Unicorn-Lite on the back side

Re: Unicorn-Lite on the back side

Nico

You people are so funny. Always looking for the next big thing. A couple of years from now someone else will make an amazing discovery and you'll all jump on that and forget all about this unicorn nonsense. Funny thing is that countless wood workers in the Netherlands have been sharpening this way for ages. Hollow grind on the bench grinder, buff on the cloth wheel next to it remove the burr. It's nothing new here and you all act like this is a first in the history of wood working. My grandfather did it this way and my father did it as well.

Troll

Winston

There is a reason that you have been banned from several other woodworking forums. Your style of trolling is very distinctive.

In another thread you said you've been using a 20-22 degree bevel plus a 45-50 degree microbevel for 10 years, when from the things you've said in other forums it's clear that you've done nothing of the sort.

I think I remember you...

David Weaver

..years ago, someone got on the UK woodworking board and claimed to be making boats, and I think it was you. Except they didn't post their work, they posted other peoples work, and posted whatever was stylish at the time.

And they - you - posted someone else's work and failed to realize that in the world of fine boat work, one of the readers on that forum would recognize the work because someone they knew did it.

You got caught, you talked like you're talking now, but you really were doing nothing at all.

Chide us if you like, but we're not inclined to believe any of your parroting of things that you read, or acting like the next topic is something you're accomplished at....we're not inclined to believe anything is truthful. You've done this one too many times.

While there is actual email and video proof of my rounding over edges, I doubt you've been doing it at all. Just like you never did any of the boat work you posted on the UK woodworking site.

I didn't remember who he was at first....

David Weaver

...but there was a lady boatbuilder posting hand work that she was doing inside boats in europe.

Fairly sure this is the same "nico" who came along and posted some unbelievable work, but then at such a volume that he posted something that someone on the forum recognized. It was fake, just like the things he says his grandfather did.

Woodworking is so accessible, and especially on the hand tool side, something affordable to the point that I have no clue why anyone would want to make up things that they're doing or that they did instead of just doing them.

Hi Nico, do you understand Needle movers

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

We acknowledge needle movers here. They are people that make positive contributions that result in positive changes in others work. People that don't strive to move needles in a positive way will be ignored.......just a tip so you understand why you will be ignored.

You need to pick a forum where the participants are less smart.

Re: I'm effing Nostradamus

Steve Voigt

Only 10 days ago, I predicted, based on the cap iron saga, "people on forums will argue, dismiss it, misconstrue it. YouTubers and bloggers will present it as their own idea and hog the credit. In four or five years, magazines will write about it, without attributing credit where it's due."

Then, in an email to Dave, I wrote "I forgot a big one: the guys who will say "oh yeah, I've been doing this all along… what's the big deal?"

Some of the others have already happened on SMC. Waiting for the Youtubers, bloggers, and mags to get in on the action.

The trouble is...

John in NM

Apparently, none of those old timers wrote this stuff down. No one who knew of the technique, like yourself, bothered to share the knowledge. It may amuse you that people get excited about a new discovery that you've always known about - I expect that is why you don't share the knowledge, this way you get a feeling of superiority without earning it.

I basically came up with something similar several years ago as well. These guys also came up with it but got more excited about it than I ever did, improved the method through adding a bevel before buffing, applied it to bench chisels instead of just planes (my method) or carving tools (what you are talking about) and then did a lot of documenting of it - I just filed the method away in my memory as useful for planing really difficult wood.

So while all this talk may be covering ground that a few knew already, these guys deserve the credit for driving that talk - explaining, photographing, documenting, and getting others excited about another tool in their kit of methods. As far as I'm concerned, they get all the credit for doing the lifting that helps this craft progress.

By contrast, you just come along and try to marginalize all the actual effort that goes in to progress - not thinking of the idea in the first place, but doing all that homework that documents it and gets others to try it.

I have a lot of respect for these guys, and none for you.

Historical record exists...

David Weaver

...you did indeed call the trolls coming. In napoleon dynamite terms, "i already did that like a million times at scout camp".

