LV replacement cap irons......

Re: stay set

TM Stock

The Stay-Set was apparently designed to allow a quick removal, touch-up, and back to work, but not sure there's really much time saved...although I only used it for a few years, I don't recall much of a delay in setting things with a conventional capiron. Seems like an opportunity for some CNC-driven youngster to get into the business of two-piece capirons for those jonseing for the Stay-Sets..

Re: coffin sided smoother plane blades...1973...this was 20 years before the Web became a useful and common utility and a couple before FWW's kick-off issue, so other than a few old books in the Clarence public library, you had to find one of the older guys to get answers to most questions, or just puzzle it out yourself. First compound dovetails (first dovetails, actually) were like that in 1969 - had a girlfriend that wanted a small, angle-sided box to keep her stuff in, and an example to work from was in the town's second hand and antique store. Clarence Center still had a mill work/lumber yard next to the Post Office and a scrap pile out back, so it got done. Had I known it was supposed to be 'hard', I probably would not have tackled the project.

The internet hasn't helped in some things..

david weaver

..The wise George Wilson often says to me "if you don't know why something is the way that it is, you should copy it until you find out".

Not casting stones at your situation, who would know?

I see a lot of wooden planes made with bench plane irons in them, and I've made some duds in the ...I don't know...60 or so planes that I've made over the years.

It took me longer than most to learn that getting exactly what is in something else until you know otherwise (which would be the pre-internet "in absence of detailed information" method) is the way to go. That sounds more obscure than I intended, but can be translated to no deviation, no information needed. I thought I might chance into something good sooner or later, but it never happened, and lots of folks on the internet are always ready to show you the planes that they made but really don't use without telling you that they really don't use them much because they're not that great.

(Insert Krenov plane joke here, and the comment that everyone says about Jim Krenov having an updated more educated opinion than hundreds of thousands of long dead professionals about things like irons that will still be adjustable after an inch is used, or ....handles).

Re: And it hasn't helped in others...

david weaver

..if you go to most forums, you'll find glowing reviews about the stayset, but woven into them are all kinds of tips about how to make it work better. The conclusion from the fans seems to lean toward "but they're still way better than stanley - they're thicker plus it's two pieces instead of one". Fellows like you and me tend to think "oh well, maybe mine just wasn't quite right" and the fans win out.

I guess the concept sounds great when someone finds putting a cap iron back on a plane to be a precarious time sucking event, but if it was that big of an issue, I think it would've been done that way on stanley planes, too.

My lone remaining stayset has been far more trouble than its worth. It looks like they fetch well on ebay, though - so that's good. Good idea in concept (still think so even though actual use doesn't bear it out that consistently) - even with the cap set close, you could hone a few times before you had to reset it. But taking the plane apart from time to time to remove shavings that got between the iron and cap iron - not much of a time saver. Twice in a row in a few strokes, and the plane is in danger of being tested for flight characteristics.

Quality is relative

Patrick Chase

At the time L-N started up the Western hand tool industry and market were basically at their nadir. You could be competitive then with far lower manufacturing standards than are needed today.

CNC wasn't as widely available or used then as now, and people certainly weren't doing things like using semiconductor-wafer-oriented lapping machines to flatten irons and plane soles. L-N's manufacturing processes back then wouldn't have been all that different from Stanley's in its heyday, so it's no surprise that their older planes would require similar fettling work.

Re: The internet hasn't helped in some things..

TM Stock

In my defense, I was 16 in 1973 and...well...16! Fresh license in pocket and any excuse to head down to DC or up to Baltimore. What kills me is thinking about the hardwoods place out in Harmons by the airport that was selling off all their Brazilian rosewood at what I thought was highway robbery prices of $12/bf!!!. Same thing with all the flawless 16" wide by 14' 8/4 and 12/4 honduras mahogany sold out when Trumpy closed in 1974...had I had a clue about either the quality or eventual scarcity of what was available , I still would not have had the money.

Not really...

John in NM

A skilled machinist can do wonderfully precise and complex work with conventional machinery, no CNC required. CNC for simple stuff like a hand plane just saves you a ton of time in manufacturing.

I stopped in to LN's shop when I was in the area around 1997. Then it was all conventional machinery, and they did the same quality work you see coming from them now.

