Adam's new A&M column

Re: Adam's new A&M column

Mick Foley (Berkeley, CA)

>John -

I don't what what Adam was thinking, but I can guess: I recently glued up a tool cabinet that is 48" x 30" x 14" with dovetails at each of the corners. I did try to get the worst of the wind out when planing, but by no means did I get it all out. When I glued up, I had to push a little to get the joint lined up - I was probably 1/4" - 1/2" off - caused by the wind. However, the boards are long enough that it took almost no pressure to line things up. Given that, I suspect that what Adam is saying is that craftsmen back then really learned when accuracy counts and when it doesn't. In the case of long boards held with dovetails, removing the wind would take a long time and thin the boards for something that a few pounds of presure would fix otherwise.

One of the things that I have found most interesting/challenging as I learn hand tools woodworking is when something is good enough. Adam's article hits that, as does Mike Dunbar's sharpeninig article in the same issue of PW. In a world of machines where every surface can be milled within 1/1000", that knowledge has faded.

Just my $0.02, Adam may have had a completely different reason for writing that.

Mick

Re: Adam's new A&M column

Adam Cherubini

>Mick's got the right idea about the first question. You can just pull out both cup and wind with dovetails. That's their advantage really. I'll talk more about this 2 articles from now.

With the second question, I don't tend to use a curved plane iron for long joints-

Ya know, I haven't had great success with the few long edge joints I've done with hide glue. I really prefer PVA for a big long joint. But now that you mention it, maybe my problem has always been that I DO use a straight bladed jointer. Had I used a curved blade, I may have had the room I needed for hide glue.

So I'm sticking woith the answer I'm giving you since that is my experience. But I'm not sure its the right thing to do. How's that?

Adam

Re: Adam's new A&M column *LINK*

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>As Jeff Gorman explained it, using the blade with camber gets you to flat, so the actual joinery end result is the same. No?

Pam


Jeff Gorman's cambered blade use

Re: Adam's new A&M column

Adam Cherubini

>I don't see how a curved blade will ever produce flat. You'll always have high spots and low spots. I think Jeff was talking about achieving square. If I run my try plane right down the center of an edge, I'll see the little dip when I check the edge with my try square.

One thing that stands out in my mind on Jeff's article is his .004" camber. I probably have 10 times that amount. And that may explain a lot.

Adam

2nd issue

John Hoffman

>Yes, but you are saying that you run the center of the plane down one edge to get a wedge shaped cut. So I am thinking that you must switch the mating board end for end so the opposing wedge cut will mate with the first wedge?????

Regards from sunny warm Indiana

JH

Re: 2nd issue

Dean J in MN

>My 2d --

I use differing techniques when sqaureing an edge vs. making a long glue joint. When I square an edge I use the cambered blade in my try plane to "fix" the high edge. When I want a long glue joint I match plane with a square edged joynter. So, no worries if the glued edges are sqaure to the face. It makes no difference as the angles will be complementary due to the match planing.

-Dean

Re: Adam's new A&M column

wilbur

>Having a camber on a plane will provide high spots and low spots. But the key is the degree of camber. Otherwise you would be able to use a scrub plane as a shooting plane.

With the slight degree of camber described in the article, you'll be able to get a planed surface that is flat enough for 18th century techniques, at least. :@)

Re: Adam's new A&M column

Warren in Lancaster, PA

>I think those who have trouble understanding this technique are greatly overestimating the amount of curvature that is necessary or desireable. If one is taking a .001 inch shaving and the shaving is somewhat thinner (say .0006} at the edge of the shaving than at the center, he can take advantage of that small discrepancy to make small adjustments in the edge being planed. As Wilbur suggests, we are not talking about big arcs here.

I once inadvertantly insulted a fellow on this forum. He said his irons were perfectly straight across and I asked "how perfect are they?" The truth is that it is difficult to get rid of every last bit of curvature on the edge, especially with hand methods, and that curvature shows up when taking thin shavings. I have not seen a Veritas jig in the Diderot Encyclopedia and I have not seen granite plates in 18th century cabinetmakers inventories. My hunch is that they did not flatten their stones several times an hour and that they had very small curvatures on their plane irons as well.