I just figured it would be one of the folks who knows everything that tage frid knows except how to make money, and not a faker.

"You can't get there from here..."

Bruce Mack

...said the Maine old-timer in response to the tourist's direction inquiry. As far as I am concerned, 28 years of Fine Woodworking magazine and innumerable entries on blogs and forums never said you can get super sharp and durable and super quick super cheaply. Nooooo way. David (David only) said you could and told us mere mortals how to do so.

There is some history here.

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

Bill, I tried many techniques in the past in regard to sharpening BU plane blades.

Possibly about a decade ago, there were discussions about the wear bevel on the back of the blade, and that the plane would stop cutting as a consequence of losing clearance. I recall arguing that I did not experience this failure.

It needs to be recalled that I had introduced a sharping method for high cutting angle BU plane blades. Up to this time, blades for BU planes featuring a high bevel angle, say 50 degrees to achieve a 62 degree cutting angle, used a single bevel angle. Lee Valley still sell these blades. But the problem is that these high angles on thick blades make it impossible to camber - just too much steel to remove at the sides of the bevel. The method I came up with was to keep the primary bevel at 25 degrees and add a high secondary bevel and camber at the same time. This works beautifully, and the method is unchanged today.

The issue I have with bu planes is that these secondary bevels need to be created with a honing guide as the plane is sensitive to the cutting angle. One cannot simply freehand a general angle, as would for a bevel down plane. I am a freehand guy, and become impatient when having to use honing guides when sharpening interrupts the work flow. Refreshing the blade in a BU plane was frustrating - there is no way to strop the micro bevel and retain the bevel angle.

So I came up with two methods to do this for myself, both of which killed the wear bevel ... and the reason why I did not experience this as a fault or weakness in these planes.

The first was simply to strop the back of the blade, and I would do this with a LV green compound on a horse butt strop from Tools for Working Wood (hard leather but with some give).

The second was one I played with for a little while, using David Charlesworth’s Ruler Trick, which adds a 2/3 degree back bevel. This also works well, but the freehander in me did not want to use any extra tools, so I returned to stropping the back of the blade. It works. It is not a Unicorn edge. It is simply a stropped straight. I very much doubt that the give in the leather would create a rounding effect.

This technique, however, does not apply to shooting planes, because it is simply unnecessary.

The BU blades on my shooting planes are hollow ground and honed and used with a 25 degree bevel. No secondary bevel. Refreshing them is no big deal: remove the dulling blade, polish the face, re-insert and continue. Sharpness is not a factor that requires a special technique. On the other hand, the Unicorn edge offers a longer sharp edge, and for this reason I have started adding it to the blade I have in my shooting board, the Veritas Shooting plane. So far I have not noticed a drop in sharpness, but have not used it long enough to get a sense for the longevity of the edge. It is the same result as I reported at an earlier time for block plane blades, which I generally hollow grind at 25 degrees, that is, the Unicorn edge does not interfere with planing end grain.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Re: There is some history here.

David Weaver

I recall that whole discussion and still had a bevel up plane at the time.

I didn't notice the longer flat side scratches to be a problem until larry pointed it out. All I could agree with him on at the time was that they took longer to get out of the iron, but I never proved that they did anything bad in work because we always bias finger pressure where we want the work to be done on the metal.

While Larry's voluminous posting swayed me early on, I came to learn that his standard of proof in anything that was to support a point of his or object to one of someone he was arguing with was very low. (look away, wiley!!)

I don't think people always do that intentionally, i think he saw pictures from someone else or perhaps saw the wear and since I've never seen much proof that he's done much hand planing in volume, supposing becomes easier than proving.

When I sold my last bevel up plane to a guy, I'd never done anything but normal edge maintenance with it, sharpening the bevel and using only a finish waterstone on the back. The guy who got it remarked that it was wonderfully sharp and "what did you use?" (the answer was just one of the $55 kitayama waterstones, nothing particularly special - but the sharpening job was complete and to the edge - tiny remaining spider-webbing on the back and all).

If I were a betting man

Jim Matthews

I would lay short odds on "Charley".

