Re: Listen to Frank! (LONG!)
William Duffield, on the Cohansey
>Don't get so tied up in your rulebook that you take the fun out of it. Especially, don't make it so competitive for the youngsters, because they won't be able to understand the rules, anyhow, so they won't understand what it took to win or to lose. You want to teach them woodworking, not how to be competitive, I hope. You can reduce the pressure on yourself by making sure that the value of the prizes is only nominal, or better yet, a little tongue-in-cheek. In the real world, the shavings end up on the floor, and it's the board that is left that is important. (Well, sometimes, my shavings are used instead of ribbon to decorate a present.) Another reason for an "attitude adjustment" is that in your envisioned contest, the contestants have no control over the condition of the surface from which they are going to take the shaving. The board's surface changes as it is used up. Each pass gets the blade closer to or farther from knots. You might even run into a bit of bird shot. The jointer that prep's the board for the next participant gets duller with each pass. Internal stresses are releaved as the board is worked, resulting in the board moving, which will affect the next participant. Some of your participants will be trained to smooth against a stop; others between vise dogs. Some will be trained to plane on a higher bench; some on a lower bench. Some will be used to sharpening on a machine or other setup that they cannot bring with them. Wood is a natural material. The only way to get around that is to plane MDF instead of wood. You cannot design a fair contest. If you insist on making the rules more complicated instead of less so, at least consider the following: Don't limit the competition to Bailey style bench planes. Since it is a smoothing contest, the board should be wider than the blade. Therefore, the thickness of the shaving at the edge should go to zero if the participant follows David Charlesworth's recommendations for a cambered smoother blade. If he don't follow DC's philosophy, then he had better have an alternative sharpening method that doesn't leave tracks. You are going to take off points for tracks and tearout, aren't you? You can argue rules ad infinitum and there will be people there who consider arguing about rules to be a noble sport. Don't give them the opportunity to waste their time and everyone else's time doing that instead of working wood and sharing woodworking skills.
Here are some alternate competetions/demonstrations that might be more interesting (in no particular order).
A. Bring your own set of planes, scrub, jack, jointer and smoother or whatever works best for you. Start with a rough sawn board. Make one surface flat and smooth. Nominate a panel of judges to decide which is best.
B. Start with a disassembled Bailey in a box and a prepped board in a vise. Time to assemble and take a full shaving. For more fun, you could open this contest up to low angle jacks and wooden smoothers.
C. Match joint two boards. Measure fit of joint, including minimum and maximum spring in middle. Feeler gauges and measured pressure from one clamp in the middle should be enough to demonstrate flatness.
D. Two stones, no jigs, dull blade. Time to get an invisible edge.
E. Using a jack, straight edge, square, marking gauge and knife, four square a rough sawn board. Time to completion wins, with tight limits on squareness and loose limits on smoothness.
F. Contestants brings his own tool box. Start with a pair of four square boards. Chop a mortise in the center of the edge of one. Cut a matching tenon in the end of the other. Demonstrate coplanar faces, assembly and disassembly with hand pressure (You should be able to put it together by hand, no mallet, no vise, but it should not fall apart due to gravity or even shaking the joint) and tightly fitting shoulders (no visible gaps at surface).
G. Contestant brings his own rip saw and jointer. Provide saw horses/saw benches and rough boards. Time to rip measured board and plane edge straight, flat and square. The results of this could be used for C. above.
H. Contestant brings his own crosscut saw. Time to crosscut a rough cut board.
I. Contestant brings his own tool set. Crosscut a prepared board. Judge for squareness in both directions and lack of chipout on edges. Results could be used for dovetailing contest.
J. Contestant brings his own tool set. Start with two prepared boards. Layout and cut a matching dovetail. Time results. Dovetail must be structurally sound.
K. Smoothing a gnarly board. All contestants bring their favorite nightmare board, something that they would use for testing the tuning of their own go-to smoother, of a certain size range, but sound with no knots, no shakes, no checks. Every contestant gets one of the boards by the luck of the draw, and smooths it. Then the guy who brought the board gets to try to make it better. One of them gets eliminated. Swap boards at random among the remaining half of the contestants and repeat, until only one is left. You will need a panel of judges, preferably retired umpires.
L. French polish one face of a short length of Borg construction grade 2x4.
M. Start with two prepared boards, two butt hinges and twelve brass screws. Judge on skill, with time only as a tie-breaker, for flush mortises, even gaps open and closed, no binding, etc. Contestant provides all other tools. Butt mortise planes, routers, chisels, and even routahs allowed, but for routahs, contestant must provide his own extension cord, find the outlet, lay out the cord and put it away again, put on and take off eye, ear and respiratory protection while the clock is running, and hinges with radiused corners are disallowed. We only want to make the contest fair.
N. Apply a decorative ogee (or thumbnail, or whatever) molding to the edge of a prepared board. Any tools you want to use, but the same handicap as above applies to routahs, and furthermore, all scalloped surfaces must be smoothed. Sandpaper is also allowed, but all manufacturer's recommended safety instructions must also be followed. To make it more interesting, and to give handicap points to those using hollows and rounds or a combination plane instead of a complex molding plane, reveal the specifications of the molding only at the start of the contest. If you want to teach the routah guys a lesson, specify arcs that are other than 90°, or that have unequal radii. Unless they brought their own machine shop with them, that'll blow them right out of the water. Judge on shape confirmation to specs, consistency and smoothness of surface, with time to complete only for tie breaker.
If you want to make your contests even more fun, bring in a couple of ringers e.g., Frank K. or Rob C. or Adam C. or even Norm A.), but don't tell anyone else beforehand who they will be competing against, or who will be heckling or cheering their efforts from the sidelines. The idea is to share and compare skills, tool sets, methodologies, etc. not to determine a winner. The only reason to make it a "contest" is to get everyone to pay attention and to get as much participation as possible, instead of just watchers.
Offer some consolation prizes or trophies. For example, our sailing club has a perpetual "turtle trophy" for whoever managed to turn his boat over the most times during the year. It's an upside down, busted rudder, with engraved brass plates attached every year. You might want to offer something like: "I found this at a flea market. Its got a bit too much rust to tell for sure, but I think it's a Type 19 Bailey bench plane. Might be a Victor. Should clean up just fine. The winner gets to take it home, make it work, and either write a review, post it on the forum of his choice and vigorously defend the review, or, as part of our ongoing handicapping system, he may instead elect to bring it back next year and use it in the competition."
Since you probably will not be able to find the time or the participants to do all the real world contests you and the rest of us can imagine, you should offer a proposed list well before the event, with a request for serious entrants. That way, you will know ahead of time for which contests you will actually need to schedule time for and prepare raw materials and tools and line up ringers. Make sure you tell your entrants at least a week before the get-together which proposed contests will actually be run. That way, they won't have to tune and tote a bunch of tools that they won't actually use. Also, let them know what kind and condition of wood they will be using. For joinery, I would suggest kiln dried board run tulip poplar, at least in this part of the world, because it's pretty cheap, fairly consistent and works well. For smoothing, you might want to make it a bit more difficult and at least use some curly maple. In any case, they will need to know how much set and how many TPI they will need in their chosen saws, and maybe the cutting angle of their chosen smoothers.
I hope it's clear enough what parts of this I wrote with tongue in cheek and what parts I am dead serious about.
One other thing: Don't allow some ringer or Dad or Mom to set up the tools for the kids. Let them adjust the planes, etc., themselves, or let them choose to use any tool used by any other kid participating in the contest. Teaching hero-worship is OK, but what we want to stress is self-sufficiency.