Where did the knowledge about the capiron get lost?

[Trafalgar]

I've seen rank beginners handle a plane with more aplomb. If it were not obvious this was earnest attempt, I would swear I was watching a parody of the process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hylKg_7ZvY

Anybody not aspiring to something much more elegant than this should consider another hobby.

Honestly painful to watch.

The plane is skipping and juttering, taking a shaving barely a quarter of an inch wide on one pass and then too wide on the next. It's a total mess. If you think this is what competent hand planing looks like (regardless of the cap iron 'stuff') you are sorely mistaken.

 

[D_W]

Choosing a stick of ash that wasn't prepared probably wasn't a great choice for a smoother, but I'm not applying "impress charlie" standards to the videos. The point of that one has more to do with jamming as thick of a shaving through the cap iron to show that you can't produce tearout if it's set right.

Perhaps the "smoothing without marks" video suits you better, where I wasn't pushing anything or trying to demonstrate extremes, just doing routine smoothing.

(I've got more painful to watch videos if you're just looking to criticize, I'm sure you can find them. i don't generally retake videos unless something is literally out of the screen or someone in the house ends up in them and doesn't want to be in them).

if it doesn't suit you charlie, i'm not much worried about your opinion. What are you going to do, go to someone else's page and show me yet another link of someone else's work?

Where's your work?

 

[Trafalgar]

David, I'm seeing what I'm seeing and you always have some excuse. The cap iron article without a payoff photo of the completely planed board and now the video whose purpose is to show how to set a cap iron and then use the plane. Ash isn't always the easiest species to plane, I'll grant you that, but the piece you were planing didn't look that bad in the portions of the video that showed the grain of the wood. That video in no way, shape, or form shows a competent effort in wielding a hand plane on any species. It just doesn't.

Why wouldn't you have planed the piece ready for the smoother before you shot the video? None of this makes sense, just like the bit about the Woodcentral article makes no sense. Somebody was in a hurry, a crucial part of the process was done haphazardly, by someone else, or not at all, perplexing at best.

 

[D_W]

David, I'm seeing what I'm seeing and you always have some excuse. The cap iron article without a payoff photo of the completely planed board and now the video whose purpose it to show how to set a cap iron and then use the plane. Ash isn't always the easiest species to plane, I'll grant you that, but the piece you were planing didn't look that bad in the portions of the video that showed the grain of the wood. That video in no way, shape, or form shows a competent effort in wielding a hand plane on any species. It just doesn't.

Why wouldn't you have planed the piece ready for the smoother before you shot the video? None of this makes sense, just like the bit about the Woodcentral article makes no sense. Somebody was in a hurry, a crucial part of the process was done haphazardly or not at all -- makes no sense.

Go look at the other video I referenced, Charlie. I take one take on a video because I expect to take the video, upload it and be done. Not take several hours taking various takes. I don't remember what the problem was with that stick, but it probably wasn't that straight because it was an offcut. If I did a second take, I would've set the cap iron slightly less far back, but I was guarding against tearout and in combination with that taking the thickest shaving I could take with the setting so that nobody would say "that looks like a thousandth and you won't get tearout with a shaving that thin, anyway, because it doesn't have enough strength to lift". I'm pretty sure I said that in the video somewhere.

In the context of a piece of dimensioned wood that is fresh and straight, I've planed still much thicker shavings than you'd finish plane on quartered beech in the video I referenced. You can go look at it, perhaps it's a more accurate display of smoothing than picking up a piece of ash that was a table saw offcut and that had a couple of months to twist or do whatever. I expect you'll twist this some other way, too, but go ahead, Charlie. I haven't ever learned anything from you, and I don't expect that will change.

I don't have this insecurity that you must have where I am afraid of any possible criticism from something, or the need to go back and keep correcting. If I was that insecure, I'd take the other video down, but what am I afraid of - peoples' judgement? Come on. What I would be afraid of is spending hours and hours making videos if I didn't take them in one take, something that you may notice, I don't have any ad revenue turned on, and by far the biggest point of the channel has been documenting how the inside parts of a double iron plane are laid out and made. That's done, and I don't have much else to prove.

Same deal with the article which probably took a combined write and edit time of 8 hours. I'm not going to spend another 8 arguing with people to make it perfect. Anyone who wants the information can take it and run with it, and plenty of people have.

You want to add something positive to the discussion, I'll respond from now on. You want to cherry pick stuff from me and propose fallacies, then I won't.

