A Pair of Jack Planes

[Mr_P]

The more I use woodies, the more I wonder how the hell did the Stanley Bailey conquer the world.

 

[G S Haydon]

Good point Mr P, I think it has something to do with most of the woodworking being done by machines and it's a plane that can be made in mass production style much more easily than a classic woodie. However the Bailey is still a fine option and I'm more than happy to own and use 'em.

Sadly to modern eyes the woodie can look and antique or a relic, that's so far from the truth. They are highly evolved for hand tool woodworking.

 

[Cheshirechappie]

Until I checked in William Lincoln's 'World Woods in Colour', I hadn't appreciated that Americam and European beech are different species, but they are - European is Fagus Sylvatica, and American is Fagus Grandifolia. There's a Japanese one, too - Fagus Crenata. It would appear from the information in the book that the American and European woods are very similar - much the same density, seasoning and working properties, the only noticable difference being that the American has a slightly more reddish tinge to it than the more creamy-brown European, which I think shows up in the photos.

One similarity, I suspect, is the difficulty in tracking down well seasoned quarter-sawn stock of thickness suitable for bench planes, which makes a project like this one hard even before it's started. Even the great Charles Hayward suggested making a wooden bench plane in two halves, cutting the escapement and wedge abutments by sawing and chiselling, then gluing the two halves together. Given the quality of modern glues, that would simplify making with little danger of failure at the glue-line. Doing it the 'old way' from the solid needs rather more skill with chisels and floats; rather more practice.

Nice one D_W - that's work to be proud of.

 

[MIGNAL]

Well they might be different species but they are still all fagus.

 

[Derek Cohen (Perth Oz)]

The more I use woodies, the more I wonder how the hell did the Stanley Bailey conquer the world.

I think that mass production played a major role. At the same time, if all things were equal production-wise, there would still be differences - differences that now more relevant these days where the choices are there to be made by hobbyists (who are probably the major consumer of old and new handplanes).

David had demonstrated here (and also the recent couple of years) that a properly designed woodie, that is, one designed to maximise the influence of the chipbreaker, will outperform single-iron woodies that simply rely on a high cutting angle to tame tearout ... thicker shavings are possible with a lower bevel entry to the wood.

However, performance is one thing - there are many personal preferences that come into play when one looks at ergonomics, that is, the feel and feedback from the plane in use.

Stanley planes feel very different to woodies. Woodies are higher and the wood itself absorbs the "vibrations" of cutting. Wood glides so much better over wood than iron does (even when waxed), and it is a no-brainer when used on the face of boards. It is a different story when used on the thinnish edge of a board. Whether a short coffin smoother or a long jointer, woodies just do not have the immediate control that a lower Stanley offers. (This is also one of the big drawcards for bevel up planes, where the low centre of gravity is taken a step further).

None of this is to imply one is better than another, just that they impart a different feel and many will therefore have different preference, as is the nature of human beings. As with many things, it is also what one is used to using.

Regards from Perth

Derek

 

[ac445ab]

You did really a great work. Bravissimo!
And thanks for videos: they explicate very well all phases of building such a plane.

I would like to know your thinking about the wear angle of the plane. I see, you set it to 79 degrees and the mouth isn't very tight (correct for a plane intended for removing wood fast). In my experiences I found some difficulties to bring together the need of a tighter mouth, the presence of a chipbreaker and its position.
In my planes with double irons I had to set wear angle at least at 90 degrees or even 100 degrees for smoothers in which the chipbreaker was set very close to the cutting edge.
What is your experience about wear angle in woodies with double irons and requiring a tighter mouth?

Ciao
Giuliano

 

[D_W]

Well, normally, I try to have the mouth on a try plane around a 16th, maybe a fat 16th. It does require the person setting up the cap iron to set it up properly, and there are times that you can get trash wood that doesn't make nice continuous shavings and have a plane want to load and maybe have the next pass force the junk wood up out of the plane.

The mouth on that particular plane got out of control due to carelessness.

