Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

Re: The other issue...

david weaver

If you do what warren is suggesting correctly, or should I say if you do correctly what warren is suggesting, I don't think there will be any detriment. The heaviest part of the shaving is the most likely to tear, but that is also where the cap is the closest to the surface.

I think if such a thing becomes suggested practice, there will be a lot of mangled cap irons, because most of the people reading aren't warren. I have a feeling I could do it without mangling (i'm sort of joking when I say that), but I'd have to have a reason and the reason is what i'm missing whereas the use of the jt brown single iron jointer gave me a TON of reason to see what warren was talking about with the cap iron in general.

Though I must not know as much as I think I do about the cap, because once in a great while, I get a message through youtube telling me that Chris Schwarz has some posts on it and I should go read them so I can learn about it. I've been getting those since June of 2012. As well as messages from my washita videos telling me that I can get a better edge with honing films.

Re: Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

TomD

"You know as well as I do, if you're having a discussion about any of this with someone who planes machine planer marks off of a board, they're not likely to grasp why any of it is really that important."

While we are on style (can I just pre-confess massive guilt), You are probably right that there are contrarians who always sound like they are on the negative, even if in reality they are just making a point from possibly considerable experience, and 10x the time in the seat. But there are also fan boys who are late to the party, over-emphasize their latest realization and then following the next synthesis will be in some completely new country for the following years.

The critics are more annoying I would imagine because nobody likes a critic, and setting the record straight is essentially less useful to the newbie population than setting a reasonable course. But fan boys bring it on themselves, like Columbus discovering the Americas, which had been inhabited for millennia, the guy who brings in the immigrant gets to re-write history. But you are going to get some blowback.

The idea as in the quote above that most guys who use planes only remove a few planer marks (not to mention how similar that is to removing minor tear-out), is ridiculous. There are whole crafts that regularly do far more than that: Green woodworking; bamboo rod making; lutherie by hand (still a commercial craft); timber framing; boat building; etc... And many of the big name authors who had the fancy books from the 70s, like Krenov.

The thing was that around 2002, there were all of a sudden all these influences for single bit planes. I went to my second Japanese plane making seminar, and they weren't terribly interested in breakers, which was cool, because it reassured me. But we had Clark and Williams and all the bevel up guys. Also people were rediscovering molding planes across a wider group of users. The point is that was a blip. I don't know where the majority of the craft is today, but for at least ten years, a lot of it seemed to go to single blade. For at least 100 years prior to that it was globally double bit, and for a lot longer than that in most places.

But all we get is this trash about the unique position of a few people; no reference to the impact of wood types in different crafts, as it critically depends on what you are doing to determine what you need to use; and a general ignorance of the history my lens (other than a minor amount from relatives in the craft) hits a wall around 1970, so I am guilty of all that too, just fewer around to complain.

Re: Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

david weaver

I am definitely guilty of only responding when I disagree with something. That seems to be the forum in general, or all forums. I think that's human nature, just as it's nature for some to not post their honest opinion because they want to be polite.

In terms of things that are a blip, I don't think the cap iron will be among them for anyone who is dimensioning wood by hand, but that isn't and won't ever be many people. I think it'll survive the fad issues unless hand tools go out entirely - and the reason I think that is because the cap iron originally pretty much eliminated the single iron plane. The old arguments on here were generally denial of that (including Larry's supposition that all of the single iron planes were better liked and consumed by use).

I, too, would like more substantive discussions from more other people, but from time to time I disappear for a period of months more or less for the same reason they do - I have other things I'd rather do with my spare time, or I'm just not interested.

My suggestion that Warren usually posts in disagreement isn't a supposition that I don't. I mention it because to a beginner, a troll does the same thing, but a beginner can't discern between a troll and someone who is disagreeing because they see something that's not true or likely not true. Many of us thought warren was the former, but we know that's not the case. People who stumble upon this board or another one where warren makes a post or two without too many specifics might come to the same conclusion initially.