 

[Carl P]

CStanford & D_W, I've learnt a lot from both of your posts at various times, so with respect to both of you, perhaps pm's would save a great deal of tedium on the behalf of other forum users, and a possible diminishing of said respect.

Cheerio,

Carl

 

[D_W]

Duly noted, Carl. I certainly would also like no more and will do my part in making it zero from this point on.

 

[pedder]

Let me beat this horse one last hit. (hammer) (hammer)

I think the knowledge was never gone. Some people just didn''t walk the last step in mind.

Did you ever read any of the instructions for a card scraper?
In every instruction is written: Why do they work so well?
Because the burr makes them look and work like a very fine set smoothing plane.

Ever looked at a burr at a card sraper? If so, you know how a fine setted smothing plan has to look like.
(The same thought just being thought in the other direction.)
So everybody how knew how to set up a card scraper, had the potential knowledge to set up a smoothing plane.
Maybe they just didn't walked the last step. But the knowledge was there even without the video.

That being said: I prefer the card scraper over a fine set smoothing plane.
I get much faster to the goal. To get the setup with a plane iron and a chipbraker (sic!) is much more difficult.

Cheers
Pedder

 

[DennisCA]

Had some time to look at my plane, also at the Kato video, very informative. My plane doesn't have a bevel at the inside of the mouth, and the mouth is too small to get a file through. I suppose I will leave it alone as I don't see a way of accomplishing it.

Filing the cap iron to get an 80 degree angle seems like a useful modification that is more easily accomplished.

I should perhaps look at my 3½ smoother instead for further modifications and let the 5 be for coarser work. Also have a 4 of swedish make I could tune a bit.

 

[Jacob]

........ I prefer the card scraper over a fine set smoothing plane.
I get much faster to the goal. To get the setup with a plane iron and a chipbraker (sic!) is much more difficult.

Cheers
Pedder

But getting a perfect finish with a plane is a challenge, even if it is otherwise pointless and impractical!

 

[pedder]

People who work with difficult grained wood obviously need one extra fine tool for the last step.

It maybe a fine setted plane or a scraping plane or a card scraper or sand paper.
More or less a matter of taste.

 

[swagman]

http://planetuning.infillplane.com/html ... aking.html
http://planetuning.infillplane.com/html ... ngles.html
http://planetuning.infillplane.com/html ... sults.html
http://planetuning.infillplane.com/html ... ation.html

Source of information; http://planetuning.infillplane.com/index.html

 

[D_W]

Here is the second video I was referring to:

https://youtu.be/Uc02mxDhX6A?t=1m50s

Perhaps more typical because it's with a stick that has just seen the try plane. Charlie is right that I didn't do my due diligence in setting up for the other video if the intention is to make it look easier.

Jacob's right, it may not be necessary, but I guess it's a challenge, and in context it's often faster and preserves crisp lines.

Anyone who has ever watched Larry Williams smoothing with a 55 degree smoother will note that he skews it to avoid tearout.

The whole notion of what is going on in this video, boring that it is, is that finish planing (truly finish, can apply finish afterwards) is something that is easily done with overlapping through strokes if you don't have to contort a plane everywhere. It's an exercise of something that warren said, that if you can't plane a board with through strokes just pushing the plane forward, something is wrong. Beech is not generally difficult wood, but willy nilly planing of the quartered side does result in tearout.

The rest of the video is a diatribe about something that I think gets short shrift (the idea of using a single washita stone to sharpen) and can be ignored.

I can count on any debate with Charlie to result in picking of selective material, and of course the above wouldn't have been referred to because there's nothing incompetent about it. So be it.

 

[Trafalgar]

From Steve Elliot links:

"To test the effect of a much higher cutting angle, I honed a 12º back bevel on a blade and used it in a plane with a bed angle of 47½º. On a difficult piece of Bolivian rosewood, it gave the best finish I’ve yet produced on that species. "

 

[Trafalgar]

David, you lost me at "I forgot what plane I was using."

I could be that woodworking instruction just isn't your thing, or that the presentations need tighter editing.

Search YouTube for Chris Tribe's videos if you want to see what a solid presentation from an extremely competent craftsman looks like. He is worth watching. You, unfortunately, are not.

 

[D_W]

Charlie, I am not a woodworking teacher and have no interest in being one. Several people requested planing without leaving marks and I made a video (one requested seeing the sharpening, which has a lot to do with planing without marks).

The material part of the content is quite good - in one take with no editing as usual. It might seem haphazard, but in this case, it is the chance to make a video to respond to a request or but down gobs of text that don't do a very good job of explaining what's shown in the video. It does the job well, better than a forum where the first response is "no you can't", leaving whoever asked the question wondering who is right.

