Shall I continue lapping this sole ?

[JobandKnock]

Precisely (or rather not). My half set of hollows and rounds are also by Griffiths and I'm sure a few had never been used before I acquired them (maybe because there isn't much call for #18 hollows). The #4 to #12 sizes are well used.

One of the things I am struggling to understand is the need to make a virtue out of hand planing. When I need to replace a large timber in, say, a king post truss roof it is at times necessary to resize timbers as they come from the merchant. This is partly because a lot of yards have lost the ability to resize larger section timbers in recent years, so if I need 10-1/2 x 3-3/4in I might have to start with something like 12 x 4in and take it down to size myself. These days that involves a large portable rip saw to make the deeping cuts, a hand rip saw to part out the waste and a large power planer to get me within a few millimetres of finished size. All these tools do is to replace the goose wing axes, adzes, draw knives and scrub planes of a previous era. Nothing more. Hand planing when you can do 95% of the work with less effort has never been a way to earn a living, now or in the 18th century

 

[D_W]

Well, this is a hobby (the woodworking). There's a small minority who would probably like to work entirely by hand, but information from folks like Jacob is going to leave them thinking it's harder than it is. When everything is set right, it's just exercise.

In the states, we also get the same thing "there's no sense in woodworking entirely by hand, and anyone running a business wouldn't do it". Most of the commentary comes from people who have failed running a profitable business with power tools. The reality is that produced goods in the US aren't the territory of either.

So, the virtue of planing well comes to it being for the sake of the hobby. Just like power tool woodworking. Where does it really pay off? Aside from the work being sort of the brisk walk variety, it gets away from the purchase of tools or fitting of work to machines when the reality is a lot of us want to do the hobby. it's a hobby that costs money, not one that makes money. I could make money making tools (I don't, and don't want a business), but I'm fairly sure that it would be difficult to find customers to buy much woodworking - there are a few joiners working here, but their work is spartan and I'm not interested in it. It's necessarily plain because that's what people will pay for.

I call the whole "nobody would do it like that for a living" the tycoon mentality here in the US. The tycoons went to CNC factory controlled bits way back in the 1980s here and what's left for the small shop is really oddball stuff (it takes a spouse with an income to make "the business" work) or repair work. People who want to make furniture end up installing kitchens instead (someone else makes the cabinets - a factory), trussing roofs and doing trim carpentry work.

The reason I have some disregard for jacob is he sees whatever he's talking about through recent customers and through having done fairly little with hand tools by his own admission (in terms of the work volume) in the last three decades. It sounds like there's more opportunity for site work there, too, but that's not a surprise. But I doubt there are any places in the first world where someone is doing much of what's being shown in woodworking magazines, etc. The writers are writing articles because they don't have day work -they need to attract students and get a writing fee. That's the "tycoon" type.

I have sort of two lines for people - one is for folks who want to fit joints and finish plane. They can do whatever they want to do and will never notice any difference in effort, and the reality is that if they are having issues with finish prior to smoothing, they should get a drum sander or a spiral head. For the rare person who wants to work entirely by hand, I'll talk details because the rules will be different. The latter will end up probably preferring simpler steels in older tools and they'll do 5 times as much work between sharpening stops on chisels and planes, and sharpen quickly. The former, I don't know what - I guess they'll buy PM-V11 and be convinced that it's a time saver. The latter will ask about rip saws and sharpening them quickly and the former will probably be asking who can sharpen their joinery saws or buying disposable pullsaws, etc.

 

[Jacob]

.....

One of the things I am struggling to understand is the need to make a virtue out of hand planing. .....

It's a big question and part of the answer is the arts n crafts tradition - a quasi religious faith in "proper " woodworking and craftwork, probably started by William Morris.
But then it's deeply fascinating about what they used to do with such basic tools, the ingenuity and the undoubted quality of often quite ordinary stuff. See "The Wheelwright's Shop" by George Sturt. Or visit Highlights
So if somebody wants to do the full monty, with primitive tools, wear the flat hat, grow the beard, play banjo music, that's fine!
I like hand planing myself but also like my combi woodwork machine. I'm into freehand dovetails and wouldn't be seen dead with a dovetail marking gauge, ditto honing gauge.
But if it's down to making a bit of money then absolutely no effing about is allowed - I might even consider a pocket hole jig, though I haven't sunk that low yet.