Re: Adam's new A&M column

Paul Kierstead

>I use Gormans technique to the letter (including the amount of camber); it was the only way I found to successfully and reliably joint. I usually use Hide glue for long edge glue ups, often without clamps or very short clamping. To put it in perspective: I have probably only done 25 or 30 smallish panels this way. I have had one failure, when my jointing was poor and I was impatient; without clamps, you really can't afford to have the edge convex. I will note though that I suspect you might not want such a joint hanging out in space; for example, it might not work well for a trestle table top where the under cleats do not go beyond the last join, if you follow my meaning.

Yeah, but . . .

John H. in Baltimore

>After cambered jointing, does anyone finish the edge off with a nice straight iron?

The jointer plane I use for edges (but not edge joints) has a pretty big camber. To take the hollow channel out of the edge, I take a few passes with my jack plane. I find it to be pretty easy. I just "ride the rails" which is somewhat analogous to the "skating" one does when honing a hollow ground bevel freehand.

Does anyone do this? The big camber helps with squareness. This technique may remove the edge's perfect linearity - but oh well. Also, I figure riding the rails saves me from the temptation to buy one of those edging plane gizmos.

BTW, for edge joints, I typically match plane with a straight iron. However, aligning and securing two big boards can be a drag (especially with my workbench). Does anyone here joint each edge separately? If so, I'd love to hear your perspectives on how to do this efficiently (e.g., camber or straight, jointer fence, etc.)

Man, I've asked a lot!

Regards,

John

Re: Yeah, but . . .

Paul Kierstead

>Sometimes I match plane (with a straight blade) and sometimes I do finish with a straight blade. Match planing definitely helps, I haven't seen that finishing regular jointing with straight blade helps all that much (or at all), might even hinder a little.

Re: Yeah, but . . .

Adam Cherubini

>After cambered jointing, does anyone finish the edge off with a nice straight iron? The jointer plane I use for edges (but not edge joints) has a pretty big camber.

See, I don't call that step or that tool jointing. The long plane with a cambered iron is a try plane in my book. And it should have less camber than your jack plane, but more than your smoother.

BTW, for edge joints, I typically match plane with a straight iron. However, aligning and securing two big boards can be a drag (especially with my workbench).

Yeah, one of my complaints with so many modern workbenches is their inability to perform this function efficiently. You need a bench that can support edge work. It often doesn't take much. But its amazing how many times folks skip this functionality.

Does anyone here joint each edge separately? If so, I'd love to hear your perspectives on how to do this efficiently (e.g., camber or straight, jointer fence, etc.)

I'll be interested in the responses to this as well. What you are asking is fairly difficult to do well and no fence is going to solve this problem. If you want an invisible joint, match planing is the easiest way to get it. Barring that, I'd be inclined to take advantage of the curved blade of the try plane. I could probably crush the edges a little to get a good joint. But I don't recommend this.

Adam

P.S. So jointers should be wide, long, and have a straight blade. Try planes should be long, but they may be narower and should have a curved blade.

Re: data

Adam Cherubini

>Hi Warren,

We had a LN rep come to our ww group last month and he talked a lot about .001 shavings, specifically getting all of his planes to produce .001 shavings. He felt that .001 was as rank as one could set an iron and not get the gutters and dawks Moxon wrote about.

So just to understand this issue, I just went into my shop and mic'ed some shavings. My try plane is putting out shavings in the .014-.025 region. The curvature of its iron is .040"

Moxon talked about curved irons on fore planes and said that they take a shaving the thickness of an old (worn) groat.

From my perspective, its helpful to have planes that do more than smooth. I need planes that remove wood fast. So just to put this in perspective, when I have a problem area that needs to be taken down, tho I may not get the board as flat, my planes will get me close enough 14 times faster than my LN rep.s.

Adam

Re: data

Warren in Lancaster, PA

>Adam, I perhaps went a little overboard on the numbers. I was speaking to those who were having trouble imagining getting a flat surface with the slight camber and emphasizing how little curvature we were talking about. I think that many of "perfectly straight" jointers still have enough camber to use this technique. Of course, the smaller the camber and the thinner the shaving, the finer the joint can be.

There are six or seven techniques that help control tearout. Don't ask me to enumerate them; I don't want to get in another fight. Many people master one of these techniques and claim it is absolutely the only way. The representative is right in that very thin shavings tend to keep you out of trouble, but one can certainly get tearout free performance from an L-N plane in a .01 or more shaving. I would agree with you that there is a lot of focus on very thin shavings, but that for people who are actually trying to get work done, a range of thickness is necessary.