SJB on the other hand made the mistakes made by a guy who didn't use planes - I visited his shop too, since he was in the Phoenix area and I lived in Tucson.

So I remain surprised at the awful description of LN's cap iron. A good shop does not produce what was described and keep their good reputation. Especially on something as simple as a cap iron.

Re: growing pains..

david weaver

..I've seen old LN cap irons, but none old enough that they were ratty (just the old design on planes that a friend of mine has - he doesn't use his planes, anyway, so it doesn't really matter).

At the same time you're talking about, LN was only hardening part of their irons because (speculating) they couldn't control the warpage. That's all part of growing pains. Someone who asked them about it (due to an iron that went past the hardening) told me they said most users wouldn't get past the first inch. That's true, anyway.

Re: The internet hasn't helped in some things..

david weaver

You're way past me. I didn't even know there was such a thing as mail order woodworking shops until I was late in high school, and i never would've had the discipline to use a hand plane at that point.

I have heard the same thing about brazilian rosewood. There are probably a lot of people with big piles of it afraid that the USDA is going to raid their shops looking for paperwork (that nobody ever got before there were restrictions).

Now that CITES covers all dalbergias, I'm not sure what the future will bring. I like the ability to get inexpensive cocobolo and indian rosewood, but maybe those days are gone. I already had a norris 2 swiped by ebay's shipping service, because they told me they'd get in trouble with customs if they mailed it here (I got three other brazilian infill planes about the same time that didn't go through ebay, and no problem).

The days of good wood are probably in the past now. I have trouble finding anything reasonable locally without spending a lot of time going from one one-man mill to another. The stuff that's in hardwood specialty stores here is the 2nd growth low quality coin-sorter mill variety, and my lumber guy (who actually sawed trees and kept the boards together) retired.

Maybe we'll be able to print it soon. If I don't manage to sell my SS record, maybe I can print a good cap iron for it, too.

Re: growing pains..

John in NM

That probably was due to warping problems, you're right. Given the locale at the time, they may not have had any expert toolroom guys on staff. Could also have been due to available treating set ups. No way of knowing at this point, at least not for those of us in these armchairs

Reminds me of a friend who makes and sells metal shears for jewelers. He makes the blades out of some armor plate alloy rather than screwing around with heat treating - offers free replacements for anyone who wears them out and says he could send out 3-4 sets per shear before he even came up to the cost of heat treating (3rd party that is).

Re: growing pains..

david weaver

I've never heard anyone say that they like to make scissors, and can't imagine that heat treating them makes the process any easier.

Re: First one I saw...

Charlie Stanford

Yes, but didn't you report tear out free performance? Last time I checked, HNT Gordon was still in business.

Somebody buys them.

Re: First one I saw...

Charlie Stanford

I frankly don't remember you ever reviewing a plane that didn't give tear out free performance. That was your metric. L-N, Marcou, Terry Gordon, Lee Valley, and others. This isn't an indictment, it's important information in light of all this cap iron 'stuff.'

Re: First one I saw...

David weaver

The guys who figured out that the cap iron was faster probably didn't have a spouse paying the bills so that they could just call everything equal.

Re: First one I saw...

Charlie Stanford

Depends on time and place David. Sometimes the whole family worked, including the children. Ever read Dickens?

Re: First one I saw...

david weaver

Perhaps in high school - it's not the kind of thing I'd read these days. The point is, everything is fine if time isn't important. Current woodworking isn't really much of a judge of what's most efficient with hand tools, because little of the commercial market involves any of it.

But it took little time for double iron planes to eliminate single iron planes (a few decades?), and if the spouse was in the shop (instead of working at a "town job"), I'm sure they'd appreciate less effort, too.

Does it matter in 2017? Probably not. Does it matter if you want to dimension? It sure makes a large difference in effort, but a thickness planer probably makes a whole lot more (and basic versions of those are pretty cheap).

Sticking with a 65 degree plane in the day of making a living with hand tools would be a lot like skipping a few grits of sandpaper and refusing to start below 180 for the current crop of planing and sanding.

