Thread: Australian timbers and tool steels

Originally Posted by IanW

This could morph into yet another "sharpening thread", but I think D.W. has pointed to the nub of the matter. Without getting into a debate about when the steels we think of as 'highspeed steels' were first available to woodworkers, I think we can all agree that there is a trade-off between hardness & what you can sharpen with practicality in the average workshop. Over the 50 years I've been woodworking, I've come round in a bit of a circle on blade hardness. My first 30 years or so were spent on a quest for ever-harder & tougher blades, but in the last 10 years or so, I've switched to a more nuanced approach. I've got a couple of very hard irons that hold their edge better in woods like Gidgee & She-oak than any of my more 'regular' irons, & I'm grateful to have them at times, but most of my bench planes carry Hock O1s or similar. The reason is that they do a perfectly good job on the more 'sensible' woods I normally select for cabinetmaking, yet are very easy to sharpen well. Despite the advertising blurbs, the harder blades do not take as good an edge as easily, in my hands, & I suspect many others have had the same experience. You can get a usable edge on PMV11 with oilstones, but it's not super-good, & takes a lot more time & effort than I'm prepared to give to the task.

The HSS Bailey-type irons produced in Tasmania back in the 70s (no idea what the compositions was - does anyone know for sure?), were a boon because they did hold an edge longer than 'regular' Stanley or Record irons in our abrasive woods yet were still easy to sharpen with regular 'India' or Carborundum oilstones. Fast-forward to the last 10 years or so, with an increasing number of manufacturers offering harder steels and I think a lot of people are discovering that the old sharpening media don't cut it, so to speak.

As with just about everything in life, there are compromises to be reached, so when it comes to plane irons, I suggest you weigh up the pluses & minus. If you always plane very hard, abrasive woods, then go for the toughest steels you can lay your hands on, but if you mostly work with woods no harder than say, E. regnans, you might find more middling steels suit you better. You will sharpen a few more times, perhaps, but because it's easy, I reckon you'll spend more time working with a truly sharp blade than a half-sharp one!

Cheers,

It's not just the alloys that are the solution (for hard woods), it's also hardness. I don't think there's much edge life difference on gidgee between a smoothcut iron and a high speed steel iron, but the smoothcut iron will leave a clean surface until it's dull. It's too bad tsunesaburo doesn't make them in more configurations than the ultra thin stanley replacement iron (they'd be fantastic in an infill). Most of the difference between a stanley iron and an A2 iron in edge holding is related to the difference in hardness. M2, maybe a little bit more is due to alloy, but it's not material in the context of actual work.

And it goes back to what you're suggesting - people read and read about what iron they need to make a bureau out of sandy rosewood, but they have no clue that they won't be able to make anything notable out of it in the first place (who is cutting a moulding in it and how? Dovetails? hidden miter dovetails? Most of the woods of that type are unforgiving and take details poorly. What's the payoff, then? They're the fascination of beginners unless you are doing really fine small work (like carving boxwood or ebony or something).

I've made a couple of irons to 62 or so hardness in O1 and find them to last about as long as anything that I have. I've been picky about the steel source (the hardening isn't difficult with it, of course, but the steel has to be good or you won't have a good iron), and that seems to have separated them from Hock's irons (hock's irons are chippy). Even being picky about the steel source and getting branded O1 made in the states here, the cost of the irons is only about $10 to $30 plus a little bit of time to cut them. $30 is the cost of the giant 8 inch long 2.6" wide 1/4th inch thick iron that I put in my shooting plane, and $10 of that is the shipping.

The tables in the chemistry of wood book posted earlier shows basically 1 useful thing - that everybody who works wood already knew but gets lost on the bean counters working at the corporate offices..... That trees are different depending on where they grow...

The second useful thing which everybody already knew is that it is talking about averages... And the lumber in your hands always trumps book average values....

Otherwise.. It doesn't really have a much useful info for this discussion because it is geared more towards manufacturers making pulp wood products... In that industry - you would really like to know which sort of trees generally have make most "good" pulp with the least trouble.. Ash content means something you have to pay to dispose of... Cellulose, hemicellulose, lignins, and stuff like that tells you something about the type of pulp you will get - and you can use that info to decide if it's worthwhile to your pulping operation... .. So it's an important consideration... For example - making pulp out of Khaya yields 6x as much "ash" (aka waste you have to pay to make go away) vs long leaf pine.... Probably not worthwhile....

That also explains why a lot of pulp operations are going on in the USA and Russia and not Mexico or Borneo... The native soils, climate, and trees tend to be easier to get the process to work right...