Re: data

Paul Kierstead

>From my perspective, its helpful to have planes that do more than smooth. I need planes that remove wood fast. So just to put this in perspective, when I have a problem area that needs to be taken down, tho I may not get the board as flat, my planes will get me close enough 14 times faster than my LN rep.s.

Well, Adam, you do know you can adjust your planes to take a lighter cut when you get closer to flat, right?

I'll give you that the LN rep was nuts, and lots of us use planes for rougher work (I do all flattening and jointing by hand, from rough wood), but characterizing it as "my planes vrs his" is a little off-base I think. You could just as easily have "your planes" set to take a minuscule shaving and he could have his set rank.

In other fields I have often found reps to be poorly informed (after all, they don't make their living doing, they make it selling), and for LN to have a few that are poorly informed wouldn't surprise me. Beyond that, it would seem that a great many WWers (or at least on-line ones) do just use them for smoothing, so perhaps he is just sucking up to them.

Edge Jointing Separately

Jim Crammond in Monroe Michigan

>Paul and Adam,

I edge joint separately, never thought to much about why, it's just the way I was taught and it seems to work for me. It probably is not the most efficient way to edge joint, but then I'm not in that big of a hurry, I enjoy spending time in the shop woodworking.

I do the stock preparation, then lay the boards out on the bench to determine what I percieve as the best orientation as far as grain, figure etc. It never seems that all boards are oriented optimally as far as apperarance and grain orientation for planing but at times you have to accept compromise. I then mark the boards so they stay in the same relation during edge jointing and assembly.

Next I place a board in the vice and joint the edge so that it is square to the face and slightly concave (a thousandth or two over it's length). I check the edge fairly often with a straight edge and square. When I am satisfied, I do the same thing to the second board. There is a slight learning curve to this process, the first couple of times it can be frustrating because you can't get the board quite square and straight at the same time. After a little practice, it goes pretty quickly.

When I'm finished with the second board, I leave it in the vise and lay the first board on the edge of the second board in the correct orientation, I check the edge joint to see if it is sprung correctly and check to see if the two boards are flat with a straight edge. I then make any necessary corrections on the board in the vise. When the joint is correct, it is very stable, there is no rocking and it has a firm feeling to it. Then it's on to glue up.

Jim

Re: Yeah, but . . .

Wiley Horne--So. Cal.

>"...Does anyone here joint each edge separately? If so, I'd love to hear your perspectives on how to do this efficiently (e.g., camber or straight, jointer fence, etc.) "

____________

I do each edge separately. Partly because I don't like all the clamping or other fixing required for match planing. But mainly because handtool work is so enjoyable when you just get into a rhythm and get lost in it. With single boards, I don't have to stop and start, but rather can just get in the zone.

Efficiency? Like everything else in handtools, it's at least 98% practice. I use a combination of the two methods--putting the center of the plane on the high line, versus keeping the plane on the same line but biasing it toward the high line with your thumb. If starting with a roughsawn edge, which is typical, I will knock the big unevenness off with a jack plane (heavily cambered), and then work from the inside out a few strokes with a foreplane (moderate camber), and then switch to a 26" or 30" woodie jointer with light camber (in the thousandths) to finish up. The stroke is from the inside out--that's part of reading the shaving--and finish up with a long stroke. It doesn't take many strokes, though I don't count. The key skill to acquire is reading the shaving, as a control on both the squareness of the edge and correctness in the length.

In using the more heavily cambered jack and fore planes, you have to center the plane on the high line--there's no choice. When you shift to light camber, you do have a choice. When I get past the fore plane into the jointer, I just hold the plane upright on the centerline of the board, and bias its attack (if needed) with the thumb of my lead hand. Check squareness by the shaving and finally by looking for light under the blade of a 3" bevel-edge square. The shaving tells you everything about the board's profile in the length.

Well, that's for roughsawn. Sometimes you're working from a pretty clean edge--like when making drawer bottoms. I try to clean up my shorts pile when its time for drawer bottoms, and often those edgegs will be right clean from past encounters. In those cases, go straight to a light-camber plane, and just hold it square.

You can tell when the edge is good, because the two edges will go together on your bench top with a distinctive 'clack' and the joint disappears without pressure. If the joint doesn't disappear instantly, something is wrong--and you can see where, too, it's where you can still see the joint. Go back and find out which board has the bad place. Hit it a lick. This won't happen much after you get about 5 minutes into the pile you're working on.

