Jointer flatness . . . did I go far enough ?

[Ttrees]

Definatly flat enough.
I have just took out a no 8 that I flattened a few years ago,
I haven't used it since I deemed it unsuitable for what I was doing....jointing long lengths
I bought it for flattening my bench top
The reason I have not used it is because I found the no.8 to want to dive off the edge too much
making one put effort into making stop shavings
In other words it was more hungry and would more readily leave the end of the length low.

I can say with 100 percent that a jointer needs to have a double iron, and that I have never used a jointer
plane, because there is still a visable camber which the first user ground over a hundred years ago.
I must say I'm excited about trying out the jointer plane when the time comes.

I'll write this again for clarifacation, because some just folks just refuse to figure this out for themselves....
A plane set up to have the cap iron infulence, will not dive off the ends of a length leaving the middle high.
You dont have to take stop shavings, the cap iron dictates the way the plane works...
It has nothing to do with planing style or technique
You can take constant full length shavings without needing to take a stop shavings, blindfolded if you like!.

To get the cap iron to have infulence
the mouth needs to be open, frog all the way back, flush with the casting.
A steep angle on the leading edge of the cap makes things easier to set ...somewhere around 50 is recommended.
A steep undercut on the cap iron, as it is more liable for shavings dust to get trapped between them.
Not more than a hairs camber on the cutter, otherwise the cap wont be able to have infulence.

I cant say I'll ever want that tolerence like what is bothering you , as I dont need the area in front of the mouth to have full contact with the work to combat tearout to only an extent.
The cap iron completly eliminates tearout, and my plane is much easier to push, instead of planing with a tight mouth
and still getting tearout
Good luck
Tom

 

[Garno]

Never mind with the feeler gauges, just put a hatching across the entire sole with a thick black felt pen and keep going until it's removed. Start with a coarse grit (I use 80 grit, some use a bit coarser). Don't switch to a finer grit until the hatching is gone, the bulk of the work is done with the coarsest grit. Only then work down through the grits (I go to 240 grit, some go to 320), don't forget to ease any sharp edges and arrises along the way, finally use a metal polish which will help keep your plane slick on the workpiece.

Don't obsess about this, remember a plane will flex a surprising amount under hand pressure alone.

After that set yourself some practical training projects with a plane, like edge jointing two boards or planing a rough sawn board true and square.

An apprentice planing exercise that originated at the Barnsley Workshops and it now widely used on woodworking courses all around the world is to start with a rough sawn Oak board and make an octagonal breadboard where all dimensions are accurate to within +/- 0.5mm and the two opposite faces are flat and parallel.





If you're fairly new to woodworking you should expect this exercise to take as much as 100 hours. Besides learning about plane craft it's also a useful lesson that hand woodworking to fine tolerances is incredibly S-L-O-W!

100 hours, it would take me 100 weeks. :shock:

 

[MikeG.]

.........The cap iron completly eliminates tearout..........

Apart from the fact that the question was about the flatness of the sole, not the setting of the cap iron, I just LOVE the incredible exaggeration. Completely eliminates tearout. Righto. Whatever you say.

Now, how about the subject of the thread: the flatness of this plane's sole? It'd be good to have a planing conversation where we didn't get a sermon on cap irons.

 

[D_W]

It generally will if you want to set it to. There are a lot of unskilled users that would argue that it's not very effective, though. It's only about as effective as a 65 degree plane with a tiny mouth (and there are certainly woods that refuse to be planed - especially those that have an enormous difference in early wood and late wood hardness - the earlywood crumbles when you plane them, and they should just be scraped and sanded).

If you're competent with a cap iron, it's pretty easy to get from jointing a board to using the cap iron since it makes doing so accurately faster and easier by a mile (supposing we're talking about planes and not going to an argument of how fast a good machine can do the same thing).

 

[G S Haydon]

Hello guys ,

I'm in the middle of an exhausting process : flattening my jointer plane (Stanley n°7 plane) ...
But . . . wait a second, before I die for the fatigue : How far should I go ?