I think the subject matter we are really looking for is the stuff on Plant Nutrition... Many elements are necessary for healthy, vigorous growth... When those are lacking - the plants take up other stuff...

So for example - plants need silica, iron, magnesium, calcium, etc for certain biological processes... If they can't get enough of that stuff - they end up taking in stuff like aluminum, titanium, lead, and other nasties.... Substituting Al for Si or Fe is not a healthy thing.. It stunts the tree and causes other problems - but it happens.. The same sort of things are found in animals... If you feed cows Calcium deficient diets - they tend to end up substituting Aluminum in their tissues instead of Calcium.. That's very very bad... You would be much better off running goats on laterite soils than cows... And the trees will probably be either very very deep rooted or hard and stunted....

On the working wood question... It's telling that HSS and high alloy hand tool blades have been "A thing" in Australia and the Far East (except Japan) for a long time now where it basically doesn't sustain a major following in the USA, UK, Europe, or Russia.. Is it because they don't understand wood? No... More likely they have decided the trouble gains them significant benefit in some places where it doesn't in others...

But it also confirms why Americans love European and traditional Japanese tools while Australians love Taiwanese and the "new alloy" Japanese tools... The wood is similar...

Originally Posted by derekcohen

It also compares the Silica content of Turpentine grown in Australia (0.59%) having high marine durability to grown in Hawaii (0.09%) and being susceptible to attack!

Our Turpentine is resistance to attacks by sharks?

So where the wood grows definitely matters.

That appears to be a logical conclusion to which we are coming. Is there something different about the regions in which our timbers grow, and compared to other countries. One possible distinction is climate: the fairly dry and hot WA (at times desert) conditions versus the wetter climes of the Eastern states.

I wonder if eucalypts grown in the USA (where they were transplanted from Oz) work the same way as here? (Assuming that anyone has managed to harvest them for timber - from what I have read, these trees, although now abundant, are considered likely to check and split too much when drying to be worth the effort).

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by truckjohn

The tables in the chemistry of wood book posted earlier shows basically 1 useful thing - that everybody who works wood already knew but gets lost on the bean counters working at the corporate offices..... That trees are different depending on where they grow...

The second useful thing which everybody already knew is that it is talking about averages... And the lumber in your hands always trumps book average values....

Otherwise.. It doesn't really have a much useful info for this discussion because it is geared more towards manufacturers making pulp wood products... In that industry - you would really like to know which sort of trees generally have make most "good" pulp with the least trouble.. Ash content means something you have to pay to dispose of... Cellulose, hemicellulose, lignins, and stuff like that tells you something about the type of pulp you will get - and you can use that info to decide if it's worthwhile to your pulping operation... .. So it's an important consideration... For example - making pulp out of Khaya yields 6x as much "ash" (aka waste you have to pay to make go away) vs long leaf pine.... Probably not worthwhile....

That also explains why a lot of pulp operations are going on in the USA and Russia and not Mexico or Borneo... The native soils, climate, and trees tend to be easier to get the process to work right...

I think the subject matter we are really looking for is the stuff on Plant Nutrition... Many elements are necessary for healthy, vigorous growth... When those are lacking - the plants take up other stuff...

So for example - plants need silica, iron, magnesium, calcium, etc for certain biological processes... If they can't get enough of that stuff - they end up taking in stuff like aluminum, titanium, lead, and other nasties.... Substituting Al for Si or Fe is not a healthy thing.. It stunts the tree and causes other problems - but it happens.. The same sort of things are found in animals... If you feed cows Calcium deficient diets - they tend to end up substituting Aluminum in their tissues instead of Calcium.. That's very very bad... You would be much better off running goats on laterite soils than cows... And the trees will probably be either very very deep rooted or hard and stunted....

On the working wood question... It's telling that HSS and high alloy hand tool blades have been "A thing" in Australia and the Far East (except Japan) for a long time now where it basically doesn't sustain a major following in the USA, UK, Europe, or Russia.. Is it because they don't understand wood? No... More likely they have decided the trouble gains them significant benefit in some places where it doesn't in others...

But it also confirms why Americans love European and traditional Japanese tools while Australians love Taiwanese and the "new alloy" Japanese tools... The wood is similar...

