"I only sharpen to what's needed for the task"

[D_W]

.......Very weak, Mike........

I have some wisdom for you D_W. How's your Spanish?

I think it's important that there is actual information being presented here. Someone who went to shed college and now practices who knows what, but the information being presented is tied into other studies, doesn't disagree with any of them, and it's being presented by someone who literally performs stochastic simulations as part of their job. I understand data and variability. I understand when further work needs to be done to feel like the result is likely correct. None needs to be done further, but I laid out how I gathered my data and anyone could.

Please make some attempt to provide some value or utility in responses going forward or I will make a request that the moderators help you stay on topic.

 

[MikeG.]

......... Someone who went to shed college....

Grow up.

......now practices who knows what......

Architecture.

 

[D_W]

Fine work:

Lynton MacKenzie

George Wilson

(george wilson was a member of one of the forums in the US after he retired. He's still around, just not on the forums. He does not do all of his work by hand, either, but his finest work seems to generally be done by hand. He'd be offended by the implication that some of the other work might not be as fine).

Since george is a supremely skilled guitar builder (and die maker, and machine restorer, and toolmaker, and violin maker and harpsichord maker, and.....) I asked him about his arch top guitars as he mentioned he has a duplicarver. I would like to progress to the level of making arch top guitars and violins, so I call him sometimes to ask questions. He's never used his duplicarver - I don't know why, and he didn't say. I suppose he's got the desire to not do the same thing twice but his eye for fineness is as good as probably any that's ever existed.

George Wilson Archtop

I kind of wonder if makers like lynton and george are on the outs due to lack of desire of paying customers. George made a pistol at one point (it may have been a pair) and showed pictures of it, and I asked him what happened to it. He said one of the du pont's kids purchased it (them?) but he had another one similar that used no purchased parts where he had made the entire lock set, all of the mechanisms and springs, etc, and that he was keeping that because it was his finest work.

The rise of hobbyists doing work entirely by hand and doing good power work is probably far stronger than it's ever been, though. I knew a lot of people making things to sell (my mother was one of them - she made and sold primitive stuff for about 40 years and just stopped last year) where I grew up. Most of the work wasn't really that good, and most local folks who did high level work only found work back then doing restoration and repair. Nobody did good work for no reason that I'm aware of (in an area with a population of about 250,000). The explosion of information and documentation, hopefully, will lead to more and more people doing excellent work like we see on this subforum with the infill planes as we speak.

 

[D_W]

......now practices who knows what......

Architecture.

Please refrain from further confusion about the difference between likelihood and empirical data collection and analysis. You're not qualified. I wouldn't mind that you're not if it seemed like you had honest intentions, but you have a personal issue and are just trolling. In the time you've done that, you could've tested the same thing and reported your results. It's not useful to anyone.

 

[Yojevol]

......now practices who knows what......

Architecture.

Please refrain from further confusion about the difference between likelihood and empirical data collection and analysis. You're not qualified. I wouldn't mind that you're not if it seemed like you had honest intentions, but you have a personal issue and are just trolling. In the time you've done that, you could've tested the same thing and reported your results. It's not useful to anyone.

So there

 

[D_W]

A follow-up comment on George, because he's one of the few world-class makers who will just pick up the phone and talk to anyone who just wants to do better work.

On another forum, someone asked him what he did to sharpen. He was loathe to talk about it, for obvious reasons. After much prying, he finally mentioned that at the museum where he worked, he used budget and time to test every sharpening stone he could find (this was in the 1970s) and settled on requesting the museum stock several (coticules - at the request of one of the cabinetmakers, frictionite ( now defunct) and his favorite was spyderco stones. the UF spyderco is very fine, but he followed it up further with chromium oxide on green leather. I asked him why, and he said he just prefers the level of sharpness. His job as instrument maker at williamsburg required him to build with hand tools only in front of the public full time. They created the position for him after meeting him and needing someone to make a harpsichord - he was a math and shop teacher - small school in the south where more than one subject may be covered by one teacher - prior to that but wanted to be a maker for a living). The violins that he made while working in front of the public were sold to professional players and are in use in professional symphonies in the US.

I thought this was odd (the desire to have that kind of sharpness on everything) because most of the forum advice in the US was that nobody who actually does work:
* tests steels
* sharpens to extremely fine levels
* and nobody doing either of the above would work for a living by hand

George had done all of these, and his work has professional customers who like the results and who are repeat customers, but he does things that people on the forums say nobody does. And he worked bonkers amounts when he was still working - full time at the museum making things - and then practically full time on the side sometimes.

