Low VS standard angle planes

[madge]

Hello all, can anyone explain to me the advantage of a bevel down plane compared with bevel up? Bevel up seem to have a few advantages - the mouth can be adjusted more easily (at least on the veritas LAJ), the effective pitch can be altered simply by changing the sharpening angle so that end grain can be tackled with a low angle or difficult grain with high, and they seem to be slightly cheaper. In a David Charlesworth book I read recently he commented that he didn't think bevel up planes worked quite as well in standard situations but didn't explain why. Can anyone enlighten?

 

[longinthetooth]

What makes you think that you can't alter the angle of a bevel-down blade?

 

[madge]

A back bevel though can only raise the effective pitch and a high angle frog is expensive

 

[dunbarhamlin]

One point often glazed over is that returning an iron to common pitch from a higher angle is far easier with a bevel down plane, as only a (micro) back bevel need be removed.

 

[custard]

I'm guessing that David Charlesworth's concern with bevel up planes is twofold, the relative difficulty of lateral adjustment and cambering the blade. These aren't insurmountable problems, but these are the two issues that stop me using my LN bevel up jack on a daily basis.

Reading David Charleworth's books it's clear that he puts great emphasis on using a cambered blade for stock squaring in general and edge shooting in particular. That's also the way I work. But that requires an easy and repeatable method of cambering the blade, I tried a few different ways of cambering a bevel up blade and even though I got there in the end I was never particularly comfortable with it, and likewise the lateral adjustment is just easier on a bevel down bedrock style plane.

But maybe David will be along to explain his concerns, I'd also be interested.

 

[Jacob]

Bevel up planes all seem to have the same problem of poor adjustment. There's no room for the complicated (and highly effective) Bailey pattern of adjusters. The Norris adjuster looks good but doesn't work as well.
Stanley have stupidly followed fashion on this with their new SW planes with Norris adjusters. I suppose they are cheaper to make though.
But anyway I can't see any particular point in bevel up - except block planes where the compact design is good for one handed use.

 

[madge]

having not tried to camber a bevel up blade, what makes it different to cambering a bevel down?

 

[Paul Chapman]

Bevel up planes all seem to have the same problem of poor adjustment. There's no room for the complicated (and highly effective) Bailey pattern of adjusters.

The Lie Nielsen #164 and the #9 have a Bailey-style adjuster and it works very well http://www.lie-nielsen.com/catalog.php?grp=1256 http://www.lie-nielsen.com/catalog.php?grp=1257 Pity they don't use it on their other bevel-up planes.

Cheers :wink:

Paul

 

[Jacob]

Needs a deeper camber to get the same profile presenting to the wood. Just geometry. Otherwise no prob.

 

[Corneel]

There must be thousands and thousands of bevel down planes available on the second hand market at low prices. Stanleys and woodies. So price is an advantage of the bevel down design.

You don't have a chipbreaker in a bevel up plane, the greatest invention in handplanes in the last 250 years.

In a bevel down plane the sharpening angle isn't very critical. Anything between 25 and 35 degrees is fine. Because in a bevel up plane the sharpening angle dictates the efective pitch, you need to sharpen more precisely.

Cambering was allready mentioned.

But of course I don't really know, because I don't have a bevel up plane apart from a small block plane.

 

[Peter Sefton]

I find the bevel down planes easier to adjust and set up, the extra weight of a Clifton 5 1/2 is great for removing stock.

The bevel up planes come into their own on difficult interlocked grain and its easier to hone a 50 degrees blade for most students than producing a repeatable back bevel on a standard bevel down plane at say 17 degrees.

 

[speeder1987]

Interestingly i find my bevel up plane easier to setup, everything is much more visible, and there is less to line up. I suppose it is what you are used to. But i agree that that sharpening is more challenging with a bevel up plane.

 

[custard]

having not tried to camber a bevel up blade, what makes it different to cambering a bevel down?

Two things.

To get the same effective camber on a bevel up blade requires a much tighter radius, so a 20" radius camber on a bevel down blade might require a 5" radius camber on a bevel down plane (I'm guessing with these figures, but the principle's right).

And to achieve those cambers on a bevel up blade requires far more metal to be removed, and that's a lot of work.

I like using a cambered blade, and on a bevel down blade the camber's easy to produce using just finger pressure at the edges of the blade whilst honing, but to produce a comparable camber on a bevel up blade I had to make a jig and grind rather than hone the camber. I know some people persevered and seem to produce an acceptable camber on their bevel up blades as a matter of course, but I just found it all too much trouble for too little return, so now stick to bevel down planes. However, I keep dedicated bevel down planes with higher frogs and back bevels for difficult grain, and all my heavy planing is done by machine, so other woodworkers who work differently may come to different conclusions.

