Sharpening Stanley Irons Question

[Stew Denton]

A while back was a post that touched on vintage Stanley plane irons, although it was only a side topic on the post. The point of one of the posts, and others, was that when sharpened with oil stones that the old Stanley irons would do wonderfully, about as well as modern high quality replacement irons. Not so much when water stones were used.

Also mentioned were Gokumyo 10000 water stones, as being excellent for the vintage Stanley irons.

What oil stones do you use, and were do you find one that is big enough for plane irons? Any comments on use would be appreciated.

I also looked for a Gokumyo 10000 stone on the net, and all I could find was a price in Yen. Where can these be bought, and what is the price in English for a stone large enough for a pretty fair sized plane iron.

Any comments, agreements/disagreements on the oil stone idea, etc., and thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thanks and regards,

Stew

[Jim Koepke]

A while back was a post that touched on vintage Stanley plane irons, although it was only a side topic on the post. The point of one of the posts, and others, was that when sharpened with oil stones that the old Stanley irons would do wonderfully, about as well as modern high quality replacement irons. Not so much when water stones were used.

There may be some misunderstanding in this.

My recollection is the Stanley irons were made at a time when oil stones were what most people, in the U.S. had on hand. The newer harder irons may need a more aggressive stone to cut through them.

Most of my water stones are made by Norton. They may not be the best available. They do work fine on chisels, knives and plane blades for me.

a good oilstone will cost as much as a good water stone of the same size.

Looking at danswhetstone.com/ would be my first choice for a new oilstone. I am happy with the two recently purchased from them. One is a triangle stone the other is a slip stone. Pricey but very nice.

jtk

[Daniel Rode]

I may be wrong but I'm sure someone knowledgeable will chime in.

I believe the difference is that the vintage irons were thinner and so the relatively slower oil stones worked just fine and were fast enough. Today we often have thicker and / or harder irons, so the benefit from a faster cutting water-stone is more apparent. That's what I've taken from the discussions here at any rate.

[David Weaver]

I think I'd like to calibrate the talk. It depends when you say it will "do as well as replacement irons" what's really meant by that.

I use all old stock irons now, and I used to be fanatical about replacements. The performance (and I've said I like the vintage better in the context of use now) is based on the whole package of use where time is considered in sharpening, and ease of sharpening and grinding is considered. Also, if you take heavy and light shavings (as opposed to just 1 thousandth inch smoothing shavings), the difference between the two types isn't as drastic.

For the hard alloyed modern irons, oilstones aren't that pleasant to use, and they trail in sharpness on those irons to modern waterstones. For vintage stones, the gap is closed a little bit, but something like a shapton 15k still makes a sharper edge in the context of tool sharpening. Oilstones, however, do a very good job of working fairly quickly with the vintage stones and you can tell that the two were made for each other. If stanley wanted to make harder irons, they could've made harder irons. The notion that their vintage irons were just poor quality is just not correct - they were spec to a hardness to work with natural stones whereas a 62 hardness A2 or D2 iron is not.

From a strict count-the-strokes between sharpening contest, the A2 irons and more alloyed than that (like PM V11) are going to go more feet of planing before needing to be resharpened. If you're sharpening with a method of limited clearance like the charlesworth method, then the issue is magnified a bit, and to add to that, the thinner the shaving, the easier it is to tell because as clearance narrows from wear, thinner shavings are the first to go.

So, someone using a smoothing plane only and using a guide to sharpen their irons is probably going to really have a preference for A2, etc, irons if they start counting strokes. Someone dimensioning from rough is going to be a toss up, but to me the loveliness of sharpening of plainer steel irons at vintage hardness is just much nicer to use. I don't take many 1 thousandth smoother shavings, either, compared to other types of shavings. If the work is prepared properly before that point, the smoother shavings are few.

As far as oilstones
* fine india + black ark or trans ark
* washita + black ark or trans ark

which way you go on that depends on whether or not you want natural stones only (I usually go that route because the hard black or trans ark follows a washita or soft ark better than it follows a fine india, but either will work).

If you're using a guide, waterstones definitely perform better. If you're sharpening freehand, the subtleties available to you using a stone that has a wider range (any stone that doesn't release its particles in regular use gives you more options) like an oilstone is maybe going to be more satisfying, even if it's not providing a keener edge than a soft waterstone with very fine particles.

[Andrew Pitonyak]

A while back was a post that touched on vintage Stanley plane irons, although it was only a side topic on the post. The point of one of the posts, and others, was that when sharpened with oil stones that the old Stanley irons would do wonderfully, about as well as modern high quality replacement irons. Not so much when water stones were used.

I must have missed this post unless they said something like "those oil stones worked fine on the vintage steel but not so much on the newer super steels", or something like that. I will admit that I do not own something like these Sigma Power Select II stones (http://www.toolsfromjapan.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=335_404_513) or the Naniwa stones (http://www.toolsfromjapan.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=335_404_484 or http://www.toolsfromjapan.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=335_404_407). I do, however, own King, Bester, and Shapton. I have not had any problems sharpening the old Stanley steel with them.

Do you remember off hand why someone thought that the newer stones were not appropriate for the older steel? Any links?

[Stew Denton]

Hi All,

This is the link:

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?219690-Favorite-Stanley-planes&p=2288304#post2288304

The section of interest starts where David's post begins with: "I use to have only." I am thinking that you are right, it may be about matching the stone to the iron, and the new steel is too hard to be sharpened well with oilstones, but am not sure. It kind of looks like some are saying that the old Stanley irons get sharper with oil stones, and that they were designed to be sharpened with such.

Not sure.

Stew

[David Weaver]

You can sharpen hard irons on oilstones, you just have to be specific about the condition of the oilstones and very specific about how little metal you work. the loveliness about the natural stones is how marginal they seem on really hard steel, and then you put an iron that you think is too soft on the stones and raise a burr on it *easily* and find that it holds together well in use. Just a totally different floor in the department store vs hard irons and waterstones, if you know what I mean.

[Mike Henderson]

Those old Stanley blades were plain old carbon steel. Back when Stanley was laminating them, good steel was expensive and that's why they went to the expense of laminating the good steel to cheaper steel (low carbon steel). Once steel became cheaper, they stopped laminating them. There's nothing magic about those old blades and most modern replacement blades will be head and shoulders above those blades.

They will perform about as well as a modern carbon steel blade. Our ancestors did excellent work with plain carbon steel, but it does not hold an edge as well as many of the modern replacement blades. You just have to sharpen more often. They're also very thin and thicker blades work better - at least for me.

My experience has been that the biggest improvement you can make to an older Stanley plane is to replace the blade with a modern blade.

Mike

[As far as sharpening those old blades, I've always used water stones and they got the blades very sharp. I doubt if it makes much difference whether you use oil or water stones as long as the grits are selected properly. Many of them are not even close to flat and they can take a lot of work to flatten the back. I've done a bunch of them.]

[Steve Voigt]

There's nothing magic about those old blades and most modern replacement blades will be head and shoulders above those blades.

They will perform about as well as a modern carbon steel blade. Our ancestors did excellent work with plain carbon steel, but it does not hold an edge as well as many of the modern replacement blades. You just have to sharpen more often.

My experience has been that the biggest improvement you can make to an older Stanley plane is to replace the blade with a modern blade.


