Frustrated with low angle plane

[Scott Winners]

Osvaldo, I too am in the group who think you have your plane set up correctly and are up against challenging grain.

You can try making your iron/ blade/ edge even sharper than it is. You can twist the plane a little with respect to the direction of cut, so the direction you slide the plane is maybe 45 degrees to the right or left of the direction the plane is pointed.

Derek has probably forgotten more about woodworking than I have learned in the last 40 years as a dabbler.

As a clumsy n00b (me) I can sometimes make clean cuts with a bevel down plane that I can't do with a bevel up plane. For that to work for me I have the cap iron on the blade as close down to the edge as I can get it, with the mouth of the plane closed up tight.

Can you close up the mouth of your plane so the wood ahead of the edge is supported by the plane body pressing down on it until the last possible moment when it is sheared by the edge arriving? If I recall correctly the LN low angle jack has an adjustable mouth.

Since you did fine on Rosewood I think it is the grain in the mahogany. Maybe a cabinet scraper? Or a rasp, then a file, then a cabinet scraper?

[Jim Koepke]

There is also the dampening effect of having a chip breaker "spring loaded" against the cutting edge of a bevel down plane iron, which is an advantage not to be underestimated.

Will you explain that Doug?

Regards from Perth

Derek

Not being Doug, this is my understanding of the effect Leonard Bailey explained in his patent to allow the use of thinner blades. The pressure of the chip breaker against the iron was to reduce the effects of metal distortion and lessen chatter.

jtk

[Rob Luter]

One of my first "good" planes was a Veritas Low Angle Jack. The 25* iron certainly does promote tearout on face grain. When I purchased it I also got the other two available irons at 38* and 50* These yield an effective cutting angle of 50* and 62* respectively. I've found these higher cutting angles to be very effective in eliminating tearout, especially when making light cuts. They are a bit harder to push but the results are worth the effort.

[don wilwol]

My opinion, and it may be nothing more than my opinion, is a bevel up blade is more prone to lifting wood ahead of the blade's edge. A tight mouth is supposed to help in such cases, but in my experience this will be better handled by using a chip breaker set close on a very sharp blade.

Maybe another way to look at this is the low angle bevel up blade is employing a slicing action where the bevel down blade is a shearing action.

jtk

I'd repeat this

[William Fretwell]

A plane requiring 3 blades at different angles, all to be sharpened is not so begginer friendly. I have a BU jack and jointer from the same maker, both set up the same, on some woods the jack simply would not work but the jointer was acceptable. Things like that just add to the frustration.

All planes are fussy to set up: Part of the appeal of BU planes is eliminating the chip breaker and it’s set up. My old Bailey jack plane chip breaker is no marvel of engineering and required much fine tuning. My new Clifton planes with the one peice chip breaker are an engineering marvel, tweak the breaker at your peril! Until you muck one up you don’t appreciate the precision it’s made with. When you have had to fine tune tools your whole life fiddling becomes a habit! Apart from the front knob brass screw needing it’s dome lowered a bit (they may have fixed that), there is nothing to do but sharpen the blade. Yes they work; so my BU planes rest.

[Derek Cohen]

Not being Doug, this is my understanding of the effect Leonard Bailey explained in his patent to allow the use of thinner blades. The pressure of the chip breaker against the iron was to reduce the effects of metal distortion and lessen chatter.

jtk

Hi Jim

My argument is that "dampening" irrelevant. It may be needed for thin blades, such as the Stanley Bailey. However the thick LN and Veritas BU blades do not need dampening.

The performance from a Bailey plane does not come from the chipbreaker dampening the blade. That is a misunderstanding of the reason for the chipbreaker. The performance of a Bailey comes when the chipbreaker is set close to the edge of the blade.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Derek Cohen]

A plane requiring 3 blades at different angles, all to be sharpened is not so begginer friendly. I have a BU jack and jointer from the same maker, both set up the same, on some woods the jack simply would not work but the jointer was acceptable. Things like that just add to the frustration.

All planes are fussy to set up: Part of the appeal of BU planes is eliminating the chip breaker and it’s set up. My old Bailey jack plane chip breaker is no marvel of engineering and required much fine tuning. My new Carlton planes with the one peice chip breaker are an engineering marvel, tweak the breaker at your peril! Until you muck one up you don’t appreciate the precision it’s made with. When you have had to fine tune tools your whole life fiddling becomes a habit! Apart from the front knob brass screw needing it’s dome lowered a bit (they may have fixed that), there is nothing to do but sharpen the blade. Yes they work; so my BU planes rest.

We shall have to disagree on BU planes, William. That they can use three blades reflects their flexibility. As it is, I rarely use more than one blade per BU plane. The BU Smoother is dedicated to smoothing and has a 50 degree blade. The LA Jack has a 25 degree blade for end grain. However it does borrow the 50 degree blade where indicated.

I find the BU planes requiring the least tuning of all ... to such an extent, that I would be prepared to put plane to work piece without a test cut.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[James Pallas]

I sometimes think that we get hung up on how tools work. Tools have the same name and same use but work differently.i look at BU and BD planes the same way as I look at CC saw and rip saw. They both saw and nowadays there are just handsaws. You can crosscut with a rip saw and with experience in where you start your cut can be successful. Somewhat the same for planes. Low angles work well on end grain higher angle not so good. You can trick a high angle plane by skewing it a little or taking really thin shavings. You can back bevel a bevel down plane to show the wood a steeper angle or use the chip breaker. You can steepen the bevel on a bevel up plane and approximate the same. Learning how and when to do these things is key. I learned back bevel long before chip breaker. Having several irons around helped a lot. Just my experiences, yours may be vastly different. That is why we have these discussions.
Jim

[Nicholas Lawrence]

People point to the chatter language in the patent application though. That is why we spent so many years calling them “cap irons” and people would call you ignorant if you called it a “chipbreaker.”

