Thread: Plane digging in

Hi Tiger,I have some experience with Tasi oak and found it quite problematic with interlocking grain which tears out and splinters when hand or machine worked.

I use a spiral head for planing and a drum sander which works well with the timber but for final finishing with hand tools a scraper plane may halp as it has more of a shearing action

Thanks Mark at least it's not just me.

As said tas oak can be a bu&&3r sometimes. Plane needs to be well set up and really shave hair off the arm sharp. Even then sometimes that still is not enough. Stanly type 45* planes are often not going to do so sometimes the higher angled plane is the go. And some woods have to be scraped and or sanded as a last resort.
Regards
John

I guess a few qns are in order - eg,

- what do you use to sharpen the blades,
- are both your blades straight across? (any camber?)
- when you plane pine how lightly can you adjust the cut down to?

Derek has used Tassie Oak a fair bit, I think ... ?

Cheers,
Paul

eg A Pair of End Tables

There might be some for you to learn from here ... Chip breaker experiment: session four
Maybe even just in so far as "does my wood look roughly like Derek's board?"

I don't understand how a plane blade can 'dig in' Do you mean that you are getting significant tear out?
The blade can only dig in by the amount that it projects from the base which should be in fractions of a millimetre.

Originally Posted by Tiger

Thought I'd try an exercise yesterday so I took down some Kiln dried Tas Oak that I wanted to make a straight edge out of. It was a little concave and the grain changed direction about half way across its length which was about 1.8 m long. I found that the plane dug in every few inches whether I was going with the grain or against. If I retracted the blade it didn't cut, I tried that because I thought I was taking too aggressive a cut. The blade is straight and parallel and works well for pine. The blade is sharp. It happened on 2 of my planes a Bailey no 4 and a Falcon no 5. Just wanted to know what else I could check to prevent these dig-ins. I should also say that skewing the blade helped a little and I did wax the sole of the planes.

You're definitely not the only one. I was planing some (kiln-dried also) Tas Oak last week with a Stanley #4, and struck the same problem. The plane would dig in, even with very shallow cuts, to the extent that I couldn't push it forward. (I'm pretty light-weight and can't push especially hard.) My answer was to plane at 45 degrees to the direction of the grain, from both sides. That worked OK.

N.B. The blade was very sharp, (freshly sharpened and finished with 1200G), bevelled to 25 degrees and square, chipbreaker ~0.5mm behind the edge.

G'day guys. Based on one humble man's opinion, a couple of things for you to keep in mind.

Is your workpiece at the correct height and do you have a good stance? Brute force isn't necessary, and neither should body weight if you are correctly positioned over the workpeice. Balance is even more important. Your entire body should be driving the motion and you should more or less be shifting your weight from one foot to the other in one fluent action.

It's always temppting to try and take off to much on each pass. In good old theory, your plane should be set to create the thinnest continual curl/shaving possible. These will also have a dergee of transparency.

Angling the blade to the grain direction as you have mentioned is fine for reduced resistance on the cut, but 45 degrees is a bit extreme.

Finally, as John points out, your blade should be able to shave your arm. It's more about the burr than the stone grit.

Craig.

Originally Posted by CMB

G'day guys. Based on one humble man's opinion, a couple of things for you to keep in mind.

Is your workpiece at the correct height and do you have a good stance? Brute force isn't necessary, and neither should body weight if you are correctly positioned over the workpeice. Balance is even more important. Your entire body should be driving the motion and you should more or less be shifting your weight from one foot to the other in one fluent action.

It's always temppting to try and take off to much on each pass. In good old theory, your plane should be set to create the thinnest continual curl/shaving possible. These will also have a dergee of transparency.

Angling the blade to the grain direction as you have mentioned is fine for reduced resistance on the cut, but 45 degrees is a bit extreme.

Finally, as John points out, your blade should be able to shave your arm. It's more about the burr than the stone grit.

Craig.

