David, in the past I have been criticised for applying the standards for Australian woods to those in the USA. I am careful to qualify the differences these days. You talk about planing thick shavings. But why would I want to do so all the time? There are times when I do and times when I do not. It all depends on what is required. Further, woods like Jarrah have a Janka similar to Wenge, and both these are 50% greater than white oak. How often do you want to take thick shavings in such woods? Building furniture is not just about thick shavings.
Planing is also not just about using the chipbreaker. You know I am comfortable using one, and I do so much of the time by preference. Still, planes with chip breakers are just a small proportion of the planes I use. There are also single blade rebate planes, shoulder planes, block planes, spokeshaves, etc etc. Some take thicker shavings than others .. when necessary.
Regards from Perth
Derek
A thick shaving in something very hard might be 3 thousandths on a smoother instead of 1. You take a thick shaving specifically because it allows you to get the work done faster. It's not only for non-smoothing work.
the same woods were worked eons ago and the difference between now and then is that the workers were mostly experienced. I doubt working (speaking of smoothing, etc) a 2000 hardness janka wood was very difficult for someone 150 years ago or more with plain steels.
The whole premise of modern steels is that they'll allow you to work a long time, but implicit in that is that you're taking a million small shavings because that's how the irons are tested. 60 years ago, high speed steel was available, and so were the mediums to sharpen it, but nobody had any interest in it in planes. I'm not sure how relevant planes were even at that point in use, but the few that were made were probably used by carpenters, etc. So maybe that's a difficult comparison for relevance.
the biggest thing that keeps people from doing more work by hand is speed, my point in all of this is that there is much more speed available to most people, and without sacrificing results. It's just that most people are looking in the wrong place for it.
I've got a hunch that 200 years ago, all work that was flat was done with a double iron, it wouldn't have been economically feasible to compete with a single iron. Rebates are generally hidden, most joints were in wood, and I would assume most other joinery work was done with chisels and saws - because that's fastest and perfectly neat for an experienced maker to do work right off of the saw and chisel without getting out a whole bunch of specialty planes. The fact that you'd have some tearout in a rebate or a plowed groove would be no big deal, and if the cleanliness for the part of the joint that appeared was paramount, then the line would be struck first before taking the cut. I would put my money on the double iron being a lot bigger deal (as in an economic necessity) than just one method. I'd bet turning was done with much more competence and fewer tools, too than what's marketed now, and the surfaces obtained were probably suitable for use without anything following the skew.
It leads me back to the comment that if steel is perceived to be too soft or too short wearing, the person making that determination probably doesn't know what the real problem is.
I built two planes out of cocobolo last year, and made it a point to make them both using a stanley 4 with a stock iron in it. Non laminted, nothing special. The face of a flatsawn cocobolo board is about 3000 hardness, though the early wood can be soft and the hardness variable. It's abrasive and some pieces can be really hard on irons. When I first started woodworking, I went to high speed steel irons so that I could continue taking thinner shavings as I crept up on my finished spots. I recall not even being able to thickness a piece of wood for a handle without resharpening. For the two smoothers I made, I sized all of the blocks, made the wedges and removed the bandsaw marks from the sides of the planes - in cocobolo - sharpening each plane once during the exercise.
The latter was much faster. I saved the very thin cocobolo shavings only for one pass when I had otherwise sized everything and already taken coarse shavings.
It taught me that the stanley iron will give up taking thin smoother shavings pretty early with cocobolo, but it will take a thick shaving (perhaps 3 thousandths) for a very long time before the abrasion of the wood removes clearance. It opened my eyes. I probably would've bought the high speed steel irons early on if someone would've showed me the productive way to do the work, and I see a lot of people who are where I was then that are just as bullheaded.
(jacking and try plane work in any of those hard woods is slower, though, you just don't take as thick of a shaving - that's a concession you make with them. I'd imagine the maximum thickness that a thickness planer will take off in a pass is also less).
