Adam W.
A Major Clanger
Sigh, shrugs shoulders.
So what? Just because you can't manage it, it doesn't mean that others who have more skill than you can't either.
I rest my case, please carry on if you like.
Try-plane with lead in its nose
- Thread starter Dr W
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Sigh, shrugs shoulders.
So what? Just because you can't manage it, it doesn't mean that others who have more skill than you can't either.
I rest my case, please carry on if you like.
Ttrees
Iroko loco!
You should give it a try Jacob!
You might be pleasantly surprised by this occurrence.
Doesn't need to be aspen, but any timber I've worked will do the same.
Inaccurate statement, Jacob.
This is the shavings from making a painted bed for my daughter out of white pine 2x4s. Straight shavings are typical and not ideal, as in if you had more experience planing, you'd do this on purpose and with ease because it's less effort. This lower quality wood wouldn't be practically planed with single iron planes.
That's exactly where they fell coming off of a Stanley 4.
If you didn't set the plane this way, it would tear up the wood, especially behind the knots.
Jacob
What goes around comes around.
As I said you get straight shavings off easy wood if you try hard enough. Easier still with a pronounced camber, fine adjustment and an obsessively carefully set up plane, as we see here!
Those are not straight shavings in the Rob Cosman or Japanese competition sense either, they are merely thin shavings which will drape straight if allowed to.
In normal woodwork white pine would be planed with a much deeper cut without bothering too much about little bits of tear out, on the assumption that it will be painted or otherwise finished. The idea is to produce a finished item as efficiently as possible, not just photogenic shavings. Knots here very small anyway - nothing like scots pine, (the basic UK timber a.k.a. "redwood") which is more difficult to plane
I presume you will be carefully polishing these to preserve the chatoyancy and planing perfection, even though this is cheapo rubbish wood!
Typical of the modern sharpening enthusiast - close attention to the shavings! I was like that as a beginner too.
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You have no clue what you're talking about. They came out of the plane straight. Without the cap iron, they would curl. Straight overall shape with some rippling is cap iron thinner shavings, thicker shavings are less wavy.
These shavings are off of a Stanley 20 type with a 2.99 iron sharpened with india sone and buffer. The whole point is to square the laminations and remove the mill finish at the same time and be paint ready or close. You lack the skill and experience to identify what's going on here, and all you can do is insert smileys to try to hide it.
These shavings are off of a Stanley 20 type with a 2.99 iron sharpened with india sone and buffer. The whole point is to square the laminations and remove the mill finish at the same time and be paint ready or close. You lack the skill and experience to identify what's going on here, and all you can do is insert smileys to try to hide it.
Here's where the ratty wood ended up.
My daughter had her eyes on a $3700 bed. I told her I'd make one half as nice and paint it. The $3700 bed had a cabinet and steps at the end, but only half was actually wood. I spent about $300 on wood, high hardness paint and bench bolts. I rarely get the chance to just slap something together like this with a contest of keeping materials cheap. Cheap wood and hand work from rough will challenge planing skills.
My daughter had her eyes on a $3700 bed. I told her I'd make one half as nice and paint it. The $3700 bed had a cabinet and steps at the end, but only half was actually wood. I spent about $300 on wood, high hardness paint and bench bolts. I rarely get the chance to just slap something together like this with a contest of keeping materials cheap. Cheap wood and hand work from rough will challenge planing skills.
Adam W.
A Major Clanger
Looks great and that's a massive saving in cash.
You could probably now afford a new plane which does curly shavings instead of that straight rubbish.
You could probably now afford a new plane which does curly shavings instead of that straight rubbish.
Jacob
What goes around comes around.
Thin shavings don't curl so much as ripple. Yours are typical.Thinner shavings waft away like gossamer. If you set the cut deeper they would start to curl. Who said anything about "without cap iron"? not me.
I get the distinct impression I've done a lot more planing than you, but I'm not going to beat my chest about it or start grunting!
Cheapness has nothing to do with it and your wood simply looks very unchallenging, soft, straight, small knots etc. Ideal for a beginner.