Mine was easily shaving hairs and had no burr. I test for a burr with the flat of my thumbnail and do the shave test every time I sharpen a blade. Good workpiece height and stance, very shallow cuts. I regularly (daily) plane hardwoods and never usually have a problem with pushing right through, except this one time. I was really surprised to have this problem, but worked around it as mentioned. It was fairly old, recycled, kiln dried timber, not fresh stuff.

Thinking about it, in my cure the angle was probably more like 30 degrees than 45, not just angling the plane while pushing forward with the grain, but planing with the plane straight but from the side at 30 degrees or so, from one side then from the other. The end result was fine.

Should probably have elaborated re burr. We obviously don't want one on the finished edge. My way is a bit old school. I've never had fancy water stones or the like, just your run of the mill silicone carbide. I create a particular size burr and then remove it by stropping it on my hand. Not OHS freindly I know, and I wouldn't recommend others try it. I then give the blade a tiny tickle back on the stone and I'm away.

Hope this clears that up a bit. Craig.

Originally Posted by CMB

Should probably have elaborated re burr. We obviously don't want one on the finished edge. My way is a bit old school. I've never had fancy water stones or the like, just your run of the mill silicone carbide. I create a particular size burr and then remove it by stropping it on my hand. Not OHS freindly I know, and I wouldn't recommend others try it. I then give the blade a tiny tickle back on the stone and I'm away.

Hope this clears that up a bit. Craig.

Yep. I just do a last touchup on the back of the blade with it flat to remove the burr.
Anyway, I'm quickly turning this into an unintentional hijack.
Sorry Tiger, I only meant to report a similar problem and got carried away.

John mentioned a scraper - but if you first want to get the piece flat you can plane at 45-90 degrees across the piece to first get it close to flat. After that you choices could be ...

- scraping (some cabbies have apparently used broken pieces of glass) (eek!)
- sanding
- HNT Gordon high-angle plane(!)
- toothing plane, followed by a normal plane
- ask Derek what his 'secret' is

Assuming you don't having a toothing plane on hand (?) ... and given you want to make a straight-edge ... perhaps you could substitute with a tenon saw and make some light scoring across/down the piece.
I think, however, from memory toothing blades were about 20-40 teeth to the inch

Cheers,
Paul

Originally Posted by Tiger

Thought I'd try an exercise yesterday so I took down some Kiln dried Tas Oak that I wanted to make a straight edge out of. It was a little concave and the grain changed direction about half way across its length which was about 1.8 m long. I found that the plane dug in every few inches whether I was going with the grain or against. If I retracted the blade it didn't cut, I tried that because I thought I was taking too aggressive a cut. The blade is straight and parallel and works well for pine. The blade is sharp. It happened on 2 of my planes a Bailey no 4 and a Falcon no 5. Just wanted to know what else I could check to prevent these dig-ins. I should also say that skewing the blade helped a little and I did wax the sole of the planes.

Tiger

I would check the sole of your plane. The symptoms sound like the sole has a hollow.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Thanks for your comments so far. I'll elaborate further. The planes are sharp, I use diamond stones and waterstones up to 6000 grit followed by some stropping on a piece of MDF.

Derek I think the sole is ok as I flattened it on a series of wet and dry paper some time ago. Wish I had a Starrett straight edge to check.

Paul mentioned the camber. This has been something of a struggle for me ie my plane blades always come out with too much of a camber, it must be my honing. A little camber is fine but I suspect that it's too much and no matter how much I try, I still get too much camber, could that be the reason? There is very fine line between when the plane cuts and as soon as I project the blade a bit more it seems to struggle. The shaving comes off thick in the middle of the blade but not much action toward the ends, although if a board is perfectly flat then I get close to a full-length shaving.

C'mon then ... Photos!

The wood surface before and after ... the shavings you are getting ... the camber on your iron ...

There's a paying audience you know!

Well ... non-paying maybe ...

Paul