 

[JobandKnock]

Big fingers, small screen...

 

[JobandKnock]

...

 

[D_W]

play banjo music,

power tool era...

 

[JobandKnock]

There's a small minority who would probably like to work entirely by hand, but information from folks like Jacob is going to leave them thinking it's harder than it is. When everything is vset right, it's just exercise.

Excluding the fantasy woodworker element for a moment, what percentage of folk actually want to don the hair shirt and do it all by hand? And where do you stop? Do you buy in tree boles and set up a pit saw? (In which case who gets to be top dog?). Do you take it a stage further and go into the forest and chop the tree down yourself? If you look at medieval paintings of carpenters and joiners at work there are a lot of people preparing wood, often by sawing, adzing, axing, etc then by hand planing. Planing seems to have been regarded as a finishing process and was often undertaken by the lowest paid, the apprentices and improvers - olden days planer thicknessers?

 

[Ttrees]

One of the things I am struggling to understand is the need to make a virtue out of hand planing.

"Everyone knows, real machines are three phase"

 

[D_W]

Separately, one of my favorite guitar making companies is Collings. They're expensive. I'm not aware that they plane anything - but they do a lot of fitting deliberately with careful CNC and then at least some sanding to fit. When they drop a guitar neck into it's pocket, the air probably warms under it if they push down quickly.

I could care less that they use CNC and sandpaper. I'm the buyer, and not the maker. Plus, they've managed to do some things I couldn't duplicate even on small principles (how to get guitar bodies - solid bodies - to sound the same from one guitar to the next, because you can't even just get wood from the same tree and density and do that. They just flatly tell you how they do it if you ask (I'd have never figured it out). Too much guitarry kind of detail to go into detail here, but impressive that a "company" would take the individual effort to voice solid guitar bodies and not affect their tonal balance.

When I'm the maker, I care how I'm making things and I don't care if the customer cares how I'm making them. I had a guy tell me that he'd buy chisels if I used a commercial heat treat service - which is funny. I told him something like "Hi, I make chisels for the cost of materials, so I'm not really looking for customers, and if you're looking for a machined chisel that's heat treated in a vacuum oven, there are a whole lot of them out there at the end of a google search".

If I were trying to sell 10 sets of chisels a day, I'd get real interested in how quickly they could be made, how big of a margin and I'd catalogue what people said they'd like vs. what they bought when I offered it (sometimes those things aren't the same).

 

[D_W]

Excluding the fantasy woodworker element for a moment, what percentage of folk actually want to don the hair shirt and do it all by hand? And where do you stop? Do you buy in tree boles and set up a pit saw? (In which case who gets to be top dog?). Do you take it a stage further and go into the forest and chop the tree down yourself? If you look at medieval paintings of carpenters and joiners at work there are a lot of people preparing wood, often by sawing, adzing, axing, etc then by hand planing. Planing seems to have been regarded as a finishing process and was often undertaken by the lowest paid, the apprentices and improvers - olden days planer thicknessers?

I buy wood from a guy who saws it locally - he saws it, sells it for market or slightly below and it's good quality. I thought about mentioning that above. There's a company here that plain saws trees and sells them as a boule. It costs the moon because the whole thing needs to be really good. I'm a toolmaker half the time and woodworker half the time, not a re-enactor.

I dimension wood by hand because it feels good physically and mentally. I would hope that anyone else who wants to do it does it out of pleasure and not self-torture. I don't have a fascination with trying to make a living woodworking or make the argument for it being economically viable. That's for the *tycoon* woodworkers who are angry and head to the forums bitter about their inability to make as much as they want with their shop setup. Knots was full of that - people with failed businesses harassing white collar individuals who were just looking for a hobby, as well as a couple of white collar wannabe tycoons who never made anything that I saw wanting to tell everyone how they should work and what they should make to be a "real woodworker".

If there's a dude who loves making things out of sheet goods on a slider, then that's what they should do. If there's someone who wants to work comfortably by hand, I can tell them what they should do. If I were to get a whole glom of really great power tools and start making volumes of things and spending all of my time doing joinery and sanding, the hobby wouldn't last long.

