My new favorite mortising chisel for planes...and the start of a panel plane

[David Weaver]

A cheapie. Warren came to mind when I was using this, but not for the steel (it's high speed steel). It's a mujingfang chisel that is not beveled or tapered on along its thickness (at least not enough to matter), but along its length. It has almost no resistance when cutting mortises, and maybe it doesn't clean the sides of the moritse, but that doesn't much matter for planes.

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(warren comes to mind because he has often pointed out that vintage mortise chisels were tapered along their length, too, something that appears to have gone the way of the dodo bird once chisels were mass produced)

These muji chisels would be cheap if they were offered individually - they're about $8 each, but they come in a set of medium, medium wide, wider than you'd use, wider than that and wider than that yet, and the shipping on a set of 5 of them from china is expensive (about $30). So they end up not being that cheap, and their tang isn't real long which will necessitate an eventual fix.

I won't be making a second of this plane, I've got no tools for skewed planes (no floats cut to fit in a corner) and have done all of the work with chisels, except for the bed.

I had a salvage double iron, well not salvage - sacrifice. Sacrificed an english badger plane because skewed double irons are not easy to find, but a double iron will be a necessity to making this plane cut against the grain in all woods. Badger planes have some lean (the iron at the bottom is at the edge, but not at the top), which messes up skewing if you don't do them that way. I chose to not have lean on this plane, and since it's raised panel only will let up the plane at the side of the mouth a millimeter or so such that the cut bottoms out.

Anyway, eliminating the lean changes the skew angle from 20 to 28 which could be problematic (and definitely would if the cut used the entire iron, but this one only uses about 80% of it, so I'm hoping that will save me). Double iron planes don't love extreme skew angles, but it's no issue on a normal bench plane because you never have to skew it to eliminate tearout.

Guessing at all of the angles has been a complete pain, and working up low effort ways to find out where they'll need to be (for example, the 28 degree skew required to get the iron to bed such that at a 45 degree bed, the cap iron will be lined up with the edge so that it actually works to prevent tearout). And then making and fitting the wedge, which results in a lot of dragging a wedge with no square sides over a plane stuck upside down in a vise. Fortunately, such things set up with the cap iron set close don't actually cut the skin on your hands. The angle on the wedge is dependent on the skew and the bed of the angle in combination, so if you blindly cut it at 28 degrees, it won't fit, it's somewhere around 20 or 21 (I guessed at the angle divided by the square root of 2, which was close).

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The reason I'm letting up the edge instead of leaning the iron out (so that it cuts at the edge of the plane) is that letting up the edge and keeping the iron tucked in gives me the option to add a wedged nicker later if it seems like it will be helpful (if the finish isn't good cross grain).

Random thought, the front of the mouth, front corner at the edge, is always an erosion point for skewed planes. That edge wears in 3d, and then these planes have a problem feeding. I've left the mouth a little wider than you'd leave with a single iron plane, because double irons like a mouth tight or loose, but not between. I'll eventually put a brass wear strip there.

The work could be a lot neater, adding the skew makes everything you normally look for (a coplanar bed, etc) a challenge. The eyes are gigantic because I tried cutting them a little differently this time and had to redo them twice. Lost cause, mostly due to picking the worst blank from my new pile of beech - intentionally, so as to leave the good ones for planes that I know will turn out good.

Here's the donor plane. My shop has become a dangerous place for a plane that has a good iron.

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"modern" steel is a bit of a departure from normal for me, but this chisel, which is super tough, even at sub 30 degrees, sharpens nicely on a dry diamond hone and then believe it on not, on an okudo suita (japanese natural), which raises black swarf fairly quickly and doesn't allow an organized wire edge to form on the finished edge. This is a chisel that is a bit much for a king stone, and that gums up a shapton. This is the first time I've ever seen a natural stone outdo most of my synthetics for finish work, but it's a very strong cutting stone that most will not come across buying low priced natural stones.

[Kees Heiden]

To be honest, I have no idea what you are writing about! But describing in words all the subtleties of a skewed plane is very difficult, I guess.

Anyway, I am looking forward again to the result.

[Stewie Simpson]

Hi David. I am struggling to understand the logic behind why you marked out the skewed bed the way you did on this plane. Its all ended up looking rather messy. The upside; you would have learnt a lot from this experience.