I, for one, am thankful that warren posts no matter what he posts. I don't care if he calls me a buffoon and then offers up a nugget of information. I'll take what I can get. Really, if he just wants to call me a buffoon (not accusing him of doing that) and not offer up a nugget of information, that's fine, too.

I'd like to say if we didn't have contrarians on here that the board would be abloom with posts of all kinds of sharing, but we know from the past that in such a situation that, say, patrick and I aren't lighting it up (or in the old days, warren and larry with a 10/90 share, respectively), little gets discussed. That's unfortunate. If I draw heat for going way out there with specific topics, that's fine, I don't mind. If the moderators do, that's up to them, too.

Re: Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

steve voigt

Patrick, thanks for doing this. While I agree with an earlier comment that the tests done on forums are often not very enlightening, I think this is a good one. The variables are few, the situation is realistic, and you don't overreach, or compare apples to orange, or commit any of the multitude of other experimental sins that people fall into.

The interesting conclusion for me is the big increase in force. Thinking back to my experiments with cambered cap irons, that was probably the biggest deal breaker.

At the risk of stirring up trouble, I will point out that this doesn't prove that one can't set the cap iron below the sole with a cambered jack iron. The force of having a straight iron 1 mil below the surface is obviously greater than say having a heavily cambered iron 2 or maybe 3 mils below the surface at the deepest point. However, even if you haven't tested this scenario, I doubt the conclusion would change much.

Not really lighting it up

Patrick Chase

I for one would not describe this as "lighting it up".

We actually agree for the most part, though as you say posting about that is boring so we generally don't. In fact the degree to which the fundamentals of double-iron use are now broadly accepted, at least by this forum/community. I view this as a spirited discussion of a refinement about which reasonable people can disagree.

I get a chuckle out of the idea of people referring you to Schwartz' writeups on the topic. I have very mixed feelings about him. On the one hand I took a look at his new edition of "Handplane Essentials" and he's still confused on some of the details, and it was an epic struggle even to get him to move even that far. On the other hand he did eventually yield, and he adds a lot to our community by running Lost Art Press etc.

Re: Radius of cambered blade - some #'s

Patrick Chase

Yep, I was doing an admittedly nonrepresentative test with a straight iron just to get a better feel for the tradeoff space. As Steve alluded, one objective was to eliminate confounding variables. Should have been clearer.

FWIW I camber my roughing irons for somewhere between 1/64" and 1/32" of center extension when the corners are flush to the sole. For example the primary iron for my #6 (which I didn't use in this experiment) has a 16" camber radius, which yields about 1/32" cut depth in a 2-3/8" iron pitched at 45 deg.

Note that the equation you used doesn't take bed angle into account, which you need to do when determining the depth of cut corresponding to a given camber radius. It's pretty easy though - just divide x by sin(bed_angle), using the naming conventions in your post. Speaking of conventions, it's more common to have x be along the width of the iron and y be extension :-).

Correction

Patrick Chase

Previous post should have said:

"In fact the degree to which the fundamentals of double-iron use are now broadly accepted, at least by this forum/community, is remarkable"

Re: Correction

TM Stock

When I checked out of WoodCentral around 2007, this knowledge was something I took for granted...certainly common knowledge in the 1970's for anyone working with hand planes, which is when I must have absorbed it from the boat carpenters on the Eastport side of Spa Creek. Not sure how something becomes arcana so quickly.

Remarkable restraint

Warren in Lancaster, PA

You can call me a contrarian if you want, but I think I have shown remarkable restraint on this curved cap iron issue. I must have had thirty chances already to comment on this, but did not engage until eight days ago when Patrick asked me point blank what I did. [Do you profile your cap irons? 10/13/2017]

Larry Williams was actually the first to bring up this issue around 2008. He had not read Kato very carefully and was under the mistaken impression that the cap iron had to be within .004 of the edge to be effective. He suggested that for a cambered iron, the cap iron would then have to overhang the edge at the corners. Larry thought he had read Nicholson, but he had not read that carefully either because he completely missed the part where Nicholson addressed this issue. If Williams had engaged me directly I probably would have straightened him out at that time.