I vaguely recall you mentioning somewhere that you do a lot of hand work and have sold off your machine tools, or perhaps the variation was that you sold the machine tools off and do something else now, but use hand tools when you find a paying project that looks like furniture. It's beyond me why you wouldn't follow the lead of the people who did it for a living 200 years ago. It wasn't exactly an age of cheap furniture, and I'm not sure what the argument would be for working by hand sans double iron.

(I know several people here who do woodworking for a living, all of their spouses have jobs that are about as good as mine. None of them know how to use a double iron, aside from me showing them. They are more concerned with doing trim work during the day when they can get it, and finding students who want to refinish planes. I bounce all of this around in my head, why is it important to minimize effort in something that is unneeded effort in the first place. I guess it's just a matter of curiosity. For every one of us (with perhaps the exception of Rob Lee and a few others), we'd be financially better off if we had a cheaper hobby and spent as much time reading texts like "the checklist manifesto" or attaining professional certifications vs. reading about woodworking.

Plus, there will always be exceptions. I've got a friend who doesn't like to make much effort in his woodworking, but he loves to hand sand. Can't get enough of it, and that's no joke. 3x and a rubber block is his idea of a good time. He'd argue that 3x vs. something else is just as important as the cap iron. He's fond of trying to find a super high angle plane like the HNTs (not sure what's stopping him) because he believes there's something neanderthal-ish about using a stanley plane and just planing (vs. quasi scraping).

Can you enlighten us about why they would all be considered equal, and maybe some historical reference to that? Or a statement of likelihood based on history?

Re: First one I saw...

Charlie

The point of my posts to Derek was to point out that he has been hand planing lumber tear out free with several different planes, some of them bedded at high angles and some not, and all of this well before the 'rediscovery' of the cap iron. Can't un-ring a bell and not sure why one would want to in this instance. Nothing to be ashamed of, in fact quite the opposite.

Final smoothing represents less than 5 percent of the time required to build a project with hand tools. It's over practically before you get started. This is true even if scrapers and sandpaper have to be brought to bear. As such all the talk of 'efficiency' and the other stuff is at best rhetorical, if not outright whimsical daydreaming.

Re: First one I saw...

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

The point of my posts to Derek was to point out that he has been hand planing lumber tear out free with several different planes, some of them bedded at high angles and some not, and all of this well before the 'rediscovery' of the cap iron. Can't un-ring a bell and not sure why one would want to in this instance. Nothing to be ashamed of, in fact quite the opposite.

Final smoothing represents less than 5 percent of the time required to build a project with hand tools. It's over practically before you get started. This is true even if scrapers and sandpaper have to be brought to bear. As such all the talk of 'efficiency' and the other stuff is at best rhetorical, if not outright whimsical daydreaming.

Hi Charlie

It appears you have been asking me whether I still use a high angled plane, and why I now prefer the chipbreaker if both do the same job of tear out free planing?

Actually, I use both. Of the two I prefer the chipbreaker because it is better at avoiding tear out. The chipbreaker can plane into the grain, which the high angle plane cannot do as well. For example, when planing a book-matched panel.

Further, with some woods - mainly softer timbers - a lower cutting angle leaves a clearer finish. I cannot say that I notice much difference with West Australian hard woods: the chipbreaker and the high angle leave a very similar shine.

Over the years I turned to BU planes to achieve a high cutting angle. I find them easier to push that a high angle BD plane. This is most evident with Bailey-style planes. The downside of high angle BU planes for me has always been that the secondary bevel required a honing guide for accuracy. I get too impatient for this, and much prefer freehanding on a hollow grind. Another reason why the re-emergence of the chipbreaker has been welcomed.

With regard the "efficiency" and hand planes issue, that is David's focus. Much of the time I am happy to rough out with machines for efficiency. I prefer hand tools for joinery, shaping, and finishing - that is where I see the artistry element coming in. Roughing out is just a basic step. It was left to the apprentices in days of olde. There is some fun in working the whole way through with hand tools, and I am about to do this with a bunch of Windsor chairs, but when it comes to most furniture, my efficiency involves walking over to the machines at the other end of the shop to turn rough sawn lumber into sized boards.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Re: First one I saw...

