Thread: Plane iron sharpness testing

qwertyu - not lining you out on this at all, by the way. How the influencers operate and what their incentives are aren't nearly as transparent as they should be.

they are probably much cheaper to go through than traditional advertising channels, but we all knew to keep magazine advertisements at arm's length and didn't have this kind of "oh, they're friendly" thing going on that the affiliate marketing thing creates.

I didn't suggest anything about affiliates to the DFM guy, but it looks like he figured it out. He was charging about half as much for his irons (per cost to make) vs. a lot of boutique stuff (LV is also not gouging on V11), but they weren't really getting much notice.

Interestingly, when I went to see if they are pumping up the price of the blades (hate to say it, but if they added $30 to it, people would probably buy more of them...their plane irons are on "clearance", still at $49, and the front of their page says this)

"for each referred new customer, you get $10, and your referral will get a $10 store credit".

The affiliate summary page suggests there's a much more layered version than that for influencers.

The affiliate thing is like nematodes. there's probably no territory where it's not all over the place.

Hi All


The key performance indicator for timber I see, would be tearout, in testing. Thelocal timber have plenty of interlocked grain and localised reversals. With a poor blade, tearout can be deep.
The sustained sharpness indicated for the Magnacut and Zen Wu might see a reduction tearout. The chipping would less important as it easier to fix than a missing chunk.
Understand David's point the string test is localised.

Originally Posted by D.W.

I would imagine all of these guys work and if they have staff, their staff works, to find the affiliate stuff that pays the most. And then a video sort of implying some superior use property ("this knife has been sharp for 6 months"). it's as fake as a football bat.

Nitro V steel is AEB-L with a trace of nitrogen and vanadium added to it. Relative edge life would be about the same as A2, but the steel is a stainless with less carbon, so it's slightly different. Does James Wright know anything about the knife? I doubt it.

When was the last time you said something nice about anything?

Originally Posted by doug3030

When was the last time you said something nice about anything?

Probably yesterday. Wait, I spent 15 hours yesterday replacing my main cold water stem and finished at 1:30 am. So, probably the day before.

I don't compliment fakes like wbw or really anyone who sees woodworkers as gullible cash bags who are just ripe for shell game tests or reviews that include only things that can be revenue linked.

Originally Posted by MartinCH

Hi All


The key performance indicator for timber I see, would be tearout, in testing. Thelocal timber have plenty of interlocked grain and localised reversals. With a poor blade, tearout can be deep.
The sustained sharpness indicated for the Magnacut and Zen Wu might see a reduction tearout. The chipping would less important as it easier to fix than a missing chunk.
Understand David's point the string test is localised.

So, the answer in this case is that if that's representative of the wood you work, it's what you should test in. However, I probably did a more realistic test of irons than has ever been done, planing about 40,000 feet of shavings, weighing shavings, and taking pictures of edges. I did those tests in maple, but mostly beech (maple can have silica inclusions that damage the blades and waste the test effort). What even that test couldn't do is simulate what happens when you work in wood that's not in good shape. I was enamored with V11 (CTS-XHP) after doing the test, and then made a bunch of XHP irons and had already had 3 V11 irons. My experience with them sizing beech for plane bodies was that the veritas custom plane was vastly outdone by my own wooden plane with a Butcher iron, which is an iron with less edge life even than O1. I couldn't really figure those two things out, and sort of filed it.

As soon as I got to work back with cherry and beech (the two woods I use), V11 and my own XHP irons became a hassle because chipping (probably of any iron, but it's magnified if an iron has twice the abrasion resistance and could go long, and then sharpens half as fast), and I ended up going back to O1 and vintage irons - they were more efficient in actual use. I didn't anticipate such a big difference, but the work and the microscope pictures of nicked edges told the stories.

So, on to the bit about avoiding tearout. it's done with high angle or the chipbreaker, and if there is something in the wood causing chipping, that's solved by edge geometry (figured that out later).

I don't know anything about zen wu other than that they won't tell what the steel is in their irons. A first guess with no exposure to them would be CPM 4V, which is what larrin thomas was shooting to duplicate with magnacut (a stainless version of CPM 4V). But we can't really know anything about zen wu's stuff because they don't provide information. if they have an affiliate program, we'll be hearing all about them for sure and probably nobody will challenge them to prove their claims.

their first claim on their site is an unspecified alloy holds an edge several times longer than A2. 10V theoretically has about double the edge life of A2. Nothing else that would go in a plane does. The second comment that they have is that the edge will not microchip in hard woods. This is a false statement. Nothing has better edge stability than the plainest of carbon steels. Edge chipping and nicking isn't avoidable in some situations without correcting geometry to deal with it. When that's done all steels fail or all survive depending on whether or not it's done right. None of the PMs have magical edge stability that avoids nicking or denting.

Their claims go up from there, and they're fascinated with describing long edge life, almost as fantastically as the seller of the original academy saw works blades saying that their blades last up to 22 times longer than other irons.

probably the most wear resistant steel I can think of with excellent edge stability is Magnacut - the trick with it that larrin thomas managed is preventing the chromium from forming carbides. Its edge life is a little less than V11. In practice, they may be the same as it's less susceptible to originating cracks in carbides of size. What dents or nicks one will most likely nick both, though - it takes sort of a special weird case of something that nicks an edge, but isn't an outright abrasive contaminant particle to nick one but not the other.