For nine years I held my tongue on this and the thanks I get is suggestions about being argumentative, trolling, contrarian. Remarkable.

Re: Remarkable restraint

Kevin Adams

Hi Warren,

We have corresponded privately over the years as I was seeking your advice. I just wanted to comment here that history has shown, and I mean like recorded history, that often times the world or certain people are simply not ready to hear something that they cannot understand because it is so different than what they were led to believe. And for some, “led to believe” means they read it only and perhaps never experienced it themselves or even tried it. There’s nothing more you can do except to continue doing what you do and decide to keep speaking up or show “remarkable restraint” in waiting for the world to catch up.

While you don’t need me to say this as my knowledge and skills will never come close to yours (and others that write here), I do want you to know that I owe you a debt of sincere gratitude for always being willing to share your knowledge over the years. In fact, I don’t get to follow these boards as much or have time to participate as I would like, so if there is only one response I read in a long thread it is yours. Because it is spot on, unvarnished, true, and done knowing that you will be open to criticism.

So thanks for all you do, I sure hope we can meet one day.

Kevin

Re: Remarkable restraint

david weaver

Warren, I'm not sure what you're looking for. I don't think there has been any lack of credit pointed toward you for pushing this topic (however subtle). I have literally mentioned you on forums that don't have members in this country, generally. Contrarian and argumentative from me are no slight if you have good material and experience - if someone can't learn something when they're proven wrong (and we often remember when we were wrong better than when we were right), that's on them. I guess the way we come across is often not the way we intend to, but I have gotten multiple PMs (perhaps a dozen) over the years from people who have asked the same "is Warren trolling?"

My response to that is "no, absolutely not. I thought it was possible when I first started reading these boards, too, but if you stick around long enough, you'll realize that's not the case".

No comment about larry and the overhang. His detailed responses poisoned me for about five years until I saw the limitations of the plane type he likes.

Let me say this, there are probably two people who have had a significant effect on my thoughts of woodworking and the fact that it has been the only hobby I've had that sticks:

1) you (in regard to the double iron, discussion of subtleties, liveliness in design and the lack of sanding - which for someone who had childhood asthma is extremely important in lieu of the desire to set up some absurd multi thousand dollar contraption of electric sucking noise making piping and fans)

2) George - in terms of design. The first saw I made looked OK. I still have it. It didn't look great. I had no clue who george was and thought he was a bit of a curmudgeon because he can spot a fraud from a mile away. He sent me a message and said "give me your phone number", which always makes me a little bit leery. He called, told me my saw could be better and how. Everyone else on the forum said "great saw, that's great" out of politeness or ignorance of how it could be improved. George spent about an hour talking to me about design-type items (crisp lines, proportions, etc) and while I felt a little bit beat up about it at the time (being moderately proud that my first saw was workable and decent), it didn't take long to realize how right he was.

Just about everything else I've ever read from anyone, I could take or leave. I have a great local friend who is precise and intelligent, but he is insistent on every single thing being done by machine - so I can learn from him, too - and that's what not to do. Both you and George are intelligent and accurate, and experienced. I haven't seen a lot of your work, but I could hardly guess it's anything other than exactly what it should be. George's work is easy to find - at least some of it is.

I have the opposite of you - lack of restraint. It's how I learn - repetition and refining, goading people into proving me wrong so that i can learn (many won't offer anything at all, otherwise). I can be friends with people I don't agree with, but I often notice that others don't agree with that. People who need exact step by step instruction float to my inbox, I guess, because of my reputation for word count and detailed discussion, and in regard to the dozen or so messages I mentioned above, they often say "Warren doesn't help me the way he describes things." They think the subtlety and one-and-done type of posting isn't spoonfeeding them like they'd like". My response to them is simple - "Warren will speak up when he sees something incorrect. It's best to listen to what he says, and you will get about half of what you need. The other half you will need to go to the bench and figure out, but it will be well worth the trouble. You will own the knowledge that you come by and the subtleties will be possessed above your own two feet, and when you learn to work that way, it will open a lot more doors and a lot better thought process than looking for the next list of bullet points to follow exactly."

