Lie-Nielsen Blades

Re: Lie-Nielsen Blades

Frank D. in Montreal

>Hi John,

Others might give you better advice, but if the hump on the back of the blade is too high to take out by ordinary lapping (or a reasonable amount of it), I would ask Lie-Nielsen for a replacement. Blade manufacterers are supposed to produce flat or slightly concave backs. Lie-Nielsen really stand behind their products so I would email them and explain the problem. You probably have a dud that they would replace without hassle.

Frank

A few comments

jim_reed@marietta

>Sounds like a bad problem. Did it get out of the factory or did it happen after the blade was shipped? If you get the back flat, it will probably perform well. LN blades function so well because they are thicker and because they are heat treated better than originals. Both serve to cut chatter. I doubt that loss of .005 worth of thickness would increase chatter that you could measure.

Re: Lie-Nielsen Blades

Russell Seaton

>If the hump is up the blade aways, away from the edge a reasonable distance, then you can just grind it out and not flatten everything else. Take one of those grinding stone points and put it in a drill and grind the hump away. Sort of like a Japanese blade. In Hack's plane book he mentions flattening blades this way by grinding the high spots out.

Back-bevel it

WoodburnBob

>John, don't feel bad, I've spent countless hours putting domes on what I wanted to be flat. It's really a pretty instructive challenge from which to learn. Just getting a new blade is perhaps too easy a solution. And, I don't see why, as others suggest, LN would give you another blade because of your imperfect "polishing" technique.

I am curious if it's a new LN plane or just a blade you're fitting to an old Bailey plane. Either way, I take it the blade face was flat until you began "polishing", as all the LN blades I have are precision surface ground to well less than 0.001 flatness. I assume that by vigorously "polishing" (grinding, stoning, lapping, whatever) you were able in time to put a dome on the blade face (by gradually knocking off more and more of the corners and edges). This is what is expected if you think about it. Right? Alas, the sin of imperceptible rocking!

I think your blade thickness issue is completely irrelevant; you were right on target when you labelled it a "selling point". But, you now have two problems: 1) how to hone the face edge without rolling it and 2) how to ensure a tight fit of the chip breaker across the width of the face. If you put the chip breaker on and hold it to the light now, there are large gaps of non-contact. Correct? Bad!

There are several solutions but I think the simplest is to put a 2 degree back-bevel on the blade. It would change your cutting angle from a nominal 45 degress to 47. If anything this will work in your favor. The tangent of 2 degress = 0.035. A $0.25 piece is about 0.070. Scotch-tap a quarter two inches up from the edge of the blade and sharpen in an "X" or "8" motion. Be very wary of how you are applying your downward pressure: avoid rocking at all cost. Try it. What have you got to loose.

Re: No Big Deal

Todd Stock

>Get it flat within a quarter inch or so of the cutting edge - if the chipbreaker fits, you should not have any other problems. Work the first inch or so of the blade on a diamond stone or a coarse (220) water stone should do it.

Note: polishing just the last quarter inch or so of the blade is essentially creating a fraction of a degree back bevel.

Now the big question: how did you manage to remove .005 worth of cryo steel? That stuff's hard, so it sounds like your mistake might just be someone else's technique.

Re: Lie-Nielsen Blades

John Hoffman

>My apology to all LN fans and the man himself for my lack of clarity. I was attempting to minimize my error. The blade iron came flat, in a mistaken attempt to polish it I used a Norton stone that was not flat and after hours made a real mess. I am going to send it back to LN and they said they would gladly grind it flat or sell me a replacement.

Thanks

Admiration!!!!

glh

>Unbelievable, I didn't think anyone on the planet was capable of admitting he/she actually made a mistake these days. (Although I have noticed that computers make a lot of mistakes these days.)If I were LN, I would send you a new replacement blade and a #8 just out of admiration.