Steve Voigt mentioned to me that the wears on some of the older planes he's seen (or seen pictures of) were around 90 degrees, which probably makes things easier, and I believe that's what steve is making in his smoothers - it gives an unfamiliar user some more margin for error, and there should be little need to condition the soles of double iron planes so the mouth should stay in good shape (the danger, of course, is that the mouth could open up to huge if the sole is planed off often just to make it look nice.

The other thing you can do is make a plane with a very short wear, as caleb james shows with his single iron template. There are double iron planes that have that very short wear, too, mujingfang makes them. It gives less place for the shavings to get trapped. I think the wear on one of my continental smoothers is probably 1/4th inch tall or less.

I like to make the wear back toward the iron, and have been making them more like 75 degrees lately, but I do it because I think it looks pleasing. I don't think it's necessary.

 

[D_W]

The more I use woodies, the more I wonder how the hell did the Stanley Bailey conquer the world.

I think that mass production played a major role. At the same time, if all things were equal production-wise, there would still be differences - differences that now more relevant these days where the choices are there to be made by hobbyists (who are probably the major consumer of old and new handplanes).

David had demonstrated here (and also the recent couple of years) that a properly designed woodie, that is, one designed to maximise the influence of the chipbreaker, will outperform single-iron woodies that simply rely on a high cutting angle to tame tearout ... thicker shavings are possible with a lower bevel entry to the wood.

However, performance is one thing - there are many personal preferences that come into play when one looks at ergonomics, that is, the feel and feedback from the plane in use.

Stanley planes feel very different to woodies. Woodies are higher and the wood itself absorbs the "vibrations" of cutting. Wood glides so much better over wood than iron does (even when waxed), and it is a no-brainer when used on the face of boards. It is a different story when used on the thinnish edge of a board. Whether a short coffin smoother or a long jointer, woodies just do not have the immediate control that a lower Stanley offers. (This is also one of the big drawcards for bevel up planes, where the low centre of gravity is taken a step further).

None of this is to imply one is better than another, just that they impart a different feel and many will therefore have different preference, as is the nature of human beings. As with many things, it is also what one is used to using.

Regards from Perth

Derek

I like the old try plane style on edges better than a stanley plane, too, but if one uses a stanley or other metal plane to plane edges all the time, it takes a couple of weeks to get used to jointing edges with the wooden try plane or wooden jointer because the handle is oriented higher and the planes feel much taller on the joint.

The fastest way I've found to joint boards that don't need a jack first is to leave the try plane or jointer set coarse, check the joint for fit (specifically for match planing) or against a straight edge, and then there are only minor adjustments to make. Those are better made with a smoother set for a light cut. I don't joint edges with a shaving thinner than about 5 thousandths, except for the smoother touch up. It makes correcting lateral issues a whole lot faster to do it with a heavy shaving.

I like a metal plane for smoothing, though. I just haven't found anything else as good as a stanley 4.

 

[D_W]

Thanks, Chappie and Benchwayze. You guys have gobs of planes over there that are in good shape, but i see that at least on ebay, they're starting to bring some money.

If nothing else, a wooden jack is nice to have, and of course, I like the middle step in wood, too. I had a lot of trouble with wooden planes when I first started woodworking about 9 or 10 years ago. I bought a couple, but didn't know why they didn't work well for me and assumed that you had to be able to plane downgrain all the time if you wanted to use a woodie.

Nobody said much about double irons online or how to use them, and I heard a couple of guys say that if I wanted to use old planes, I should learn to make a wedge. That sounded unrealistic as a beginner. I could fix those planes now, but I made bad buying decisions and it wouldn't be worth the trouble with the ones I bought.

Chappie, you're correct, getting the wood over here is a real problem. There is one good source for it, and it comes out of the kiln fairly irregularly, it's expensive, and even at that, beech in general has a pretty wide range of density and hardness so it never seems to work the same from billet to billet (or provide an identical plane). The trees are plentiful (beech), but finding it commercially is a problem for anything other than railroad ties and framing inside of furniture.