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Jacob
What goes around comes around.
I wouldn't dream of it I know nothing about either.
Nice bed! A bit of a waste of effort all that fine planing though - you'd never know! Distinct absence of chatoyancy!
I'd have done it with a 5 1/2 , filled any tear-outs with putty and slapped paint on the same. It looks soft anyway so I doubt tear-outs would have been a problem.
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We've covered this. I've planed more in four years as a hobbyist than you did as a pro for ten years and the last 30, you've used mostly power tools. Your posts are spectacularly devoid of actually using planes for more than little test cuts. You have no clue what you're talking about in this case. These shavings came straight up and out of a 4 each laying next to the last. There are zero posts from you talking about using a cap iron before 2013. There was one Finnish guy and one other person on the entire board history here mentioning using a cap iron before 2013. I'm sure you've done a bunch of coarse house work. That'll do little to help most people wanting to make things for their houses with planes. Your advice for anything other than stabbing around with a half sharp iron is terrible.
Hah! I'm curious and results oriented due to the curiosity. That allows you to accumulate knowledge about what works and what doesn't quickly. The biggest push is that I want to find out how easy hand work can be made vs just settling for the idea that everything is equal.
I'm not very good at things I don't have a fascination with, though. I'd be terrible with mid level power tool advice and use, and little value talking about dust collection.
And I've literally never attempted a pocket screw.
Jacob
What goes around comes around.
4 years? Surprised!
True I don't take many snaps of shavings, sawdust, empty beer cans, and I have posted one or two demo pieces out of interest.
True I haven't posted much about cap irons either, but that's not because I don't use them. Except on a scrub plane - I'll have to tell you about that another time!
Pressing the ignore button again!
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It would be wise for you to use the ignore function, because every time you reply to some of my pictures, you assert something completely inaccurate. The fact that you used mostly power tools is apparent because your advice is about as good as "do this, it'll be good enough, and fall back on power tools if it gets difficult".
When I wanted to go to hand tools only, there was only one person that I can recall who had accurate advice (but an inability to communicate it), and then a dozen or two of your type who made big claims but blew off needing to do accurate work as unnecessary and showed stuff like your last test piece. Construction work.
When I wanted to go to hand tools only, there was only one person that I can recall who had accurate advice (but an inability to communicate it), and then a dozen or two of your type who made big claims but blew off needing to do accurate work as unnecessary and showed stuff like your last test piece. Construction work.
Hi, I'm not going to get into the argument of is this necessary or the best way etc. I just wish I had the skills to sharpen and set a plain that accurately. Once they have the skill each can decide what works best for them, probably different methods for different projects. Personally I'm improving with the tools I use and a lot of that is due to listening to people like yourself on here. It's good to see the odd thread actually mention wood work now and then.
the "best way" for this because of the number of dead knots would've been a drum sander, I think - at least that's my opinion. I wanted to bull through it faster, but you can make a mess of breaking the knots and then they come out or are uneven on the surface with broken bits sticking out. I'm sure that I sized them some before this with a try plane or a giant cocobolo rough smoother that I have that's magic on this kind of work, but the knots were the hang up in this case.
As jacob said above, you could just break them out all over the place, go back and fill them (it would take about the same time) or you could spend about 10-15 minutes on each like this and then chamfer the corners and fill just whatever breaks out on the corners (some do).
It seems like unnecessarily thin shavings, but it's what the wood would allow. If it was bright and clear wood with straight grain, it would've allowed a lot more - I'll always go as fast and heavy as the wood will allow and started faster, but it made a mess of the dead knots combined with very soft grain behind them and this ended up being faster and just as pleasant.
Better wood would've been the best case, but there was a chance that this bed would get pitched. Daughter wanted a loft bed, but she's a sleep walker. She's managed it so far now for almost a year, but if she hadn't, it would've been thrown out. using cherry and a clear finish was ruled out by both the princess and the queen (that would've been my first choice). The sleep walk thing is also the reason for the cattle pen style top rail.