Some people like to subscribe to the narrative of technological progress, that quality keeps getting better as more and more "improvements" are made. It's certainly true for some things; my acura is light years away from my old 67 bug (though a lot less fun).
The problem with applying that to tool steel is that the basic principles have been known for almost 200 years. It's just not that complicated. I like the way George Wilson put it recently. A pure high carbon steel like 1095 or Japanese white will take the keenest edge you can get. When you start adding gunk (manganese, chromium, etc), you prolong the life of the edge, but at the expense of both sharpness and ease of sharpening. So, you add a little gunk, you get something like O1 or japanese blue. Add some more gunk and you have A2 or D2. In short, there is no free lunch, there is always a trade off.
The best vintage irons I have are superior to the modern irons I have. The one thing I'll agree with Mike on is that quality control has gotten better; vintage irons especially 19th C ones, can be all over the map. But I doubt that's an issue with a 20th C Stanley limited iron.
So, my point is, your old iron should work just great. Sharpen it with oilstones, water stones, whatever. The nice thing about these irons is how easy they are to sharpen.

[Doug Trembath]

Steve, I couldn't agree more. Too much has been made about some wild, esoteric measurement of sharpness. In an effort to draw back from the tendency of folks who wish to describe some magical, unobtainable level of sharpness on any type of steel, or existing iron, for the benefit of new users and experienced, I submit that any sharpening regimen that allows an edge that will pare, by hand, simple Pine end grain to a polished surface, sufficient for ANY timber found in North America. My sense is, after planing many items of other, perhaps more esoteric, and diverse timbers to a finished state, that this test of sharpness will suffice for our normal timbers, quite sufficiently. To supplement my suppositions, I refer to the Australians in our assemblage, who work with some of the toughest timbers available, who use the same metric. Too much is made of the "Supreme Level Of Sharpness". This has led new folks to strive well beyond sharp, in an effort to reach sharpness Nirvana, to the detriment of our craft...Isn't it time for us to reduce this focus to an obtainable level, and reduce the stress on our newest acolytes?

Just sayin'...

Doug Trembath

[David Weaver]

I doubt the steel used in the stanley irons was too far behind anything now. I don't know if and when they went to oil hardening steel, but I can't find anything lacking about it - except maybe consistency if there is a dud or two. Such a problem is extremely easy to remedy - spend a few bucks and get another one. You could buy 5 for the price of a new make O1 iron.

It would be the equal of a 60 hardness new iron if stanley decided to make them that hard. I'd imagine that the virtues of the modern irons (and they are nice) are things that have arisen due to targeting amateurs and needing spec sheet superiority, the same way cars need to have more horsepower and rev higher to get it, even if very few people make use of it. It's our notion of that if 10 is good, 11 is definitely better, even if 10 is twice as good as what you're buying 11 to do.

In terms of thickness, I'd imagine experienced users, especially those who get control of the cap iron, will start to find much more favor in the stock stanley irons and find them to be plenty stable, two or three times as fast to grind and faster to hone. I, for a long time, preferred the most pimped out medium thickness replacement iron I could get, but that sort of went away as time went on and I learned to take fewer thicker strokes to complete work - something that makes iron that planes the most feet at 1 thou sort of go away. If shops were surveyed, I'd bet that the modern irons would correlate with either less experience or a lower % of plane use in terms of how the wood is worked.

Given access to all of the tools available, a hand dimensioner will probably ultimately gravitate toward wooden jack and try planes, and the smoother can pretty much be anything because it does very little work unless it gets used as a do-all, too. (then a stanley in stock trim is nice). It's nice on the jack and try plane to have something that sharpens most easily using stones that take the least preparation - you can have your plane apart, honed and back together before you have to break thought, and the grinding is quick and easy. Easier to grind steel grinds cooler and much faster.

[Matthew N. Masail]

I made a comment like that and about the Gokomyo 10K (which is a 1 micron stone like the 16K shapton) so I'll explain.


my comment was intended mostly to edge durability during use, when sharpened with oil stones the stock Stanley iron lasted just as well as newer irons I have, and it cut very nicely. when sharpened with waterstone, the edge would get chippy very quickly and stop taking full width shaving, dulling came soon after. David has explained many times why this is and how oil stones cut shallower, I know only from using it.


The Gokomyo! a weird special stone.... it cuts very strongly, so much so that is leaves a burr, either side! and I must strop after using it. this is comparison to a 8K stone that leaves much less of a burr and a smooth sharp edge, but is clearly coarser. the Gokomyo edge is not great right off the stone despite how fine it is, it is obviously finer by a good amount than an 8K, but followed by a light strop with green compound it produces an edge that is the best longest lasting edge I've used.
the Weird part - the edge off the stone feels to the touch and the wood much like a edge off a oil stone, and the stock Stanley iron was as good off this stone as it was off a black ark from Dan's. please note I have not done any extensive experiment with this, I will do so as work goes on, but not for the sake of just testing it. I have not tried the shapton 12K, and the feel off the Gokomyo might be because it is a 1micron stone, but I lead towards thinking it's somthing about the stone. you can buy it from tools from japan for about 180$ shipped, not cheap, so far, I'm liking it but have not yet discovered it's use well enough to say if it's worth it or not, a good 8K is a great stone for woodworking and can be had for half that.

Oil stone sizes, my favorite size is 2"X6". larger ones are just plain heavy and cumbersome, and if you free hand 2" is wide enough for anything. if I were looking for a oil stone set, I'd get a fine India and a hard\trans\black Ark. the black ark from Dan is cut to a high standard and comes FLAT, well worth the extra $$, it's no fun flattening a stone like that.

[Warren Mickley]

These vintage plane irons were designed for oil stones. The steel composition, the hardening, and the tempering were all tested and adjusted using oil stones. Water stones will not duplicate this system. The Japanese irons and stones are a completely different system and the best are likewise matched, plane iron to stone. Today's "modern" steels are often borrowed from other uses which do not include plane irons and are often tested by workers without much experience actually using planes or chisels.

I cannot but think that the Stanley laminated irons were designed for ease of sharpening. They are easier to sharpen. In the 18th century and earlier the steel was very expensive and it was easier to weld a tiny bit on the plane iron. But by 1920 however, steel was cheap and to weld a piece on and true up the iron was a lot of extra work compared to using steel bar stock.

When sharpening plane irons and the wider chisels, it is best to have the edge of the iron stick out over the edge of the stone. Otherwise the stone gets dished and the plane iron gets too rounded. You really want to concentrate on the edge of the stone in order to keep the wear even. I prefer 2X8 stones, but 2X7 and 2X6 are adequate, as is something slightly less than 2 inches wide.

[David Weaver]

I'm not going to put any irons on my gok 20, at least not on a regular basis, but what the razoring community says about the gok 20 is that it doesn't damage razor edges like the other ~1 and slightly under micron stones do (shapton pro, SP 13k, shapton glasstone, naniwa super 12k)

At 18 degrees or so, razors are a lot more fragile, though, and the sharpening process is different and far less frequent.

[Mike Henderson]

Some people like to subscribe to the narrative of technological progress, that quality keeps getting better as more and more "improvements" are made. It's certainly true for some things; my acura is light years away from my old 67 bug (though a lot less fun).
The problem with applying that to tool steel is that the basic principles have been known for almost 200 years. It's just not that complicated. I like the way George Wilson put it recently. A pure high carbon steel like 1095 or Japanese white will take the keenest edge you can get. When you start adding gunk (manganese, chromium, etc), you prolong the life of the edge, but at the expense of both sharpness and ease of sharpening. So, you add a little gunk, you get something like O1 or japanese blue. Add some more gunk and you have A2 or D2. In short, there is no free lunch, there is always a trade off.
The best vintage irons I have are superior to the modern irons I have. The one thing I'll agree with Mike on is that quality control has gotten better; vintage irons especially 19th C ones, can be all over the map. But I doubt that's an issue with a 20th C Stanley limited iron.
So, my point is, your old iron should work just great. Sharpen it with oilstones, water stones, whatever. The nice thing about these irons is how easy they are to sharpen.
I certainly do subscribe to the narrative of technological progress. Over the 200 or so years you mention, a great many people have run a great many trials of differing steel with the goal of producing a better product for woodworkers. It would be sad indeed if all that work did not produce anything at all.

