Puzzzling grind on a Lee Valley Cap Iron

Don't deny.....

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

....that occasionally someone comes along that wants to build finely made furniture. Hand planes are eschewed because of unanticipated tear-out. Then he/she learns from a woodworking Forum that proper application of the cap iron vastly improves the reliability of the hand plane, if not for planing show surfaces, at least the myriad of fitting tasks that result in fine joinery.

Companies that sell stuff often also give away the knowledge to use their stuff. If you call the tech service department of Franklin glue company you have access to the millions of dollars of research they have done on using their glue. What might I have gotten had I called tech service at LV and asked how to adjust the useless cap iron they provided.

I am trying to imagine why cap irons are the exception to this business practice. The plane companies should be teaching their customers how to use their product, not making it difficult. LV and LN could do more to advance cap iron knowledge than we could hope to. Apparently it is in their interest not to.

create some spring....tell us how

Re:  create some spring....tell us how

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

Easy peasy.

Clamp the chipbreaker in a steel vise (such as a metal work vise). Position it where you want it to curve. Make sure that it is perfectly square in the vise. Now just a few taps of a hammer will add a little bend.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Handplanes that work.

Mark Hennebury

Supersurfacers are handplanes with a power feeder. They have a knife and a back-knife/ chipbreaker or whatever you want to call it.

Marunaka, Makita, hitachi, Ryobi, Heian, Takekawa, Showa, Shinx Etc ...... Have been making them for many years, Marunaka i know have made them since the early 70's.

They work. They don't need to be modified.

They function exactly like handplane.

So it is nothing mystical.

If you manufacture the plane correctly, it will work.

The samples below are a wide variety of woods finished with a supersurfacer. The Birdseye and curly maple are "baked" and harder than normal maple.

All the machines come ready to use.

All the machines need no modifying to make them function.

All of the machines have complete detailed instructions on setup, tool geometry, tolerances for regrinding and sharpening.

There is no guesswork needed.

Not a single machine has a single knife Bevel UP system!

They all employ chipbreakers.

They all work.

Re: Handplanes that work.

Barry Irby

Modern application of ancient tech. I have never seen one of these machines, but I was thinking about them as I read about hand planes.

Re: Handplanes that work.

David Weaver

Good point, mark, and I noticed that the machines (the older ones, that is) that use straight knives and have an adjustable chipbreaker are quite capable of planing figured material without doing damage.

When the spiral insert heads came about, that sort of solved the issue, but at a cost.

My case study friend above had a delta DC580 (has, I guess). He bought a head for it for about $1200. Not ungodly expensive for a machine of that size. The surfaces he got on it with the original cutters were awful, pulling dimples out of curly maple and tearing wood up in general. I didn't ever look at the thing, but I can't imagine it didn't have an adjustable chipbreaker to solve that.

The old machines did. The makers probably just thought it was common sense.

Re: Spring the chipbreaker

David Weaver

Hi, Derek - you can get used to that spring pretty easily. I like them better than the slab type and don't have that happen now.

The older planes tend to have a little bit of personality, but so do the new ones. That meaning that I generally set my cap iron with finger tightness, adjust and then screw it home tight. Things may move a couple of thousandths. On a stanley plane, they may get slightly tighter.

On the LV custom plane I had, the cap iron when cinched tight would actually pull away from the edge a little bit (so it's not really an issue of old planes having that personality and new ones not).

Repetition brings familiarity.

The only cap irons I've really hated are the monstrously sprung type that come with emmerich planes (and then mujingfang copied that into theirs). They can be set, but they're crude to say the least.

Of all of the planes I've ever bought, the emmerich type with primus promised the most and delivered the least. Supposedly improving every flaw with a stanley plane, but proving to be a pain in the ass.

The older continental planes with the more vintage style irons and caps are a joy to use if you like the iron where they are, and I have two of those. They cost a fraction of the modern makes (their irons are better, too).

Anyway, if there is an issue with the stanley cap at all, it's that when you get to the uber hard woods that are really stiff, they can make it under the cap easier. I think that may occur in anything that's on the order of 3k hardness, especially if the hardness comes in layers (like planing the flat face of cocobolo - the late wood is ungodly hard sometimes, even if the early wood isn't).

Not many people do much planing of that. It's no treat to plane any significant amount of it with a high angle plane, either, but I have made a couple of planes and guitar necks from rough billets and it's fine.

Re: Disclaimer....

David Weaver

Harsh!

I think they are doing what Gibson did with their guitars. They're giving the market what the market wants.

Mark, you stand out in my mind because when I went on a bender to figure out how to use the cap iron (because of how miserable it was to dimension wood by hand without it), I wasn't smart enough to go look at old literature and read. I just figured it out. Then the K&K video came out almost right after (bill sent me an email and said "I have something i think you'll like to see".).

What stands out in my mind is that you were the only other person other than warren who showed up with significant evidence of having used the cap irons on planes heavily, and I liked your flippant attitude about it "hey, it's just common sense!!".

It's hard for me to gauge what other people will tolerate, i've pissed off a lot of people droning on about the cap iron, but I wouldn't be woodworking still if I was using machines (i'm disorganized, and it's boring to me - I need that physical element) and I wouldn't be dimensioning wood (and thus woodworking) if I hadn't learned how to use the cap iron. In a world of drum sanders and spiral head planers, etc, I'm sure it's easy to do without. But, dimensioning taught me more about smoothing than smoothing ever taught me about smoothing, just as sawing wood from rough and getting comfortable and building neurons made cutting tenons quickly and without reservation happen a lot faster than just cutting tenons would have.

I pay attention to your posts when you write, though, like a trawler dragging a net looking for something to catch.

I think that you are confusing *LINK*

Mark Hennebury

Supersurfacers with thicknessplaners.

A supersurfacer has a fixed blade like a handplane.

If you want to see one that i put together a few years back check out the link. Its was a big double machine that i cut in have and modified into two separate machines, if you tough it out to the end of the video, you will see the knife, and back-knife and see it working.


Supersurfacer video

I am a lot nicer....

Mark Hennebury

On the internet that i want to be.

There are a lot of "teachers" and "experts" around these days. some days i get a tad upset that they don't know what they are talking about.

I always loved using handplanes, loved working with, tinkering and tuning them up. I used to teach woodworking classes in my shop back in the 80's the class that i enjoyed most was the handplane class. Were we would spend 3 hours a night once a week for 8 nights, lapping the soles, filing the throat opening, filing it with a slope to the front to make room. fitting the chipbreaker, setting the frogs, sharpening the blades, then the last night making shavings, The pure joy that the students found in making a nice shaving was just awesome. They would be showing each other the shavings and carefully rolling them up to take home, to show to their family, who i sure must have thought that they were crazy.

It is how people should learn woodworking.

Isn't it grand that Ellis provides us a place!

Re: I think that you are confusing

David Weaver

Not confusing the two but figured someone might use a supersurfacer to do some dimensioning with them.

Sorry, i misunderstood.

supersurfacer shavings and video *LINK*

Mark Hennebury

You can make some pretty fine shavings with the machines, i did on occasion play to see how fine.

The video is a really nice professional one, well worth watching.


Supersurfacer 2

You got that right!