I think the new alloy japanese tools probably don't sell much to cabinetmakers. They sell to construction workers, which isn't what we're really looking to do as woodworkers. Don't forget that the HSS iron in England preceded any of the other makers you're talking about by the better part of a century. They tried it on razors (high tungsten steel) as well, and it just wasn't used.

the real differentiator is loss of skill in using planes, and a market that is full of amateurs (who are both more reliant on gimmicks, and who also are less tight when it comes to spending. Take a look at cabinetmakers before the internet - they often had blue handled marples chisels, including for fine work. The internet decided that you can't do work with those tools, but mostly because they have to be gripped at the handle based on their balance, and they rely on you being able to figure out what they like rather than getting a guide and a jig and trying to sharpen everything the same).

Where the HSS chisels and planes separate themselves is when you're planing something filthy and that can have hidden nails and staples. God save your plane, though, because it's still going to take damage.

The traditional market in japan (of experienced users) still favors white 1 and very plain swedish steels, but that market is going away. You can make the case that nobody was making HSS irons in the US, but that's not really true. Nobody was making them commercially (and in australia, a small division was making them in low number and they were fairly inexpensive until Beach's web page went up. that goes back to amateur users buying based on what they read). Beach loves something like that because he has an absurd sharpening setup, and he measures a wear bevel. A cabinetmaker would measure their output over a given day, and judge a plane iron on longevity and surface quality across longevity. So while the US wasn't really anything HSS for planes, they really weren't marketing anything at all. The irons that stanley has made of late, and the $2 buck brothers irons are enough to work the top of a door on a worksite, but they're really not fit to be compared to irons from 100 years ago.

I'd expect that the more the market becomes less mature, the easier it will be to market specialty steels to users. A new crop of users shows up on forums and turns over at a fairly high rate, and one says that whiz-bang really helped them work a lot longer, and they never really progress with planing skills, or sharpening skills. the people who do (think Raney Nelson, etc) just disappear instead. I remember Raney having a fit in text on woodnet years ago saying "the discussion never progresses", and he's right. He's just a little bit smarter about this than I am in spending his time reading less from other people and doing work that he wants to do. Or more specifically, he got annoyed and went offline more or less except for addressing specific topics on his own blog. I'm not quite as smart as raney, so it's taking me longer to get to that point.

Ditto on the books not giving a proper range for woods. I read somewhere that Purpleheart was 1700 janka. But I couldn't sand endgrain off on my last plane without burning it, not even with a coarse belt. I can float it off with bodywork tools, but it's slow and difficult. Planing it rough is doable, but fine work with a plane across the endgrain, forget it. I have since read that it's tested between 1700 and 3900 on various strikes. I hand sawed and planed all of the plane body with soft irons except for a short diversion where I took a few strokes with an HSS muji that I have, only to realize that it is no longer the magic solution (the iron itself is durable, but the plane is a compared to an old sorby metal bench plane). I sharpened an iron once in all of that and planed in a way that I never would've 10 years ago, which was several times faster and less dependent trying to find an iron that will take a thousand feet of smoother shavings in cocobolo.

I also worked much more accurately than I ever would've with the old strategy (hard iron, thin shavings), but you can't explain those kinds of nuances to someone. Even I still tinker (sanding instead of floating the end grain), but it usually rewards me with needing to go back and do by hand what I tried to do with a power sander (to remove the burn marks on my plane).

Invest in the skills and technique and experimentation, and encourage others to do the same - and to share when they do. Everyone will be further ahead. We can still buy blingy tools for novelty, but in a lot of cases, they're just putting a bandaid over a bigger problem. If they weren't, Revilo HSS irons would cover Australia from coast to coast - they've had a hundred years to do it, and I'm sure someone was importing them, as I've been able to find them domestically in the US, and they weren't made here.

Per-capita I have a feeling that Taiwan and Australia use 5x or 10x more HSS and super alloy blades and irons in their hand tools than we do here in the USA... It's telling that Japan appears to be making their HSS hand tools for the Australian and Mainland Asia + Taiwan markets - not for the USA or Europe... And based on group buys here on WWF - HSS and D2 chisels and plane irons are quite popular vs the conventional O1/W1 fare we prefer in the USA.... Nearly all the HSS plane irons in the USA are coming out of Australia and Taiwan - where they have a strong domestic market... Isn't it ironic that the USA makes more HSS than anybody in the world - yet nobody here makes it into chisels and irons (for long)... Almost every domestic USA distributor for those HSS irons has quit stocking them. But apparently they are still selling well in Asia and Australia...

You know my opinion on them for my own use... I have several HSS irons and chisels including a couple ASW's and they are all sitting in a box... For now - I am very much content with HCS... Even on the Osage Orange guitar I just bound with Purpleheart... I certainly won't criticize somebody else if they really like them in their planes or chisels...