I've heard the story over and over again that old tools, and old steel is superior to anything we have today and it just doesn't make any sense. 200 years ago (around 1800), we did not have the knowledge or processes to even know what was in steel. Steelmakers went by recipes - so much of this and so much of that - and waited to see what came out. Often it was not good steel because they did not have the exact same materials that had made a good batch of steel earlier. The ore may have contained too much sulfur, or some beneficial alloy was missing from this batch of ore. When you read the history of steelmaking, you find over and over complaints from buyers about the inferior quality of the steel and the inconsistency from batch to batch.

The introduction of the Bessemeyer process did little for the quality of steel but did allow steelmakers to increase the quantity they could produce, albeit with lots of inconsistency between batches. The steelmaker had to rely on his judgement of the color of the blast from the converter to decide when to stop a blow.

After the electric furnace was invented and perfected in the early 20th century the quality of steel got better but the steelmakers still had to do a lot of experimenting to find what alloys produced the best steel for different purposes. That research continues today, and progress continues to be made. For example, the new powdered metal blades offer significant advantages over plain carbon steel because the size and dispersion of the carbides can be controlled much better.

So, yes, I do subscribe to the narrative of technological progress, and I think for very good reasons.

Mike

[I'll add a note: Blind taste tests by wine aficionados have proven that they cannot tell the difference between wines that are rated as "great vintages" and wines that cost significantly less - but are good wines. I think people who believe that progress in steel stopped in the mid-1800's are something like that. They WANT to believe so they find what they want.]
[Probably the reason people find old blades to be "good" has more to do with the hardening (perhaps as hard as a Japanese blade) and with the thickness of the iron - many of the old blades for wooden planes are very thick - than with the basic content of the steel. Since those old blades were laminated, the cutting steel could be very hard and the wrought iron it was laminated to would provide toughness.]

[Jim Koepke]

Steelmakers went by recipes - so much of this and so much of that -

And don't forget the red headed boy... preferably of an age less than 14.

jtk

[Jim Koepke]

Maybe the 'wonder steel' of yesteryear was called that because they all wondered what the heck made that batch so good.

jtk

[ian maybury]

+1 that the standard quantitative measures often don't capture the nuances of material properties. And that's even before the question of whether people are often led more by their perceptions than what's actually happening in front of them.

Nothing whatsoever to do with irons and sharpening, but abrasion/wear resistance is a peculiar business. I spent a lot of time years ago playing with materials for off road motorcycle chain tensioner rollers and suspension bushings - stuff that had to survive in dirty and abrasive conditions. The lessons (we didn't even do enough experimentation to properly understand what was going on) was that outcomes were often very unpredictable and highly counter intuitive.

Hardness very often does not confer wear resistance - soft bronze bushing would for example often wear less than a hardened steel sleeve they were running on, while softer polymers often did better than harder ones.

I'm guessing that cohesive strength counts for a lot. That's where if there are harder particles that they are very strongly held in the surrounding matrix. Maybe also the degree of flexibility - where stuff can deflect and bend out of the way rather than be stiff and get broken off. Then there's issues of lubricity and galling. Austenitic stainless/high alloy steels are for example notorious for picking up (galling) - they don't make good bearings. I don't know if this carries over into high alloy tool steels etc, but it could easily matter quite a lot how easily a given material slides on or picks up on wood…

Or how a given steel behaves in contact with a given abrasive, and vice versa....

I suspect that in the end there's lots of parameters that could be used to define/ characterise the sort of performance we are interested in, but that the work hasn't been done to define them, or the words invented to express them - let alone to test a wide range of materials in respect of them.

There's still i think a surpising amount about crafts that resides in this sort of territory, that only somebody else who has been doing 'it' for a very long time will recognise. Which (while we often overdo the reverence for tradition - at the expense of ignoring reality) is why it may sometimes pay not to underestimate the sophistication of some of the older and more traditional ways of doing things….

[David Weaver]

I don't think anyone here has said old steel is "superior" to new steel as a blanket statement. There is, however, better quality crucible steel than some of the steel we get regularly now, but that steel was the best of the best steel made when you had more time to clean out the steel than modern process provides - especially with bessemer process, which affords the ability to get cheap and quick steel that is somewhat clean (and consistent from batch to batch), but not clean compared to the plainest/best selected of the crucible steels.

But none of it matters much until you get into the rarefied air that the highest quality white steel is pushed to, and that doesn't occur in most practical situations. There has not been for quite some time any issue with blade steels, the blade steels made 200 years ago were as good as the blade steels are now when it comes to cutting (as opposed to hitting a blade with a sledge hammer, etc, or making steel cheap - something modern steel does well).

The japanese have made very good blade steels, simple very clean high carbon steels with high carbon content that can be driven up to very high hardness and do what woodworking tools are supposed to do. On the western side of things, we haven't done any such things - but instead we've pretty much adapted steels that were perfected for industrial processes. that's what warren says.

The same thing is occurring in the billy-big-rigger market of 1/4" thick spine knives. Lots of computer commandos are buying $150 and up knives very plain knives and then showing videos of themselves cutting fruit with them, where a simpler cutting steel knife would work far better, despite the fact that it's "old technology" with "poor quality" steel.

I think it's important also to realize that the rash of recent "improvements" were made for the amateur market, and that for the last 100 years, the market of professional users ignored the tungsten high speed steels, and then the cheaper HSS that used alloying elements we're more used to seeing now. It has only been very recently that diemaking steels and now some powder metals are popular in woodworking tools, and I'd suspect that's a market driven by white collar dollars and professional dollars. IIRC, karl holtey was the first person to use A2 extensively in planes (at least he says so), and he's not been making planes in numbers that long.

I think, personally, it's misleading to believe that we've got some really innovative woodworking tool market compared to what existed 150 years ago. We have a market driven to sell things to white collar amateurs, and one that cannot make moderately priced tools that match the quality of the commodity tools from 125 years ago. Simply compare a stanley chisel to a narex chisel. They probably both hold their their edges similarly, but the narex chisels are thick and chunky and have rubbery steel whereas even the common stanley, buck, pexto (you name it) chisels had a nice dry steel that didn't cling to a wire edge to the outer reaches of micron space.

Certainly none of the modern spec sheet tools allow anyone to do any better work than they were capable of before, and the one precisely made example of forged tools, carving tools, is lacking in finish compared to tools made 200 years ago. Whether or not the modern tools are nicer to use in the context of actual work (even if they don't allow you to actually do anything better, more of a subjective "but it feels nicer") is subjective. I thought they were when I was a beginner, but I definitely don't now.

[Mike Henderson]

I don't think anyone here has said old steel is "superior" to new steel as a blanket statement. There is, however, better quality crucible steel than some of the steel we get regularly now, but that steel was the best of the best steel made when you had more time to clean out the steel than modern process provides - especially with bessemer process, which affords the ability to get cheap and quick steel that is somewhat clean (and consistent from batch to batch), but not clean compared to the plainest/best selected of the crucible steels.
You can't compare crucible steel to Bessemer steel - they're totally different animals.