 

[speeder1987]

One other thing I don't think has been mentioned, most bevel up planes (well the ones I have/seen, please correct if incorrect) have an adjustable mouth. This is really useful and adds to the versatility

John

 

[marcus]

One annoyance with Bevel Up planes is that if, say, you have set a tight mouth and then you want to take a deeper cut, you will have to open the mouth to advance the blade, otherwise the advancing blade closes the mouth up. Or vice versa. I find this really irritating.

 

[bugbear]

One annoyance with Bevel Up planes is that if, say, you have set a tight mouth and then you want to take a deeper cut, you will have to open the mouth to advance the blade, otherwise the advancing blade closes the mouth up. Or vice versa. I find this really irritating.

You'd need a wider mouth to pass the thicker shaving anyway.

Most low bedding angle planes have a sliding plate mouth adjustment. This is needed, as a lot of movement on the LA bed is needed to effect a depth adjustment (reductio ad absurdum; if the bed angle were zero, you obviously couldn't adjust the depth at all by moving the blade on the bed).

BugBear

 

[Corneel]

In bevel down planes you have no problems with thicker or thinner shavings, because you don't need a tight mouth. You've got a chipbreaker to deal with any tearout issues.

:mrgreen:

 

[marcus]

You'd need a wider mouth to pass the thicker shaving anyway.

I find that with a BD you can set the mouth to a setting where it's tight enough to deal with most tear out but there's still enough opening to be able to take reasonably deep cuts if needed without having to change anything. That's how I have most of my planes set up most of the time, but I have found I can't do that with a BU without having to change the mouth, which doesn't take long on a BU, but is still annoying enough to put me off....

I have one BU up smoother that I keep set with a fine mouth which I use on very difficult grain, and I do find it's excellent for that.

 

[woodbrains]

Hello,

I recently got a Veritas LA jack, as much out of curiosity as anything. I was determined not to like the thing, as I had thoughts on the lack of versatility before I got it. I am glad to say that it was a revelation to me, it is superb. I do not think bevel up planes would completely replace my Bailey style planes, but I do know of some who have pretty much done that, so it is possible, money being no object, that if I had just started woodworking, I might have equipped myself with more BU planes than Baileys.

Regarding camber; I do not camber any of my planes except smothers and the amount of camber on these is marginal. For a smoother, the shaving thickness is very thin so too much camber just serves to narrow the blade width. I want my smothers to make a shaving 80 per cent of the blade width, and this requires very little, so clambering a BU smoother should not be too arduous, I would not let this put you off. If you do prefer a camber on jointers, then this might be an issue, but perhaps it would be better not to camber these as I do and change planing method slightly to compensate, if you do not use straight across blades already. I must admit, I find it easier to plane square with a flat blade and easy to correct if I have not, but that is me. I have to say that I do not camber my jack planes either, unless I know I am removing a lot of stock, which I seldom do these days since planer thicknesses do the brunt of this work. I do not mind track marks from a jack, since the smoother will remove these and as I approach swapping from jack to smoother, I will reduce the cut of the jack, so track marks are very light anyway. If the cambered blade is off putting, there are ways round it.

The adjustable mouth is great for taming tear out. A cap iron is useful, but it seems that people are less aware that a fine mouth is at least as effective as a cap iron. Since BU planes do not have cap irons, the adjustable mouth is very effective and easy to alter. For final smoothing strokes, the mouth setting on these planes can be set finer more easily than any others, so even without changing the lower EP, tear out is often no worse than with a common pitched plane.

Back bevels on common pitched planes are useful and I use them often, but raising the EP of a LA plane is no harder to do. A micro bevel is a micro bevel, so reverting to the standard blade bevel is just the same. It is spurious to say it is easier to remove a back bevel on a regular plane. In any case, it is better to have a couple of irons for different applications, whichever plane is used. Removing micro bevels just wastes metal, if this is done often enough.

My advice is to try the BU plane. I do not think you will regret it, they are very good, and very well made, too.

Mike.

 

[Duncumb.fc]

One interesting thing to add to the conversation is that of blade wear.
As you use a plane, the lower face of the iron tends to be the one that wears (the one lowermost in the plane)
This means that on a BD plane, the wear happens on the bevel side, meaning that a quick sharpen will get rid of any wear.
On a BU plane however, the wear happens on the flat side of the iron, making it much harder to hone out the wear. (Either one has to flatten the whole iron through the wear, which I don't advise as you'd soon end up with a micro thin iron! Or one has to grind the bevel back much more frequently in order to counteract the wear)
It is for this reason that I have switched almost entirely to BD planes, and seeing as I made my block plane, I put a 32˚ bed angle on it. Voila! A block plane with as low an angle as is really possible on a BU plane!

Fraser