Shooting Plane....Not LV or LN

[Patrick Chase]

A ramped board, such as above, certainly does aid in shooting. The principal factor is its reduction in impact, which also reduces blade wear. There is some spread of blade wear in addition.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Hmm, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on that count. From an analytical perspective the amount of skew you get from a ramped board strikes me as "homeopathic", and my own experience is consistent with that. I don't see much difference in ease-of-cut between unramped and ramped boards with straight blades, while I do see a very significant improvement with 20+ deg of blade skew as on the dedicated shooting planes.

Out of curiosity why do your configure your board so that you shoot top->bottom? The lateral component of the cutting force will tend to lever the workpiece up and away from the bed in that configuration. It probably doesn't matter at such negligible skew angles (see above) but there's a reason why the blades on the shooting planes are oriented the way they are.

EDIT - Never mind, you do it so that you have the option of working tall-but-narrow workpieces that wouldn't be feasible if the fence were at the high end. Given my own conviction that such small skew angles are irrelevant, that's logically the "right" configuration :-).

I agree that a lower cutting angle helps. No debate there.

[Graham Haydon]

I'd echo Brian, George and others in regards to using a normal bench plane. On the basis you use mainly power tools a #6, #7 or wooden jack will work great and offer the ability to shoot long grain edges as well.

[Patrick Chase]

I'd echo Brian, George and others in regards to using a normal bench plane. On the basis you use mainly power tools a #6, #7 or wooden jack will work great and offer the ability to shoot long grain edges as well.

As has been previously stated, the key thing to note here is that the OP is already shooting with a bench plane (a 4-1/2) and is looking for something with a lower angle, presumably to help with end-grain shooting. Given that context I don't see how recommending more of the same in the form of a bigger bench plane is responsive to the OP's requirements (though ideally he should clarify why he thinks he needs a lower cutting angle - I suspect that skew might actually be more helpful...)

EDIT: Given the OP's apparent constraints, Derek's suggestion of a low angle Jack is probably the most reasonable one so far.

[Derek Cohen]

Hi Patrick

With a ramped board, I am not suggesting that the "skew" action creates a slicing cut. I am stating that the skew action causes the blade to enter the wood in a progressive manner, rather than all at once/ straight on. This has a noticeable effect on the the way the plane strikes the work piece, reducing the impact. This is not a theoretical issue. This is factual. I have used and compared different shooting boards over some years, as well as eliciting the opinions of others. Try it for yourself.

There is no noticeable tendency for a workpiece to lift when shooting on a ramped board. In the same way that a straight-bladed plane does not impart a slicing cut, a ramped board does not impart an upward angle to the plane. In both the situations, only the initial impact is skewed, and thereafter the workpiece remains .. just a workpiece without angle.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Patrick Chase]

Hi Patrick

With a ramped board, I am not suggesting that the "skew" action creates a slicing cut. I am stating that the skew action causes the blade to enter the wood in a progressive manner, rather than all at once/ straight on.

Yes, everybody agrees on that point. The key question is: How much does does the impact have to be spread out to create a noticeable effect?

Let's try reducto ad absurdum: Several of my planes (the Veritas customs, the L-N and WR Bed Rock clones) have frogs that can be skewed by a fraction of a degree. By doing that I can cause the blade to "not enter all at once". Do you think that doing so would have a meaningful impact on shooting? For that matter no plane has a perfectly straight blade, even with modern CNC tolerances. Do you think they really vary in shooting performance? The answer to both is clearly "no", and so we must accept that there is some threshold below which the impacts are so negligible as to not be meaningful.

Now let's consider a ramped shooting board: The effective skew amounts to a couple/few degrees. When shooting a 3/4 workpiece this will cause the blade to enter the bottom of the workpiece about 1/32" before it enters the top (using the way your board is laid out as a benchmark). Most people seem to shoot at ~2 feet/second or a bit faster, so the net impact is that the impulse at workpiece entry is spread out over just over one millisecond (1/1000 sec) instead of being instantaneous. If you look at the mechanics of cutting (not all of the work is done at the exact moment of impact), the mass and momentum of the plane and the amount of compliance in your arm/body, spreading the impact out by that amount simply cannot possibly make a perceptible difference, just as homeopathic remedies cannot possibly have a medical impact (hence my choice of words in my previous post).

