Bench Plane - Sharpening/Tuning question

[Jacob]

.......
But it is important to hone both surfaces that make up an edge because both suffer wear.

Except for the fact that the flat face is going to be a much bigger area than the face of the bevel so it makes more sense just to remove material from the bevel until the wear is also gone from the face - as indicated by a burr right across.
So you don't need to hone or flatten the face at all except for the few quick passes to remove the burr. In time this eventually produces the appearance of a polished and flattened face but to do it in advance is a bit like stone washing jeans or distressing furniture - it may look how you want it but there's no other point to it.

 

[woodbrains]

.......
But it is important to hone both surfaces that make up an edge because both suffer wear.

Except for the fact that the flat face is going to be a much bigger area than the face of the bevel so it makes more sense just to remove material from the bevel until the wear is also gone from the face - as indicated by a burr right across.
So you don't need to hone or flatten the face at all except for the few quick passes to remove the burr. In time this eventually produces the appearance of a polished and flattened face but to do it in advance is a bit like stone washing jeans or distressing furniture - it may look how you want it but there's no other point to it.

But we are not trying to remove the wear bevel by honing the flat side, are we? So stop, yet again, putting words into someone's mouth and then telling them they are wrong. It is bloody tiresome. If you do not understand that a SHARP edge is formed by two equally polished intersecting surfaces, then there is nothing that the right minded posters here can do. But continually arguing the opposite ad infinitum will not make you correct. Just because you are obviously lazy, and try to justify your lazyness by declaring every other woodworker is wasting their time by doing something correctly, won't change anybodies minds.

Trust me, any novice out there who might not know already; there is no such thing as too sharp. Sharpness depends on two equally honed edges, so that there is no visible junction between them. Forget shaving arm hairs, use your eyes, if you can see an edge, no matter how small, you have not sharpened. If you do not polish the back as well as the bevel, you will see an edge. And by polished, I mean from a stone in the order of 6000 or finer for Japanese, black Arkansas (and then preferably stropped on chromium oxide) for oil stones or equivalents.

Mike.

 

[Jacob]

.......
But it is important to hone both surfaces that make up an edge because both suffer wear.

Except for the fact that the flat face is going to be a much bigger area than the face of the bevel so it makes more sense just to remove material from the bevel until the wear is also gone from the face - as indicated by a burr right across.
So you don't need to hone or flatten the face at all except for the few quick passes to remove the burr. In time this eventually produces the appearance of a polished and flattened face but to do it in advance is a bit like stone washing jeans or distressing furniture - it may look how you want it but there's no other point to it.

But we are not trying to remove the wear bevel by honing the flat side, are we? So stop, yet again, putting words into someone's mouth and then telling them they are wrong.

Don't you read these posts? Here are two quotes from above:
But it is important to hone both surfaces that make up an edge because both suffer wear.

I would also always advocate flattening the back of the blade,

It is bloody tiresome. If you do not understand that a SHARP edge is formed by two equally polished intersecting surfaces, then there is nothing that the right minded posters here can do. But continually arguing the opposite ad infinitum will not make you correct. Just because you are obviously lazy, and try to justify your lazyness by declaring every other woodworker is wasting their time by doing something correctly, won't change anybodies minds

.A lot of misinformed amateurs are found to be spending hours flattening and polishing plane and chisel faces. I guess you are one yourself.
Yes It is bloody tiresome - they pick up on that silly mantra a SHARP edge is formed by two equally polished intersecting surfaces, which is sort of true but also misleading.

..... If you do not polish the back as well as the bevel, you will see an edge. And by polished, I mean from a stone in the order of 6000 or finer for Japanese, black Arkansas (and then preferably stropped on chromium oxide) for oil stones or equivalents.

Mike.

Nonsense. OK if you are into brain surgery or microtomy but completely irrelevant to woodworkers.
How on earth did we manage before we learned that "a SHARP edge is formed by two equally polished intersecting surfaces" or get our hands on "stone in the order of 6000 or finer for Japanese, black Arkansas" (and then preferably stropped on chromium oxide) :lol:
You do talk b****x for a wood "brains". :lol: :lol: and offensive and bad tempered to boot.

 

[G S Haydon]

Explains it all with some much needed clarity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pdWAcK6Eh8

 

[Duncumb.fc]

Explains it all with some much needed clarity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pdWAcK6Eh8

Resisting the urge to pervert the use of the thank button by thanking this post...
If only some clever sod would make a "like button" :mrgreen:

Fraser

 

[G S Haydon]

Do it, you know you want to ;-)

 

[Duncumb.fc]

I shall stay true to my morals, but you have my written thanks! :mrgreen:

 

[G S Haydon]

Booooooo

 

[lwilliams]

...A lot of misinformed amateurs are found to be spending hours flattening and polishing plane and chisel faces. I guess you are one yourself.
Yes It is bloody tiresome - they pick up on that silly mantra a SHARP edge is formed by two equally polished intersecting surfaces, which is sort of true but also misleading...