Stewie;

[David Weaver]

Kees hit it on the head, it's a bit difficult to describe the problems you encounter making a double iron skew plane when your cap iron and iron are a set angle and it's not ideal for your plane.

I guess it was more of a brain dump than anything else, most is esoteric.

Safe to say that when you're given a fixed parameters, it makes everything else a lot more difficult.

The chisel, however, is top shelf due to the taper in width (and the fat handle). It's too bad nobody retails them over here. Mujingfang has the has tooling down pat, though I don't know what their steel is. I have seen a couple of casual mentions that the steel may be T1 HSS, which would explain why they're a little nicer to use than M2 or something similar (tungsten steel being better for edge taking at high hardness because it's finer grained than M2). At any rate, not a heavy chisel, just a slab of steel with a small tang on it, and muji calls it a cabinetmaker's chisel. It took less time for me to chop this mortise out than it would've for me to drill it (especially given what I have available in the shop to do accurate drilling).

But who knows...

[David Weaver]

Hi David. I am struggling to understand the logic behind why you marked out the skewed bed the way you did on this plane. Its all ended up looking rather messy. The upside; you would have learnt a lot from this experience.

Stewie;

Pretty much because I have a double iron that has a vintage cap iron on it that must be bedded at a certain angle for the cap iron to be a constant distance from the cut. I don't know if I remember enough trigonometry and geometry to figure out the angles on a sheet of paper, so fitting and drawing lines manually proves to be a better way to go. That literally involved leaning the iron on a 45 degree angle and turning it askew until the iron was:
* bedded at 45 degrees
* otherwise vertical so that the iron once bedded isn't leaning to the left or the right in a plane (as in lean that a badger plane has where the iron is 3/8" to the left of the edge of the plane at the top of the mortise, but comes out the side of the plane at the top.

That was an operation that I could've used a third hand for, but it worked.

I'll admit I cut the angles on the wedge (where they fit the side of the plane) at 28 degrees to match the skew before I realized that they are at a shallower angle because the bed angle compounds the situation. I guessed at 21 IIRC on a subsequent attempt and it turned out to be pretty close.

Had I used a single iron, I'd have had none of these issues (just decide what bed and skew you want and then just grind the end of the iron to work with the bed). A single iron plane, however, even at 55 degrees, would be much more sensitive to wood choice than this plane - to avoid tearout, and wouldn't hold a candle to this plane in a heavy cut. Nor would it stay bedded as well in a heavy cut, which allows you to use the plane longer before having to resharpen it and reset it. Thus the desire to trudge through it (and throw away a badger plane body that really doesn't need much to be put back in good working shape).

I'll clean up the aesthetics some on this plane before it's done (trimming the wedge fingers, etc - actually that's done, just not for the pictures) and the housed area in the fence of the plane below the mouth. To some extent, it doesn't matter that much because the plane is for me, and I'm not sure that I care what this one looks like (I'd like the bench planes I make to be a little neater each time, though the aesthetics of the three bench planes in my avatar are fine. This one will end up looking decent when all is said and done. I'm overstating the disappointment with the eyes to some extent they're just big but there are no other aesthetic issues after cleaning up the wedge except for the small split at the left side of the wedge.

Simply put, this plane is to cut a bevel 1 1/2" long and field a raised panel that has a bevel slope of roughly 10 degrees. After putting fitting the wedge better last night and setting up the iron and cap iron, it will feed left and right, but I don't have enough grip without a handle to see if it will handle a full width cut.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

FWIW, the Narex mortise chisels I have from LV are tapered in width a bit. Not as dramatic as the chisel you snapped a photo of, but after using non-tapered chisels, I really agree how much it helps when making deep mortises, keeping from getting stuck.

I remember reading the skewed plane construction in Whelan's book, and man, it can make your brain hurt.

Joshua Clark has set up a second page selling some bits and pieces, last I looked he had some older irons there.

[David Weaver]

I need to go track down Josh's page. To the extent I can secure enough irons and cap irons to satisfy anything I'll make for myself for the next several decades, that would be good.

As far as reading about doing something like these planes, I've not yet read whelan's book (and probably won't) and I generally don't read anything about what anyone else does because I know I'm probably not going to do it the same.

