So.. If one has a Scrub and a Shooting plane.
Which of the three Bevel Up / Low angle Smoother, Jack, Jointer, is the most "useless" and could be swapped out with a Bevel Down with Chipbreaker.
Last edited by Dan Kraakenes; 08-11-2020 at 3:53 PM.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
A lot of people use their bu jack for shooting and a cambered jack is often serving the same purpose as a scrub; the question is then, what are you going to use a jack for? If you don’t have an answer then maybe you don’t need either bd or bu. The chip breaker rediscovery of recent years means that the reason many used a bu smoother may not be applicable. I personally prefer a bd jointer because the height of the plane makes it easier to feel vertical.
Derek: Maybe I've just learned too many things from you. I guess my own experience mirrors yours.
Bevel up: Smoother, Jack and jointer.
Use 25 degree blades in all 3
Camber the blades 6-8degrees
Microbevel to 50-60ish degree
Plane through anything with nearly zero tear out..
Do we concur?
You will be planing everything with a 60-70 degree cutting angle. Not so bad for final smoothing but I wouldn't want it for a lot of other planing tasks- limits depth of cut and is kind of nasty on softer woods. So you end up wanting additional blades ground at different angles, etc.
I don't think you will much enjoy cleaning up the face of a scrub-planed board with 1.5 thou shavings at a 65 degree effective cutting angle, for example. That's where a nice BD try plane would shine.
To answer your earlier question, if you have a scrub and a shooting plane then the one BU plane I'd keep would be the jack. I'd just keep a 25 or 30 deg bevel on it and use it for end grain tasks and wasting material away where you want more control/refinement than the scrub plane allows.
Other than my block plane I have no experience with BU planes. (And I'm just edging out of beginner phase... so take appropriate grain of salt).
I have a LN #5 BD with cambered iron, and a LN scrub (obviously with cambered iron). I don't consider them interchangeable. The scrub worked great for planing down a board edge that I had an inch or so of material to remove. I've done the same with the #5, though with the less aggressive camber it takes longer.
My scrub plane was actually the 2nd premium tool I bought. For a few early projects I tried to use it, where in my recent experience, has shown I should have used a cambered jack plane. The scrub is just way to aggressive for planing down to thickness in the face of a board (At least for me) and the blade width is too narrow so you are making many more passes, each with deep dawks.
This is probably what Rock means: On most planes, the sole and the side are flat planes along the the entire length of the plane, and they intersect in a straight line that also runs the length of the plane. If you tilt the plane to the side, it will rest on that straight line, and you can use it as a straightedge. Plane the workpiece, then tilt the plane to the side and check for light passing underneath; if you see light, then it's not flat.
The sides of the Veritas BU jointer aren't ground flat along the entire length. They're ground flat for only about half the length, which means you can't use the tilting method to check for flatness. (It's too awkward to try to tilt it and keep just the front half -- the part where the side is ground flat -- on the workpiece.)
Here's the BU jointer:
05P3701-veritas-bevel-up-jointer-plane-a2-f-08.jpg
For comparison, here's the Lie Nielsen #7:
1-7.jpg
Got it. I didn't realize they weren't flat like the BD planes. I use the plane for this (checking for flat) as part of the work. That would be a big strike against the BD jointer for me.
(Funny thing is I own one, but it is still in the closet never used it... I went a little nuts buying stuff a few years back)