Jacob,

You can't remove the wire edge without flattening the back, you just bend it back and forth. The wire edge is the indicator that tells you where you are on each grit but it has to be removed then recreated on each grit to use it as an indicator. The wear on the flat face is cumulative, if it's not removed it keeps getting worse and your edges dull faster. It's not misleading to say that the quality of the edge depends on the quality of the two surfaces that make up that edge.

Obviously you didn't watch the video. "Hours flattening and polishing plane and chisel faces???" Hardly! Didn't I sharpen two irons in about six minutes and at a slow pace so I could demonstrate the process?

I know I'm wasting my time with you but this may help others. Here's one of Steve Elliot's images. The brown line is where you'd have to hone the flat face to on your coarse stone, if you want to remove the wear that forms there when the edge really starts to go off at 200 feet. It's only about five or six microns deep but about 25 times as long streaming back from the edge. The blue line is where you have to hone the bevel to if you want to remove the wear by only working the bevel. The red line is the center line between the flat face and the bevel. The green line is where the cutting edge is moved to during the formation of the wear profile. You can see that initially most wear is on the flat face and, I believe, is caused by adhesive wear where the shaving is rubbing on the iron. If you go to Steve's web page ( http://bladetest.infillplane.com/html/w ... files.html ) you'll find another image that shows you lose clearance at 200 feet. When clearance is lost the wear on the bevel accelerates because the bottom of the bevel starts rubbing on the wood causing growing adhesive wear issues on the bevel. The accelerating bevel wear becomes the dominant fastest growing wear profile if the iron isn't sharpened. It is pretty obvious that frequent sharpening is a good thing. If you sharpen frequently, you'll want to remove barriers to sharpening and make the process fast and easy. This is the traditional system and it evolved because it's the fastest, easiest, and most reliable method to get a sharp edge.

 

[Jacob]

That science of image is deeply dubious in at least one respect - viz "800LF"
That's 800 linear feet of shoulder planing.
A large traditional house door could have about 8 ft of shoulders and I find it unbelievable that anybody would plane all the shoulders on one hundred large doors, without sharpening say at least 100 times. Bearing in mind that most shoulders wouldn't need planing much anyway this would be a many years of door production - without sharpening?
The normal process of turning face down to remove the burr 100 times, would take care of the face, without the need for any special face flattening process.
That's the trouble with off-the-top-of-the-head theorising and amateur science - you get tangled up in a very unreal world.
Better to look at reality first and then adapt the science to fit, rather than the other way around. It may be apocryphal but a scientist is reputed to have proved the bumble bees can't fly!

 

[Duncumb.fc]

That science of image is deeply dubious in at least one respect - viz "800LF"
That's 800 linear feet of shoulder planing.
A large traditional house door could have about 8 ft of shoulders and I find it unbelievable that anybody would plane all the shoulders on one hundred large doors, without sharpening say at least 100 times. Bearing in mind that most shoulders wouldn't need planing much anyway this would be a many years of door production - without sharpening?

Jacob, your argument is somewhat ridiculous here.
You mention that a door has 8ft of shoulders, and given that the shaving thickness is 0.002" thick, I highly doubt that you would be giving each shoulder 1 pass. Extrapolate this out to 4 passes per shoulder, and you're suddenly at 25 doors. 4 passes I still reckon is a little less than adequate when the shaving is so thin, I'd guess we're looking closer to 10 passes. This gives 10 doors.

Think before you post, it'll save us all a lot of bother

Fraser

 

[Peter Sefton]

Jacob ridiculous? How very rude

 

[Jelly]

It may be apocryphal but a scientist is reputed to have proved the bumble bees can't fly!

Not apocryphal, but not the whole story either... Someone theorised that bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly, because they need to beat their wings at a rate faster than their neurons can fire to make their tiny little bee-muscles contract; Being that Bees can fly, they set out to find out how, the answer being that their wing is attached at the far end to some elastic tissue, then passes over a fulcrum, then is attached to the muscle... one muscle contraction provides enough power for the elastic tissue to oscillate, beating the wing several times.

 

[Duncumb.fc]

Jacob ridiculous? How very rude

Not him, just his argument! :mrgreen:

Fraser

 

[Jacob]

That science of image is deeply dubious in at least one respect - viz "800LF"
That's 800 linear feet of shoulder planing.
A large traditional house door could have about 8 ft of shoulders and I find it unbelievable that anybody would plane all the shoulders on one hundred large doors, without sharpening say at least 100 times. Bearing in mind that most shoulders wouldn't need planing much anyway this would be a many years of door production - without sharpening?