I think the chatter language in the patent was a scheme to get an unpatentable device past the patent examiner. You cannot patent something that is already commonly used in the industry.

The presence of chipbreakers on my wooden planes was a “light bulb” moment for me. I read the “chatter” versus “close set” arguments for years, looked at my bailey style planes, fooled around with them and could not decide who was right.
Then I bought a antique double iron wooden plane and started using it. Those irons are massive, no need for dampening, and are far too heavy to care about being “spring loaded.” Yet there they are, equipped with chipbreakers years before Bailey’s patent.

A patent was an important selling point in a competitive market. Admitting it was there to break chips would not be patentable, because that was not a new idea, so the patent application would be rejected. But calling it an anti-chatter device apparently got it past the examiner.

Hi Jim

My argument is that "dampening" irrelevant. It may be needed for thin blades, such as the Stanley Bailey. However the thick LN and Veritas BU blades do not need dampening.

The performance from a Bailey plane does not come from the chipbreaker dampening the blade. That is a misunderstanding of the reason for the chipbreaker. The performance of a Bailey comes when the chipbreaker is set close to the edge of the blade.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[William Fretwell]

Actually Derek I don’t think I disagree that much! You clearly have had the benefit of a wider view of the BU than I. Mine were bought some years ago. I wish they had marketed them with 3 blades included at different angles to start. Marketing could be “three planes in one”. My memory says secondary blades were only suggested as possibly needed. If we all had three angles to start I’m sure a lot of people’s frustration would have been relieved! I did buy a second blade eventually but the damage was done.......

[Doug Dawson]

My argument is that "dampening" irrelevant. It may be needed for thin blades, such as the Stanley Bailey. However the thick LN and Veritas BU blades do not need dampening.

The performance from a Bailey plane does not come from the chipbreaker dampening the blade. That is a misunderstanding of the reason for the chipbreaker. The performance of a Bailey comes when the chipbreaker is set close to the edge of the blade.

One needs to take off one's spectacles and observe the scratches on the glass one is polishing. The thickness of the blade has only secondary influence on what is happening at the cutting edge, which is a very fine point. Physically, the cutting edge in action is a damped oscillator, with the driving force effectively being variations in the resistance of the wood being cut, at the semi-microscopic level. The spring-loading of the chipbreaker close to the cutting edge will indeed cause an increase in the damping (and mitigate chatter.) The BU plane has no such additional damping.

The guys who originally set this up were very smart, although their understanding _may_ have been more intuitive than technical. I am an actual physicist, and have studied this, long ago.

[Phil Mueller]

Osvaldo, I too was in your position. I had pretty much relegated my BU planes to end grain and very straight grained wood. Given this thread and others I have read, I decided to take the extra iron I had for my LN 62 and grind it to a 50 degree bevel and give it a try. Well, first, thank you to all who provided this input. And second, I think I just got another plane I can use for face work. I took a piece of mahogany and went after it. Yes, a bit harder to push, but got nothing but nice thin shavings and a tear out free board. Here’s after the first dozen passes or so.

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[Vincent Tai]

a 38° bevel is a good place to start. The BU planes I use for face work have that as standard (minus the BU smoother). this gives a 50° angle of attack and is rather nice. I can get away with 50° angle of attack on figured woods - most of the time. I have planed mahogany and other problematic woods that have grain hell bent on reversing everywhere; 50° did alright when breaking down the stock, and a BU smoother with a 60° angle of attack cleaned up fine.



Pictures; a BD plane with cap iron and a BU Jack shared the bulk of the workload and a BU jointer cleans up quickly and well enough I skip the smoother. Adding an Apple sticker to your plane increases the value by 35%. Also may reduce chance of tear-out. reduces weight by 50%. I think the results are decent enough. One can learn the balance the tear-out; a small bit from the thicker shavings taken by a jack is alright, just stop soon enough to where a few passes with thinner shavings from the jack followed by a few passes with a jointer erases all tear out. A few woodies would've done just a good a job, Western or otherwise. Sharp solves most things. Make sure you've gotten rid of the wear bevel.

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[Robert Hazelwood]

Tearout is a basic problem of hand planing. If you can't solve the issue by simply changing the planing direction, as is the case here, then you can deal with it in several ways:

-Increase sharpness
-Decrease depth of cut
-Increase angle of cutting edge (this is why your power planers don't tear out too badly most of the time)
-Reduce mouth aperture (close the adjustable toe plate as much as you can)

There is another method- the chipbreaker/cap iron, which is the most versatile, but your plane doesn't have one, so you will need to experiment with cutting angles and thin shavings. Try honing a 50 degree microbevel on the blade, get it as sharp as you can. Then set it to take the thinnest shaving you can manage. See what happens- tearout should be greatly reduced if not eliminated.

If you kept your microbevel small it should not be a big deal to return to your original bevel angle.

[Bill McDermott]

My BU Jack is a trusty and reliable go to plane. It gets used as if it were just a big block plane. I use if for trimming and adjusting where a longer reference is helpful. This often involves some end grain, or a change in direction; e.g. flushing protruding tails, fitting a drawer or flattening a face frame -- going around the corner and bridging the open space. I tend to use a very heavy shearing approach with that plane (and block planes). I am not using it to run with the grain on the face of a board. In any event, I don't expect it to give me the final finish. Happily, it usually does yield a great finish. When it does not, it is almost always time to sharpen. I need to grind to a burr and then hone on the BU jointer. None of the other planes demand that very often. Even BD my smoother works great with regular honing or even stropping alone. All that said, some wood just wants to tear...