Comparing planing here, this wood is worse than something like curly maple -I don't plane much junk wood, so I wouldn't have known. Keeping the dead knots from breaking out into a spiky dirty mess is trouble. I posted this picture a few months ago of an 1840s or so English plane that I came across, setting the plane up and planing with the same kind of setup (thicker shaving) in curly maple.
Luckily, it's all a variation on the same theme - you go as fast as the wood will allow and the prep of the plane and then setup for use is kind of the same across the board. Whatever the wood allows, you go as fast and heavy as you can without battering elbows and shoulders, and then it's just work in rhythm.
There is a reason that most of this was done with a 4, though - pine is friction/sticky and once basic straightness was established, a bigger plane would've been more work and wasn't needed. This needs to be eyeball straight.
What I was really going for was a result where you couldn't easily tell that the posts were laminated (can't) or that the wood was really cheap (can't tell that either). The load bearing parts that are lateral are all yellow pine, which planed a whole lot more easily because all of the knots were live.
Despite jacob's uneducated comments above about what's easy planing and what's not, reality when you put nuts to the floor with hand tools is that some of the most spectacular lovely looking stuff isn't that difficult to plane cleanly, and it's the junk that makes a challenge.
And industrially, that junk, if used, would be done through an industrial drum sander. There's a guy about 45 minutes from me that I used before I learned to plane - he's got a beach 52 sander. It's magical. It's also three phase and would never fit in a normal house - three drums, all three oscillate and the last drum is something like 80 or 120 grit paper. It'll take 1/8th inch off of a 20" wide maple panel without much complaint and leave a sanded surface that just need a little bit of finer sanding. A half hour of time on anything you can haul will more or less get a sanded surface for an entire project like this for about 40 bucks.
But on the plane setup and set - no part of it is difficult, it's just getting a small amount of experience to do it a couple of times right and then it just becomes routine because you know what to feel and what to look for.
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Thanks for the answer. I think the thing I most need to improve is my sharpening, it's obvious that the plain you were using cuts like a razor, I have watched a few items on U Tube etc. and made some progress but still a way to go. Practice and more practice I think. The drum sander sounds like quite a bit of kit!
I counted the specs on the three motors - 7 1/2 horsepower on each of the first two drums and 5 on the third. Definitely not home shop approved!! you can imagine the size given that it's usable sanding width (even after oscillation) is 52. Would need appropriate dust collection (that was also three phase and to say it was hearing protection mandatory would be a huge understatement). A lesson in what one would do even in the 1950s when it was made vs. what we think is big home shop machinery. I know enough now to flatten and finish plane those panels in rhythm, but it still remains true that the beach can take five of those panels in about two minutes and get them to final thickness and ready for what more people would do - use a finish sander. Brute force fine work, if there is such a thing -and already "antique" by decades. The same shop had a 30" jointer, and I have no clue how wide the thicknesser was. All of it "out of date" machinery.
As far as the sharpening goes, if there's anything i can explain to make that easier - the process to sharpen the iron used in the pine pictures is about one minute, including time to remove any damage. It's a little bit prescriptive but it has to be to give good clearance, certain completion, excellent sharpness, and then resisting damage on the knots (they're dry and some are dirty). It gets away from the "make it simple and don't learn any more", but once you go one extra step and make each component simple, then the whole process becomes extremely easy and there's a lot of margin to execute it. It's fast and cheap - and can be used on all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with woodworking.
Fast and completed properly every single time without too much thought, deliberation or concentrating are very important, just as the right 20 minutes of preparation of a new (used) plane are, and using the cap iron right. Those three things make good hand tool work far easier and it just becomes exercise, and very pleasant. I remember wearing noise canceling headphones and doing this planing shoving the shaving off to the side at the start so that it would lay out predictably. probably 10 minutes of planing and 1 minute of sharpening, back and forth in a rhythm (the planing fairly short time interval thanks to hard knots, but just sharpening to 30 degrees or something would've made the planing interval about a minute).