 

[ac445ab]

Well, normally, I try to have the mouth on a try plane around a 16th, maybe a fat 16th. It does require the person setting up the cap iron to set it up properly, and there are times that you can get trash wood that doesn't make nice continuous shavings and have a plane want to load and maybe have the next pass force the junk wood up out of the plane.

The mouth on that particular plane got out of control due to carelessness.

Steve Voigt mentioned to me that the wears on some of the older planes he's seen (or seen pictures of) were around 90 degrees, which probably makes things easier, and I believe that's what steve is making in his smoothers - it gives an unfamiliar user some more margin for error, and there should be little need to condition the soles of double iron planes so the mouth should stay in good shape (the danger, of course, is that the mouth could open up to huge if the sole is planed off often just to make it look nice.

The other thing you can do is make a plane with a very short wear, as caleb james shows with his single iron template. There are double iron planes that have that very short wear, too, mujingfang makes them. It gives less place for the shavings to get trapped. I think the wear on one of my continental smoothers is probably 1/4th inch tall or less.

I like to make the wear back toward the iron, and have been making them more like 75 degrees lately, but I do it because I think it looks pleasing. I don't think it's necessary.

Grazie for your reply.

Ciao
Giuliano

 

[Derek Cohen (Perth Oz)]

By way of contrast, I was Googling for information on Trying vs Jointer planes, and came across this blog of Chris Schwarz on the subject. This is from 2010, and before the re-interest in chipbreakers. Definitely not intended as a swipe at CS (whom I think the world of), but an interesting contrast/reminder of what we believed so strongly in just a few years ago ...

http://www.popularwoodworking.com/woodw ... d-jointers

By reducing/removing the threat of tearout, the chipbreaker also changes the direction one runs the plane along a board, compared with one with a high angle bed.

Regards from Perth

Derek

 

[G S Haydon]

It's a good example of what changes over time. Thanks to David, Kees and many others I began to fully understand how to use a cap iron. I know there will be many that did do this all the time but I got the detail from those guys and I'm grateful of it.

 

[Trafalgar]

1) Hone the iron
2) Take a light cut
3) Set cap iron close until the plane stops cutting.
4) Then move it back a hair.
5) Have another strategy for curves, modern thin veneers, and those times when 1-4 won't work.

You're welcome.

All of this has been in Planecraft since the 1920's and later through six or seven editions and special reprints.

I can't help but think of the surfaces that James Krenov, Art Carpenter, Alan Peters, Jere Osgood and those of that era were (are in the case of Osgood) able to achieve. They look(ed) damn good to me. Not sure how they did it, exactly, but I think it involved other tools and techniques than a hand plane only approach. It had to on the curved work, yet quality appears not to have suffered.

We're losing perspective, gentlemen. People who can barely work wood (compared to those in the list above) have somehow become standard setters and 'experts.' It's absurd. It's like Van Gogh following the lead of an eight year old with a box of crayons and a coloring book. Ridiculous. On. Its. Face.

 

[G S Haydon]

I love you're total no BS approach Charles .

I've seen it written too, not only in planecraft, but other sources as well. I'm never going to get close to those guys but I do enjoy learning things. Learning how to set a cap iron nicely has improved how my wooden planes work and has made me work more effectively.

 

[Derek Cohen (Perth Oz)]

I can't help but think of the surfaces that James Krenov, Art Carpenter, Alan Peters, Jere Osgood and those of that era were (are in the case of Osgood) able to achieve. They look(ed) damn good to me. Not sure how they did it, exactly, but I think it involved other tools and techniques than a hand plane only approach. It had to on the curved work, yet quality appears not to have suffered.

I have no idea about the others, but as far as I can determine, Krenov did not use the chipbreaker to control tearout. Instead, he took "paper thin" shavings, to quote him in The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking.