TM Stock

Pretty sure time savings in routine tasks matters to most pros - does for me, in any case. For hobbyists, though, it seems like less time spent doing something that gives them pleasure would be a net negative. And given the hobbyists dramatically outnumber the pros here, it seems like 'saving time on final smoothing' should be firmly in the 'minus' column for most of us.

Frankly, I am worried...if we continue to laud time savings at leisure tasks for amateurs as something positive, how long can it be before other pleasurable activities follow suit?

"Done in 28 seconds! New record! Hey, hon, can you fix me a sandwich?"

"Had that beach house for the 1-2 PM block...best vacation ever!

"Dude...what a game! The other team was a no-show...awesome!!!!"

Easy to see where this sort of thing goes...

Re: Latest Development

William Duffield

I think you spoke too soon. I received notification yesterday from Dan Schwank of Red Rose Reproductions that he is now offering cap irons for his tapered plane irons for wooden smoothers, jacks and jointers.

http://redrosereproductions.com/cap-irons-now-available/

Re: Latest Development

TM Stock

Thanks for the link, William. Seems like one of the tailgaters had a box of irons at a couple of the PATINA auctions...like 1999? 2000? 2001? Anyway, one of the shows we both attended. Looked like a few of them were only minimally beat up. Tom Law was still holding down his corner of the activity hall, so it was a while back.

Re: First one I saw...

Charlie Stanford

You were, and are, obviously adept enough to have found several smoothing plane set ups that were able to plane wood tear out free, with and against the grain, and all before the cap iron epiphany. I love it. In hindsight those reviews, and the information in them, deserve more credit than they've gotten over the many years you've been doing them. The Marcou review, with other planes involved and other reviewers involved is particularly good.

With you on the machines. I'm close to pulling the trigger again. I have a bad shoulder, just can't go at it like I used to.

Re: First one I saw...

Patrick Chase

I would word that to: Derek generally doesn't review a plane unless there is some way (higher bevel angle, cap iron, etc) to get it to produce good results on the Weird Sh*t that he works down there.

Back before he was aware of proper cap iron use he made plenty of references to common-pitch BD planes causing tearout in his reviews of other planes. That may explain why he didn't really do dedicated reviews of BD planes until 2015 (LV Custom family).

As David and others have said, high pitch fixes tearout, but at the cost of degraded surface finish and increased effort. If you're using machined wood such that all you need is a thin finishing pass, and if you're going to use a film finish anyway, then it's totally viable.

Sandpaper

Patrick Chase

You should have your 3X-fiend friend take a look at some planed vs sanded wood under your scope. If that doesn't give him pause then he's doing woodworking of a different sort than we're discussing here :-).

Seriously, abrasives tear the living daylights out of the wood's structure. It's not exactly a subtle difference. It doesn't matter if you're going to slap wood filler and 6 coats of conversion varnish on everything you make of course.

Final smoothing isn't the problem

Patrick Chase

Who said anything about "final smoothing"?

Smoothing has never been the limiting step when it comes to tearout. As you say, there are several viable tearout mitigations for smoothing planes: High angle, ultra-thin shavings, ultra-sharp and frequently sharpened irons, cap irons, etc. If smoothing is all you do by hand then you can achieve good results in reasonable (though not optimal) time without a double iron.

The biggest payoff from the double iron is when you need to remove volume rather than just clean up the surface, as in jointing and roughing. In that case most of the other mitigations become nonviable for one reason or another: Thin shavings take forever, maintaining an ultra-sharp edge is impractical, high angles are too much work, etc. Double irons are petty much the only game in town for that sort of work. Note that deep cuts cause deep tearout, so if you get into trouble in the jointing phase then your smoothing will take forever as well.

This is why David keeps going on and on about "people who rough their own wood".

Re: Sandpaper

TM Stock

...or a mil-and-a-half of French polish, 3 mils of instrument lacquer, or 4 mils of varnish. Pretty much any film forming finish and especially one applied over a transparent pore filler - makes the difference in surface quality moot. The notion of putting 12 mils of plastic on an instrument is disturbing, but I don't mind a 3 mil finish on highly figured B&S woods that looks like it's a 1/4" deep.

Different story for oil or wiping varnishes - planed or scraped surfaces beat the snot out of sanded surfaces, and it makes a big difference on the chatoyance seen and amount of light bouncing around.