Did you ever impugn pockethole jigs or bandsawn silhouette making?

It's a challenge to orthodoxy that conventional people detest.

I think this guy is from germany

David Weaver

If I recall from the UK forum debacle, he's from europe somewhere and his posts don't always reflect normal english usage as we would call it.

As far as the kreg jig and pattern cutters, I josh one guy at work who has a kreg jig and loves it (he uses it like the commercials -as in, he doesn't make much, but when he wants to put shelving in a closet, then it's just the thing with limited other tools and no bench.).

The joke is that it's banned on the property here, but no such thing is present more due to lack of interest.

As far as the pattern cutters, in the early 2000s, i remember seeing scrolling clubs. When I first started ruining wood around 2005, used scroll saws were everywhere on craigslist. I wonder if that "sport" has gone the way of the craft show sign routers and bandsawn-yard-duck makers.

(Message Deleted by Poster)

Netherlands

Winston

Pretty sure he's from the Netherlands. That's where the Nico from another forum (who was also banned for trolling) is from. Also, in the post about his father and grandfather using a buffing wheel, he said "here in the Netherlands." That part seems to be true, or is at least consistent across forums.

The parts that I remember

David Weaver

Wiley - I may not have seen the beginning of the discussion, but what I posted is accurate at the point that Larry brought it up.

Context is important. If that's what Larry had seen, it's from woodworkers who didn't work the backs of their irons at all, because it's not experienced otherwise. What Larry failed to address is that it's not a failure of the plane, but rather a failure of the person sharpening to understand that the back must be lapped.

Larry's conclusion would be much like me saying single iron planes chatter and they just shouldn't be used anywhere, just because individuals showed up with planes that became out of fit. Double iron planes have far more tolerance in wood movement without showing issues with fitness, but that's ignoring the fact that the wood wasn't fit well.

Here's the part that I saw, which would've been after what you relayed. Larry posted reference to a blog that Konrad Sauer showed with pictures of the back of a bevel up plane and a mention of it being harder to polish all of the marks from the back. Larry showed that picture to derek as proof. The real issue was that konrad got a bevel up plane and attempted to back lap the plane like he would have a bevel down plane. Failure to accommodate how a tool works is not failure of the tool. We saw this same behavior from larry in spending a great deal of time to find out how to make single iron planes "just so" and then make inaccurate statements about double iron planes. These are factual things to me, not a threat of any type because I make no money and never will from the things that I make. They led me down the wrong road.

Assertion to derek (and many others in australia who use those tools without ever mentioning such a problem) that this problem is critical without having solved it is problematic. It's from lack of experience. I wasn't aware of this first part, but the behavior is the same - see tools at a woodworking show, give them less deference than your own preference - draw a conclusion and assert it loudly.

I don't know what your relationship is with Larry, but it appears to be more important to you than many other things, and that is your business, and it's fine. I am not much for speech monitors outside of factual corrections.

Anyone who has an issue with any of my statements is welcome to take issue with them, addressing me as the source (for clarity, especially, and hopefully so they're brought to my attention so I can see if I'm wrong) whether I'm present or not.

The showing of the picture (from konrad) to derek of a plane that Larry has little experience with and stating a conclusion in contradiction of folks who were actually using those planes a lot is fact. I had no issue in use with my plane, except that after seeing that, I did find it harder to remove all cosmetic evidence of any long scratches - including the ones that had no effect on performance. I'd have never noticed it otherwise and had no idea why Larry thought that the issue was terminal when so many other people were continuing to use the tools without complaint.

Dancing around who said what just makes it very hard for anyone to figure out what's being discussed.

Re: The parts that I remember

Wiley Horne

David,

My relationship with Larry is this: he is a good person (with strong opinions) who deserves fair representation in his absence.

And I say the same thing of you yourself: If someone were making what I knew to be misleading or unfair statements about you, in your absence, I would state clearly what I knew to be the truth.

Wiley

One thing I will try not to do...