But the steel used in the best tools was crucible steel. Huntsman developed the process in the mid 1700's but it took a while for it to take off. Certainly by about 1800, crucible steel was used in the best tools and was marked "Best Cast Steel". But crucible steel was hit or miss, for the same reasons. The understanding of what steel actually was chemically did not come until the late 1800's. They knew that if they put cast iron (high carbon) in a crucible with wrought iron (low carbon), and if they put it in the proper ratio, the final product would be homogeneous (because it had been melted - and that's the real "invention" of crucible steel) but the chemical makeup could be almost anything because they couldn't control the input (they had no idea what impurities were in the cast iron and wrought iron). You use the word "clean" in your statement but I have no idea what you mean by that. Since they couldn't analyze the steel, they couldn't add things to remove unwanted materials in the melt.

The thing crucible steel brought to the world was that the steel was homogeneous. Prior to that, the best steel was known as shear steel, where strips of wrought iron were put into a sealed chest with high carbon material and heated for perhaps a week. The carbon diffused into the iron but the surface had a lot more carbon than the center. The strips were then hammered together and folded to make shear steel. This steel was not homogeneous, and that's the problem crucible steel solved.

But crucible steel does not automatically equal good steel. It depended on what you started with, all the way back to the ore, and that's why ore from Sweden was so prized. They didn't know it at the time, but it was a low sulfur ore and that produced better steel.

In no way can we say that crucible steel is better that modern steel produced for demanding applications. The modern steel will be much better controlled and it will contain alloys in the percentages that were specified for the steel. Back then, no one had a clue what was in the steel. The only way they knew if it was good or not was after the fact, when they tested the finished product. If they were lucky, they got a good batch. If they were unlucky, they got a bad batch but they had no idea why.

Mike

[Mel Fulks]

Sometimes technology improves what is available for expensive military or highly specialized uses while the quality of what is available for workmen decreases. T-1 steel was available in 1900. Then taken off the market because the tungsten was
needed for WW2. Stayed unavailable for years. Available now but has very small part of the market. One reason is the higher rpm of newer machines. Try using the common semi HSS in an old lower speed machine,...makes a good wood chipper!

[David Weaver]

You can't compare crucible steel to Bessemer steel - they're totally different animals.

But the steel used in the best tools was crucible steel. Huntsman developed the process in the mid 1700's but it took a while for it to take off. Certainly by about 1800, crucible steel was used in the best tools and was marked "Best Cast Steel". But crucible steel was hit or miss, for the same reasons. The understanding of what steel actually was chemically did not come until the late 1800's. They knew that if they put cast iron (high carbon) in a crucible with wrought iron (low carbon), and if they put it in the proper ratio, the final product would be homogeneous (because it had been melted - and that's the real "invention" of crucible steel) but the chemical makeup could be almost anything because they couldn't control the input (they had no idea what impurities were in the cast iron and wrought iron). You use the word "clean" in your statement but I have no idea what you mean by that. Since they couldn't analyze the steel, they couldn't add things to remove unwanted materials in the melt.

The thing crucible steel brought to the world was that the steel was homogeneous. Prior to that, the best steel was known as shear steel, where strips of wrought iron were put into a sealed chest with high carbon material and heated for perhaps a week. The carbon diffused into the iron but the surface had a lot more carbon than the center. The strips were then hammered together and folded to make shear steel. This steel was not homogeneous, and that's the problem crucible steel solved.

But crucible steel does not automatically equal good steel. It depended on what you started with, all the way back to the ore, and that's why ore from Sweden was so prized. They didn't know it at the time, but it was a low sulfur ore and that produced better steel.

In no way can we say that crucible steel is better that modern steel produced for demanding applications. The modern steel will be much better controlled and it will contain alloys in the percentages that were specified for the steel. Back then, no one had a clue what was in the steel. The only way they knew if it was good or not was after the fact, when they tested the finished product. If they were lucky, they got a good batch. If they were unlucky, they got a bad batch but they had no idea why.

Mike

The best crucible steel is, to me, a better quality steel for a blade steel than modern steel. It's pretty easy to say. We have the benefit now of being able to sample a few irons or chisels to get just what we want. We don't have that luxury when producing new.

Even then steel that is described as cast steel is better from 115 years ago for razors (I have no idea what process made that steel). I'm sure it was monstrously harder to make a razor from, but modern "carbon steel" razors are lacking compared to the best razors made in solingen germany and new york around the turn of the century. All it takes is to hone one and use it.

I would imagine that we could take white #2 and make an excellent razor with it, but who will have the skill to do that these days? It's used in kamisori, but it would be hard for anyone to mass produce something like that. The process of making a razor is fairly simple - fine grain steel that is forged in a die, heat treated and then finish ground. Yet we can't do it as well with the modern steels as it was done when the competition to make razors was stiff.

The level that tools were made to 125 years ago was intentional, and the level that wooden tools were made to 175 years ago was intentional. We really haven't done anything to improve them, and the only way you can call a thicker iron that takes much longer to grind is to put it in the hands of an amateur and tell them to use a smoothing plane for two hours and see which one smooths the longest. They don't have the judgement to know which is better, because they're not using the plane in context.

It's great that the steel these days is cheaper, but aside from being more wear resistant in some cases, I'm not buying that the irons are significantly superior in any material way vs. irons that were probably bessemer process irons 100+ years ago. Those irons were sold to professionals in a very competitive market. If they got a dud, I'd bet their dealer would square them up on it - we still see duds from time to time today, and the dealers, as should be expected, square folks up on the duds. To suggest that a handful of amateurs have improved something that millions of professionals demanded is a great sales pitch, but it's really improved for inexperienced users. The experience for the rest is pretty much the same, but some things (like grinding 1/4 inch irons in some specialty planes) are not remotely close to being an improvement.

[Jim Koepke]

Yet we can't do it as well with the modern steels as it was done when the competition to make razors was stiff.

The competition may have done more to improve quality than the steel used.

With a multitude of makers and workers the knowledge was intact. Over time, two world wars and changes in technology some of the old arts were lost or abandoned. Some of these were "in house secrets" closely guarded and kept from the competition.

Safety razors followed by electric razors likely were the end of the straight razor industry.

Today, most makers never used a straight razor and do not know the ins and outs of making quality that feels right on the face.

In today's industry steel can be made uniform from batch to batch. That was not the case a century or more in the past.

Yes, there was some great iron made in the past with qualities we enjoy. The same metallurgy could be used today. Most likely it isn't as practical as making what is made today.

One sad consideration is much of today's market thinks all things are equal with price the only determining factor.

The only other explanation would be you have fortunately found some magical mystery steel whose composition was lost in time, never to be made again.

jtk

[David Weaver]

I think that the old steels in the razors were a bit plainer, and the makers very competitive. The known cutler's marks (ERN, Kobar, Carl Monkhouse, ...) produced very straight razors of a nice steel composition, I would imagine partly out of pride and partly out of reputation. There are off marks from those days (that just say made in germany), or some other marks that just didn't seem to consistently make straight razors (torrey) that didn't do quite as well, but did get to use some of the same fine grained steel.

The last two remaining large razor makers are in france and germany, and the resurgence in straight razor shaving has backlogged them a ton, but I think they are wise enough to not just double production at their cost given that they were recently working in a dying industry. What I can tell of the modern german razors is that they are closer to what we call modern tool steel, it's more alloyed. They are still good and still usable, but not the same experience as using a laser straight carl monkhouse made razor that just seems to get sharp on anything it touches. And their ability to grind and finish a razor isn't as good as it used to be, which is probably a matter of cost. The crispness, thinness of the hollow and straightness of the razor is not comparable to a 100 year old razor, but we shouldn't expect it to be. They have been competing for a small segment of the market that is going to buy no matter what, and it's unlikely that they want to deal with the plainest of steels, which from my understanding are harder to get straight due to warp.

