thetyreman":3aun99tc said:
I have a lot of time for PopWood, but I'm saddened to see them perpetuating a commonly held belief:
"Inclined Shooting Board:
Another type of shooting board for both long-grain and cross-grain (end-grain) shooting is this inclined shooting board.
The sloping recess holds and guides the plane to allow full use of the whole width of the plane’s cutting iron. "
Correct, the wear is spread over a greater proportion of the width of the blade.
"The sloping guide allows the plane to cut at an oblique cutting angle, which, because of the slicing action, is more efficient than square cutting. "
Complete nonsense. The cutting angle is not oblique at all. A shear cut is when the blade moves in one direction whilst facing another. We do this all the time on the lathe with a skew chisel. The cutting edge is facing at, say, half-past ten, but moving from right to left.
Just by ramping the plane downhill does not alter the fact that the blade is moving in the same direction as that which it faces. A skew cut with a plane is made when the plane moves along the edge from end to end (six o'clock to twelve o'clock), but is twisted to, say, 11 o'clock. This reduces the cutting angle. The more it is twisted the lower the cutting angle becomes. Twist it by 90 degrees and we have zero cutting angle. More than that and the cutting angle becomes negative (i.e. the plane is moving backwards) and, of course, the plane no longer cuts at all.
On a ramped shooting board, no matter how steeply it is ramped, it will still cut with a head-on action.
It may help to imagine that the workpiece is a round dowel. No matter how you ramp the plane, the cut is identical.