In each case the math is what it is, and its conclusions are inescapable. With that said, plenty of people have convinced themselves that homeopathy works, just as many people have convinced themselves that a tilted shooting board makes a difference. At that point it's a matter of faith and not really open to debate (except to say that I've tried it, and it didn't make a difference. Then again I'd already done the math before that and had a clear idea of what "should" happen - expectation is a powerful thing :-)

[Derek Cohen]

As I said Patrick, this is not for armchair reasoning or speculation - the effect can be demonstrated easily on a practical level.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Patrick Chase]

As I said Patrick, this is not for armchair reasoning or speculation - the effect can be demonstrated easily on a practical level.

Oddly enough, so can homeopathy - there was a recent study demonstrating positive medical impacts. The key thing in that case was that the patients *knew* they were getting homeopathic treatments and *expected* that they would work, leading to a classic case of a placebo effect.

Same thing here. Unless of course you've rigged up a plane with a representative (similar compliance to human) robotic arm and a force gauge and collected data?

EDIT: Actually there's a simpler way to test this: Mill some stock at a complementary angle to the skew, and have people shoot it in a blind trial (the latter part would take some doing since most experienced woodworkers can spot 2 deg of cant on the edge of a workpiece. you'd have to prevent them from seeing at least that part of the workpiece, or maybe paint a pattern on it that obscures geometry). See if the perceived benefit stays or goes away.

[Graham Haydon]

Hi Patrick

As the OP mentioned his inexperience with hand tools I thought a larger standard bench plane would prove more versatile. That's the thing with opinions and experiences, they all vary. My 47.5deg pitch wooden jack works great on a flat shooting board and I like the fact I can then bring it to long grain work with confidence.

Wooden-Jack-Shooting.jpg

[Steve Voigt]

As I said Patrick, this is not for armchair reasoning or speculation - the effect can be demonstrated easily on a practical level.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Completely right. You can present rational arguments all day, or you can try it and I'm sure most will be convinced.The problem here, as is so often the case, is that the rational arguments are too simple, and fail to take account of all the forces and factors involved.

Instead of frog angles and homeopathic comparisons, consider a closely related situation: skewing a plane when face-planing. Try face-planing for a long session, pushing a 2 1/2" jointer blade, and always presenting it at 90° to the edge of the board. Then try skewing the plane just a few degrees on every stroke. The difference is dramatic. For me, it's the difference, after a couple hours of work, between being tired and being exhausted.

[Patrick Chase]

Completely right. You can present rational arguments all day, or you can try it and I'm sure most will be convinced.The problem here, as is so often the case, is that the rational arguments are too simple, and fail to take account of all the forces and factors involved.

Instead of frog angles and homeopathic comparisons, consider a closely related situation: skewing a plane when face-planing. Try face-planing for a long session, pushing a 2 1/2" jointer blade, and always presenting it at 90° to the edge of the board. Then try skewing the plane just a few degrees on every stroke. The difference is dramatic. For me, it's the difference, after a couple hours of work, between being tired and being exhausted.

Actually the case you cite is NOT "closely related", and the analysis works out very differently and predicts exactly the result you describe.

For starters you're using a 2.5" blade on a wide surface, instead of shooting a 0.75" thick edge as I assumed, and that buys you a 3X increase in "diffusion".

Furthermore people usually aren't up to full speed by the start of a long jointing stroke (a shooting board allows more of a running start) - If you're at, say, 1 fps then that's another 2X. Admittedly this one his highly variable by user.

Finally I'd be willing to bet that your skew angle is >5 degrees (5 deg corresponds to 2" of total offset over the ~24" length of your jointer) which buys you another >2X. Note that this is a fundamental difference - with a shooting board the total skew is limited by the need to keep the entire length of the workpiece on the blade. When you skew during roughing, jointing, or smoothing you don't need to do that.

Taking all 3 of those together you're now diffusing the impact over ~10 msec, which should be perceptible. Not coincidentally that's also about what you get with the ~20 deg skew angles on most dedicated shooting planes - it's almost as though Stanley, L-N, and LV did their homework and figured out how much skew is required to make a difference...

[Pat Barry]

Yes, everybody agrees on that point. The key question is: How much does does the impact have to be spread out to create a noticeable effect?

