Patrick Chase
09-21-2016, 7:37 PM
At the risk of re-opening an argument that is unresolvable by my own prior admission...
Last night I was working on something with my 6-y/o son, and noticed that he was doing extremely well with a low-angle shave, getting continuous shavings with a minimum of force either into the wood or in the direction of the cut. He had trouble with the cutting forces from a conventional BD shave set for a similar cut depth on the same woods (Poplar and Yellow Birch). From my own experience the "real world" performance of the LA shave doesn't change much over the course of hundreds of strokes, and I'd used mine a bit since I last sharpened it. The back of the blade is dead flat and I typically set the mouth very tight, but other than that I don't do anything extraordinary when preparing that shave.
Like all low-angle shaves the LV that I use has only a few degrees of clearance. While the low cutting angle (25 deg microbevel plus the clearance angle) probably has a lot to do with the ease of cutting, IMO the usability of such shaves is another empirical datum suggesting that you can obtain good real-world performance (i.e. when used by a human) at remarkably low clearance angles. Note also that the low clearance angle is what fundamentally enables the low cutting angle, so you really can't separate the two.
On a related note, I recently attended an L-N Hand-Tool Event and noticed (and then confirmed) that L-N had honed the blades on their common-pitch demo planes at 35 deg.
Last night I was working on something with my 6-y/o son, and noticed that he was doing extremely well with a low-angle shave, getting continuous shavings with a minimum of force either into the wood or in the direction of the cut. He had trouble with the cutting forces from a conventional BD shave set for a similar cut depth on the same woods (Poplar and Yellow Birch). From my own experience the "real world" performance of the LA shave doesn't change much over the course of hundreds of strokes, and I'd used mine a bit since I last sharpened it. The back of the blade is dead flat and I typically set the mouth very tight, but other than that I don't do anything extraordinary when preparing that shave.
Like all low-angle shaves the LV that I use has only a few degrees of clearance. While the low cutting angle (25 deg microbevel plus the clearance angle) probably has a lot to do with the ease of cutting, IMO the usability of such shaves is another empirical datum suggesting that you can obtain good real-world performance (i.e. when used by a human) at remarkably low clearance angles. Note also that the low clearance angle is what fundamentally enables the low cutting angle, so you really can't separate the two.
On a related note, I recently attended an L-N Hand-Tool Event and noticed (and then confirmed) that L-N had honed the blades on their common-pitch demo planes at 35 deg.