If I was promoting something, I'd certainly clean up the garage and bench. And turn on google ads as I've forgone a couple of hundred bucks of ad revenue. In putting up unedited videos, I don't think it's appropriate for me to expect someone to sit through an ad, and i'm generally against that sort of thing when I'm using youtube (aside from the double iron plane thing) as a method of responding to questions.

I don't know yet if it's a good medium to *ask* questions, but I'm going to test that out, too.

 

[ED65]

People who work with difficult grained wood obviously need one extra fine tool for the last step.

Many old books do emphasise that you should get the wood as smooth as you reasonably can with the smoother (even if they don't go into quite enough detail how that's done!) and then go to the scraper or a scraper plane to solve any stubborn areas of tearout. Or to work the whole surface if it's just one of those pieces of wood.

It's easy to gain the impression that it was rare that this would be needed, and looking at old furniture for support you can see in a lot of cases that little of the wood used would have been any great challenge to smooth by plane for an experienced user.

 

[ED65]

David, you lost me at "I forgot what plane I was using."

I could be that woodworking instruction just isn't your thing, or that the presentations need tighter editing.

Search YouTube for Chris Tribe's videos if you want to see what a solid presentation from an extremely competent craftsman looks like. He is worth watching. You, unfortunately, are not.

Perhaps you missed this from the previous page so allow me to bring it to your attention:

CStanford & D_W, I've learnt a lot from both of your posts at various times, so with respect to both of you, perhaps pm's would save a great deal of tedium on the behalf of other forum users, and a possible diminishing of said respect.

Cheerio,

Carl

 

[Trafalgar]

Lots of woodworking videos on YouTube of varying quality. If one **chooses** to self-publish there and then posts links on various woodworking forums pointing potential viewers to the videos, then comparisons and critiques are inevitable. True for anybody, not just David.

ED65, thank you but I read Carl's post yesterday.

Didn't The English Woodworker post a series of videos (or a couple at least) on cap irons and planing without tear out, planing in general too?

His stuff is usually very well done, fwiw.

Here's one from another fellow that looks promising. I've teed it up to watch later:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id2XeZ2TD5Y

 

[D_W]

Lots of woodworking videos on YouTube of varying quality. If one chooses to self-publish there and then posts links on various woodworking forums pointing potential viewers to the videos, then comparisons and critiques are inevitable. True for anybody, not just David.

ED65, thank you but I read Carl's post yesterday.

So, of all of the stuff I've said about the cap iron, i will take it that you've got nothing in rebuttal at least to this small display where a finish surface comes off of a fat shaving. Something that wouldn't occur with a single iron plane. In furniture work, you would take one more thin shaving after the fat one to get a brighter surface. It still takes less time than anything else if conditions allow, because even if you sand or scrape, you have to plane first, and if you sand, you will have to put twice as much finish on the wood and deal with a lot more grain raising.

I was hoping to have something bigger on the bench to plane a larger surface to show the same, but the biggest thing I'm likely to encounter in a continuous surface in the next 6 months is door panels, and they're cherry and easier planing than quartered beech. Someone requests demonstration of something (in this case, including sharpening since that has a lot to do with leaving no marks) and I make it.

I keep two 4s, by the way, because once in a great while you may drop one (in the past 4 years, I dropped one by accident and it broke). It's very uncommon that two are on the bench like that (because it makes it hard to remember which one was sharp), but it's not worth reshooting a video over when you literally are not making videos to promote anything.

I can't imagine how long it takes to shoot good videos and edit them, but I sure wouldn't do it if I had to do that. To answer a question in this format, it takes video time plus about two minutes to harvest the file and upload it. It keeps me from referring to other peoples' hypotheticals. Or dealing with the instant "you can't finish straight off of the plane, there are lines on the work and chatter marks" that I have always gotten every time I've explained what's in the video.

Perhaps you can set up a phone or camera and record something that someone would find useful. It's free to do.

 

[Trafalgar]

Like I said David, maybe video just isn't your medium. I don't know. Nobody is making you do any of this stuff. I don't for one moment think it's easy. Your videos are a reminder of this. It isn't easy and I doubt they show you in your best light. I applaud your courage.

You ought to talk Warren, your mentor, into letting you shoot a video of him giving a presentation on the cap iron. We've heard so much about him I think it would be very well-received, don't you? Maybe it would be worth of a professional videographer. Perhaps Ellis could help?