 

[JobandKnock]

Maybe you have a different regimen in the USA. Here (and by that I mean the North of England) I don't know a single woodworker who earns a living with hand tools alone. The commercial pressures are just too great. In fact the only guy I ever knew was a French carver we had on a few jobs down in London, and even there he depended on us to do a lot of his prep for him (commercial pressure again).

As to hand tools, a lot of people were taught about wooden planes, including moulding planes, until the 1980s. Same gies for saw sharpening and setting. I can and still do that, but not much as power tools work faster for us so there's less of a need for sharpenable hand saws. They started to disappear when corded saws got cheaper and hard tip hand saws became cheap (1970s). In any case you wouldn't want to saw chipboard with a Disston, would you?

I don't see your point about old steel being better, either. Some modern plane irons are far superior to the hit and miss products turned out in Sheffield and elsewhere "back in the day". Maybe as an "old school" carpenter and joiner I have more in common with Jacob.

 

[Ttrees]

Regarding this thread though, I'm gonna bet the OP might be a person who is on the hobby side of things, however not discounting the possibility that plenty of folks might be in some transitional place where a business premises might be down the road a wee bit yet, so their still working in a workshop of their own,
and depending where that might be, one might not opt for some noisy piece of plastic junk,
for a bucket full of reasons, so doing this work with a wooden plane has merit.


Yet to see a big ol cast iron P/T that can be run from a 13a plug like I can with my 12" tablesaw or 24" bandsaw.
Not saying there's folks not doing so, but I haven't seen it here, nor on the tube.
They're not cheap either, I'd possibly have one now if it weren't the case.

Though it's one of those tools that I see as an non essential, as I have both saws which can do
a lot of work for me, resawing and rebating are two jobs where it's a lot of work,
which would be a lot more difficult compared to the planing.
I try and find the perfect piece which would require minimal work, if I can so a P/T is a bit OTT.

Just a matter of practicality personally.

Tom

 

[Jacob]

..

I dimension wood by hand because it feels good physically and mentally. ...

OK that's fine if hand planed PAR is your thing, but it's not very practical. A touch masochistic perhaps, and very unusual.

 

[D_W]

I don't think many people were taught to use planes or saws to dimension. If they were, nobody remembered much to give very good advice about it (other than the odd use here or there where something doesn't fit on power tools).

I have no idea why I keep saying that I work wood mostly or entirely by hand for pleasure, and the comparison of "I don't know anyone making a living that way" comes up. I don't, either. I don't actually personally know anyone who is making a living woodworking - period. I do know a couple of folks who have spent their wife's money setting up a semi-commercial operation that failed.

What I know here is trade cabinet setters, etc, who are specialty carpenters and who install things made in factories. This is what I referred to as the "tycoon woodworker" mentality because it seems like the 70s and 80s convinced some folks they could make furniture for a living, and it doesn't look to have flown. There are hundreds of nice shops in this city, I'd bet, and very few that produce any income.

I mentioned one joiner - I never met the guy, but a house in my neighborhood has a couple in it who had a small room and they wanted some kind of custom solution to have a lift up bed that wasn't exactly a murphy bed and some woodworking to tie it in. They did it as part of a renovation, so they probably rolled it into a loan, and maybe that guy got paid well. My wife badgered me to go look at the work. It was very plain, but neatly done. I didn't really need to see it.

If you're following what I'm saying, the hobby woodworker who thinks they're net close to making money because of their power tool setup vs. something I have is errant in two ways:
1) they would be trying to beat better men before them (but it's nice to dream)
2) I don't care - recreation has nothing to do with running a business. I want to work by hand. Your generation isn't able to make it productive - not enough is remembered about using planes for more than fitting and surface finishing

If it's considered dumb to hand saw or hand plane wood from rough, I don't really care. It's definitely not common here even in hobby, though there are often people who say they want to do it. In order for it even to make sense at a hobby level, you have to be good at it. Anyone who thinks a metal plane results in more volume worked in the same context isn't very good at it.

Once in a while, I'll say that I doubt there are many people on here who know as much about how planes function as I do. That's still true. And, I'm not talking about krenov planes and hollows and rounds. I'm talking about what you learn when you try to make good planes that you'd use above anything else you can find (I have made moulding planes, too, though, but they sit on a shelf because there's something I like about the look of the old ones). The bench planes, I go back and forth between mine and 1800s English planes (Except smoothing is almost exclusively a stanley 4).

