Smoothing plane

[D_W]

David, for fun, watch the Wood Whisperer and his new Felder thicknesser (planer). In particular, the finish quality.



Regards from Perth

Derek

I think my comment was received the wrong way. I don't cheat myself out of planing the good stuff. The guy who got me into woodworking never set his delta dc580 properly and eventually got a spiral head. After he got it, it doesn't quite look like wood is finished planed, but it's close. You do have to wear gloves to handle hardwoods with it.

I don't care to plane junk wood that is exceedingly poorly sawn. As in , relatively extreme stuff that can be really cheap here but still hardly worth having.

this is an example of junk wood, though I planed this. if I were going to attempt to make a cabinet with it and not just a wall mount to hold a TV, I'd run it through the thickness planer.

 

[D_W]

I forgot, i had a picture of this board after planing it.



Coarse shavings are long gone. the smoother in this case is some kind of stanley pattern, i just don't remember which one.

Everything on the left side is like end grain, except it runs toward you at the near end of the cut in each case and away going away. the condition for "junk wood" isn't that it's difficult wood like a difficult type (cocobolo and gombeira aren't that hard to plane if they're well sawn), it's whether or not the wood will tolerate jack planing. if the answer to that is no, it's just party trick work to do it by hand, anyway. there's no real payoff - it's junk.

All of the shavings down the left side look like shooting plane shavings - the grain runs out into all of them and more of a velvet quality than ribbon. it was interesting to plane, but too much of it would wreck elbows and shoulders for no reason. Especially through the parts that the runout is a match for the plane bed angle or close.

by the way, having been to IWF in 2008 and seeing *everything*, like far beyond felder's typical $15k level equipment, my English friend was smitten. I think he will move in retirement (which is soon) and probably buy a shop full of martin equipment. Around that time, i was considering spending about $25k on improved power tools and organizing my shop and upgrading the electrical service. I had the panel upgraded with add on construction and then I just couldn't think of anything stimulating about the idea. it seemed like the next logical move, but it didn't correspond with making things that I wanted to make. it corresponded to maybe making a lot of flat work and joints, and I was starting to develop a (personal) distaste with joints that show at all. Realizing that, i tried to think of a reasonable scenario where i could get equipment of that type out of a below grade garage that only has a 7 1/2 foot ceiling and a garage door that's even lower and given how slowly that kind of equipment can move around here (it stays listed for a LONG time - there's more of it than there are people who want it, and getting it used isn't without risk).

this is a trap that gets a lot of everyday rogers and keiths in the world....seeing shop tours and not really knowing what they want to make well, but outfitting the shop like they've seen anyway. it becomes a nest rather than a workspace - filled with immaculately clean work surfaces with no marks and rows of jigs and ideas that are just waiting to actually be used. But they'll only be used to improve the nest. My English friend is in that category - a shop of large capable equipment - maybe the martin stuff will be nice enough that it draws him to the shop more.

 

[Ttrees]

Is that a straight shaving? It looks a bit curly to me, not to mention wrinkled.

I call that a straight shaving, as one would with any shaving coming out of the mouth like such, be it thick or thin, the cap iron plays a role for my panel/fine set jack plane also.
Can post a picture of crinkly and waxy shavings aswell, the shavings beforehand.
It still comes out of the plane the same way, i.e with influence from the cap iron.

Perhaps it's not obvious from photos that the shaving is bending under it's own weight and wrapping around itself, rather than being tightly curled.

I kinda disliked my no.4 in favour of the no.5 1/2 below, until I learned to
use the cap iron like David W suggests, it did infact work!

I had failed in the past as I believed closing the mouth up tightly, or somewhat so,
had to have involvement,
when infact it was very much so the opposite case, and one is encouraged by many to disregard any thought of such nonsense should they wish to see for themselves that
the cap iron needs no help for tearout elimination.