David Weaver

Is tell you what you should say or not say. I don't have a high enough status in this world to tell people what they think is appropriate or how they should address issues or people. I don't know what someone else is using to form their opinion or what their priorities are.

I don't know larry offline. I have been told since the last similar string of posts as these that he's helped a lot of planemakers. That's good, it's unrelated to any of this, though. I watched larry make some particularly nasty statements to me before I knew who he was, and I watched him do it to Derek, going as far as suggesting the validity of Derek's phD should be called into question. There's no reason to whitewash. It would be the same if I made a broad statement about how I always try to be helpful - I don't always have that good of a day.

Where the rubber hits the road is when someone is misled and information can literally set people back for years or indefinitely. All of the above is kind of meaningless to me (the spats mentioned in the prior paragraph - they come and go and only help give a picture of whether or not someone else is really interested in finding the right answer, or if they just want to win regardless), i'm trying to learn. There is an information issue here, and that is what I'm focused on, not the people (or the horrible term people use now "not their personal brands"). If I said I was sorry that that priority is important to me, it wouldn't be honest. Your assertion that i would pick a person and then create a line of discussion to attack the person rather than focus on the substance of the discussion and label it back to that person for clarity is wrong. It was wrong the last time, but my first comment at the beginning of this post applies. Just as it's wrong to imply that posting someone's insistence on bad conclusions is the same as saying they're a bad person. They are two different things, and I'm not here for that kind of thing.

****

(after that much above, I figured maybe I should see how big of an issue this apparently was)

I can't believe I'm wasting time on this, but I googled bevel up plane clearance angle, and we can guess who came up front and center. It was like social factions - how pointless. The assertions were that 12 degrees of clearance doesn't work on softwoods, and larry mentioned that strike block planes probably disappeared in favor of miter planes because people were in capable of sharpening accurately. These are the kind of things I'm referring to -I don't have to refer to larry other than to bring context to the discussion. There are so many of them that make no sense and assume something unlikely, but putting this in present context, I'm using a common pitch plane with about 12 degrees of clearance. Far faster in work, both soft and hard, than any single iron plane could match. 20 was stated not to be enough (can I not say who said that?) and the assertion was that derek's conclusions were only valid because he used wood too hard to spring back. This is like a grand strand of old wives tales weaved together.

I've never had an issue in softwoods with 12 degrees of clearance and I see surrogates resorting to claiming that a five degree back bevel is needed and thus it's 7, and that's too little.

It boggles my mind. Why we have to dance around who said what is beyond me.

The assertion that I am making ad hominem arguments is wrong. I can only state that - telling you that you should think it's wrong based on what you may have reasonably concluded is well beyond what I intend to tell anyone, and i'm not thin skinned enough to be upset when someone gauges my intentions wrongly.

I now see how big of a spat this must've been before, as it's littered all over places that I didn't generally read (knots, schwarz's blog) and it looks like it turned into an 8 on 8 football game. Nobody learned anything from it.

That's too bad. The problem could've been solved quickly. 12 is enough, do some quick experiments and post the results (the same as I plane footage - that's a bridge too far for many, and maybe a threat). If one is using a certain type of plane that works well for others and the experience isn't the same, then let's figure out if there's something easy. If someone has a 12 degree clearance plane and they're having issues with clearance, find a faster stone, less back bevel or spend more time on the stones. That was apparently too much to concede.

I'm out on this, but I cannot dilute discussions about simple things to the point that nobody can tell what's being discussed, or paint an overly rosy picture (I wouldn't want one painted of me or by someone on my behalf).

I'm lost

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

I do not understand the objective of your post and David's addition assured me I was lost. I didn't read the Troll so maybe in there explains the transition to your post.?.

From your opening it seems you are responding to me but I didn't ask a question. I merely reported a Unicorn-Lite experiment result. What follows, much of which I didn't understand, doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I posted, maybe because I didn't understand it. Will you summarize what you wanted to convey as it relates to my report of lightly buffing a blade back?