Getting a double iron plane to feed properly was the thing that we went over here (in terms of the design of the abutments and where they terminate and how they're shaped, etc..... on a good plane) was the only thing on planes that we've all made on this board that really required thinking so as not to make plane shaped objects that you put down.

I know there is an article or two out there about making skewed planes in PWW, I even have that magazine, but haven't read the article - it doesn't mean anything to me until you sit at the bench and do it, and at that point I want to do it, not read about it.

My cosmetic wants from this point are pretty well defined. I could make a bench plane in less than 10 hours, and nobody is writing about making double iron planes with vintage irons so it's just easier for me to sit and do it and figure it out than it is to try to learn from someone else. I own the knowledge then, so to speak, and never get to a point that I have followed instructions but don't understand why. I don't really have a plane to copy for this one, so there is some flying blind (though it's really a matter of just fitting things). But for all of the other planes (the bench planes, etc) learning locations of mouths, etc, and seeing the executed work is something I couldn't get just from reading - having a good plane in hand and using your brain to figure out why it is the way it is is far more valuable.

[george wilson]

A chisel found at Novaya Zemlya, From the 16th. C. shipwreck there, looked quite like a much later chisel. It had beveled edges,but was also tapered in width. The blade was 3 or 4" long as judged from a picture.

[David Weaver]

I can see the virtue of the chisel being tapered in width, even for something other than mortising. It would give a craftsman just another small dimension that they could control.

the subject chisel above is probably about 4 1/2" to the tang, it's not a tiny chisel and the handles are shaped like barrels (which is nice if you hold a chisel by the handle and not by the blade). The bevels on the top of it look like they're more than they really are, as if they were put on because someone requested bevels, but that they didn't want to do a really good job of making them useful. They only go about a third of the way down the side of the chisel and are kind of pointless.

[george wilson]

Old Mr. Simms used firmer chisels. He made them useful for dovetails by just grinding angles on their corners starting about 1/2" from the cutting edges. They quickly tapered out to nothing. They enabled the workman to get the corner of his chisel into the inside corners of dovetails. That seems to have been the standard way of prepping chisels among many workmen,ugly as it was. I noticed a few such prepped chisels for sales by Lee Richmond this last tool list.

I tried to get an image of the 16th. C. chisel I mentioned just above,but was not successful. I saw an image of it a long time ago. Surprising it survived in as good a shape as it did. I meant the length of the blade up to where the tang started.

[David Weaver]

Joshua Clark has set up a second page selling some bits and pieces, last I looked he had some older irons there.

Josh, can you send me a link to that page?

[David Weaver]

Never mind. I found it! I think sometimes that I am the only person buying tapered vintage double irons. I'm sure that's not the case, but it seems relatively close to it some days.

I would like to find more 2 1/2" full length irons with matching chipbreakers, though. 2 to 2 1/4" irons are relatively easy to find, but the 2 1/2" irons are what I like to have to make jointer and try planes. Even the 2 1/2" slotted irons are easy to find, but finding them with a good condition cap iron is a little tougher.

[Kees Heiden]

Here's the nova zembla chisel. A lot of Central European chisels up till the 20th century were shaped like that. I have a couple too.


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[David Weaver]

We'll try again another day. Next time, I'll just build a badger style plane and go with 20 degrees and just let the iron lean. 28 is just too much leverage on the abutment - the wedge is just pushing out splitting it. For anyone new to planes, that is the end for this plane. The split is toxic.

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This is what it looked like just before it split. Fortunately I hadn't built the handle yet, and only buried about 6 hours into it before it split:

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[Steve Voigt]

Dave, bummer man. I've lost planes too and it's no fun.
I've not had great luck with skews either, so far. I think if I were going to make a panel raiser, I'd try modifying a regular double iron set, as Lars did in that post I mentioned before, and keep the skew conservative, maybe around 15°.

[David Weaver]

This badger beds at 20, which is what i'll try next, but I am going to modify the abutment on the right a little bit so that the abutment is closer to 90 degrees. That won't be hard to do on the wedge.

28 degrees is pretty extreme. I really should've done what I just described to the abutment, left it around 15 degrees instead of 28.

This was the least nice, or second least nice piece of wood out of my pile so I don't mind too much. I just wanted to try this style of panel raiser because it would look from above like a normal bench plane. If I add lean to the double iron like one would do on a badger plane and go with 20 degrees, and basically do what the donor plane had (it has held up fine, long enough to have erosion around the mouth), I can use the iron as is and do a job similar to this one and just have an extra 3/8th of width, or just literally make another badger plane and attach an adjustable fence.

