Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

Re: Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

Brian Holcombe

I find it significantly faster than sanding and scraping but anymore I am exceptionally particular around the wood I buy. I spend a lot of time in the lumberyard when I am buying material, I comb over every board examining the grain.

I can plane an ugly surface into something good but why do so when I can avoid 95% of that mess by combing over my purchase.

Re: Japanese planes

Patrick Chase

Yeah, now that I think about it it was probably Stanley who made that point. Sorry about the misattribution.

Re: Japanese planes

Brian Holcombe

Sounds right, Stan is much more well versed in the history of such things in Japan.

Chip breakers or sub blades in Japanese planes are an interesting topic becuase they can be used with or without them installed and so it is far more obvious that they have a purpose beyond stiffening the blade or holding the blade in the plane, etc.

They are also very easily adjustable on the fly so the feedback loop is quite rapid.

I knew

Mark Hennebury

I was one of those people who

"went to woodstock but doesn't have a ticket"

I learned woodworking at school in England back in the 60's and from my father who was a carpenter and joiner.

I knew that to prevent tearout you set the chipbreaker close, deciding how close was by trial and observation. People may say 1/32 or such for a starting point, but you eyeballed it and adjusted until you got the best results.

I thought everyone knew, right up until Bill Tindale contacted me asking about supersurfacer settings. That was at the time of the Kato video was being discussed. I had the Kato video on my website for quite some time prior to that, plus a lot of information on setting up supersurfacer blades and chipbreakers.

that's when i joined the forum and joined in the discussions.

I seem to recall some people were quite upset because i said that if they didn't know about chipbreakers it was because they hadn't done their homework.

Prior to that i wasn't participating on forums, and doubt that i would have thought to bring the topic up if i had been. If someone had disputed the chipbreakers usefulness i would have.

I taught woodworking at nights in my shop back in the 70's My fist 2 classes were about wood structure and tuning up handplanes. The handplane course was 8 weeks, 1 night per week for 3 hours per night. at the end of it you made fine shavings. We spent all that time, fitting the frog, lapping the soles, filling the throat opening and fitting the chipbreaker sharpening and adjusting planes.

I have studied and used planes for many years and now know more from a technical standpoint, but i understood quite well the basic principals all along. I have never had any expensive planes, just common Record planes, but they were well tuned and have planed thousands of feet of lumber with good results.

I believe that many people understand the basic principles of chipbreakers maybe like me they were just busy using them rather than on the forums talking about them.

Re: I recall

David weaver

That you knew what you were talking about when you joined the discussion, Mark.

By the way, Mark..

david weaver

I really enjoyed your perspective when you showed up, and I recall the unique modifications that you made to your planes - I haven't seen anything like it elsewhere.

Re: Correction

TM Stock

I think there are a number of posts which were made at the time by myself and others that noted better results in difficult timbers with double-iron planes, but yes - your point about none of us calling out the peripheral case of extremely thick chip generation where edge effects can be ignored (e.g., edge jointing) - appears valid. I don't think this boundary case suggests the more general craft knowledge of 'chipbreaker good/no chip breaker bad' was somehow forgotten.

If nothing else, we've proven that - yet again - the vociferousness of any argument is in inverse proportion to the usefulness of any resolution. And the abysmally low post count up a bit, although nowhere near what I recall from the BP fusion days.

Re: Correction

david weaver

I think Warren has probably done a better job of showing that you didn't make those posts. Despite context that would invite them.

And if the subject matter on this board is that dull or overdone, jeez - offer something up. Something in the making, etc. It doesn't have to be the next Met exhibit.

There's a direct correlation between the folks who complain about what's being discussed and their activity level when such things aren't being discussed. I.e., the people who complain the most about "too many posts about ____" are the ones who don't show up at all without them.

Re: By the way, Mark..

Mark Hennebury

Hi Warren, and thank you.

It would seem to me that anyone that used a handplane would figured out the chipbreaker simply from trial and error, just a desire to have it work better, some observation and analysis and some basic tinkering. I didn't realize that there was this big controversy, ignorance or disinformation.