Jacob, your argument is somewhat ridiculous here.
You mention that a door has 8ft of shoulders, and given that the shaving thickness is 0.002" thick, I highly doubt that you would be giving each shoulder 1 pass. Extrapolate this out to 4 passes per shoulder, and you're suddenly at 25 doors. 4 passes I still reckon is a little less than adequate when the shaving is so thin, I'd guess we're looking closer to 10 passes. This gives 10 doors.

Think before you post, it'll save us all a lot of bother

Fraser

You are hung up on the hypothetical science again. In reality it's extremely unlikely that you would make anything like 4 passes per shoulder.You would probably ease one or two of them if necessary. Many of them you wouldn't touch, if you'd cut them accurately in the first place. The 800 linear feet should do 100 doors - unless all your cutting is inaccurate!.
But in reality you'd also give a quick hone before starting on each door. Or if you are only doing 10 then 10 honings (at a rough guess).
That's why these discussions go on so tediously - they are 90% hypothetical and half the time the participants have little grasp on the science to start with, let alone practical experience!

This elaborate face/flattening and polishing is a new idea. How did they manage in the old days?

PS and it would be interesting to see how BBeech did his 800ft. Some sort of jig? How did he get the shavings to be so precise? I'm dubious about the whole thing and I think a little more scepticism about many of the claims made by our would-be gurus, would be a good thing all round. Especially as the basic message from guru world is that things are much more difficult than you think and you are doing it wrongly. Two fingers to that!

 

[lwilliams]

That's a straw man, Jacob. I certainly didn't suggest pushing a cutting edge that far although the fore plane I sharpened in the video had planed a lot more than I normally would between sharpenings. Both those planes had spent two long days as demo planes at a show.

What are you bringing up architectural doors for? You need molding planes to make architectural doors. Show me how you sharpen a molding plane with your method. Traditional techniques work just as well for profiled molding plane irons as it does for straight irons. One can sharpen gouges, molding plane irons or skewed irons using traditional sharpening. With your "rounded bevel" method one is locked into only sharpening the easy to sharpen tools just as rigidly as if one was tinkering around with a honing guide. The stuff on your web site has a decidedly rectilinear look to it. Maybe if you learned to sharpen you could progress beyond that.

 

[G S Haydon]

Iwillimas, do you have a link to the video? I seemed to of missed it.

 

[lwilliams]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ClNp_Eknw

 

[Duncumb.fc]

That science of image is deeply dubious in at least one respect - viz "800LF"
That's 800 linear feet of shoulder planing.
A large traditional house door could have about 8 ft of shoulders and I find it unbelievable that anybody would plane all the shoulders on one hundred large doors, without sharpening say at least 100 times. Bearing in mind that most shoulders wouldn't need planing much anyway this would be a many years of door production - without sharpening?

Jacob, your argument is somewhat ridiculous here.
You mention that a door has 8ft of shoulders, and given that the shaving thickness is 0.002" thick, I highly doubt that you would be giving each shoulder 1 pass. Extrapolate this out to 4 passes per shoulder, and you're suddenly at 25 doors. 4 passes I still reckon is a little less than adequate when the shaving is so thin, I'd guess we're looking closer to 10 passes. This gives 10 doors.

Think before you post, it'll save us all a lot of bother

Fraser

You are hung up on the hypothetical science again. In reality it's extremely unlikely that you would make anything like 4 passes per shoulder.You would probably ease one or two of them if necessary. Many of them you wouldn't touch, if you'd cut them accurately in the first place. The 800 linear feet should do 100 doors - unless all your cutting is inaccurate!.
But in reality you'd also give a quick hone before starting on each door. Or if you are only doing 10 then 10 honings (at a rough guess).
That's why these discussions go on so tediously - they are 90% hypothetical and half the time the participants have little grasp on the science to start with, let alone practical experience!

This elaborate face/flattening and polishing is a new idea. How did they manage in the old days?

PS and it would be interesting to see how BBeech did his 800ft. Some sort of jig? How did he get the shavings to be so precise? I'm dubious about the whole thing and I think a little more scepticism about many of the claims made by our would-be gurus, would be a good thing all round. Especially as the basic message from guru world is that things are much more difficult than you think and you are doing it wrongly. Two fingers to that!

The point was Jacob, showing how quickly 800ft could be reached.
800ft is not an unfathomable amount.

Fraser

 

[Jacob]

....
What are you bringing up architectural doors for? You need molding planes to make architectural doors. .....

I read somewhere that the shoulder plane was more or less invented for trad doors (aren't they all architectural?) as they have long shoulders between lock/bottom rails and stiles, unlike smaller shoulders which are easily fettled with a chisel.
And in fact, in practice, the 92 etc is ideal for a shoulder on a 12" rail, particularly where there is a gun stock stile and both edges are angled and have to be matched.

The point was Jacob, showing how quickly 800ft could be reached.
800ft is not an unfathomable amount.

It's a lot, it would be reached slowly, and in reality the plane would be honed many times before you got there.