This is my set-up :
I've a marble strip, 4 feet long, that I use with sandpaper attached for flattening.
I've checked the marble strip with my straight edge and there is no light passing in between the marble and straight edge, so I'm assuming that my trueing/lapping surface Isn't that bad
The Straight edge is a Veritas one, a 36" long and ground flat over the entire length
to within 0.0015"/0,03 mm (Sorry I'm Italian we use metric system).
I've also a feeler gauge, its smallest blade is 0,0019"/0,05mm thick,
for the purpose of this measurement I've managed to find something that is thinner than the feeler gauge blade ... I've a Borletti digital venier caliper and I've used it to measure first the smaller feeler gauge blade, when I got the 0,05 reading I kept measuring various materials untill I found
some plastic/paper sheet that was thinner than the feeler gauge blade and I've found something around 0,0007"/0.02mm and 0,0011"/0,03mm . . .
When things get smaller it's difficult to get reliable/reproducible measurements but I would say
that I defenetly found two "blades" that where increasingly smaller than the blade of the feeler gauge.

With this tools I started measuring deviation along the sole of my jointer !!!

Don't worry, you've done a great job on the biggest metal plane you'll need to use. Time to put it to use and get woodworking.

 

[G S Haydon]

Never mind with the feeler gauges, just put a hatching across the entire sole with a thick black felt pen and keep going until it's removed. Start with a coarse grit (I use 80 grit, some use a bit coarser). Don't switch to a finer grit until the hatching is gone, the bulk of the work is done with the coarsest grit. Only then work down through the grits (I go to 240 grit, some go to 320), don't forget to ease any sharp edges and arrises along the way, finally use a metal polish which will help keep your plane slick on the workpiece.

Don't obsess about this, remember a plane will flex a surprising amount under hand pressure alone.

After that set yourself some practical training projects with a plane, like edge jointing two boards or planing a rough sawn board true and square.

An apprentice planing exercise that originated at the Barnsley Workshops and it now widely used on woodworking courses all around the world is to start with a rough sawn Oak board and make an octagonal breadboard where all dimensions are accurate to within +/- 0.5mm and the two opposite faces are flat and parallel.





If you're fairly new to woodworking you should expect this exercise to take as much as 100 hours. Besides learning about plane craft it's also a useful lesson that hand woodworking to fine tolerances is incredibly S-L-O-W!

Excellent info, both on the plane and first projects. Providing a time scale for that project should be very helpful to new people who want to get to a high level of skill.

 

[thetyreman]

just make sure it's flat at the front, the mouth and the very end, a jointer really does have to be flat, but by its nature it is already flatter just because it is longer, you get less chance of it not being flat, I spent probably no more than 30 minutes flattening mine using 80 grit then through the grits up to about 320, wet and dry.

One 'trick' I've found helps massively is once you've done all that, go over it with autosol polish, buff it out then wax it and buff it out again, you will get an incredibly friction free plane, I think it was david charlesworth or custard I first heard saying it, anyway it really makes a big difference!

 

[Ttrees]

.........The cap iron completly eliminates tearout..........

Apart from the fact that the question was about the flatness of the sole, not the setting of the cap iron, I just LOVE the incredible exaggeration. Completely eliminates tearout. Righto. Whatever you say.

Now, how about the subject of the thread: the flatness of this plane's sole? It'd be good to have a planing conversation where we didn't get a sermon on cap irons.

I said the sole is flat enough, what would bother me though, would be the edges of the plane dubbed/rounded, so shavings could get caught underneath.
You don't need to rely on the area in front of the mouth for tearout, if you use the cap iron, so it makes the plane "ready to use"
I stand by what I've said about never using my jointer yet, because of how the cap iron changes the technique. totally different night and day.
And I have not experienced tearout on anything I've planed since I eventually realised what David was on about.
Absolutely no tearout since on iroko, meranti, sapele, sipo, afrormosia
It clearly works perfectly regardless of grain direction, I don't pay too much attention to t he grain anymore work wise
However, I would like to talk about orienting boards to counter opposing chatoyance sometime when everybody catches on to this,
as it eliminates the need to work with the grain if your doing your work n stages...ie
timber stacked after jack plane work, which the grain would be considered, but not considered after that, as its orientating for looks afterwards
That's another thread though

Tom
[

 

[Paddy Roxburgh]

Definatly flat enough.

I can say with 100 percent that a jointer needs to have a double iron, and that I have never used a jointer plane,
A plane set up to have the cap iron infulence, will not dive off the ends of a length leaving the middle high.
It has nothing to do with planing style or technique

Good luck
Tom

Wait a minute, you can say 100% that a tool you have never used needs to be set up a certain way???
A close set cap iron is useful for controlling tearout, but I, like other woodworkers for centuries can plane an edge without"diving off the end", or leaving "snipe" (TTrees description of his problem with hand planning in another thread) regardless of how the cap is set. It has everything to do with technique.