Gillette, as the story goes, was wise enough to get the old early safety blade razors in GI kits. When people came from doing things of skill and technique, the early conveniences must've looked like they were dropped from heaven.

[Mike Henderson]

It's great that the steel these days is cheaper, but aside from being more wear resistant in some cases, I'm not buying that the irons are significantly superior in any material way vs. irons that were probably bessemer process irons 100+ years ago. .
Bessemer steel was never used for cutting tools. Bessemer steel was used for railroad rails and other similar things. Bessemer steel was a quantity product and used where a large quantity of steel was needed.

High quality cutting tools were made with crucible steel.

However, to claim that crucible steel is superior to modern steel is a stretch. Our ancestors did not have knowledge of chemistry - in the early days, they didn't even know that carbon was what caused iron to become steel. They weren't aware that sulfur was what was making their steel hot short. They worked with primitive kilns with little control of temperature and almost no control of their inputs. We have documentation of buyers complaining about the quality of the steel and the lack of consistency from batch to batch.

Every now and then, the planets aligned and they got a good batch of steel. But in no way could they produce it consistently.

It's also possible that only the best of that steel survived to today. That the inferior steel was discarded as unusable. The problem with that theory is that the best steel should have been worn out from use.

If you're going to argue that crucible steel produced in the middle 1800's was consistently better than modern steel, you need to provide some theory about how our ancestors, with the technological limitations they had, managed to out perform modern steelmakers.

Mike

[David Weaver]

If you're going to argue that crucible steel produced in the middle 1800's was consistently better than modern steel, you need to provide some theory about how our ancestors, with the technological limitations they had, managed to out perform modern steelmakers.


That's extrapolation. It's not what I said, and the comment that the stars had to align only has actual history to work against. What I said was that the best crucible steel, as in the best batches were at least as good as modern process steel, and probably more plain. It appears that nobody wishes to deal with water hardening steels these days because it's a bit more difficult to work and requires skill. Nobody except for the japanese, who make what is the closest to the best file steel from over a century ago. And a couple of companys from sweden and austria may make a very high carbon blade steel without requiring the process to be powder metal - I don't know if bohler does, I don't need to know much about blade steel other than to find hitachi white.

At any rate, it's naive to believe that 150 years ago, the "stars had to align", or even 200 years ago, to get a good batch of steel. I'm sure the vast majority of irons that were made were very good, and a good iron is or isn't, it requires knowledge of the process to create it but not knowledge of its chemistry for it to be good. That is the basis of craft skill, to find something that is good and perform it skillfully.

To believe that you could come up with a crack theory (all good tools would have been used up) is also naive, and suggests that there is some full information mechanism that pulls tools out of a deceased workman's shop with certainty and provides them to someone else who will feverishly exhaust them. It's not the case. I've gotten two NOS planes that someone set aside that are absolutely top shelf. I couldn't speculate why they were set aside, but if I have two, clearly there are many others.

I stand by my statement that an experienced user, one who wasn't theorizing but instead actually using, would probably come to prefer the vintage irons to the new ones in heavy use. There are few that I know of who use their tools to make a living, but warren is one, and as I'm a convert from the school of thick hard grinding irons to what professionals chose and preferred (when the market was professionals - surely if the market wanted harder irons that were 1/4" thick, stanley would've made them or purchased the company that did) when professionals used the tools. There's really not much to argue with in terms of actual proof. high alloy steels were cast aside by professionals in favor of simple steels and less thick irons, and despite the fact that silicon carbide stones became common, the irons did not get harder. Nor did the chisels.

For anyone who comes across modern replacement irons and decides they are better than full length sweetheart and older irons, I'll be glad to give my mailing address. I take donations. I don't, however, have any interest in receiving any modern replacement irons. And not because I'm a backwards costume wearing role player. Simply because heavy use has pointed me toward a preference. I no longer have any new razors, either - the difference in the quality of the steel for actual use for its intended purpose (to get sharp, to shave, to stay sharp via a strop and linen) is easy to see and feel.

[Steve Voigt]

If you're going to argue that crucible steel produced in the middle 1800's was consistently better than modern steel, you need to provide some theory about how our ancestors, with the technological limitations they had, managed to out perform modern steelmakers.

Mike

Mike, you clearly have pretty extensive knowledge about steel, and I don't think any of us is going to convince the other. But I would make a couple points.
First, I would argue that the steel in many (but by no means all) cutting tools from the 2nd half of the 19th c. is better in some ways than a lot of modern steel.
It's better in the sense that it takes a great edge, lasts a reasonable amount of time, and most of all sharpens quickly and easily. Meaning that when you move to your finest stone, the wire edge almost dissolves, and very little flipping back and forth or stropping is needed.
This is a matter of priorities. If you view sharpening as a chore, and make a big production out of it, you're likely to prefer something like A2, where you sharpen once and maybe not again for the rest of the day. If you'd rather sharpen quickly and often, then vintage steels can be really nice.

Second, I'd reject the idea that a process has to be understood, in scientific terms, to be effective. I think most woodworkers would acknowledge that japanese irons are among the best there is. Did the japanese smiths a century ago (or even today) understand all the chemistry? Did they know that charcoal forges are ideal because they limit carbon loss from the surface? I doubt it, and I doubt it would make any difference if they did. Same thing for mid 19th c. western steel: foundries and smiths did what worked, and probably didn't care that much about why.

Third, I think you assume that technological progress is always aimed at making the product better. It isn't, especially for an insignificant sliver of the market like woodworking. It's often aimed at making the product cheaper and more easily massed produced. Take A2 for example. It's designed to be more abrasion resistant, it doesn't need quenching in fluid, and it has minimal distortion. That makes it more easily mass produced, but not necessarily better. Any supposed advantages (and I would question whether there are any) for woodworking are purely coincidental.

Edit: er, sorry for responding to the exact same quote as David…I guess we were writing at the same time.

[Mike Henderson]

If that old steel was so wonderful and better than anything we can produce today, people would be collecting it to use it in modern mission critical applications. The fact that those mission critical applications use modern steel should tell you something.

Mike

[Warren Mickley]

My friend George Alteneder used to make drawing instruments. His great grandfather started the business around 1850 making brass instruments, but for 100 years they used a nickel silver alloy. Here is a protractor they made in 1952 when George was a young man. It has a vernier scale that reads angles to one minute (1/60 of a degree). The protractors were $60-85 at a time when minimum wage was $.75
294669George told me that in the 1970's they had only one supplier left who could make the kind of nickel silver they used and then that supplier started to have problems with bad batches. Finally they gave up trying to make the stuff altogether and George could only offer stainless steel instruments. The know-how had gradually been lost. This stuff is not like rocket science where you can just call in an engineer and solve problems. It is much more complicated.

The best chisel I have was made 180 years ago. Like the special nickel silver, I don't think just knowing the hardness and the steel's composition would enable one to duplicate the chisel. I don't know if anyone is seriously trying to duplicate the quality. I think it would be quite an undertaking.

[David Weaver]

If that old steel was so wonderful and better than anything we can produce today, people would be collecting it to use it in modern mission critical applications. The fact that those mission critical applications use modern steel should tell you something.

Mike

Are we talking about blade steels intended to cut, or are we making a completely irrelevant comparison?

[David Barnett]

If that old steel was so wonderful and better than anything we can produce today, people would be collecting it to use it in modern mission critical applications. The fact that those mission critical applications use modern steel should tell you something.