I favored this design because it allows a wedged nicker, but there would've been a lot more to favor with a double iron that would've bedded with less skew. As you're implying, not much is needed to get a decent cross grain cut.

[David Weaver]

Lesson learned...sort of, well, yeah, no more skews beyond 20 degrees.

Since this is a plane that will never see anything but the inside of my shop, it may be salvaged with some phillips screws and glue (i glued it earlier, with CA medium glue, no less, and put some #6x 5/8 screws through it).

IT really isn't bad to use aside from the fact that I think I made the lip on the side a bit high, which leads to a panel that's raised a little more than I want. That's easily remedied by laminating a little strip of wood back on it, what cosmetic rules are there with a plane that has four square head screws in the side?

It does cut both ways, though (with and cross grain), just fine, and no real clogs to speak of if the wedge is set right.

I won't take the time to make a full closed handle for it, but I will make an offset low handle (for strength, and because it's quick) and see how long it lasts before I just throw it away.

You can see the straightened shavings from the double iron. It's not set super close, but close enough. It can really take a big bite without tearing out, even without the benefit of a handle

It doesn't clog, but I can tell it *almost* wants to because of the skew angle. I'll bet it would clog in pine. I'll bet I won't use it in pine, though.


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[Stewie Simpson]

Hi David. I notice you mentioned the cap iron wasn't set super close so I am thinking its probably not serving any real benefit.

Have you considered the possibility that the skewed blade alone is the reason your not experiencing tear-out.

Stewie;

[Kees Heiden]

Steam punk! You could make a statement with philips screws in the sides of all your planes... Well, at least it was a great learning experience.

About the tapered chisel, here is one for sale at the moment at one of the Dutch tool dealers. I have a few like this too. The maker is Nooitgedagt. Like I wrote they made these well into the twentieth century. I've seen similar ones in Germany too.

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[David Weaver]

Hi David. I notice you mentioned the cap iron wasn't set super close so I am thinking its probably not serving any real benefit.

Have you considered the possibility that the skewed blade alone is the reason your not experiencing tear-out.

Stewie;

Stevie, I guess my statement about closeness can be taken two ways. I suspect that my sort of close setting is probably closer than most people's close setting.

I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it is close enough to straighten the chips, which suggests it's about right.

My experience with single iron skews is that the skew can sometimes alleviate tear-out, but it can also be going the wrong way in less than perfect wood and create spectacular tear-out, something that can't be afforded on raised panels. A double iron doesn't experience that, which makes it markedly superior for this as it is for most things. It does complicate several things in making the plane, though.

The shavings on the ground are approximately one hundredth thick, fwiw. The things that will limit the tearout that a wrong-way skew will have are the kinds of things I don't necessarily want to do with this plane (take the iron out and sharpen it, take a thinner shaving). I just want to smash it through the wood and create a bevel, but without any significant tearout. Hopefully the stitched up side will hold up for a little bit, but if It doesn't, I guess I'll remake i "the right way" at 20 degrees of skew.

I noticed that many of the very old panel raisers have a single large iron, though I don't know why that is (it's not universally the case), and the badger planes I've seen have been mostly double irons (I can't recall one that isn't, though I'm sure google could find one because they would've been cheaper to make and offer as an option). The single iron john bell panel raiser that I had had tearout problems (it was single iron, and a very old plane), and was bedded common pitch like this plane. What I'm slowly getting to is that I believe the badger planes, which were probably intended for working a heavy shaving, have a double iron for a reason because it would be much easier to make this type of plane with a single iron and not be bound to using the profile on the single iron (though as steve suggested, even that could be changed with some work. I'm just a bit too lazy right now and the edge of the double iron is generally in good shape).

[David Weaver]

Steam punk! You could make a statement with philips screws in the sides of all your planes... Well, at least it was a great learning experience.

About the tapered chisel, here is one for sale at the moment at one of the Dutch tool dealers. I have a few like this too. The maker is Nooitgedagt. Like I wrote they made these well into the twentieth century. I've seen similar ones in Germany too.