But welcome to the age of dis-information. The internet where teachers are endless and knowledge is buried in the landslide of bulls**t spewed forth by the self professed Gurus who are little more than mass marketing machines cashing in on the new age of lazyness. I cannot believe how lazy people have become, nobody seems to want to experiment, observe, analyze and question anymore, the mantra is "google that Sh*t" no-one wants to figure stuff out, no-one wants to learn they just want to know the answer, immediately.

I recently attended a woodworkers get together and questioned a well known internet Guru, teacher, author, handplane expert, and to no surprise when posed with some pretty basic questions about handplanes, he looked like a deer caught in the headlights and had no answers.

If you want to learn about handplanes get a $50 one and 1000bf of hard maple and when you are finished planing it you will understand handplanes.

There were many people i "believe" that knew how to setup and use a handplane and that understood the chipbreaker.

I don't know how much i knew from my father or from school, probably quite basic instruction such as "set the chipbreaker closer for finish work " or perhaps "1/32" back" type of thing, but i do know that it was enough to get me started. I have a "curious type" of personality and a need to understand how things work, i have no interest in asking anyone and would rather take anything apart and tinker with it until i destroy it or figure it out. I have a bad memory, so i need to understand the principles.

A handplane is not a complicated tool and there are not too many things that you can adjust, if someone locked you in the workshop and gave you one and said figure it out and make it work, how long would you be locked in the shop before you tried adjusting the chipbreaker?

The people that are saying "no-one knew", are just trying to ease their embarrassment at not knowing themselves. Which is understandable, because i think that they should be embarrassed.

We all have a lot more detail available today down to the microscopic level, but the principals haven't changed.

The take away from this whole issue to me has been that people need to get back to tinkering with a desire to learn. To test analyze, observe, modify and experiment and learn.

Re: By the way, Mark..

david weaver

A perfect assessment. Get 1000 board feet of something, and natural laziness and desire to do better will kick in. Not in 10 maybe, but in 1000, for certain.

I should be embarrassed, but nobody other than the internet taught me anything (aside from a friend who is obsessed with finishing a project without doing anything by hand - at all).

I had the same curiosity as you, just later (that faced with a pile of wood and no planer, there had to be room for improvement in getting close to a finished surface. The fact that you can do the finish work faster then after that is also a bonus). There must be dozens or hundreds of other people who came to the same conclusion, but who are they?

I have no idea how the instructors work (what goes through their minds - if their curiosity is in how to book more students, or what), but you can see on here that even if there is no other discussion going on, if you go into the minutiae on something, two people will discuss it and everyone else will complain. And, if you cross the fan boys of some of the gurus (even just saying someone doesn't seem to know that much about a specific subject), you'll get into entanglement - you're lucky that tying up the instructor's mind is all that you got out of that!

Re: Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

Sgian Dubh

"But there is one thing you mentioned that's awfully difficult to overcome, and that is planing over a large wide surface (because smoothing a table top wouldn't actually involve many sharpening cycles - my ash bench top required 1...one...uno (with a horrid stanley 70s iron)...anyway, the real issue here is that planing a large wide and long surface can be quite painful."

In my experience David, workbench tops are pretty small. The main flat work area of mine, for example, is only about 1,700 mm long by about 460 mm wide. True, overall the bench is bigger than that, but there's a tool well and a back board set at the same height as the top face of the main flat surface. The only other type of workbench I've used on a regular basis is the traditional English pattern where a wide tool well is enclosed by two work surfaces at either side that are typically about 220-250 mm wide by 1500 mm to 2000 mm long, so there's not much to flatten. In the end of course, it's just a workbench which gets bashed up, so it doesn't need to be pretty, just flat. I'm not particularly exercised by things like tearout on the working surfaces of a workbench top, so I'd never try to set up a plane to achieve a tear free surface - it's not worth the effort.

On the other hand, table tops like one I'm making now are a different story, this one being American white oak 2,500 mm long by 1100 mm wide with clamped ends. This does need to be prepped free of tearout, and your point about working such large surfaces is well made - they're a pain to prep to perfection with just hand planes. They're seldom perfectly flat meaning there are usually slight undulations that even a short number 4 plane won't reach the bottom of (the undulations that is) without significant time and effort so, for me anyway, I don't even try. I just knock off the worst of any steps at glue lines with a plane, and then get at it with scrapers and (usually) power sanding, plus perhaps a bit of hand sanding to finish off. It gets the job done quickly (noisily and dustily too usually which is a bit of a necessary pain) and more than good enough for ~98% of all those that will eventually view the finished article.

