Interesting Adam Cherubini blog post

[James Scheffler]

Adam recently wrote about some advantages wooden planes have over metal ones, especially when one has to remove a lot of stock. He has issued a challenge for us to find an old woodie and put it to use.

I have a couple of working wooden planes (a smoother and a skew rabbet), but my experience has been pretty limited. I've been inspired to pull out an old wooden fore plane that I had lying around. It looks a little rough, and I've hesitated to do much with it, but I'm going to give it a try. The blade and chip breaker are sitting in Evaporust as we speak. The wedge will definitely need some work, but hopefully not replacement.... The mouth is big enough to drive a city bus through, which is really perfect for this experiment.

Anyway, I thought it was a great post and I hope it will spark some debate over here.

Jim

[harry strasil]

I use Woodies and/or Wood bottomed Transitionals depending on which shop I am working in, and they are sharpened the way the old timers did them,

Often on old furniture on the back where no one sees you will find the shallow grooves where the cambered fore plane was the last plane used to thickness plane the back boards or panels. And a Jack Woodie (14in. long) was used like a scrub and it was called a Bench plane because it was used to quickly rough material to thickness, then the Fore to smooth out the deeper grooves and then a Trying or Jointer before using the Smooth to finish. Most old Woodies or others you pick up usually have been sharpened with no Camber by the Unknowing mostly modern WWers.

I usually go for 1/16 on the jack, 1/32 on the Fore and just a tad on the Trying, with the Jointer and Smooth straight across with the edges slightly rounded.

[harry strasil]

Ooops, I make the BooBoo, I camber the irons 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 inch, at a 45 the blade will take half the camber in thickness off each swipe of the tool.

[David Gendron]

I saw Adam's post and it is sure interesting. I liket he woodies a lot, for the same resons he said. I just made my self a scrub plane with a Ulmia woodie I have and it work like a dream, I can take shavings at least 3/64 thick and it is easy! On face grane or on edges, you realy have to be carful at first not to remove to much material!! The wooden planes are much lighter and glide way more easily on the surface of stuff than a metal body plane even with a waxed sole! I would love to get rid of my metal planes and replace them with good wooden ones. But since I,m in canada, and most buyers are in the states and it cost a lot of $ to ship to the states, I,m kind of stock with my metal planes for now!!

[David Gendron]

Jr., when you say 1/8, do you meen you get 1/8 of an incheat the corner of the iron when put under a straight edge?

[harry strasil]

1/8 is how far the center of the iron sticks out when you put a square across even with the corners.

[David Gendron]

Thank you!

[Ken Whitney]

Just for fun (thank you SketchUp) the radii of Harry's cambers on a 2" iron are:

1/8 = 4"

1/16 = 8"

1/32 = 16"

more or less.

Ken

[Dave Anderson NH]

One of the major misconceptions that modern hand tool woodworkers have is that all planes must have tight mouths. I often use my G-G-G-Grandfathers Union by Chapin fore plane and jointer planes, 22" and 28" respectively. Both have fairly wide open mouths. Both are capable of both coarse and fine shavings without tearout when the irons are sharp. My point is simply that often the mouth can be fairly wide and still give excellent results.

[Jim Koepke]

One of the major misconceptions that modern hand tool woodworkers have is that all planes must have tight mouths. I often use my G-G-G-Grandfathers Union by Chapin fore plane and jointer planes, 22" and 28" respectively. Both have fairly wide open mouths. Both are capable of both coarse and fine shavings without tearout when the irons are sharp. My point is simply that often the mouth can be fairly wide and still give excellent results.

Yes, there are a lot of misconceptions about hand planes and they are not limited to mouth sizing.

A sharp blade with an open mouth will leave a better surface than a dull blade with a tight mouth.

There is a lot taking place when a blade takes a shaving from the surface of a piece of wood.

A sharp blade shears the shaving as it lifts, a dull blade will do more lifting than shearing, which means tear out. Depending on the wood, a tight mouth can help if a wood is prone to tear out even with a sharp blade.

With metal or wood planes if the blade is not supported close to the sole there can be vibration, aka chatter. This bouncing of the blade can leave its mark on the surface no matter how tight the mouth. Moving the frog forward to tighten the mouth may cause the blade to be unsupported and causing less smoothness of the planed surface.

There is a lot going on and this is just some of it.

jim

[David Gendron]

I think ebed angle is also something that can be hard to understand, I meen by that, again if you have adull blade, even with a 55* iron, wont help you much! Interesting what Larry Williams had to say on an other post on plane irons, that the highter the bed angle the more trouble you get with a " double iron" assembly like in metal plane?!?!

[Adam Cherubini]

For all of the collective thinking we've done on this subject, the magazine science projects, the endless forum discussions, it seems to me we're little better off for it. When I encounter woodworkers, they tend not to have planes that work well in my opinion. They fiddle with brass knobs and struggle to produce a shaving (which is always teh exactly width of the iron).

I think we've done ourselves no favors discussing the merits of chip breakers and bed angles. To work effectively by hand, you need at least one plane that can quickly remove wood. And you need a bench and a technique that always you to do that. Maybe we need to think about planes from the work we need them to do instead of analyzing their designs.

Don't mean to be a curmudgeon. I'm asking this question sincerely. (The question is, have we focused our super powers, and we do have super powers, on teh right things for the past 10 years). Seems to me we would have been better off to take a non-innovative approach, simply copy old tools accurately and focus on the work.

Adam