Originally Posted by truckjohn

Per-capita I have a feeling that Taiwan and Australia use 5x or 10x more HSS and super alloy blades and irons in their hand tools than we do here in the USA... It's telling that Japan appears to be making their HSS hand tools for the Australian and Mainland Asia + Taiwan markets - not for the USA or Europe... And based on group buys here on WWF - HSS and D2 chisels and plane irons are quite popular vs the conventional O1/W1 fare we prefer in the USA.... Nearly all the HSS plane irons in the USA are coming out of Australia and Taiwan - where they have a strong domestic market... Isn't it ironic that the USA makes more HSS than anybody in the world - yet nobody here makes it into chisels and irons (for long)... Almost every domestic USA distributor for those HSS irons has quit stocking them. But apparently they are still selling well in Asia and Australia...

You know my opinion on them for my own use... I have several HSS irons and chisels including a couple ASW's and they are all sitting in a box... For now - I am very much content with HCS... Even on the Osage Orange guitar I just bound with Purpleheart... I certainly won't criticize somebody else if they really like them in their planes or chisels...

Kind of curious which tools you're talking about going from japan to australia in HSS vs. going to the US in carbon steel. I suspect that the lack of carbon steel tools coming out of china has more to do with lack of skill to make them consistently, and to finish them after making them, as well as difficulty in getting a good supply of clean carbon steel.

TFWW did, for a long time, sell HSS chisels (they still might), and one of the retailers who is probably no longer in business sold those gray semi-HSS chisels that don't take much damage if you accidentally run them into metal. You have to resharpen them, but that's it.

Originally Posted by D.W.

....... I suspect that the lack of carbon steel tools coming out of china has more to do with lack of skill to make them consistently, and to finish them after making them, as well as difficulty in getting a good supply of clean carbon steel......

Hmm, I guess you haven't bought any Chinese tools in the last 10 years or so, D.W. They've made some pretty big strides in the quality (& quality-control) of their products, recently, and bang for buck, some of them are second to none. As for the quality of their steels, the Chinese-made blades I'm using are as good as any - they should be, they are most likely made from top-quality Australian iron-ore & coking coal.....

Cheers,

Ian,

I think the term you are looking for is "Alarmingly good" quality coming out of China... Not just that - but they are getting paid premium prices for their stuff now too... That should tell us something... Lunches being eaten and all..

It used to be that companies shopped out their down market cheap trash and kept their premium lines "At the Mothership"... Not anymore..... I like my Chinese made Marples chisels better than my Pfeil bench chisel.. The steel is very good stuff...

And there are now $200 planes and $45 socket chisels coming out of China that are more expensive than UK made Stanley socket chisels.. Granted - they are socket chisels.. But those $45 Chinese chisels cost more than Ashley Iles or Two Cherries - which are by no means "down market"... Current production UK made Stanley is quality stuff....

Originally Posted by truckjohn

Ian,

I think the term you are looking for is "Alarmingly good" quality coming out of China... Not just that - but they are getting paid premium prices for their stuff now too... That should tell us something... Lunches being eaten and all..

It used to be that companies shopped out their down market cheap trash and kept their premium lines "At the Mothership"... Not anymore..... I like my Chinese made Marples chisels better than my Pfeil bench chisel.. The steel is very good stuff...

And there are now $200 planes and $45 socket chisels coming out of China that are more expensive than UK made Stanley socket chisels.. Granted - they are socket chisels.. But those $45 Chinese chisels cost more than Ashley Iles or Two Cherries - which are by no means "down market"... Current production UK made Stanley is quality stuff....

It's difficult to use woodcraft's pricing as a good example of what tools can bring. They will sell those overpriced chisels (the ones that are $45) at some of their stores, but it probably won't be long before they ditch them for something else. They have found that just marking items up to absurd prices (e.g., it costs more to get a WR plane at WC than it does to get similar plane in europe, despite those european planes having a heavy VAT added to them. And it's cheaper to buy carving tools from canada, by a significant amount, despite having to pay shipping from Canada. There are some exclusive Pfeil items that WC has).

Their attempt to sell those bubinga handled chisels, four for $150 is in bad taste, but they have pretty much switched to that (bad taste) ever since the LN spat. They are one of the few stores I've ever seen who sells items above the retail price. The fact that their chisels cost more than ashley iles is just a bad joke. They probably cost a tenth to make. But they will get people new to the hobby - they always do.

Originally Posted by IanW

Hmm, I guess you haven't bought any Chinese tools in the last 10 years or so, D.W. They've made some pretty big strides in the quality (& quality-control) of their products, recently, and bang for buck, some of them are second to none. As for the quality of their steels, the Chinese-made blades I'm using are as good as any - they should be, they are most likely made from top-quality Australian iron-ore & coking coal.....

