If you make an infill, you'll find you wish you had a file. The mild steel just doesn't yield much to the paper.
If you get an old infill that's horribly out of flat, the same. They'll be steel and hand lapping won't do much. Common wisdom would suspect either the old ones aren't very flat, or they're all very flat. I found most of them to be very flat, but I did get one norris that was for some reason horribly out of flat. Fortunately, it was a smoother, so I lapped it, anyway, but it took a while and ate paper. If I'd have figured out the filing ahead of time, it would've taken a lot less work.
Why is this flatness important? At some point in the future, I'd like to sell a few infills (way in the future), but I'm not going to sell an infill that is less flat than a lie nielsen plane. It doesn't really have much to do with function, but the video I put up a couple of weeks ago continuing to joint an edge without putting a hump in it does rely on a plane bottom to be flat or reasonably close to it (lapping by hand has always been good enough for me).
What we're left with, though, that the above method would be useful for is spot removal with a file (the file type is important, you have to be able to use the end and flex the file a little bit) and lapping, as an iterative process. I have a lot of old planes and not a single one of them is square. I do have planes that are square, but none of them are old bench planes. My perception from actual use is that if they're reasonably close, you can still use them to shoot without any issue, but I'm sure there are some folks who won't believe that.
There are a lot of things that we do that we don't *have* to. I'm not going to build infills to sell for $300, so this is something that I'm going to have to take care of, and I have zero interest in buying metalworking machinery and then having subsequent plane designs that look like they were made to fit my metalworking machinery.
Not at all advocating any of this for someone who wants to buy a bailey pattern smoother of some brand and use it. Lapping the plane sole is just fine for that, and a given plane may not even need anything at all, even for smoothing (and very finely).
there was also a rash here of people sending off their old planes to be surface ground by a guy and paying at least one way shipping, so they were out of the use of their planes and out of something like $100, and putting that into a plane where they'll never get their money back. If they got their plane back and the machinist doing the work left the toe and heel two thousandths proud of the mouth, they'll never be able to do what I did in the video that I showed, and it will materialize in facing lumber, too - that's a real pain.
If you get an old infill that's horribly out of flat, the same. They'll be steel and hand lapping won't do much. Common wisdom would suspect either the old ones aren't very flat, or they're all very flat. I found most of them to be very flat, but I did get one norris that was for some reason horribly out of flat. Fortunately, it was a smoother, so I lapped it, anyway, but it took a while and ate paper. If I'd have figured out the filing ahead of time, it would've taken a lot less work.
Why is this flatness important? At some point in the future, I'd like to sell a few infills (way in the future), but I'm not going to sell an infill that is less flat than a lie nielsen plane. It doesn't really have much to do with function, but the video I put up a couple of weeks ago continuing to joint an edge without putting a hump in it does rely on a plane bottom to be flat or reasonably close to it (lapping by hand has always been good enough for me).
What we're left with, though, that the above method would be useful for is spot removal with a file (the file type is important, you have to be able to use the end and flex the file a little bit) and lapping, as an iterative process. I have a lot of old planes and not a single one of them is square. I do have planes that are square, but none of them are old bench planes. My perception from actual use is that if they're reasonably close, you can still use them to shoot without any issue, but I'm sure there are some folks who won't believe that.
There are a lot of things that we do that we don't *have* to. I'm not going to build infills to sell for $300, so this is something that I'm going to have to take care of, and I have zero interest in buying metalworking machinery and then having subsequent plane designs that look like they were made to fit my metalworking machinery.
Not at all advocating any of this for someone who wants to buy a bailey pattern smoother of some brand and use it. Lapping the plane sole is just fine for that, and a given plane may not even need anything at all, even for smoothing (and very finely).
there was also a rash here of people sending off their old planes to be surface ground by a guy and paying at least one way shipping, so they were out of the use of their planes and out of something like $100, and putting that into a plane where they'll never get their money back. If they got their plane back and the machinist doing the work left the toe and heel two thousandths proud of the mouth, they'll never be able to do what I did in the video that I showed, and it will materialize in facing lumber, too - that's a real pain.