 

[D_W]

Elliot's results on edge retention, but truncated. For whatever reason, at the time Steve was more interested in proving that sharpness is the same across steel types, so he didn't publish most of the edge retention by abrasive fineness.

http://bladetest.infillplane.com/html/i ... pness.html

Steve says in these pages that he used 1 micron diamonds day to day (and he's another person who makes a living woodworking - i have no idea how he became so gifted for the type of analysis he does on his pages as most of his woodworking has moved away from hand tool use).

But he ended up publishing most of his results in 0.25 micron diamond because he found the edge retention better than 1 micron, and far better than what we would normally consider fine (waterstones labeled 6 or 8k, and in his case, a translucent arkansas. He generated his results using a guide, which is a difficult way to use a translucent stone, so I'm not surprised that he couldn't manage good results with one).

You can see a chart that he generated and then didn't publish full results on (this particular chart is holtey S53, which doesn't wear very well in wood - brent beach found the same). I'd expect if steve published all of his information about durabiliity vs. fineness, the difference wouldn't be quite as large. He asked if I would continue to test below 1 micron, but I told him that I was running out of wood having tested about 8 different media/fineness alternatives, and I didn't have much interest in setting up separate sharpening apparatus to go further into small abrasives because I was also aiming for something practical and quick. Using a guide and going through many steps isn't that.

I prefer something closer to the jacob method - get it sharpened, get on with it.

Steve also found something that I did (I was pointed back to steve's page after I did my tests - seeing other results while you're testing something isn't a good thing - distracting at the very best). It's difficult to strop 1 micron diamond edges and improve them. (it's not difficult to strop less fine edges and improve them). One of the things that I struggled with was sharpening on a black dan's stone and not creating any edge defects under the microscope stropping on bare leather. I've never looked at this before, but it's evident that the stropping to remove any remnants from a black or trans ark stone should be done with a light touch.

Here is an edge that was only lightly stropped. https://i.imgur.com/9VKYWdR.jpg

I wasn't able to strop an edge on bare leather and not create any defects at all. Does it matter for durability of an edge? I doubt it. It's cosmetic.

Why do I think that?

Here's a picture of the O1 iron used in the test (my make, equivalent to a hock iron - something I also tested - mine lasted ever so slightly longer and wore a little bit more evenly - I have been making tools for a while and didn't have a hock iron that fit my base test plane) - at any rate, this image is just as the iron as stopped keeping the plane in the cut without external influence.

https://i.imgur.com/J2OMH4M.jpg

See the groove...something in the wood or as a defect in the metal at some point removed a groove from the edge. In good steel with good toughness, small defects tend to wear themselves off and the edge remains uniform. The little nits in the oilstone edge would disappear fairly quickly and not leave a visible line on work. The lines that they make (you can see and feel with a fingernail - that defect is about a thousandth) would only bother someone applying finish directly to a planed surface.

This led to a question then about why when geometry is the same and an edge tends to be sort of self healing in clean wood, why such a difference in durability, and the research chemist mentioned here came through with the answer. The rounder an edge is, the faster metal wears off of it. That was demonstrated by Kato and Kawai, who used a planing machine, and while initial sharpness (staying in the cut without external force) may last something like 800-2000 feet for typical irons, they allowed their machine to continue to plane with (brute) significant downforce to 3 or 4 km with some of the steel they tested. The duller an iron is, the faster it loses metal from the edge.

 

[That would work]

This is possibly one of the greatest examples of process over useful outcome I have ever seen.
Is it not time that this thread was shut down?
I'm going to go and shave my arm.

 

[Jacob]

.......... Its sort of like saying the guy using the nail gun to put together mass produced sofas in a factory is a craftsman.

If you find yourself having to do a c rap job like that (I've done loads!) one thing that nearly everybody finds is that one of the perks of the job is in getting a bit of pleasure out of trying to do it as well as possible. Probably comes as surprise to many, you can get satisfaction out of some of the simplest tasks!
That's all craft skill is about; doing the best you can with whatever is to hand.

 

[D_W]

This is one of the shaving piles from a test done later on (to find out if the base type used in V11 could be heat treated in a home shop). I made the iron used for this test, treated in open atmosphere.

The relationship of V11 to O1 from a prior test was around 2 to 1.