The roughly 2% of the population that might be able to work out the surface wasn't prepped entirely with hand planes aren't the sort of people likely to pay me to do such a job, so their informed knowledge of the likely techniques employed doesn't really matter. Unless, of course, they really are paying me to prep such a surface to perfection entirely with hand planes, in which case they'd also presumably expect to pay a matching premium price. Something along those lines has never occurred for me in all my working life in the craft furniture field ... but I guess there's still time yet for that, ha ha. Slainte.

Re: Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

david weaver

I don't know what your client group is like. My bench top is a bit bigger than you described, but not much. I don't love tearout because I do metal and woodwork on the same bench (and I know that's a mortal sin). I don't want to have to do more than card scrape the top quickly to remove any metal contamination. My bench top is ash. It was easier to plane wihthout tearout than it probably would've been with. I didn't pay any attention to grain direction when laminating it, and I'd expect not to. Ash is contrary enough that even with the cap set, it wasn't that pleasant to plane. I can't imagine planing it, even to prep for sanding, if one was to allow tearout. That wouldn't have been as much of a problem if I had made it out of soft maple or something less contrary. The entire bench build took about 30 or 35 hours. I didn't spend much time planing it, and it is not a work of art, but it is materially free of tearout.

We have an ash death problem here (the ash borer) so I bought the cheapest I could find, which was delivered and not picked. I guess I could be chastised for working junk material, but it seemed ideal for a bench.

But regarding the table top you describe. I'd probably plane it - not in your circumstances (where there's 25 more jobs behind it and you need to get out of bed the next day and go at it again), but in mine.

I have no idea how many people would pay for a hand planed surface, but I think Brian has found some. I'll bet it's below 2%, as you say. I agree with you, and it reminds me of a body man I heard talk about filling rust damage in cars for a used car dealership. You do the work you're paid to do. If you start trying to do an A level job on a C level price, you'll go out of business quickly.

Re: Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

Brian Holcombe

I simply feel that if you buy something made in the spirit of Japanese craft or 18th century Western than it should have a planed finish.

I don't buy that hand planing a finish is any more time consuming than sanding, especially off of properly jointed and planed boards. The few times I've done so it has been extremely fast. Most often I am working from the rough entirely with hand planes.

planing

Warren in Lancaster, PA

I stopped sanding in 1978 because it wasted too much time and degraded the surface to boot. And frankly I did not enjoy sanding anyway. If you hand plane, it saves time in staining and finishing as well. It does take experience to do well and to do quickly. If you try it a few times and then throw up your arms and say it is just too hard, well, I think then you will never learn to work efficiently or how to handle finishing a planed surface.

Re: Cap iron setback and shaving thickness

Brian Holcombe

Sorry for the double reply, I mean to say that the few times I've worked wood that has been machine jointed then machine planed it has been extremely quick to a finish with hand planes. Especially if the work is done accurately.

Most often I work from rough boards on through to a finish instead of working with machined surfaces.

Re: Correction

TM Stock

Uh huh...but clearly understood that I got better results with a close set chipbreaker. I tend to agree with your earlier comments that would align with my own assessment that the grand swell on newbs arriving on the hand tool scene from 1980 onward tilted the percentages askew WRT basic skills.

Re: planing

Sgian Dubh

Hi Warren, it comes across to me that your advice is usually well meant, and I'm pretty sure your opinion of me is that I don't know much when it comes to the use of handplanes. Believe it or not I can actually use handplanes pretty effectively. I even teach learners in the trades of both furniture and joinery, when I'm in a teaching role, about setting the cap iron close to reduce tearout, and demonstrate it to them. It's tied up with setting up a plane and how to sharpen, and all the usual stuff.

I do however get the impression you think all woodworkers ought to work the same as you, and your comments to me along the lines of "It does take experience to do well and to do quickly. If you try it a few times and then throw up your arms and say it is just too hard, well, I think then you will never learn to work efficiently or how to handle finishing a planed surface" come across as failing to take into account the necessary working practices of woodworkers that don't do whatever it is you do.