 

[D_W]

The cap just makes it easier and faster. You arrive at the flatness desired just by removing the saw marks from rough.

The whole thing depends on a consistent shaving thickness, which is easier to get with a cap iron.

 

[D_W]

.........The cap iron completly eliminates tearout..........

Apart from the fact that the question was about the flatness of the sole, not the setting of the cap iron, I just LOVE the incredible exaggeration. Completely eliminates tearout. Righto. Whatever you say.

Now, how about the subject of the thread: the flatness of this plane's sole? It'd be good to have a planing conversation where we didn't get a sermon on cap irons.

I said the sole is flat enough, what would bother me though, would be the edges of the plane dubbed/rounded, so shavings could get caught underneath.
You don't need to rely on the area in front of the mouth for tearout, if you use the cap iron, so it makes the plane "ready to use"
I stand by what I've said about never using my jointer yet, because of how the cap iron changes the technique. totally different night and day.
And I have not experienced tearout on anything I've planed since I eventually realised what David was on about.
Absolutely no tearout since on iroko, meranti, sapele, sipo, afrormosia
It clearly works perfectly regardless of grain direction, I don't pay too much attention to t he grain anymore work wise
However, I would like to talk about orienting boards to counter opposing chatoyance sometime when everybody catches on to this,
as it eliminates the need to work with the grain if your doing your work n stages...ie
timber stacked after jack plane work, which the grain would be considered, but not considered after that, as its orientating for looks afterwards
That's another thread though

Tom
[

Re: surface finish, you are correct, you still want wide boards on a panel going the same way. If you get stuck with them opposing each other, you can smooth plane from the edge to about half a shaving over the joint line, turn the board around in your clamps and do the same thing with the other board, but smooth only up to the line and then lightly burnish the joint line with smoother shavings.

I do it fairly often if it gives me a better match at the joint.

The old advice about lining up all of the boards the same way on a lamination like a bench top, though.. that advice can be discarded, it's a tedious waste of time.

 

[Paddy Roxburgh]

DW, on a mild piece of timber, going with the grain, where tear is not an issue, do you think that the cap position makes any difference? I'm on my lunch break right now, but if I get a chance I will test this this afternoon, I will plane an edge with the cap set back and with it close set and compare flatness, maybe you do the same and we can compare notes later. I am NEARLY certain it will make no difference to either of us, but let's try it. What I do know for a fact is that I will not create the "snipe" that TTrees spoke of in another thread, I have only had snipe from a machine.
Paddy

 

[MikeG.]

Here we go again. Someone asks about the flatness of a plane's sole, and in response someone else obsesses about the cap iron. It's like listening to a fanatical religious convert: anything that can be said about the subject of planes or planing is an excuse to proselytise about damn cap irons. Never mind the actual subject of the question.

This is why newcomers think that planes are something extraordinarily complicated, and that the knowledge is held only by initiates of a secret society. Ask a simple question and you'll get blinded by irrelevant asides from someone who thinks that planes = cap irons = mastery of the woodworker's universe.

 

[Paddy Roxburgh]

Sorry Mike, I brought t up again, but only because I was a bit shocked at someone giving advice about how to set up a tool they stated they have never used. I'm reluctant to give advice on using tools I have used for 30 years!!!

 

[MikeG.]

Sorry Mike, I brought t up again, but only because I was a bit shocked at someone giving advice about how to set up a tool they stated they have never used. I'm reluctant to give advice on using tools I have used for 30 years!!!

You're not the guilty party here, Paddy.

 

[Paddy Roxburgh]

Sorry Mike, I brought t up again, but only because I was a bit shocked at someone giving advice about how to set up a tool they stated they have never used. I'm reluctant to give advice on using tools I have used for 30 years!!!

You're not the guilty party here, Paddy.