Fiction

Winston

Just so everyone else recognizes that what this guy says is total fiction, here's the comment that stood out to me:

> I've been sharpening my Japanese chisels like this for almost 10 years. A flat 20-22 degree bevel and I finish the edge on a very fine suita with a slurry holding the chisel at 45-50 degrees.

(From http://www.woodcentral.com/woodworking/forum/handtools.pl/page/1/md/read/id/494756/sbj/yet-another-chisel-edge-test/)

And yet, less than a year ago in a Facebook group about Japanese woodworking, he's talking about how much grinding it'll take to increase the bevel angle of a chisel to 32 degrees:

And here he is criticizing someone for an article where he recommends setting up a paring chisel with a secondary bevel of 30-40 degrees (though this isn't the tiny microbevel we've been discussing with the buffer):

(For the curious, this PDF has the article in question: http://www.daikudojo.org/Archive/robert_meadow/beyond_the_edge_vol1no2/robert_meadow_beyond_the_edge_vol1no2.pdf)

This guy clearly is just making stuff up when he says he's been using a 20-22 degree primary bevel and 45-50 degree microbevel for a decade. What he says about his father and grandfather buffing plane irons is probably fiction as well.

Re: I'm lost

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

Bill, it relates to polishing/buffing the backside of a Veritas shooting plane blade.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Clearance

Warren in Lancaster, PA

I was involved in the clearance discussions in May 2008. I had done testing of clearance angles in 1976 and found that 8 degrees of clearance caused noticeable problems and that at 12 degrees I was confident that there were no effects. For angles between these there were very subtle problems. I was completely baffled when Larry Williams insisted that clearance needed to be more than 20 degrees. He talked a lot about milling machines and seemed unable to see a difference between a milling machine and a plane.

Years later I think I may have figured it out when I saw a video of Larry honing. On a roughened Arkansas stone, he rests the tool on the bevel, then raises it "just a little bit" to well over forty degrees. So if he has a 42 degree bevel, that can't be expected to perform if bedded at 45. And it would be marginal at 50 degrees. He said he had trouble getting a 40 degree strike block plane to work, and attributed the problem to a stone that was not flat.

I made a video yesterday....

David Weaver

...because I'm back to actually being able to make things. Unfortunately, my field of view isn't large enough where my camera is, so I had to take it down and will redo it.

Long story short, my daughter wants a loft bed, but used to be a sleep walker, so I'm making her a quick paint-grade loft bed as it may end up back out in the trash...

with yellow pine, knots and all. which directly tests the whole "12 degrees isn't enough for softwoods" thing.

That was timely to read as I only got the wood over the last couple of days, and seeing insistence that the angles I'm used to are insufficient for soft woods was a good reminder about not talking about things one has no clue about. I cannot outlast the planes' ability to pick up a shaving at that level.

I and a lot of other people were misled by that, far misled. It happens. I've played with it off and on but the realistic outcome for someone working a lot of wood with hand tools is to experiment with the lowest total angle that holds up without increasing the angle that the plane meets the wood. For me (we've established I don't do a good job of dirt control) that seems freehand to measure around 32 or 33 degrees. It's habit now. 35 is OK, but I dont' aim for that by hand. Adding clearance at the expense of an edge's ability to hold up is a bad trade off.

In those back and forths (and it only took about 10 minutes to read about the clearance wars before I saw the smoothing wars), I saw an assertion (by surrogates, some well experienced) that bevel up planes can't be used with the ruller trick because the clearance angle will be 12-5=7.

How can a discussion be had when people aren't interested in having suppositions with correct facts (it's a fraction of a degree with any thin steel rule)? It's bad enough when suppositions on correct facts are asserted as facts. Suppositions often don't stand up to testing.

We may have our disagreements, but they're tiny things in the scheme of working entirely with hand tools. It was illuminating then yet again when brian holcome started working by hand, what he found to be worthwhile in terms of economy and efficiency within a business went the same direction as history. He wanted a lower pitch, a fine edge that holds up and a double iron.

Re: Clearance

Wiley Horne

Hi all,

Larry makes the irons for these right at 25 degrees. Just spot-checked a couple:

Wiley