It tells me those mission critical applications are more concerned with specificied consistency and guaranteed repeatability than a velveety feel on a sharpening stone, ease of quickly producing and maintaining a very sharp edge and an appropriate expectation of edge longevity for woodworking.

[Pat Barry]

My friend George Alteneder used to make drawing instruments. His great grandfather started the business around 1850 making brass instruments, but for 100 years they used a nickel silver alloy. Here is a protractor they made in 1952 when George was a young man. It has a vernier scale that reads angles to one minute (1/60 of a degree). The protractors were $60-85 at a time when minimum wage was $.75
294669George told me that in the 1970's they had only one supplier left who could make the kind of nickel silver they used and then that supplier started to have problems with bad batches. Finally they gave up trying to make the stuff altogether and George could only offer stainless steel instruments. The know-how had gradually been lost. This stuff is not like rocket science where you can just call in an engineer and solve problems. It is much more complicated.

The best chisel I have was made 180 years ago. Like the special nickel silver, I don't think just knowing the hardness and the steel's composition would enable one to duplicate the chisel. I don't know if anyone is seriously trying to duplicate the quality. I think it would be quite an undertaking.
Perhaps it would be interesting to know why the nickel silver alloy used on the protractor pictured was considered so important in its time. That might lend an insight that is otherwise lost. Was it corrosion resistance? Maybe some other property? I think knowing this it would be easy to find a more suitable material for an instrument such as this. What I am saying is that nickel silver went away naturlly because there were more appropriate materials that were more recently developed

[David Barnett]

Perhaps it would be interesting to know why the nickel silver alloy used on the protractor pictured was considered so important in its time. That might lend an insight that is otherwise lost. Was it corrosion resistance? Maybe some other property? I think knowing this it would be easy to find a more suitable material for an instrument such as this. What I am saying is that nickel silver went away naturlly because there were more appropriate materials that were more recently developed

Westinghouse used to make a white paper Micarta that took a wonderful finish that aged gracefully for knife handles. They quit producing it—there were other ways to produce phenolics and newer resins suitable for the applications for which it was intended. Newer white paper phenolic products have porosity which traps polishing compounds and simply can't be finished as suitably for most of today's knifemakers.

[Warren Mickley]

Pat, I think the problem with the nickel silver was machinability. The instruments were machined and worked with hand tools with extreme care. The drawing instruments made today look very clumsy in comparison. The thing that struck me about it was that even though the factory had made lots of the alloy and they knew the procedures, just being out of practice caused real problems. Woodwind instrument making suffered huge setbacks in Europe because of WWII interruptions, in some cases taking decades to regain their former standards. In a like manner it might be difficult to reproduce the quality of early 19th century chisels even if we had detailed accounts of their procedures and analyzed the composition of the steel.

[Mike Henderson]

It tells me those mission critical applications are more concerned with specificied consistency and guaranteed repeatability than a velveety feel on a sharpening stone, ease of quickly producing and maintaining a very sharp edge and an appropriate expectation of edge longevity for woodworking.
No, it points out that the old steel was not better than what is made today, for the reasons I pointed out earlier.

1. The makers of steel did not have control over their inputs so their outputs were hit or miss.
2. They did not have the knowledge or the processes to be able to analyze the inputs, nor the steel during the processing, so they were unable to take corrective actions during the making of the steel. If a batch had too much sulfur, for example, they could not detect it. And even if they could have detected it, they had no knowledge of what to do about it (how to correct it).
3. They did not have knowledge of the chemistry of steel, nor of the effects of various alloys, except in a very rudimentary manner.
4. Their output was inconsistent because of those problems.

This is not to say that they didn't occasionally make good steel. But to say that they made better steel than is made today is neither reasonable nor logical, given the conditions they worked under.

If you believe they made better steel than is made today, please explain how they did it.

Mike

[Many people fall prey to the belief that everything old was better. I suspect steel falls into that category often. If we couldn't make improvements with 200 years of research and experimentation, then shame on us.]

[For those who are interested in learning more about early steel making, including the handicaps our ancestors worked under, I recommend the two book set, "Steelmaking before Bessemer" by K. C. Barraclough. The books are somewhat expensive but you may be able to get them through your library on inter-library loan. There are a number of other books on the history of early steel and iron making and all of them paint the same picture. When you learn more about early steelmaking you'll understand how steel from that era could not possible be better than modern steel, especially in the general case.]

[Steve Voigt]

No, it points out that the old steel was not better than what is made today, for the reasons I pointed out earlier.




One wonders if you even read the responses to your posts. Your points have already been rebutted several times. A reasonable response would be to respond to those rebuttals. Simply repeating the same talking points over and over doesn't really advance the conversation.
I'll stop now; this is becoming pointless.

[Mike Henderson]

One wonders if you even read the responses to your posts. Your points have already been rebutted several times. A reasonable response would be to respond to those rebuttals. Simply repeating the same talking points over and over doesn't really advance the conversation.
I'll stop now; this is becoming pointless.
Au contraire. The points I've brought up have not been responded to, much less rebutted. As I said many times, if you believe our steelmaking ancestors made better steel than is made today, please explain how they did it, especially given the handicaps they worked under.

Mike

[David Weaver]

Somehow, it seems like your points are responding to something other than what's been said here.

[ian maybury]

Another perspective regarding art versus 'science'. Working in adhesives R&D in the 80s (as an industrial dispensing systems development guy) it was easy to be taken in by very highly qualified chemists (reputedly some of the best in their field in the world) talking knowledgeably about the various adhesive chemistries (methacrylate resins, cyanoacrylates, silicones, polyurethanes etc) - it gave the impression that the resulting properties were clearly linked in their minds to the different formulation options via an understanding enabled by this 'science'.

Not so. When it came to the practicality of delivering specific properties it inevitably came down to making up a great enormous collection of formulations and testing each one in turn to find which (if any) showed promise. There was minimal ability to predict properties at that level. I was quite shocked by this - it certainly bust my bubble regarding faith in mainstream science, and its ability to predict the behaviour of complex systems. A scenario repeated later in life when health problems exposed in a very raw way the highly limited functional/systemic understanding/hocus pocus of modern medicine. This perspective probably applies not just in adhesives and medicine - think also of environmental matters, medicine, health, diet, biology, weather - you name it.

A knowledge of the various chemistries certainly helped to suggest directions for experimentation, and the sort of effect that various forumulation changes might have - but it was far from the sort of finite and holistic understanding that scientists like to project to the unwashed as being the case. 'Trust me, I'm a scientist'. Like most professions based on specialist knowledge it was a lot about (the self interested) use of smoke and mirrors to manipulate others into buying the myth of their expertise….

What I guess I'm saying is that I suspect there's a lot less difference between the guys that worked a century and more ago (think Japanese blacksmith), and those today. Excellence was no doubt rare then as now, but they played/are playing with different hands of cards in terms of availability of expertise, experience, money, scale, equipment, materials and other resources (with the result that lots that was specialised/rare/difficult/non-existent has become mainstream/commodity today), and explained what they did by a different set of myths - but ultimately the difference was perhaps as much in language as anything else...

[David Barnett]

This is not to say that they didn't occasionally make good steel. But to say that they made better steel than is made today is neither reasonable nor logical, given the conditions they worked under.

If you believe they made better steel than is made today, please explain how they did it.
. . . .


Many people fall prey to the belief that everything old was better. I suspect steel falls into that category often. If we couldn't make improvements with 200 years of research and experimentation, then shame on us.

When you learn more about early steelmaking you'll understand how steel from that era could not possible be better than modern steel, especially in the general case.