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that is a heavy looking chisel. Nice looking, too. Presume they made thinner cabinetmaker's versions of that? I don't think I have any dutch tools, but presume that they are similar to french tools (plain carbon steel, not too hard, deceptively useful given any preconceived notions about how tools that aren't too hard aren't useful - I make that statement because the softest iron I have is a freres iron in a continental smoother converted to a jack. I assumed that it would be too soft to be useful because it sharpens almost as if it's giving up - but then it holds up wonderfully in use. The french have a reputation for soft tempered knives, too).

(I hope not to have to put any more screws in planes. I am by no means anything but an amateur hacker, but I still like things better right than wrong!! I pondered not showing any of this thing once the abutment cracked, but don't want to be the kind of person who only posts the stuff that works well. I really doubt anyone will ever read this and get any usefulness out of it - the idea that you can't run with 28 degrees of skew without doing some kind of modifications to make the angle at the abutments less - but I learned from it).

This test bed (which is more or less what it is now) does give me the opportunity to try a couple of things, though, most notably the low offset handle that will require some fingers to drape over the side of the plane, but still allow me to push with the web of my hand and not have to squeeze to lift the plane. Also, I get to strike the back of this plane with a metal hammer because it doesn't really matter much if it gets dented. I secretly love how well it works to strike the back of a wooden plane with a metal hammer - the wedge and iron just pop right out. The plane just adjusts better with a metal hammer, crisper and more precise, I can see why some people chose to strike them with a metal hammer, anyway, despite the fact that it damages the plane. I intend to find out how far the damage goes if you strike it in the back of the plane in the center - I suspect that it will create a convex surface but once the wood fibers are packed relatively tight, not sustain much more damage.

Well, all of that is if the abutments don't just strop off the screws.

[Kees Heiden]

Yes of course you could get smaller ones. But this shape was preserved such a long time for the big chisels mostly. The smaller ones were more like the English chisels. A chisel like in the picture is called a "molenaarsbeitel" or millwright chisel. I have to look at home what I have exactly, but at least my mortising chisels are tapered in all directions.

[David Weaver]

Dutch is close to german sometimes! I'm assuming arsbeitel means something being worked or a worker maybe.

[Kees Heiden]

I don't think you should use that word in Germany!
Molenaar is millwright. beitel is chisel. Ars is not a very friendly name for your backside!

Here is a picture of two of my chisels. 1" and 3/4" and both tapering, so at the end of their life they will be quite a bit narrower. They have bevels on the side, but rather rudimentary. All in all, perfect mortising chisels for big mortises. Which is not exactly the kind of work I do often.

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[David Weaver]

I thought it sounded a lot like arbeit! Just with an extra letter.

I'm no threat to go to germany and speak german. My relatives got chased out of there about 250 years ago, and to the extent they kept speaking german over here, the dialect got away from "real" german. I still do hear "wie gehts" at funerals and such, though. I just don't understand much of the rest of it after that.

[David Weaver]

Does anyone have a picture of george's short handled jack planes? I'd like to make a version of that short handle for this junker now, just with a little more of a 19th century look.

[Kees Heiden]

You mean this one?
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?149509-Scalable-pics-of-an-18th-C-jack-plane-I-made

[David Weaver]

That's the one, thanks!

[David Weaver]

Here's what I ended up with, not spending a lot of time on the handle, just scribbling a profile onto a piece of wood (as in no pattern), cutting it out and rasping it/card scraping it. No need to spend a lot of time on it when the plane it's going on literally has screws going through the abutment and sticking out inside the escapement. That screw fix is who knows how temporary.

This handle is small, but the picture doesn't show just how small. You can get two fingers around it, one is more comfortable and the other fingers go down the side of the plane.

I like a full sized handle better, but importantly, this one stays in the web of your thumb and you can lift the plane up without having to squeeze anything. The push pressure goes in the meat below your thumb or below your thumb web rather than into the middle of your palm (who knows if that's the way it's supposed to work?). A half inch taller and I'd like it better, I guess, but probably I'll stick with full sized handles from now on as I don't have the death grip a lot of people do with them.

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Oil once the handle glue dries, the color will be a little better.

No waste of a good brass screw in this one, but I did have to use a square drive screw - not to hold the handle in, but because I'm in the bad habit of making the handle fit so tight that I can't get the handle back out to glue without putting a screw in the front and hammering it out.