I hope you think that's fair. To me, it's as it should be (ideal, etc, however you want to put it). Instruction from someone should do two things - point you in the right direction, and give you the chance to refine your own ability to learn.

Re: Correction *LINK*

steve voigt

Every once in a while, someone comes out of the woodwork to say "I knew about chipbreakers all along." But funny thing, when you go back and look through the archives, you find exactly zero posts by those people advocating the use of the chipbreaker for tearout, or explaining how to use it. If people who knew how to use the CB were on forums in 2007, they were remarkably quiet about it. Except for Warren.

It's easy to roll the tape back to 2007 (or earlier), here or on any other forum. I'll link to an example below. The only two people advocating for double iron were Warren and Todd Hughes. A handful of other people acknowledged that it worked, but denied that it could be practical in actual use. And most folks simply denied that it worked.

The thing about the double iron is that it's so powerful and useful that anyone who "got it" would want to shout that news from the rooftops. It's simply not believable that there were people participating on forums who knew about the double iron but chose to stay silent about it, especially considering that there was no shortage of advocates for high angles, tight mouths, thick irons (lol), scraper planes, etc. One could say the same about the various woodworking "gurus" of the era--their silence about the double iron is deafening.

Of course there were craftsman who didn't participate in forums who knew about the double iron. Richard Maguire told me how he learned it from his Grandfather, who would've learned from someone trained in the 19th century, probably part of an unbroken chain going back to Nicholson's time. I think it's incorrect to argue that the knowledge was ever truly lost. But in general, consider me extremely skeptical of claims from those who say they knew it all along.


chipbreaker thread

Re: Remarkable restraint

Patrick Chase

Warren, I think/hope this is obvious, but my message (the one you replied to) was not directed at you. I was really pointing out that if you're "contrarian" then many of us are (and I think that many non-forum dwellers would reach that conclusion in a nanosecond).

None of us are perfect, and I do honestly think that you sometimes don't give others the benefit of the doubt when it would be appropriate. We've had that discussion before, though, so there's no point going into it here.

In case I forgot to say so on the other thread: Thanks for answering my question. As I hope is obvious, I'm working on understanding the "why" behind it (hence this thread), which is simply how I process information. Please don't take this discussion as anything more than that.

As I've said several times in this thread, shaping the face of the cap iron seems to me to be a reasonable thing to do given all of the constraints at play. Some of the tradeoffs involved appear to be complex/subtle, and I don't claim or pretend to have a full understanding.

Re: Correction

Patrick Chase

Steve has a good 3-part series on the history of the double iron on his blog. Part III specifically goes into some theories about how it was lost, that sound reasonable to me.

Re: Correction

TM Stock

So the essence of your argument is that lack of sufficient Internet-based angst within the tiny sample of woodworkers that frequent a particular, obscure corner of the Internet is proof that - despite a name the describes exactly what it's function is - no one ever understood how to use a chipbreaker?

Re: Correction

David weaver

That's pretty much it. I saw two people from Finland posted about it on the UK board one time each in the middle of the bevel up surge and prefaced their post with a statement that they were just stating that it worked and they weren't looking for a fight.

Obviously, there wasn't a lot of general acceptance, even there. When I went over there, I was met with a tradesman who flattened a bubinga table top and thanked me for beating the drum about it because it saved him a lot of time. A few members trolled that you could do it ten other ways, and he said he had tried them all and none were as good.

In 2012, I posted to Warren that he was right. Raney Nelson said only one other person ever said they used a cap iron other than Warren and something to the effect that it was esoteric.