I know, but I should have let sleeping dogs lie

 

[Ttrees]

DW, on a mild piece of timber, going with the grain, where tear is not an issue, do you think that the cap position makes any difference? I'm on my lunch break right now, but if I get a chance I will test this this afternoon, I will plane an edge with the cap set back and with it close set and compare flatness, maybe you do the same and we can compare notes later. I am NEARLY certain it will make no difference to either of us, but let's try it. What I do know for a fact is that I will not create the "snipe" that TTrees spoke of in another thread, I have only had snipe from a machine.
Paddy

Maybe if you split an agreeable length of timber, you will be able to able to plane an edge without the influence of the cap iron and get unbroken shavings, without resorting back to taking some scoops out of the middle.

Half the answer to your suggestion to DavidW is on that video he posted

 

[D_W]

DW, on a mild piece of timber, going with the grain, where tear is not an issue, do you think that the cap position makes any difference? I'm on my lunch break right now, but if I get a chance I will test this this afternoon, I will plane an edge with the cap set back and with it close set and compare flatness, maybe you do the same and we can compare notes later. I am NEARLY certain it will make no difference to either of us, but let's try it. What I do know for a fact is that I will not create the "snipe" that TTrees spoke of in another thread, I have only had snipe from a machine.
Paddy

Paddy - this test isn't really reflective of real woodworking, because you may work 20 of these sticks in a session, 15 might be perfectly agreeable, 3 contrary and 2 a downright pain in the ass.

What the cap iron does is make it so that when you plane all of them, the only difference you feel is some resistance from the contrary and pain in the ass pieces. You make no extra moves, no extra shavings and you don't have unexpected undulations as you would in the torn areas without the cap.

The same spills over to the face of boards when the length of a board isn't purely agreeable along its length.

In terms of a straw test where you use a perfectly agreeable board, everything should plane it the same. Even in that case, the plane with a cap iron will cut about twice as many board feet before it needs downpressure to stay in the cut.

By the way, I did all of this your way for about two years before I got the poops of taking an old single iron jointer apart all the time to sharpen it, and screwing around paying attention to parts where tearout occurred in jointing. Certainly, there were agreeable boards that were a delight to plane with that setup, but the ones that weren't perfect just made the work from rough really miserable, and taking the jointer tearout out with a 55 degree smoother that I'd made was a real drag (and often the guesswork of tearout depth meant missed thickness marks or wasted time). There's no need for any of it with the cap iron in use (unnecessarily tight mouths, steep angles, constant sharpening, etc).

The plane that I posted in another thread this week was purpleheart, rift sawn. Contrary on the edges as rift and quartered wood often is. I have thickness requirements on a block like that that are in the thousandths (I give myself an allowance of about two - bigger than that, and there will be visible gaps), but I also don't want to spend three hours sizing it - and both of my blanks had to be tapered about a hundredth in width due to the variation in the space between pins on the sole (I try to do better on the metalwork, but it always seems like there's a difference of a hundredth somewhere - a catastrophic gap if you don't taper the blank for it). I cut the billet with a hand saw and sized and finished it with an I-sorby jointer with a soft iron in one sharpening. That sounds like something that doesn't apply to edges, but on a smaller scale, the first perfectly flatsawn board with a quartered edge will vex a new user. Set the cap, and it's just like any other board, even if it doesn't run the same direction for its entire length.

 

[D_W]

Here we go again. Someone asks about the flatness of a plane's sole, and in response someone else obsesses about the cap iron. It's like listening to a fanatical religious convert: anything that can be said about the subject of planes or planing is an excuse to proselytise about damn cap irons. Never mind the actual subject of the question.

This is why newcomers think that planes are something extraordinarily complicated, and that the knowledge is held only by initiates of a secret society. Ask a simple question and you'll get blinded by irrelevant asides from someone who thinks that planes = cap irons = mastery of the woodworker's universe.

If you don't think that there is a significant difference, or that the cap iron isn't relevant in a discussion of using a plane (that has a cap iron), you probably have more to learn. It's not mastering woodworking, it's mastering planing. I've never seen anyone who actually got half way to mastering it (which doesn't take much) say otherwise, but I have seen a lot of people blow up about it like you just did.

 

[Paddy Roxburgh]

DW, you speak of having done it my way for two years (there's a song in there), don't misunderstand, I absolutely agree that a close cap iron set is a useful weapon in the War On Tear, the only reason I piped up in this thread is that TTrees said he 100% knew the only to set up a plane that he stated in the same sentence he said had never used. That along with his statement that planning edges was ALL about the cap iron and NOTHING to do with technique. That level of Dunning -Kreuger got me triggered, but I'll leave it now.