Cheers,

I've got quite a few (chinese tools). None that aren't high speed steel, though. Woodwell tools has always made things well, but they make little that's carbon steel - little enough that I haven't seen it over here (I have a few of their planes and a cheaply made but good-steel set of strange chisels that taper in length. They're HSS, but sharpen OK on natural stones. Just stamped out of plate, and if they'd have spent the effort to work on the bolster/tang area, they could be really good.

All of those have been bought in the last 10 years.

I still hear people talking about replacing wood river (quangsheng) blades with boutique replacements over here and saying that the improvement is significant. That shouldn't be (those planes have carbon steel irons).

As far as the steel that's not alloyed, I haven't heard of much that's good over there. I did get a smithed iron years ago from steve knight, but it cost me extra money and wasn't as good as his normal O1 irons. Very hard, but chippy. His irons themselves were very hard but NOT chippy (an example can be seen on beach's page).

Everything that comes from china is still a little bit off. Like the WR chisels that Woodcraft would like $150 american dollars for (four of them). They have a hardness spec of 58-63, and a socket that is a copy of LN's socket (deep stamp of the name on the socket). And a strange handle shape, just kind of ugly. They could be decent chisels, but does anyone have any idea how big of a difference there is between 58 and 63 hardness? I suspect they have a wide range because they're hardened on a moving line, like construction chisels. The steel that's in them is the same thing that Marples uses for the "pro touch" chisels. It probably could make excellent tight tolerances in hardness if someone cared to.

This is a very interesting discussion but in many ways over my head. The many complex and convoluted explanations about timbers various properties and the same for steel cause everyone to overlook the simple durability of tool edges. With all the fancy steels that have RC hardness of 60-64, could they just be too hard for the Australian timbers, not tempered back enough to say 57-59 RC where you have a still hard but more durable edge. The laminated chisels from Japanese firms that have super hard blue steel edges that work well in Japanese timbers will have you in tears when you try to chop a mortice in a chunk of Tasi Blackwood and you see the big chip missing from the edge, where as an old Ward or Woodcock will dull but not chip. My belief is that there are many factors that all come together to make some Australian timbers so hard on tool edges. Hardness is just one property.
All the best.

Extremely interesting read, I also suspect that grinding/honing angles has a bearing on the performance relative to the species of wood being worked and the desired end result but this in no way demeans the importance of the type and quality of steel used in the manufacture.

Originally Posted by derekcohen

As Australian woodworkers, we tend to bang on about the impact our timbers have on tool steel, whether this is in plane blades, chisels (both lathe and bench), and machine blades. Over the years we have seen the introduction of HSS (M2), A2, recently PM-V11, and even M4 replacing the O1 and high carbon steels commonly used by Stanley and many other manufacturers.

Our timbers tend to be harder than those in other countries, such as the USA, and we mention this on the forums. We are a tough bunch with tough tools for tough woods. The questions I ask are "is this really so" and, more importantly, "why"?

One simple piece of evidence is that the Janka rating for many of our timbers is high, much higher than most overseas. But is this enough to create the extra wear we experience? What about other contaminants in our woods, such as silica? Which of our timbers are high in silica - I was asked about Jarrah on another forum. I had assumed for years that the wear from Jarrah is due to high silica content, but it is not. Jarrah has low silica. It is hard, and it is often veined with resins. Is that what causes extra wear? What about other timbers - are they really more abrasive?

Regards from Perth

Derek

Derek

Several years ago I recall an email which I think was circulated via the NSW Woodworkers Association ( But I am not certain of that ), It has originated from a gentleman in The CSIRO who had done extensive research on Aus Timbers over many years, and had compiled a vast amount of Data which was likely to be dumped as the CSIRO was again being curtailed. They were therefore offering it to private enterprise.

If you can locate the Data Base it is more than likely to answer your queries.
Wood Review may have some knowledge of it.

Regards

Out of curiosity, i went out to aliexpress to find plane irons. There are a bunch, but they're all HSS>

I may order one, anyway. Interesting that they have irons in 51 and 57MM that are 2.5-2.9MM thick.

No carbon steel, but I'm not surprised by that.

When I was a child my cheap and nasty toys were "made in Japan." They were crap Today "made in Japan is synonymous with excellence. China has moved inexorably out of the crap zone and almost seamlessly into to the whatever you want at whatever price you want zone.

Regards
Paul