I've never seen an example of your output but I suspect it doesn't involve working in large teams churning out hundreds of square feet of surfaces in need of prepping and finishing. This sort of thing is a proportion of the kind of work I do in the commercial sector, as well as smaller scale craft furniture projects, and a range of other bits and bobs I undertake to make a living. Anyway, if I were to dig out my handplanes and meticulously plane a couple of hundred table tops for a restaurant chain I'd very quickly be asked what the hell am I up to poncing around like an old hen.

Basically, your suggestions and guidance about handplane use apply in some circumstances, but they're inappropriate in others. I do a lot of 'others' in the mix of work I undertake. Slainte.

Re: planing

david weaver

Richard, presumably at this volume, you are using a machine sander to do the initial sanding work?

I went out to your site and looked at some of the architectural work, and it's quite a bit different than what we're talking about (at least, I think it is).

You have a different problem, and I'm speaking in reference to the chance that you've got a bunch of guys and gals using hand sanders, and that is that with a volume of people, you can't really trust them to finish competently with planes.

From my vantage point (being an amateur with a fascination with finishing off of the plane - or scraper and burnishing where the plane isn't suitable), it seems to be much faster to finish flat surfaces with the plane than it is with sanders (and I have them despite not liking them).

Re: planing

Sgian Dubh

"Richard, presumably at this volume, you are using a machine sander to do the initial sanding work?

You're right. That's the sort of volume that never sees a handplane. It was an example from historical work I've done to make a point. I could offer more. My perspective is coloured by my many years involved in the furniture and joinery industry. My juices really flow when I get the chance to work on high end one-off craft furniture; its conception, the design development and presentation to a client, securing the order, making and delivering to the customer and, crucially, sending the invoice and getting paid. Most of what I guess you looked at on my website comes from this output. Stuff I'm involved in (or have been involved in over the decades) making for other businesses seldom make it on to my website - it's not mine to photograph and claim as my intellectual property.

I've always had to be pragmatic about how to earn a living as a woodworker. My experience covers furniture (high end and low rent) as an employee, business owner and on a freelance basis for a range of woodworking businesses (furniture, furniture repair/restoration, joinery); the fabrication of joinery items both large and small; building stuff for museums, exhibitions, events, theatre and TV studio sets; I have a history of teaching furniture and joinery subjects in the tertiary education sector, undertake occasional furniture/joinery consultancy work, and written articles for woodworking magazines/journals, something I no longer do, although I do still write on the subject(s), but not for magazines.

So, as you can see, I'm all over the place when it comes to interests, experience and (hopefully) some knowledge in the field of woodworking, even stretching to the creative and (to me) exciting possibilities of digital technology - design development and presentation, CNC equipment, and so on.

I guess all of the above could be construed as irrelevant to a thread on 'double-iron' planes. On the other hand I find all this discussion on the subject relevant to me and of great interest. As you can see I have a diversified experience in woodworking and I guess that colours my perspective when adding a comment or comments to a thread in a woodworking forum. So, setting the cap iron close to the cutting edge can be a boon for prepping contrary wood but in my experience using only a plane to prep surfaces polish ready is really not always an appropriate strategy, and I don't mind saying so. Slainte.

Re: planing

Brian Holcombe

Richard, Thanks for further explaining.

There is certainly room for planing in industrial type work. I had dinner recently at a restaurant where one would use chop sticks. The disposable chop sticks had what was obviously a planed finish, no doubt done with a super surfacer. What cheaper wood product exists?

The one thing I've never understood about industrial woodworking in the west is the heavy use of consumable sanding products. I would be willing to bet that super surfacing parts and tops is considerably less expensive over time but with a greater start up cost.

I feel similarly about floating tenons and other consumables.

Consumables vs skilled labor

Patrick Chase

The thing with sanding is that you can train somebody to run one of those machines in very little time, and it's pretty hard to screw it up. In contrast my impression (from the stuff Mark Hennebury has posted here, previous reading online, and my paltry knowledge of cutting mechanics) is that the super surfacer requires more skill on the part of its operator, with special sharpening requirements, settings to be dialed in etc.