For five years, I have asked every person who said it was well known to produce any simple example where someone other than Warren suggested to use the cap iron and gave credible instruction. Nobody has ever produced anything.

Bob strawn is the only person who said anything prior to 2012.

Re: Correction

steve voigt

I think it's pretty obvious that I wasn't saying anything of the sort. The sentence "Of course there were craftsman who didn't participate in forums who knew about the double iron" is pretty clear.

Tried this again today

david weaver

I haven't been in the shop in a while, and was in it this morning to repair some drawers that someone dropped off.

I broke out the #4 and found a stick of beech a little over an inch wide, quartersawn (so the edge is the same as the face of a flatsawn board).

On the edge of a beech board, I'm just not able to get close to having the cap iron even with the sole and getting something manageable. At that point, I can still take a shaving with much struggling, but it's not possible to start the cut smoothly without skipping. On the face of a board with a wider cut, it would really be a problem.

I don't have a novel way to measure the projection (I suppose I could put it under the scope and photograph a wire of known diameter with it to guesstimate, but I'm pretty sure I was well short of even with the sole).

Beech is relatively dense and even and that may make getting the cap even with the sole a taller order. I didn't have any longer planes handy in the shop, just metal smoothers and wooden long planes (which is what I generally work with).

I'm curious to find out if anyone else has tried this.

(the smoother I'm using is generally stock angle on the cap iron plus whatever it may have increased when I cleaned it up and honed it).

Re: Tried this again today

Patrick Chase

I probably should have spelled out that at the deeper extensions in my experiment I skewed the plane at the beginning of the cut to mitigate the initiation issue you describe. As you say it's pretty difficult of you don't do that.

Re: Tried this again today

David Weaver

I did, too. Maybe a softer wood would've worked better. I always start a cut just askew and sort of give the plane a little bump. Without a good way to measure the projection, I'm sort of guessing at what I'm doing.

I have the smoother in "shutdown" setting, though, the closest I'd have it no matter what. Maybe a longer projection would work better. I don't recall what kind of wood k&k used.

Re: Correction

TM Stock

It's pretty much exactly what your argument was, but with more realistic assessments of the reach of WC and SMC, as well as the participation by those that were hand tool users a few decades before the main purpose of online hand tool woodworking fora became debating bevel-up versus bevel down.

But seriously - the device is called a chipbreaker...I suspect that there might be a clue to it's purpose somewhere there.

Re: Correction

david weaver

And, you have an example of someone other than Warren who was using one with the same sentiment that Warren has?

Raney (who would run into people that we would not since he's on the ground at shows) mentioned one other person other than Warren using one.

LV tipped us off a few years ago that 10% or so of their customers participate in an online forum. I have no idea what makeup the other 90% are, but I wouldn't give them better odds on having used the chipbreaker.

Warren works in an area that probably should have as good of a chance or better than just about anywhere else in terms of finding someone using a cap iron. I've been there (there's still plenty of people making furniture in small shops). I've seen one person mention using a plane - a mennonite furniture maker somewhere near lititz who told me his son was using a stanley plane to create tearout because he liked the look.

If you're going to find someone who is using one, I think you'd have to find them at a museum, but I don't know which.

So the same comment I made in the other post still stands - show us the person (that's extended past show us the post). They don't have to be online. Maybe you can find the other person Raney Nelson was talking about. I don't think anyone here has any idea who that person might be.

Another thing I ran into on the UK forum was a fairly large group of people who said they had been taught what the chipbreaker function was when they were in school, but they hadn't used it and had no idea how useful it actually was.

Re: Correction

steve voigt

Wow Mr. Stock, thanks for explaining my thought process to me! Can you tell me some more about chipbreakers, I'm new to them. Also planes, I'm not familiar with those either.

Re: Correction

david weaver

>chipbreakers<

It's a conspiracy. There are potatoes and protection money involved. It's pretty ugly.

Re: Correction

steve voigt

Snort.