This particular board yielded over 4000 feet from my shop made iron. I thought that I was on to something oil quenching the powder stainless (XHP) quickly, but a follow up test to check the results showed the board to be favorable instead. O1 steel lasted slightly longer than 2000 feet in the same board.

https://i.imgur.com/bjgFohA.jpg/

For those who want to see the test done by a robot, there are bigger variables - like just from board to board - these boards all came from the same delivery and the same drying treatment (and probably from the same tree). This is why I rotated irons in each individual test and used only one test board for each. Relative life becomes the important factor since you can't have an infinitely wide board (to run the same test on over and over, and in the case of beech, as you get from the transition of sap to heart, the numbers start to change - so none of the test results were generated through the transition from sap to heart or the converse in any boards - including the edge retention tests).

But you can click through the image and get a close look at the shavings. Skill is important in this case because the test needs to be done with no interruptions in the shavings, weighing them for each test to make sure each iron does the same amount of work, etc. If a testing robot didn't use a cap iron and encountered varying levels of tearout, the results may not be valid.

 

[D_W]

This is possibly one of the greatest examples of process over useful outcome I have ever seen.
Is it not time that this thread was shut down?
I'm going to go and shave my arm.

Can you imagine how this thread may have gone differently if the response was "I think I'll try that" rather than "your results aren't valid"?

Apparently, you and Mike are not in agreement about whether there is too much process or none.

Useful outcome was in the first few posts and has been repeated several times. Use the finest practical abrasive on your last step of sharpening without adding any time to the sharpening process and you will get better results and sharpen less.

It's strange that wouldn't be considered practical. The rest of the discussion of process isn't really that necessary except that the results are continuously questioned.

As for wanting threads of useful information shut down because you don't like them, at what point did people lose the ability not to read threads they're not interested in?

 

[D_W]

.......... Its sort of like saying the guy using the nail gun to put together mass produced sofas in a factory is a craftsman.

If you find yourself having to do a c rap job like that (I've done loads!) one thing that nearly everybody finds is that one of the perks of the job is in getting a bit of pleasure out of trying to do it as well as possible. Probably comes as surprise to many, you can get satisfaction out of some of the simplest tasks!
That's all craft skill is about; doing the best you can with whatever is to hand.

I suspect if most people grasped what you're saying, that you have discretion to make the job enjoyable, we'd see more discussion about doing actual work. It is exactly why I work by hand, even for something as rudimentary as dimensioning.

 

[MikeG.]

......Please refrain from further confusion about the difference between likelihood and empirical data collection and analysis. You're not qualified........

You don't get to say who posts what in your thread. And I am qualified. I have a science degree, remember. I also have a decent qualification in statistics.

I say again for the avoidance of doubt: your tests are interesting, but they are weak and subjective. Not all of your conclusions follow from your results (see below). The subject is trivial, and one in which I have no great interest, but I have a huge, overwhelming interest in confronting pseudo-science, and over-blown claims such as yours are just that. I don't care whether someone talks about the correct temperature for cooking souffles or the innate behaviours of 7 day old SE Asian jungle fowl, the claim is nowhere near as important as the quality of the testing and analysis. I won't let your half baked testing stand unchallenged as some kind of authoritative treatise on the subject because it is weak and subjective. For instance, here are some claims you have made:

.........* surface quality (uniformity and brightness)
* the occurrence of skips, etc, on pieces you're finish planing (or more specifically, the sharper a plane is, the easier it will start a cut, the fewer skips and humps you'll develop at the edges of work and then subsequently need to remove with abrasives, etc)
* the amount of effort you expend planing both downward and forward in general

Not a semblance of data to back those up. No method (how have you measured uniformity? Brightness? Effort?). Not one iota of science in that entire paragraph, just claims plucked out of the air. There are eight distinct claims in that paragraph, and each would require some serious testing to sustain. And again, for the avoidance of doubt: you may be right in your central claim about sharpening, but even if you are these tests don't demonstrate it properly. I have never suggested that you are right or wrong, but I'm telling anyone reading your stuff to be cautious of over-blown weakly supported claims. You consider such caution to be trolling, but scepticism is critical to the success of science and you should welcome it.

 

[Trevanion]

If you find yourself having to do a c rap job like that (I've done loads!) one thing that nearly everybody finds is that one of the perks of the job is in getting a bit of pleasure out of trying to do it as well as possible. Probably comes as surprise to many, you can get satisfaction out of some of the simplest tasks!
That's all craft skill is about; doing the best you can with whatever is to hand.

