steve voigt
Every once in a while, someone comes out of the woodwork to say "I knew about chipbreakers all along." But funny thing, when you go back and look through the archives, you find exactly zero posts by those people advocating the use of the chipbreaker for tearout, or explaining how to use it. If people who knew how to use the CB were on forums in 2007, they were remarkably quiet about it. Except for Warren.

It's easy to roll the tape back to 2007 (or earlier), here or on any other forum. I'll link to an example below. The only two people advocating for double iron were Warren and Todd Hughes. A handful of other people acknowledged that it worked, but denied that it could be practical in actual use. And most folks simply denied that it worked.

The thing about the double iron is that it's so powerful and useful that anyone who "got it" would want to shout that news from the rooftops. It's simply not believable that there were people participating on forums who knew about the double iron but chose to stay silent about it, especially considering that there was no shortage of advocates for high angles, tight mouths, thick irons (lol), scraper planes, etc. One could say the same about the various woodworking "gurus" of the era--their silence about the double iron is deafening.

Of course there were craftsman who didn't participate in forums who knew about the double iron. Richard Maguire told me how he learned it from his Grandfather, who would've learned from someone trained in the 19th century, probably part of an unbroken chain going back to Nicholson's time. I think it's incorrect to argue that the knowledge was ever truly lost. But in general, consider me extremely skeptical of claims from those who say they knew it all along.