody thinks that. Larry (old street tool) is pretty firm on the argument so far as I can tell, though, and probably because of back-and-forth with Warren Mickley combined with how he came to his conclusions in the first place.

George's insight into a lot of things that we don't know has helped a lot to get rid of the notion that people were generally satisfied to work professionally with inferior goods, too. Insight that you can't have unless you've studied the period (I certainly don't have it).

[Jim Matthews]

I was under the impression that the "chip breaker" acted as a spring in opposition to the cutting iron.

There's more going on in these interfaces than just at the cutting edge.
Since I began honing by hand, I prefer a thinner iron - it takes less time to get it sharp.

As with most elegant contrivances, there's more than meets the eye at play.

[David Weaver]

In fact, it does, and it provides a little play under tension for the whole setup and allows it to work nicely without seeming to clamp down too harshly when you snap the levercap in place.

The whole thing has made me re-look at a lot of the things that I use in the shop (even cheap power tools) and say "am I writing this off because someone told me it works like crap and it does, or is it that I really don't know how to use it properly and there's a lot more there".

Even the sharpening stones.

[Jim Matthews]

The whole thing has made me re-look at a lot of the things that I use in the shop (even cheap power tools) and say "am I writing this off because someone told me it works like crap and it does, or is it that I really don't know how to use it properly and there's a lot more there".

Makes me wonder where I threw all the packing materials *ahem* manuals when unpacking my shop.
I believe most of the "Tips and Tricks" articles in the WW press are designed to overcome the absence of instructions on proper use.

I still can't believe I was ripping the last 1/2" off width to deal with breakout, planing endgrain.
One little chamfer, and my boards are all wide enough.

Go figure.

[Hilton Ralphs]

The whole thing has made me re-look at a lot of the things that I use in the shop (even cheap power tools) and say "am I writing this off because someone told me it works like crap and it does, or is it that I really don't know how to use it properly and there's a lot more there".


The problem is that the 'advice' is now firmly embedded in your brain and every time you pick up that 'cr@ppy' tool, you remind yourself that So and So from some WW magazine told you it's no good.

I admit it eats me up sometimes.

[don wilwol]

I think writing off a design because Stanley out sold them is a bit of a push. Even 100 years ago better marketing was better marketing. Even Bailey made plane designs that didn't sell because of manufacturing cost not because they were not better designs. And I still say the "new and improved" chip breakers modern plane makers use (and I've made a few of these chip breakers myself) are because of ease of manufacturing and not actually a better functional design.

[Chris Griggs]

And I still say the "new and improved" chip breakers modern plane makers use (and I've made a few of these chip breakers myself) are because of ease of manufacturing and not actually a better functional design.

Can't say I disagree. I don't think the new CBs are functionally any better than the old. In fact the springyness of the old makes it easier to have a tight mate with the blade.

The one advantage of the new ones is that its is easy to control, adjust, polish the actual angle of the CBs leading edge (sometimes the old ones are a little too steep) but other then that I see no real advantage of the new style.

I don't dislike the new ones either, I just don't really care either way.