Let's try reducto ad absurdum: Several of my planes (the Veritas customs, the L-N and WR Bed Rock clones) have frogs that can be skewed by a fraction of a degree. By doing that I can cause the blade to "not enter all at once". Do you think that doing so would have a meaningful impact on shooting? For that matter no plane has a perfectly straight blade, even with modern CNC tolerances. Do you think they really vary in shooting performance? The answer to both is clearly "no", and so we must accept that there is some threshold below which the impacts are so negligible as to not be meaningful.

Now let's consider a ramped shooting board: The effective skew amounts to a couple/few degrees. When shooting a 3/4 workpiece this will cause the blade to enter the bottom of the workpiece about 1/32" before it enters the top (using the way your board is laid out as a benchmark). Most people seem to shoot at ~2 feet/second or a bit faster, so the net impact is that the impulse at workpiece entry is spread out over just over one millisecond (1/1000 sec) instead of being instantaneous. If you look at the mechanics of cutting (not all of the work is done at the exact moment of impact), the mass and momentum of the plane and the amount of compliance in your arm/body, spreading the impact out by that amount simply cannot possibly make a perceptible difference, just as homeopathic remedies cannot possibly have a medical impact (hence my choice of words in my previous post).

In each case the math is what it is, and its conclusions are inescapable. With that said, plenty of people have convinced themselves that homeopathy works, just as many people have convinced themselves that a tilted shooting board makes a difference. At that point it's a matter of faith and not really open to debate (except to say that I've tried it, and it didn't make a difference. Then again I'd already done the math before that and had a clear idea of what "should" happen - expectation is a powerful thing :-)

We had this same discussion a month or so ago and I brought up the same points as you are regarding the ramped shooting board and the same people had the same thoughts about a perceived benefit from the ramped board. A ramped board is nowhere near as beneficial as a skewed blade but some perceive it worked (subjectively) but that's likely because they want to believe it works, after al, they built it because they wanted to believe. I also agree that planning forces with Derek's ramped board would tend to lift the work piece. I guess if it works for you then have at it but buyer beware.

[Patrick Chase]

We had this same discussion a month or so ago and I brought up the same points as you are regarding the ramped shooting board and the same people had the same thoughts about a perceived benefit from the ramped board. A ramped board is nowhere near as beneficial as a skewed blade but some perceive it worked (subjectively) but that's likely because they want to believe it works, after al, they built it because they wanted to believe. I also agree that planning forces with Derek's ramped board would tend to lift the work piece. I guess if it works for you then have at it but buyer beware.

Yeah, this one has the feel of an unwinnable holy war. Guess it's time to go on forum vacation...

As I said above I think that the ramp direction on Derek's board makes sense on balance. Yes, there is an upward force component, but it's small due to the very low ramp angle. IMO the benefit of having more usable edge at the fence end and therefore being able to shoot short-but-thick edges outweighs that. I'm actually thinking of reconfiguring my own ramped board to match. I have one for perfectly rational blade-wear reasons even though I have an LV shooter with a skewed blade :-).

[Larry Frank]

Thanks for the comments and varied opinions:-)

I am mainly shooting smaller boards and based upon what I have read is that my LN 4-1/2 will work. I really would really like what I think is called a hot dog handle. Maybe not for my LN but for a similar plane. I have pretty bad arthritis in my wrists and that type of handle would make it easier on me. Any thought on a used Stanley plane that would could put that type of handle on?

[Pat Barry]

... the benefit of having more usable edge at the fence end and therefore being able to shoot short-but-thick edges

The ramp angle doesn't really buy you much of any increase in thickness so I'm not seeing that there is any benefit in this as compared to a plain shooting board.

[Patrick Chase]

The ramp angle doesn't really buy you much of any increase in thickness so I'm not seeing that there is any benefit in this as compared to a plain shooting board.

There is a benefit IMO, it's just not what people claim.

When shooting longer pieces a ramped board distributes the wear more evenly across the blade. My point in my previous post is that ramping "down" towards the fence as Derek did enables you to both spread the wear out on long-but-thin pieces while still being able to shoot short-but-thick ones. Obviously you still get uneven wear with short-and-thin pieces and the ramp means you can't shoot long-and-thick ones- there's nothing to be done about that.