 

[Jacob]

I call that a straight shaving, as one would with any shaving coming out of the mouth like such, be it thick or thin, the cap iron plays a role for my panel/fine set jack plane also.
Can post a picture of crinkly and waxy shavings aswell, the shavings beforehand.
It still comes out of the plane the same way, i.e with influence from the cap iron.
View attachment 148749

Perhaps it's not obvious from photos that the shaving is bending under it's own weight and wrapping around itself, rather than being tightly curled.

I kinda disliked my no.4 in favour of the no.5 1/2 below, until I learned to
use the cap iron like David W suggests, it did infact work!

I had failed in the past as I believed closing the mouth up tightly, or somewhat so,
had to have involvement,
when infact it was very much so the opposite case, and one is encouraged by many to disregard any thought of such nonsense should they wish to see for themselves that
the cap iron needs no help for tearout elimination.

View attachment 148751

I'd call it a normal and totally uninteresting curly shaving.
I think you are over-thinking the shavings. The planed surface is more important.

 

[D_W]

I'd call it a normal and totally uninteresting curly shaving.
I think you are over-thinking the shavings. The planed surface is more important.

I wonder if you think broken shavings will leave a smooth surface. Job site work or "it'll go through the drum sander and then the ROS", maybe the finish shavings aren't important.

I can't imagine anyone who is actually skilled at planing thinking that the shavings don't provide useful information and the legion of people who started work in the 1960s and never really learned to use planes well telling beginners that "people who look at shavings don't know what they're doing"...don't know what they're talking about and don't even know enough to know why.

you're unable to recognize the shaving that ttrees is showing as one that is being held to the surface by the cap iron. It's something an apprentice in 1850 would've learned as soon as they were allowed to touch a plane. It's sad.

 

[Jacob]

...........'Two things where flatness shows up on an already flat board or edge. Match planing/edge jointing, and smoothing a surface from end to end moving right to left or left to right. if The plane in question can't do both of those, then something is wrong.'.......

More likely to be the planer operator. "A bad workman ..." etc etc

 

[Ttrees]

I'd call it a normal and totally uninteresting curly shaving.
I think you are over-thinking the shavings. The planed surface is more important.

Not if you hold it up, it won't curl.
It's the best sign of things working as they should
and in my opinion in what any newcomer should be looking for,
no pretending or tricks, just the double iron plane doing what it were designed for.

I can assure you I'm not using the missus clothes iron to do this.

If this seems strange to somebody, then there is no question that they will be getting tearout on their work.

 

[Jacob]

....

If this seems strange to somebody, then there is no question that they will be getting tearout on their work.

I don't get tear-out and I usually bin my shavings without even looking at them. I'd be surprised to see a straight one!
I snapped some a bit back, trying to get into the spirit of things. There was no tear out - are these technically "straight"?
https://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/threads/when-to-replace-a-plane-blade.129074/page-6#post-1451470

 

[D_W]

For the OP's "seeding" of the idea for later. This is what a very heavy smoother shaving looks like in figured hard maple:





the usefulness of this doesn't become that evident if you have something like a tersa head planer or a spiral head that will do everything, or for thin work, a very good drum sander.

to actually make things from wood without necessarily needing to rely on those, especially when smaller bits that need adjustment may not be that convenient to run through power tools (there will never be an issue of snipe here), with a plane set like this, you prep the surface with heavy shavings (heavier than you'll ever be able to get through a bevel up plane without creating a disaster), and then follow up with a thinner pass or a pair of them. The plane has already set the surface to its geometry with the heavy shavings, tearout is prevented or minimized, whatever your aim, and the finish smoothing is a trivial process.

 

[D_W]

Note that in the pictures above, the shaving is unbroken. The condition of how much the shaving has been worked and whether or not it is unbroken tells you a whole lot about what you're doing and whether you need to adjust anything (it's rarely moving the cap iron, but adjust shaving thickness or perhaps you're against the grain and don't know it because there's not too much difference in grain direction).