That's fine if you're being paid a set wage regardless of how many staples you put in that day, I imagine a lot of the old high-speed production dovetailers were being paid by the box so they really couldn't take the time to do it "as well as possible" otherwise they would be starving by the weeks end.

God created man, and then the Brookman dovetailer came along and made all men equal and over half of them redundant 8)

 

[Jacob]

If you find yourself having to do a c rap job like that (I've done loads!) one thing that nearly everybody finds is that one of the perks of the job is in getting a bit of pleasure out of trying to do it as well as possible. Probably comes as surprise to many, you can get satisfaction out of some of the simplest tasks!
That's all craft skill is about; doing the best you can with whatever is to hand.

That's fine if you're being paid a set wage regardless of how many staples you put in that day, I imagine a lot of the old high-speed production dovetailers were being paid by the box so they really couldn't take the time to do it "as well as possible" otherwise they would be starving by the weeks end.

They'd be under the pressure of piece work or the eagle eyes of a foreman, but either way it's normal to make the job as bearable as possible, one way or another. Even slaves sang chain gang songs!
And of course the chap who can do it to a just good enough standard quickly, is likely to be able to do it to a higher standard if called upon, but more slowly.

 

[Trevanion]

And of course the chap who can do it to a just good enough standard quickly, is likely to be able to do it to a higher standard if called upon, but more slowly.

But I wonder if they could do anything else other than dovetailing proficiently? Perhaps that's where the term "craftsman" lies, being able to work on something from start to end. So instead of just making the drawer boxes, a craftsman would (or could, perhaps as part of a team) make the entire chest of drawers from raw material to the finished article. There's great skill in every part of the process and of course, if you're only doing the one part of the process your whole life you would be immensely skilled at that particular task, but maybe the craftsman is the man who can combine all the skills from start to end, but perhaps not as efficiently as dedicated workers.

I had a similar conversation with another joiner the other day, joiners these days seem to have many more skills buttoned under their coat than their counterparts even 50 years ago. We do the raw material processing (Maybe not direct from the tree :lol: ), we do the actual joinery work, the painting, the glazing, and the fitting. The other joiner was a far older chap and he could remember as an apprentice that pretty much all they did back in his day was do the joinery work and perhaps give a single coat of zinc primer depending on how much they liked the guy it was going to, there then would be a totally separate fitter (a carpenter), another separate glazier and then another separate painter to finish off the paintwork once the joinery had been fitted and glazed.

 

[D_W]

Mike - you are again going off the mark, and I'm sure that you don't want the results to be valid or ignore the fact that you can prove them for yourself, and both of those are OK.

For everyone else, all that's needed is applying them.

For example, surface brightness is higher for PM V11 on the same wood using the same brightness, same plane and same shaving thickness and direction. This is very easy to see. I have additional edge pictures that give a clue as to why, but I have a metallurgical scope. I don't need an optical comparator to see something and a measure of light incidence because you can test it for yourself if it's important. It was also unexpected.

You can test planing resistance, that was unexpected. You can feel it, all you need to do is control the remaining variables (sharpness, planing has to be in the same plane with the same set).

None of these differences are subtle. Some of them are easy to see why on a microscope. One that would be easy to doubt is that the japanese iron surface brightness was unexpectedly low (I expected it to be the best) because there is always a claim about how good the surface quality is from japanese steel. This is the picture of it after 400 feet (all pictures looked like this, it started right away). What are the pinholes that area appearing? I think they're probably carbides leaving the steel matrix, but it's beyond the scope, which was just to report subjective surface brightness.

Japanese Edge

Here is O1 in the same test, same planed length:

O1 Edge

And here is V11, same test, same planed distance:

V11 Edge

Nobody can make a definitive statement about the pictures showing why one looks brighter to me (something you can easily prove for yourself - nobody is obligated to provide you with a machine and the results - even in that case, you have no idea whether or not the machine observes what you observe. But, you can observe that the surface that was significantly duller (the japanese iron) has a far less even edge, and though it's difficult to tell, the V11 edge is slightly more uniform (the very edge, not the wear) than O1. later wear pictures (which I'll spare people of) show a widening gap at 600 and then around 800 feet (which is where the O1 iron lost clearance and the surface planed became entirely dull - but still uniform).

Why was surface brightness considered? It wasn't really - surface quality was. Why was that considered? Because part of the audience in another forum insists that only carbon steel can produce a surface suitable for direct finishing. That doesn't seem to be the case.