If by better, you mean more consistently, more repeatably, more predictably and even more appropriate for most modern applications and economies of modern production, I would agree. But if you mean that the absolute best steel for knife-using trades (which includes woodworking cutters) is now made then I would, in part, disagree.

By necessity, my own experience is anecdotal and not easily verifiable, but I cannot discount my experience or the experiences of other well-informed and accomplished craftsmen as superstitious or magical thinking. I have tools from an earlier era that simply display superior attributes for appropriate use than more modern tools. For each of those highly-suitable cutters, there may be a huge number of less-suitable cutters due to just about anything in the steel-making process that could render them so, but that doesn't change the fact that the ones I've experienced take a sharper edge more quickly and easily, hold it long enough for serious and often better quality work, and resultingly are more pleasurable and productive in use.

Let me give one example. I have gravers of many steels, old and new. The newer engravers are almost all steel alloys especially developed for gravers that have profound advantages in edge-holding when cutting harder metals and materials used in the production of modern firearms.

Using vintage high-carbon steel gravers of simpler composition on these steels is inefficient and limiting to say the least. These newer gravers, while nonetheless usable produce noticeably poorer results on precious and other non-ferritic metals. They also are appropriate to many of older firearms steels but they do need to be maintained more often than HSS and tungsten carbide gravers.

Examining the work of these older carbon-steel gravers under sufficient magnification shows cleaner, smoother, brighter cuts than modern graver alloys produce in non-ferritic metals. The older gravers are easily made sharper than modern graver alloys and are more suitable for that work.

Could modern technology produce gravers of simpler steels that would equal such a suitable relationship of tool to material, of craft appropriate to craftsmen who use such tools? Perhaps, but of course no-one does. There's no incentive. I can and do make gravers from simple steels such as 1080, 1084 or even 1095 that are good enough if not quite so good as my older steel gravers. I can also make fine netsuke carving tools from these steels that are highly suitable to that work although the ones made from older gravers are sometimes superior in use. Some modern alloys are better suited to some materials, such as scrapers for ivory carving. For these I prefer those modern alloys. The same holds true for tools and toolmaking for chasing, repousse, lettering in certain stones and other crafts, as well. [Edit: Meant to say I prefer the simpler steels for most of these, as well. Bad wording and positioning—sorry.]

It's more about suitability and appropriateness, about the right steel for the job than steel properties of modern alloys that yield gains in toughness, corrosion resistance and edge longevity. Often, it's not so much the steel as the tool. Often a tool better suited to a craft operation can be made of an older, simpler alloy and be a joy to use and maintain whereas a more modern alloy with all its attributes will be noticeably less so.

As for ancestors, which you mentioned in your reply to Steve Voigt, my interest in early steelmaking, as a direct descendant of Andreas Stauttenbecker, 1604 to 1688, Solingen, and subsequent heriditary guild members of Solingen armorers and swordsmiths, was piqued so I was motivated to learn more on the subject, especially after archaeologists in the nineteen-sixties unearthed the 2,500 years-old ancient smelter bordering our ancestral home. In Andreas' time the forge was attached to the family house, Am Olli. As a nod to heritage I use a stinging nettle stamp on some of my tools.

None of this confers any especial knowledge of the subject, of course, but does point to my enthusiasm for steels both old and new. Your knowledge of steelmaking is likely broader and deeper than my own. But anyone who knows me knows that I have great respect for modern alloys and sharpening methods suitable to them. As a gem faceter I have a fairly practical understanding of diamond abrasive technologies, as well.

Nevertheless, I do have an appreciation for older steels and tools made from them and do believe knowledge has been lost that is not easily recoverable in steelmaking as we know it today. I sharpen my older gravers on novaculites and other cherts, such as jaspers, and my modern gravers with diamond. Again, it's more about appropriateness than outright formulaic superiority.

At least, that's how I see it.

[David Weaver]

Thank you for the explanation, David. Exactly what I'm referring to..proof in use rather than judgment based on spec sheet and resolution about process details.

[David Barnett]

Thank you for the explanation, David. Exactly what I'm referring to..proof in use rather than judgment based on spec sheet and resolution about process details.

You know, as an admirer and enjoyer of modernity, I can understand and appreciate Mike Henderson's point on chemistry of steels:

"3. They did not have knowledge of the chemistry of steel, nor of the effects of various alloys, except in a very rudimentary manner."

But as 'rudimentary' as that early knowledge may have been, it didn't keep early weapons makers and users from realizing the benefits of batches of well-made steels. Ancient Romans used foxglove for dropsy and congestive heart failure long before they knew the etiology of cardiac distress or the chemistry of digitalis.

[Pat Barry]

Pat, I think the problem with the nickel silver was machinability. The instruments were machined and worked with hand tools with extreme care. The drawing instruments made today look very clumsy in comparison. The thing that struck me about it was that even though the factory had made lots of the alloy and they knew the procedures, just being out of practice caused real problems. Woodwind instrument making suffered huge setbacks in Europe because of WWII interruptions, in some cases taking decades to regain their former standards. In a like manner it might be difficult to reproduce the quality of early 19th century chisels even if we had detailed accounts of their procedures and analyzed the composition of the steel.
This wouldn't be the first time that someone 'lost the recipe'. Its a fairly common occurrence in fact. Often you find that there is maybe a single person who understand this art involved with a particular manufacturing process. This person goes away and the process drifts over time to the point where the result is not the same. The person with the knowledge of the art of the process either did not or could not communicate the characteristics that he had learned to be important. Now the manufacturer has to try and figure it all out again without knowing the intricacies of the characteristics of the process that the knowledgeable person had. It can be that they never will. They may need to settle for something close but not quite up to the previous standards. In today's environment, in large companies, this is intolerable and safeguards are taken to ensure that the recipe is spelled out in detail. Designed experiments are conducted and multitudes of data are collected and analyzed to learn the input variables and their affect on the output. Still, especially in small companies or entrepreneurial ventures there remains the potential for this loss of recipe to occur.

[David Weaver]

I don't mind modernity - it's what allows us to afford to have all of these things and have the time to use them. It's what makes the majority of the people able to complain that they don't have enough stuff instead of having their nose to the ground looking for the next nickel to find something to eat.

We have a term in my industry, though it doesn't fit perfectly. The term is that it's important to recognize the difference between resolution and precision. In this case, it may be that it's important to recognize the difference between resolution, precision and specification.

I can make my decisions about what tools are the nicest to use in the context of woodworking only at the bench, though. And sometimes that doesn't fit neatly into spec sheet boasts, like what iron planes the most feet at 1 thousandth inch shaving, etc, or which batches of steel are most similar to other batches of steel.

We have been down this road before, call it the engineer's fascination. Sometime last year, someone popped through here, someone who was an engineer, and flatly said that we could just easily improve on anything made 150 years ago by coming up with some engineering solutions. Never mind that they and everyone else had no clue what professional woodworkers were doing 150 years ago. I doubt the changes made to plane irons would be of much interest to professional woodworkers from 150-200 years ago....the ones who were actually using their tools.

[David Weaver]

This wouldn't be the first time that someone 'lost the recipe'. Its a fairly common occurrence in fact. Often you find that there is maybe a single person who understand this art involved with a particular manufacturing process. This person goes away and the process drifts over time to the point where the result is not the same. The person with the knowledge of the art of the process either did not or could not communicate the characteristics that he had learned to be important. Now the manufacturer has to try and figure it all out again without knowing the intricacies of the characteristics of the process that the knowledgeable person had. It can be that they never will. They may need to settle for something close but not quite up to the previous standards. In today's environment, in large companies, this is intolerable and safeguards are taken to ensure that the recipe is spelled out in detail. Designed experiments are conducted and multitudes of data are collected and analyzed to learn the input variables and their affect on the output. Still, especially in small companies or entrepreneurial ventures there remains the potential for this loss of recipe to occur.