I use yellow glue for edge joints. Woodies make edge jointing a great pleasure. But mainly, it's about reading the shaving and practice.

Wiley

Re: data

Jamey Amrine in Ann Arbor

>Paul said: "Well, Adam, you do know you can adjust your planes to take a lighter cut when you get closer to flat, right?"

It's not all in the adjustment though. Especially when using wooden planes with no mouth or frog adjustment. If you use a plane for smoothing, you can't use it as a jack. The shavings I pull through my jack plane would never make it through my smoother: the mouth is too tight. My jack would never give me the surface finish that my smoother can. My planes seldom see adjustment. My smoother is tuned to pull a thin shaving that gives a good surface in the woods I work with (I couldn't tell you the thickness of the shavings, that is of little matter to me). My jointer pulls a little thicker shaving for the sake of work efficiency (and has a pretty straight iron at that, haven't measured the camber), and the jack is set for quick stock removal. It is cambered, but I couldn't tell you how much, except to say that it seems just about right.

I prefer to leave the calipers and mircometers in the cupboard and focus on the work surface and my methods. They tell me all I need to know.

so many "shoulds"

John H. in Baltimore

>Adam,

Thanks for the grin.

What if I told you my cambered jointer was 36" inches long -- would this take it out of try plane territory?

Because I use a scrub plane (gasp), my jack plane really isn't a jack -- it is merely a "small mouth, straight iron, ripple remover plane" Sorry for the confusion.

I am starting to think of your process as "cabinetmaking in the colonial anglo idiom." A fair characterization? Is there a better one?

Perhaps if you used a scrub plane, a large frame saw, or a plane with a horn, it would be cabinetmaking in the colonial anglo continental idiom. This was the practice of Hessian cabinetmakers brought over by the British to fight in the Revolutionary war :)

Thanks for keeping me straight!

-John

Re: data

Paul Kierstead

>I think you missed the point, which was that Adam implied he needed planes set rank to be efficient and that somehow barred using less rank ones; I was simply stating that his planes could be adjusted to correct this (as he well knows, but is avoiding mentioning). Of course, he could easily have additional planes (as he has pointed out himself, they are quite economical). I wasn't talking about smoothers nor the finished surface, but about how flat the result would be (this is the topic at hand).

I think you overstate the role mouth plays in non-smoothers, but that is a another topic for another day.

I didn't mention micometers or calipers and don't condone their usage under most circumstances.

Re: data

Paul in NJ

>Paul, I think you are missing the point. Ultimately the camber of the blade determines the thickness of the shaving. While you can set the blade in any plane for a thinner or thicker cut, when you make it thinner your are also make the shaving narrower. If you need to take thinner shavings, use a blade with less camber. So the progression is a lot to very little camber, fore (jack)plane - try plane - smooth plane, rough and wavy to smooth and level. The LN planes as demonstrated didn't have the correct camber in the blades to do the job they were designed to do.

Paul Dzioba

Re: data

Paul Kierstead

>I disagree with your cause and effect, but doesn't really matter. If someone wants to make a point about camber, then metal vrs. woodie, LN vrs. whatever and what rep said what is all a side issue, is it not? Why don't we just talk about camber? Why the strawmen?

I don't know if the LN planes were set up incorrectly, because I don't know what job they were set up to do. I expect they were all set-up to give the best possible surface (hence the 0.001" remark), as that is what impresses most people in a demo. If that was the target job, it was probably set-up correctly.

What bothered me about the original post (and I seemed to have communicated very poorly) is that it seems to take issue with *something*, I am just not sure what, and it seems to mix up the whole "my planes" vrs "the LN reps planes" with it, and then mixes in camber, rank of setting, mouth, method of work and goals of the user. Adam is probably just wandering off on a rant, and I accept that, I even understand the rant, but the balkanization that pervades this group really ticks me off somedays, so I tend to slide towards rant myself....

Re: data

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>balkanization that pervades this group really ticks me off somedays

Care to elucidate?

Pam

Re: data

Paul Kierstead

>Naw, I'm just agitating, plus it would serve no real useful purpose (I should learn to keep my mouth shut), plus it has been a lot better as of late (though sadly quiet).

What is worse, I really shouldn't be picking on Adam; I have learned some *really* good lessons from him, look on his work with admiration and have a lot of respect for him. Or maybe that is why I get agitated when he says something I disagree with :)