Silly Japanese plane blade size question

Re: tight cheeks

Wiley Horne


>Thom,

My experience is in line with yours on each and every point. I have a question for you regarding the subblade on a Japanese plane....It is my judgment (and I have no other authority for this, which is why I'm asking your opinion) that what the subblade actually does is pretension the edge of the main blade, for added support on thicker shavings and/or dense wood.

Wiley

Re: tight cheeks

Thom D


>That is possible. It is certainly putting some pressure there though on an analytical basis it doesn't seem ideally suited to that: Pin is farther back than it needs to be, and blade is thinner at the edge, laminated, sharpened.

While I distrust applying explanations to other cultures that if transparent to me must be to them also. But... The Japanese woodworking culture of old derived certain things from China and had their opwn spin on them. Maybe they never really got the SB and evoled it with features like lamination which made sense to them but are out of proportion to the advantage they derived. Who knows. The avaerage Japanese wood choice seems so superior that it really doesn't require breaking as far as I can see.

I don't really know what the SB does, and I have never consistantly installed them. That is ging back over 20 years. This used to make me feel inadequate about that part of it, until I went to the seminar and found a lot of (more skilled) others felt the same way. I I had previous to then read similar thoughts on the Clark and Williams site. I now make my western planes without SB, also.

As you doubtless know the Japanese SB does amazing things to the shaving. Because it is independantly adjustible one can set it so the shaving takes off dead vertical without curl and falls on the planes' path. This is pretty easy to do, and an impressive trick. Something is happening, whether it improves the surface on the board I don't really know.

One thing I learned at the seminar is that the Japanese race plane guys use jigs to sharpen and microscopes to check their work. While tht isn't happening in my shop, it does raise the question of whether the modern world presents superior options in sharpening. Would one come out ahead ignoring the SB and just concentrating on sharpening and setting and fettling. I don't know but we are in our own uique world in terms of what makes sense in sharpening and species of wood.