There was a woman at american hone who was the only person who knew how to make the Frictionite hones properly. There is an ingredient list to make the hones, but nobody else could seem to make them and the company is now closed.

They are good hones, and there's nothing particularly special to me about them as razor hones except they have this exceptional feel (I can get the edge on other hones if I need to ). BUT, the axe men in australia seem to think they are ideal to refresh an axe between rounds at local lumberjack contests, and will pay the moon for them. there's a norton barber hone that they will pay more yet for. Neither will probably ever be made again. You could specify 75 parameters for a hone that would make a better axe hone than a frictionite, but I'd bet the axe men would still prefer it, because what it is about it is hard to describe - it has a feel that no other stone does.

[Warren Mickley]

The makers of 200 years ago were able to make better tools because they treated tool making as an art. When you learn an art you are not limited to what you are able to understand and explain. You are guided by experience and intuition to make a better product. In contrast many of today's makers are not learning an art so they are limited to what they understand. Which is a shame because both tool making (and sharpening) are complicated way beyond rational explanation. So today's attitudes are very limiting.

I am sure the guys digging ore 200 years ago could judge the quality of that ore. I am sure the guys smelting the ore could judge the ore and the product and make appropriate adjustments. I am sure the blacksmiths could discern the quality of their iron and steel and make adjustments. And I am sure that most users were more discriminating also. Altogether a much better climate. Today's workers can read a chart and push a button. For many there is not much discernment.

[Mike Henderson]

Let me add to one of the earlier comments. I see a couple of things that can affect people's "rating" of old steel.

1. The first problem is the "golden glow" issue, where anything old is viewed as being better than modern things. We see this consistently in society, where people make comments that old cars are better than new cars. Where old radios are better than new radios, where vacuum tubes are better than transistors, where vinyl records are better than CDs, etc. So I think people who have an old blade, perhaps made in the middle 1800s just have a special feeling about it and want it to be good.

2. The second problem is investigator bias. We have double blind drug trials for a reason. It's been shown many times that investigators will subconsciously do things to make the results come out the way they want them to, even when they believe they are being unbiased. In the evaluation of steel there are many places where that subconscious bias can come into play. The first place is in the preparation of the tool, especially in comparison to the preparation of a competing modern tool. The second place is in the evaluation of the results, especially since the "success" criteria are completely subjective.

If you like using an antique tool, especially one with antique steel (mid-1800's manufacture), please enjoy it. But if you claim that the steel is objectively better than modern steel, you need to provide some facts, logic, and/or reasonable arguments about why it's better.

All I've heard so far are anecdotes. Someone has some early steel and they find it subjectively better than modern steel. It's not reasonable to make a leap from that to a statement that antique steel is better than modern steel.

Mike

[David Weaver]

I don't have either bias. I started with a set of entirely premium tools and gravitated toward the vintage tools through use. I never began to separate from the premium tools quickly until I started to dimension wood entirely by hand.

I gravitated away from modern stones (though I still have a lot of modern stones, too) toward a single washita stone, because though I can get the modern stones a little bit sharper, use of the washita stone and something to chase the wire edge is faster and requires no maintenance.

It's only in the context of actual work that someone can an informed long-term decision.

It's not necessarily the steel that's better in the vintage irons, though I do prefer the plainer steels that modern makers avoid (because they take skill to harden and temper - call lie nielsen and ask them why they couldn't harden an entire W1 iron, or why it wasn't kept as an option when they went to A2), it's what's done to the irons, what they are tempered to and how they complement the sharpening stones they're used for.

I could care less is batch to batch consistency is better in modern steel, especially if the consistency of vintage irons doesn't seem to be any material issue. It is, again, an internet bugaboo where a few people have said "vintage irons are very inconsistent". What does that mean? One is 61 hardness and another is 58 or 57? Like I said, in I don't know how many dozen, I have one that I think is genuinely defective. I had others that I thought were defective (too soft) until I actually used them and found out they held up well. It takes little for internet blog and forum wisdom to become dogma, and only a few people who have exposure to actually using the "inconsistent" goods to rebut it in a practical sense.

The link you are missing completely is the one where you've made a few projects from rough lumber, you're judging what's good, I presume, on cutting some dovetails and using a smoothing plane. And without having used a properly set up vintage tool very much. That's fine. If I were suggesting a tool to someone who said they had no interest in doing anything other than using a smoothing plane and chisels, I'd suggest a honing guide and some modern tools. I wouldn't begin to suggest to someone like warren that he "doesn't know what he's talking about because his steel isn't used for mission critical", which has a meaning within cutting tools context that makes no sense to me. It would be like coming out of dental school as a family dentist after reading a book about root canals and telling an endodontist with 35 years of experience that they should change their process to match yours, and then telling them that their conclusion is false because your book says your method is better.

[ian maybury]

I guess the problem with the human factors Mike is that they cut both ways - in favour of the proponents of modern materials (and anything else we care to mention) too. Versions of history are subject to much the same...

There's pretty definitely more choice about these days, quality is in some cases more consistent (probably not mind you if we include cheap box store tools in the mix), there's far more of us with the leisure time and access to information needed to get close to accepted best practice in most fields, and we certainly have far more buying power.

Chances are though that out and out excellence in respect of highly optimised fit of a tool for a given task is as rare as it ever was - and as always tends to be the result of happenstance, or the work of a highly talented person or few people grounded enough to be able to objectively focus on the delivery of a specific requirement.

The rest tends to be a cacophony of noise - of self interest driven claims, counter claims, preconceptions, grasping at half truths and posing that has little or no basis in any reality except the machinations of the various vested interests hell bent on gilding the lily (with outrageous claims - woodworking machine, tool and equipment suppliers are particularly bad in this regard) in whatever way they imagine will maximise short term benefit to themselves.

This latter for most of us actually obscures the picture regarding what excellence in a given endeavour might actually be, and where it may be found - it's (unless we happen to be lucky enough to be working beside people who have already been down this path - and even then it never stands still/is static) only through long hands on experience that we can separate enough of the truth from the lies to accumulate the wide collection of proven tools and methods necessary to work to the highest standards. There's an old Buddhist saying to the effect that the highest truth is rarely if ever the majority or even a widely held view. The opposite in fact, it tends to be isolated, and to typically appear to go against the flow.

[Jim Koepke]

There was a woman at american hone who was the only person who knew how to make the Frictionite hones properly.

Sometimes it is a simple step or procedure that makes the difference.

When I rebuilt ticket machine components at my last job I would polish every spindle. No one else wanted to do the extra work. I would also use Turtle Wax® on each one. Technically it wasn't in the manufacturing specs so we were not supposed to use it. I took extra care throughout the rebuild process.

For me the satisfaction was finding out the field techs always looked for the components with my name on the tag. They knew it would work first time every time.

There may be steel that came from 'the mystic art' era of tool making with properties users love.

Sure there is no one making such steel today. The building I worked in was being dismantled. The steel used in the structure was no longer being made so there were companies bidding on the right to take the steel to be reused.

In the manufacturing of today it is all about moving the product out the door. As far as the makers are concerned the steel today is better than the steel of old because they can move tons per day instead of a few pounds.

For steel that has repeatability and hardening properties that can be controlled by a computerized process, today's steels are much better.

For steel with a feel of sliding on a stone like silk sliding across a young woman's thigh, we have the results of a careful craft practiced by our ancestors.

They can both be better for different aspects.

jtk