Originally Posted by
Charlie Stanford
The super-fine settings made for an interesting afternoon's diversion for me. That was about it. They work (no doubt) but the surface has to be really homogenous in the first place, almost to a machine-like standard, I rarely achieve that to be honest.
I definitely do not go through a tedious progression of planes and cap iron settings that culminate in the super-tight settings mentioned in the articles. I wonder who really does, in the "post-Kawai" (sp?) world we now supposedly live in. If the end result of all of this is supposed to look like what you get when you hand plane light machine marks out of stock that has otherwise been competently processed on jointer and planer I can reliably be counted out. If I'm misunderstanding the process then ignorance is bliss.
I'm typically back to around a 64th (I'd guess), as David Barnett mentioned in his post quoting an old FW article. For me, this pretty much is the "close as you can get it" recommendation to be found in several books by British authors (not sure what Charlesworth was looking for, perhaps Hayward providing a specific measurement in thousandths of an inch). Furthermore, I would add "reasonably" after the word "can" as a lousy two cent contribution to the discussion.
Can it be gotten closer? Sure, with some squinting and carrying on. But then that setting might not work as well on one species as it did on another. And then fiddling and faffing about ensue. I don't despise the scraper and I am on speaking terms with garnet sandpaper. 250 years or so ago I guess it would have been brick dust, loose grit of some sort, something lost to history, a shop secret, or nothing. Not worried about it.