None of his writing, again as far as I can tell, mention using the chipbreaker. The pictures of his shavings in his books indicate that he was only interested in fine shavings (none have the look of a closed chipbreaker).

When he sent me one of his smoothers, I took measurements of everything. He had been using the plane earlier, and it was set for use (as he had last used it), and he included some of the last shavings he took. The mouth was tight - too tight to use with a close set chipbreaker. I recorded that the chipbreaker was set 1/8" from the back of the bevel.

And yet he certainly achieved superior surfaces. That was what he was the master of.

Regards from Perth

Derek

 

[Trafalgar]

Most of the time we're asking the wrong questions. If you start from the rather safe assumption that the surfaces of the work of those I mentioned leave little if anything to be desired both in their overall quality and homogeneity between flat and curved surfaces, then I want the recipe for how they did it and all the way through the selection and application of the finish, which by the way is an inseparable aspect of all of this.

If these guys scraped should we despise the scraper? If they used sandpaper, should we despite it?

This scurrying around trying to interpolate angles, translations, and generally parsing to the nth degree some silly-a$$ed Japanese video really has gone quite far enough. The next think you know we'll be critiquing the cut of their respective lab coats, there really isn't much else is there? It totally plucks and pulls the whole issue out of any reasonable context.

 

[Cheshirechappie]

I know threads have a tendency to take on a life of their own and wander off in strange directions, but as we started with jack planes perhaps the discussions about how to produce a fine finished surface are too much of a departure. Maybe we should be looking at how to shift a lot of waste with minimum effort leaving a surface that needs only a little work with a try plane to make it fit for it's intended duty. What are the relative merits of single-iron and double-iron jack planes?

 

[Trafalgar]

It's the wrong question really. Some species can be very aggressively jack planed very rank and some can't or you'll leave a mess. Maybe a cap iron helps at this stage and maybe not. It depends on how close you dare get to the finish line with the jack before applying other planes. Sometimes you end up using the jack as more of a smoother than you do a jack. The species dictates the approach. To the extent that the cap iron can be set way back and taken out of the equation why would you not want a plane with a cap iron? You're left with choices, without one you're not.

I've been planing a little butternut recently, a very easy species to plane, and I've got the cap iron set pretty far back on my Marples and letting it take a fairly big bite. If I were planing something else not so agreeable then I'd simply move it closer and take less of a bite.

I must be missing some nuance as this all seems pretty simple and long-settled workshop practice.

 

[Bedrock]

DW Going back to your original posting, the blade maker may well have been James (I think - I'm not close to the workshop atm) Hilditch, although I have a wooden jointer with a Hilditch Chip breaker, married to a Herring blade, a combination I have seen on a number of occasions. Andy T would be more likely to have the best information, if it is of interest.
Regards Mike

Shouldn't have written from the office - the blade is indeed "A Hildick", the cap iron on this plane has the tall chimney stamp, about which much was written some years ago.

Mike

 

[Trafalgar]

I can't help but think of the surfaces that James Krenov, Art Carpenter, Alan Peters, Jere Osgood and those of that era were (are in the case of Osgood) able to achieve. They look(ed) damn good to me. Not sure how they did it, exactly, but I think it involved other tools and techniques than a hand plane only approach. It had to on the curved work, yet quality appears not to have suffered.

I have no idea about the others, but as far as I can determine, Krenov did not use the chipbreaker to control tearout. Instead, he took "paper thin" shavings, to quote him in The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking.

None of his writing, again as far as I can tell, mention using the chipbreaker. The pictures of his shavings in his books indicate that he was only interested in fine shavings (none have the look of a closed chipbreaker).

When he sent me one of his smoothers, I took measurements of everything. He had been using the plane earlier, and it was set for use (as he had last used it), and he included some of the last shavings he took. The mouth was tight - too tight to use with a close set chipbreaker. I recorded that the chipbreaker was set 1/8" from the back of the bevel.

And yet he certainly achieved superior surfaces. That was what he was the master of.

Regards from Perth

Derek

What was the pitch of the plane Derek?