The discussion of the shape of the shaving and how the cap iron works is in a bunch of texts until the early 1900s and then it mostly disappears because it probably was no longer economically gainful. In the US furniture was moving toward veneer or factory work and the idea that someone would dimension wood by hand was dead.

the shame of all of this is that a lot of want to use hand tools, but there's a group of loud professional novices who learned to plane wood sometime after 1960 and assume that they were at the tail end of skilled hand tool use. it was dead long before that. "Keeping things simple" just results in a lack of skill that requires a fix of some other sort or an incomplete or incorrect idea of how difficult it actually is to do things by hand without splashing out for a bunch of stuff that isn't needed.

 

[D_W]

(most of my pictures are on another PC, but I have some others that are instructive if doing "more than just smoothing" wood that came out of a good thicknesser).



Sizable wood that was being prepped to have a front cove moulding cut into it and made into a base for a cabinet.

The shavings emerging from a plane that's good for this (a heavy coffin smoother that's larger than a typical coffin smoother).



The thickness of some of these shavings:


the value of this becomes immediately evident if you're not working with power tools but also need to hit a dimension. to take 2 thousandths shavings and sharpen four times to do one thing really isn't practical.

The heavier shavings above and this kind of work is where some of the economy of time and better results come into play. A little birdie on here likes to say the cap iron is set for smoothing only and not useful. the reality is the opposite - it's labor reducing for smoothing, but you could live without it if you smooth wood that's already nearly done. the work before it, the coarse work and then the middle work is where the double iron eliminated single iron planes.

The fact that there is so much errant information about it means two things:
1) few people do as much planing as they say they do, and when they start talking about it "having worked wood for 50 years" you see them parroting things off of the internet said in the last 10.
2) there aren't very many people who were curious about actually doing much woodworking by hand, because it's possible (likely) that you'd figure this out on some saturday when you just wanted to try something. it makes it easier to understand the older texts if you figure it out first, and then see what they're saying, but that's probably not the order of operations that they were intending.

 

[D_W]

You make planes?

If you're curious about what they may be or look like, feel free to send me a PM. I often get the "yeah, well i'll bet you're a programmer or something and don't make anything" bit. There's no great need for me to clog the thread here. I spend, maybe over the last 15 years, half of my time making tools, and half of my time making things with the tools. that's not a good balance if you don't like making tools, but it's really good if like making the tools and making things. it makes just about anything to be made seem possible, too - sometimes it's a lot easier and faster to make a tool than it is to find what you think you're looking for, or if you know what you want but it's rare and difficult to find or extremely expensive.

 

[Zag73]

For the OP's "seeding" of the idea for later. This is what a very heavy smoother shaving looks like in figured hard maple:





the usefulness of this doesn't become that evident if you have something like a tersa head planer or a spiral head that will do everything, or for thin work, a very good drum sander.

to actually make things from wood without necessarily needing to rely on those, especially when smaller bits that need adjustment may not be that convenient to run through power tools (there will never be an issue of snipe here), with a plane set like this, you prep the surface with heavy shavings (heavier than you'll ever be able to get through a bevel up plane without creating a disaster), and then follow up with a thinner pass or a pair of them. The plane has already set the surface to its geometry with the heavy shavings, tearout is prevented or minimized, whatever your aim, and the finish smoothing is a trivial process.

You do realise my question was about the two veritas smoothing planes? All you’ve done is wax lyrical about bevel down planes. At this stage , they don’t interest me

 

[D_W]

You do realise my question was about the two veritas smoothing planes? All you’ve done is wax (practical) about bevel down planes. At this stage , they don’t interest me

Your original question was done when you bought the BUS. It's like a race car with a 46 mile an hour governor.

Other people here may have higher aspirations.

i fixed your quote - when someone comes in high on bevel up planes, many of us hold back. Why? Because if you're going to use bevel up planes and invest any time in that, it's almost pointless. Why bother even using planes.

 

[Zag73]

Your original question was done when you bought the BUS. It's like a race car with a 46 mile an hour governor.

Other people here may have higher aspirations.

i fixed your quote - when someone comes in high on bevel up planes, many of us hold back. Why? Because if you're going to use bevel up planes and invest any time in that, it's almost pointless. Why bother even using planes.