The numerical data is on planed length and weight planed. It is not a two standard deviation observation with 95% confidence, it's data from the result of trials. You're having trouble grasping that because you went to college and you're an architect, and you're not able to understand the difference between a confidence interval and an estimate of likelihood based on data available.

But the additional observations were by request and creating a false dilemma (there's no proof, it's not two standard deviations, it's not by machine and I have no way to observe any of this at my own bench, so it's tossed) instead of looking at them for yourself or backing out of the conversation is really unhelpful. It's foolish, too.

The opposite side of this *was* very difficult for a lot of people on the other forum to grasp. The notion in the japanese tool community is that nothing is longer lasting than a perfectly made carbon steel iron (white #1 or something specific). It's not an accurate statement. The same as true for a few professionals here in the states - nothing made since the early 1800s is an improvement, so the results of the test must be wrong.

The research chemist in this case mentioned the following - the japanese researchers who made the cap iron video also tested wear rates for different steels. Their objective was literally to assist in creating a planing machine (the marunaka super surfacer), and the machine had a cap iron (because it would not plane a large surface well enough to finish without one). They tested yellow steel (which is similar to white #2) and found that in their machine, the edge quality was better than HSS (no powder metal blades at the time) but the life of the high speed steel blade was better.....wait for it, but about the same interval as I found in my tests. This information was provided to me after I posted my results. If PM was available, they would find that the edge wear results were unchanged from their original tests, but the surface quality issues that they found (the machine is more forceful) probably would've been eliminated by PM. The reason (something I didn't track down until after I got results) is that powder metallurgy doesn't improve abrasion resistance, but in same for same steel (M4 vs. powder M4), the powder version is much tougher in die and edge work.

Not surprisingly, the edge of the non-powder HSS showed greater defects once well worn - another item that ties into research from elsewhere:

Chinese HSS Edge

Considerations in the professors' comments with their planing machine (that edge in my picture isn't really that bad) are important - they need to have a machine that can plane soft architectural beams to a bright surface with no defects because they are sometimes installed in japan with no finish. As in, their tolerance for edge defects are subjectively more stringent. I can measure the size of the defects, though by scaling a 7 thousandth bristle from a grill brush in the picture.

Grill brush bristle

And showing along with it a picture of an edge with a defect that will actually send someone back to the stones:

PM V11 after a mineral streak in maple

I didn't feel the need to find 25 mineral pockets in maple so that i could repeat this 25 times. I made my comment about edge durability test results not being relevant if you can't plane clean wood.

 

[G S Haydon]

I'll try and keep my response quick!

I have followed David's online info for a while. Anyone who takes the time to post a whole series on making a jack plane, and further to that they are superb gets my attention. In addition he's made infills and tried out a whole bunch of stuff. He made a couple of planes for a chap called Brian Holcombe (a very fine furniture maker) for the fun of it. He's hard to keep up with though!

He has also stated that he didn't like modern steels very much. From what I can work out, he's saying that some of the modern steels he was not keen on, he is now on board with them. He's also seeing the benefit of honing to a higher level and wanting to pass that on. He just likes to do it with a lot of evidence!

I hope he keeps posting, even though it's pretty heavy going at times

 

[Jacob]

I'll try and keep my response quick!

I have followed David's online info for a while. Anyone who takes the time to post a whole series on making a jack plane, and further to that they are superb gets my attention. In addition he's made infills and tried out a whole bunch of stuff. He made a couple of planes for a chap called Brian Holcombe (a very fine furniture maker) for the fun of it. He's hard to keep up with though!

He has also stated that he didn't like modern steels very much. From what I can work out, he's saying that some of the modern steels he was not keen on, he is now on board with them. He's also seeing the benefit of honing to a higher level and wanting to pass that on. He just likes to do it with a lot of evidence!

I hope he keeps posting, even though it's pretty heavy going at times

:lol:
He's persuaded me that I must try harder! I've been having a go with fine Arkansas stones for a change. They are very slow but OK on small chisels. They bring up a shine very quickly which proves that they work even though the tool seems to slide over without much feel of abrasion. This seems to sort sheep from goats - you can actually see better when an edge is going and some tools hold the edge better than others.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I occasionally use a very hard fine Ark with IPA as a lube - just when I think it's doing nothing I notice the IPA is black ...

I haven't tried the latest one yet to find out whether I've wasted another quid.