I'm not engaging anyone in a discussion of steel and tie-in to what's actually in it, and what lasts and what maintenance is like - it all ties in with the tools, and someone told me early on that if I learned to use planes well, I'd probably not find any decent iron that I could play out before it played me out. That turns out to be true. I've made irons in at least half a dozen steels (including what's probably V11) and tested plane irons with actual measured use tests. V11/XHP lasts about twice as long as O1. But how it works in the context of a significant amount of work in different plane designs negates any real benefit from it. If someone takes four or seven minutes to sharpen and uses a guide, and they plane wood that's come out of a thickness planing machine and then sand it, it might offer them something.

My comment about old steel vs. V11 is basically a butcher iron (on the harder side for butcher) vs. V11 in two different planes. The design of the metal plane made it so that an iron (which would last far longer planing smoother shavings) didn't last longer dimensioning beech billets to make planes, and it was more physical work to wear out the plane and plane iron that didn't get as much done.

I'm not aware of any updated chisel steel that is better than more plain steels for chisels, either, and there's little that I haven't come across.

I have no questions about how you do your work or why, nor do I assume that any of it doesn't make sense in your context - you likely wouldn't be doing it here in the states at all unless you were really creative at wooing wealthy older ladies. I sure wouldn't try it at all either way here (by hand or with power tools), but I'd bet an enterprising guy could get near 6 figures hanging cabinets if he got the right client list. He just woudldn't be making them and wouldn't even be making the trim - just installing it.

 

[Jacob]

Regarding this thread though, I'm gonna bet the OP might be a person who is on the hobby side of things, ...

Well yes in the real world nobody "laps" plane soles, at least not quite in the enthusiastic way we keep reading about!
It's an amateur woodwork thing.
As far as I know "lapping" is an engineering process involving grinding two plates together with grinding paste in between, so they both end up flat. If you must lap say a no.5 the obvious thing would be to do two of them - rub one plane against the other.
Hope that helps!

 

[Adam W.]

It isn't rust that's the issue - if you look at the tangs on many moulding planes you'll find they are fairly rough (i have some rounds and hollows, madevin the 1920s, I believe, which have rarely if ever been used bu the tangs show firge marks). TBH I can't say that I have seen many moulding planes where they weren't a bit rough, nor can I recall seeing any which looked as though they had been flattenedby the user in the way you suggest

Well you don't have to do it if you don't want to.

 

[Ttrees]

Can do something similar with abrasives stuck to a surface plate.
Might as well use the whole tool since you've paid for it, or in other situations it may be actually
be necessity to do it well, if one want's a well working plane.

 

[JobandKnock]

Well you don't have to do it if you don't want to.

Don't worry - I won't.

I did try your technique earlier on a double iron complex moulding plane. Try as I might I can't get it to work, and if I invert the plane so I can "read" the cutter projections (how I've done it for a few years). one or other of the irons and wedges invariably falls out, so I don't see me changing what I do in a hurry

 

[Jacob]

......

If it's considered dumb to hand saw or hand plane wood from rough, I don't really care. It's definitely not common here even in hobby, though there are often people who say they want to do it. .....

It's not common because nobody planes stock (long lengths) with a hand plane and nobody ever did.
In a typical woodwork shop, if hand planing, and usually when machine planing, it is always sawn to size for the job first.
On the other hand timber yards may supply stock PAR (planed all round) and PSE (planed square edge) but done by machine plane. It's made for DIY woodworkers and odd jobbers without machines and sometimes bought by builders and others if it suits a job.
But your typical woodworker would only ever buy sawn material for stock, with exceptions, manufactured boards, floor boards, match boards, some mouldings, depending on what they are doing. But non of this would ever have been made by hand for stock.
It crops up a lot as a topic because beginners encounter PAR and assume this is how it's done by everybody. Also there's a little saying "keep it as long as possible for as long as possible" which is good sense for stock control (use all your small stuff first) but only up to the point where you have cut to size for a project. Planing begins after that point!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I don't see your point about old steel being better, either. Some modern plane irons are far superior to the hit and miss products turned out in Sheffield and elsewhere "back in the day".

Some.