I therefore suspect that the super surfacer may have higher total running costs (including labor and any waste due to misconfiguration) than a sander even though its consumable costs are vastly lower.

Note that this in no way contradicts what people like Warren are saying, as they're the textbook definition of "skilled labor". If you have the skills then planing is the way to go. If you have to pay for somebody else's skills then it depends on how much you value the incremental quality.

Re: planing

david weaver

We're getting crossed up between what is essentially industrial woodworking vs. one or several people working in a shop (which is what amish and mennonites often do here if the business is a family business - though they certainly do have larger shops, too).

The first place I ever worked full time was one of the fortune brands factories here. 500 employees at the location where i worked. None of it was skilled, with the possible exception of a couple of guys in the maintenance area, and there were certainly no planes.

Contrast that to what I do (I am an amateur, of course) now. I sized plywood by hand (softwood ply, not baltic birch or anything) and dadoed and plowed it with hand tools, and did a good part of a plane (that's all hand work).

I have no clue if I could make a living working wood - I guess it depends on whether or not I had to. I am better at other things, fortunately.

Actually, you've fed right into..

david weaver

..what Warren often says, that just about every "advance" in woodworking has been made to lower the cost of labor involved and get them to make more stuff at the same time with that lower skill.

Once in a while, someone will show up on SMC and say that they're working in something (the last I recall was investment banking) and that they really want to get out of it and couldn't bear to work for less than some number per hour. Presume it's something like $50 or $80 or some rate they pull out of the air.

In the late 1990s, nobody at the cabinet factory where I worked made more than $10 an hour. When it shut down in 2008 (for obvious reasons, loan restrictions tend to limit kitchen renos), I doubt anyone was making more than about $13.

There are one or two people in Richard's position (and I'm not going to speculate what Richard makes, but I'm sure it's not $10 an hour, or the GBP equivalent), but there are a whole lot more people making much less than that.

Which goes back to what Warren says (which is through the lens of one person completing work, and much less about the group of folks who may have to run 400 panels through a shaper and then wide belt sander progression).

Re: Consumables vs skilled labor

Brian Holcombe

I’m certain that’s true, one if the work arounds is that you have a few people who are good at setup, but the same is true for most bits of complicated machinery.

I went to a shop recently that makes custom moldings for industry, some a very complicated. It sounded like a few guys could do anything and everything a few others might help around the shop and recieve material being fed through the machine. A molder is an incredibly complicated machine.

So I think it is a mostly overlooked bit of machinery (in the us) that certainly is better and faster in so many circumstances.

Consider that this tool is used for very regular jobs in Japan. Their version of industrial process is not a whole lot different from ours, basic consumer goods are

Made quickly and at a narrow margin by task specific workers. I think they’ve simply taken another approach that has a edge here.

I feel similarly about European style woodworking, especially in solid wood.

Re: Consumables vs skilled labor

TomD

I went to gold beach in OR one summer around 1990, a friend of mine there was friends with the local Myrtlewood turner in town. He had heard it was wrong to scrape bowls, so since I had pretty much mastered all the Richard Raffan and Del Stubbs moves, I was detailed off to give him a demo. I didn't have any of my own tools, and his lathe was a strange set-up. I don't recall how well I did in the difficult conditions, but do remember there were some points of tear-out in my hollowing, these would require more time and consumables, even though I had achieved a result that had an overall better finish. I don't really recall why I couldn't shear scrape it. The pro could crank these pieces up to some humming speed, wiggle his scraper around, hit it with sandpaper, he was done. This did require him to have very simplified forms, but basically people came to his shop, looked at what he had for sale. If they wanted a bowl, it was to have some myrtlewood to take back home with them, put some candy in, etc... It would probably have sold fewer bows if they were many of the things then popular, like super thin, detailed, too narrow in the base, etc... When it came to making pieces that looked like they could be packed out of snow, his method was certainly excellent.

I was certainly impressed to meet a guy who would even investigate the issue, and was very impressed with what I learned.

But the point is that it is pretty hard to dismiss what people know. A lot of it starts with the clients, and in the US and Canada, that doesn't leave you much to work with in many parts of the country. If one wants to do good work, choice of zipcode is pretty important.