You truly are an arrogant individual…

 

[D_W]

when it comes to the practicality of planing, yes, I guess I am. to be dismissed by people who generally don't want to learn to use hand tools isn't that big of a deal. I didn't move this discussion toward how poor bevel up planes are as anything other than a "first day of class tool" because i've done that quite a bit, and most people show up wanting to have affirmation of what they're going to do. So, why bother? It's not like most bevel down planes I've come across have been used much, either.

The other part of this post is practical - you asked a question, you got some other advice, I told you to buy a BUS because I don't think it'll be limiting to you. You can always grow out of it if you actually grow out of it. But when a thread goes to other areas and people discuss it not necessarily for your benefit, welcome to forums.

"blended woodworker" is generally something people say after they've watched one of the Youtube gurus. it's a dead end term, and that's OK. Don't let it bother you too much if you're not intending to go far enough into anything that would matter if it resulted in failure.

 

[Jacob]

You truly are an arrogant individual…

I have him permanently on "ignore".

 

[D_W]

This really illustrates how handy it would be to have a split of the hand tools forums. One part would be the kind of "toot toot...i'm buying something, only happy messages!" and the other would be for the types now gone (george wilson, larry williams, don mcconnell, warren mickley, custard, ...).

They're not "gone", just gone from the forums. We could employ jacob as the greeter at the toot toot forum. Todd Hughes used to do that for us in the states.

 

[Derek Cohen (Perth Oz)]

Your original question was done when you bought the BUS. It's like a race car with a 46 mile an hour governor.

Given a choice of either the Veritas BUS or the Veritas Custom #4, I would plump for the #4. This does not invalidate the BUS, just that the #4 has a wider range for the experienced.

There is no doubt in my mind that the BUS is a really terrific smoother, and that it is super easy to use and set up …. much more so than the #4. Hone the single blade (I recommend a 25 degree primary bevel and a cambered 50 degree secondary bevel). The resulting 62 degree cutting angle will perform very well on just about all you can throw at it. However … BU high angle smoothers work best with thin shavings, and with the grain. As a finish smoother with reasonably predictably grain direction - even if this is interlocked - the BUS should work well. I think what appeals most to many today is that they set up so easily, and will little fuss. Back when they were my go-to, the reason for choosing them was an economical high angle plane.

The Custom #4 is more complex to set up - along with other similar BD planes with a chipbreaker - in that one needs to know how to set the chipbreaker close to maximise performance. This is not a big deal, but does scare off some. With a closed up chipbreaker, one iis rewarded with a plane which can work in any direction, such as into the grain. This is especially important when planing the intersection of book-matched panels, where the grain direction is opposing.

My Custom #4 has a unique frog, at 42 degrees. This produces a 42 degree cutting angle, which is low … too low to use on interlocked grain without a closed chipbreaker. The advantage of a low cutting angle is that it leaves a smoother finish. Having stated this, in practice, hardwoods do not show this up as readily as softer woods. The finish off a high cutting angle on Jarrah is not readily seen compared to that off a lowish cutting angle.

How important the BD plane is depends on how much you plan to use the chipbreaker. One needs to keep in mind that many - most? - users pre-2012 used their BD planes with common angles (45 degrees) and had the chipbreaker pulled back. How is that different from a BU plane with a common cutting angle (33-35 degree bevel)?

Regards from Perth

Derek

 

[D_W]

Given a choice of either the Veritas BUS or the Veritas Custom #4, I would plump for the #4. This does not invalidate the BUS, just that the #4 has a wider range for the experienced.

There is no doubt in my mind that the BUS is a really terrific smoother, and that it is super easy to use and set up …. much more so than the #4. Hone the single blade (I recommend a 25 degree primary bevel and a cambered 50 degree secondary bevel). The resulting 62 degree cutting angle will perform very well on just about all you can through at it. However … BU high angle smoothers would best with thin shavings, and with the grain. As a finish smoother with reasonably predictably grain direction - even if this is interlocked - the BUS should work well. I think what appeal most to many today is that they set up so easily, and will little fuss. Back when they were my go-to, the reason for choosing them was an economical high angle plane.

