Patrick Chase
04-14-2016, 3:00 AM
This is a pseudo-review, pseudo-rant.
A while back I acquired a pair of Veritas edge-trimming planes (http://www.leevalley.com/US/wood/page.aspx?cat=1,41182,48945&p=54862). The conventional wisdom seemed then to be (and still is) that they're just for quickly trimming long grain edges, and not terribly useful overall. I had expectations set accordingly low, but turned out to be completely wrong. These are probably my most frequently used planes other than the core bench planes (jacks, smoothers, and jointers), my low-angle block plane, and my medium shoulder plane. I reach for the RH one often enough that I keep it out on my bench when working.
Probably the biggest thing that people seem to overlook is that the edge trimmers' as-shipped blade configuration (BU, 12 deg bed, 25 deg bevel, 20 deg skew) is ideal for end grain. That's exactly the same cutting geometry as the Veritas Shooting Plane, and the edge trimmers' end-grain performance is comparable. Obviously the edge-trimmers are lighter and therefore require more "muscular help" to power through tough cuts, but even there the weight doesn't tell the whole story because the blade has enough skew (20 deg) to spread out impacts from discontinuities in the workpiece.
I find myself reaching for them in the following circumstances:
- A swipe or two to whenever I'm about to mark end grain. With 25 deg blade bevel the trimmers take very clean end-grain shavings and leave a smooth surface that provides good contrast for knife/pencil lines
- To square and clean up crosscuts. I take a few passes to clean up the surface, check for square, and then take partial passes (starting with just the high/long side and progressively extending to the full width) as needed to true the surface. I'm usually within 0.2 deg of square after the initial cleaning pass, so It doesn't take many partial passes to square the end. After you do it enough you get a feel for how many swipes to take to correct any given amount of angular error, and it ends up being faster than breaking out the shooting board+plane unless there are a lot of pieces to do.
- To trim and true up long grain edges if they're short or straight enough to not require a jointer.
As to the planes themselves: They're about as you'd expect based on the manufacturer. They work well, the PM-V11 blades sharpen and hold up well, etc. Lack of a lateral adjuster means some occasional fiddling, but it's easy to get used to and become efficient at it. The one noteworthy liability is that the soles on these planes couldn't be ground/lapped the same way as other planes, and they consequently didn't come as flat as my other "premium" (LV, L-N) planes. Mine had base-to-fence angles of about 89.5 deg and several mils of warp in the fences as shipped. I corrected mine by lapping them on a 90-deg form with PSA sandpaper stuck to it.
A while back I acquired a pair of Veritas edge-trimming planes (http://www.leevalley.com/US/wood/page.aspx?cat=1,41182,48945&p=54862). The conventional wisdom seemed then to be (and still is) that they're just for quickly trimming long grain edges, and not terribly useful overall. I had expectations set accordingly low, but turned out to be completely wrong. These are probably my most frequently used planes other than the core bench planes (jacks, smoothers, and jointers), my low-angle block plane, and my medium shoulder plane. I reach for the RH one often enough that I keep it out on my bench when working.
Probably the biggest thing that people seem to overlook is that the edge trimmers' as-shipped blade configuration (BU, 12 deg bed, 25 deg bevel, 20 deg skew) is ideal for end grain. That's exactly the same cutting geometry as the Veritas Shooting Plane, and the edge trimmers' end-grain performance is comparable. Obviously the edge-trimmers are lighter and therefore require more "muscular help" to power through tough cuts, but even there the weight doesn't tell the whole story because the blade has enough skew (20 deg) to spread out impacts from discontinuities in the workpiece.
I find myself reaching for them in the following circumstances:
- A swipe or two to whenever I'm about to mark end grain. With 25 deg blade bevel the trimmers take very clean end-grain shavings and leave a smooth surface that provides good contrast for knife/pencil lines
- To square and clean up crosscuts. I take a few passes to clean up the surface, check for square, and then take partial passes (starting with just the high/long side and progressively extending to the full width) as needed to true the surface. I'm usually within 0.2 deg of square after the initial cleaning pass, so It doesn't take many partial passes to square the end. After you do it enough you get a feel for how many swipes to take to correct any given amount of angular error, and it ends up being faster than breaking out the shooting board+plane unless there are a lot of pieces to do.
- To trim and true up long grain edges if they're short or straight enough to not require a jointer.
As to the planes themselves: They're about as you'd expect based on the manufacturer. They work well, the PM-V11 blades sharpen and hold up well, etc. Lack of a lateral adjuster means some occasional fiddling, but it's easy to get used to and become efficient at it. The one noteworthy liability is that the soles on these planes couldn't be ground/lapped the same way as other planes, and they consequently didn't come as flat as my other "premium" (LV, L-N) planes. Mine had base-to-fence angles of about 89.5 deg and several mils of warp in the fences as shipped. I corrected mine by lapping them on a 90-deg form with PSA sandpaper stuck to it.