The Custom #4 is more complex to set up - along with other similar BD planes with a chipbreaker - in that one needs to know how to set the chipbreaker close to maximise performance. This is not a big deal, but does scare off some. With a closed up chipbreaker, one iis rewarded with a plane which can work in any direction, such as into the grain. This is especially important when planing the intersection of book-matched panels, where the grain direction is opposing.

My Custom #4 has a unique frog, at 42 degrees. This produces a 42 degree cutting angle, which is low … too low to use on interlocked grain without a closed chipbreaker. The advantage of a low cutting angle is that it leaves a smoother finish. Having stated this, in practice, hardwoods do not show this up as readily as softer woods. The finish off a high cutting angle on Jarrah is not readily seen compared to that off a lowish cutting angle.

How important the BD plane is depends on how much you plan to use the chipbreaker. One needs to keep in mind that many - most? - users pre-2012 used their BD planes with common angles (45 degrees) and had the chipbreaker pulled back. How is that different from a BU plane with a common cutting angle (33-35 degree bevel)?

Regards from Perth

Derek

it's very difficult to make recommendations:
1) to someone who has probably made up their mind already
2) when you gauge that the chance of getting beyond taking thin shavings is just about nil

What comes to mind, and sometimes I forget this, is that the person who got me into woodworking had four LN planes at the time (perhaps 5). the only one that he could get to work at all was the block plane.

this was around 2005, before there was any instruction for planes of note on YT, and maybe there wasn't really YT yet. I found YT extremely early because I had been watching another video site that had humorous videos on it every day, and it got hijacked. it was called compfused or something of the sort and it only had what would be called shorts now, as well as custom flash.

So all of this information, generally at the time you had to get a DVD if you wanted to get anything, around $15-$25, and frankly, some of them were really no good or were just VHS from as far back as the 80s transferred to DVD.

I also got the BU planes, and two of them in total, and the potential seems like it's there. they're simple, you can put a steep pitched iron in them and take thin shavings. they need sharpening more often than a plane with a cap iron because of the mechanics of the planes, but they're limited pretty much to that. Sure, you can hone one with a low effective angle and trim end grain with it, but over a longer period of time, much of that ends up in the vise and a #4 does great with it.

If anything, the BU planes sort of took the place of vanilla planing and having a separate high angle plane. What strikes me from that period in hand tooling is I bought everything I could find, but one change in weather in an evening after gluing up panels or case sides and you were in for a war the next day.

I just put together a painted loft bed for my son. it's 4x4 pine on the corners and the rest is SYP, right off the rack. to get paint on it, you need to fill whatever voids there are and you can plane it before that, but it's going to move and the filler is abrasive, so it's off to sanders for ease. I broke my normal habits and getting annoyed with ROS sanders (I have a pair, one is a 6" dual mode monster and the other a festool ETS finish sander), I bought an old used milwaukee half sheet sander. It's probably what I should've bought instead of the dual mode.

So my comment to the original poster, if a bevel up plane is all that's ever needed, I think the abrasive setups now are better. that's from my real life experience with a gaggle of high angle planes, scrapers and the bevel ups. There's just always something limiting around the corner.

Finished surface is often brought up - I don't know who is supposedly contending that the surface isn't bright enough off of a bevel up plane. On maple, it's fine. It may be slightly lacking on cherry, but not to a level that anyone would ever care. On maple (which "polishes" easily), I don't remember ever seeing anything. it's the ability to remove wood beyond thin shavings that's lacking, and I suppose to do it on softer woods.

I am not being anything less than totally serious when I say that you could do a whole lot of fitting and better faster finish sanding with one of the lower high tension lower speed belt sanders (the locomotives) and the half sheet types with a low cushion foot. And they wouldn't care if panels moved a little bit. single drop shop sanders were also very popular - no clue where that discussion went.