I'm not personally a fan of someone hiding the steel composition in tools - it's intentional. If i was a little more motivated, I'd buy their blades and have the XRF testing (the same test that matched PM V11 to CTS-XHP) and just report what they are and point to data on catra wear, which very closely parallels planing edge life if wood is continuous and clean.

Their page has a lot of woo, though. I would love to XRF them, and then wear the edge on one and take a picture of the carbide size under a microscope. Magnacut excels at this, but as with all things, looking for the best picture doesn't always return the same feel. 10V wears slow and looks great, but it feels dull sooner in its wear cycle.

Similar wear steels of more common types do this, too. 52100 (ball bearing high carbon steel) and O1 both have about the same potential edge life, but no matter what I do with 52100 and how hard or how tough or how many thermal cycles, it doesn't wear with the same edge quality and the smoothed surface isn't as good.

Magnacut and AEB-L both have fantastically fine structures - finer than most carbon steels, but they also don't have the same crispness as they're dulling that something like good higher hardness O1 does.


Don't believe any of these steels will move the needle actually working wood -they won't. The solutions are things you can do for free. Tearout involves dealing with the chipbreaker, and you can make a cheap blade outperform the most expensive hard blade you can find in wood that has silica simply by buffing the tip of the iron a little bit. By a very very large factor.

Knowledge that doesn't cost anything won't get priority with influencers, google ads, etc. it's not a conspiracy or anything, it simply doesn't generate ad revenue and cohort data that's worth a lot of money.

There is a factory chinese made look to me on the zen wu stuff, so in an attempt to find an unbranded version with info about the steels, I went to alibaba and aliexpress. I could find the stuff plus some more items on "rose tools" on aliexpress. Think Luban and other unmarked stuff that is sold under the woodriver brand.

There's something about the zen-wu page that doens't pass the sniff test. The aliexpress store touts some block planes with 3V steel and boasting BOS heat treatment. Paul Bos set up one of the reputable shops here and must've come up with processes for various steels as Bill Tindall here in the states sent CPM M4 and 3V items to Bos a long time ago (remember the 3V irons that Steve Elliot - perhaps steve had more to do with it than Bill, but the two of them are Bert and Ernie of sorts with some projects).

the site talks some weird story about their things being doable only by hand in many cases, and being forgiving of their employees for making mistakes, and then the laminated plane irons are pretty much either glued or electric weld laminations, definitely devoid of any hand work. The chisels are bar stock (just like the LV chisels) and the comments about their "ZW" steels is the same kind of irk as LV allowing people to call their steel proprietary and run around saying they developed a steel. They did nothing of the sort, they used CTS-XHP and freewheeling a melt and asking for something outside of spec would be bad form - that stuff is sussed out when the alloy is developed (which can cost millions of dollars).

ZW claims the steels are from the US, and gives a toughness spec, but doesn't understand the relationship between toughness and actually edge behavior. Toughness tests are an impact on the side of a tool and don't always equate to edge stability. 3V is a very tough steel, but it's just sort of OK in a plane iron because it's a matrix steel. Like AEB-L. AEB-L is an ingot version of similar potential edge life, but it's pennies, and it's stainless and can hit the same hardness and toughness specs comfortably. it's cheap because it's mass produced for consumer razors.

it sort of tweaks my dangle parts a little but to see little boutiquey stuff or what looks to be chinese production stuff with someone being creative with a web page, and then talking about steels as if they have developed them. they claim to have a PM steel developed just for chisels. I'm not aware of any such thing. the toughness claim relative to another steel suggests that one is 3V.

In the interest of consumers, it'd be dandy if someone did what they do as a standard in the knife community - XRF a steel and then test it for hardness. it costs about $35 here in the US to get an XRF analysis done on something, and get hardness testing done at the same time (I can do hardness testing in my basement, but XRF analysis isn't something you'll find floating around for $800-$1000 US in terms of tooling).

If you guys get buck knives over there, Buck must've been licensed to put a stamp in their knives with a little flame and +BOS punched into the blade. I had a 154CM knife years ago, but it wasn't the powder metal version and regardless of who came up with the process, it was coarse and terrible.

3V, XHP, CPM M4 and ingot M2 were all steels that I tested in my planing test. M4 lasted the longest, but had a lot of resistance when planing (all were sharpened with the same micron diamond finish in a guide). 3V also had considerable resistance. the idea for all of them is novel, but problems they solve are far more effectively solved other ways. I found out counting strokes with the honing guide just how likely it is that people will not sharpen nicking and wear out of the powder metal irons, too - there's much false economy to be had if you aren't as rigorous as I was making sure all of the tools were burr and defect free and fully sharpened end to end.

Call me nutty (or negative), but I think the market deserves to be told honest information rather than sold zen woo.

Hi David

The chipbreakers are as good.. Close to edge say 0.1 to 0.15mm steep pitched. Closer the plane will refuse to cut. Unfortunately this odes nor mean that teraout is banished. Some timbers just want to tearout. Blackwood and spotted gum come to mind or at least the timber I get here but there are others. In these timbers the best I can achieve is minimised and not deep. Easier to scrap or sand out- but that is additional work

I have also buff top and top and bottom at low angles looking for improvements. Not enough to unfortunately to stop tearout

The work with planes is orientated to controlling tearout, and any assessment of plane blades it tearout control that comes first, IMO.

The chipping while annoyin harg does not tend to increase tearout. And some use toothed planes as a method of controlling tearout.

Sharpness is also a factor in controlling tearout and I was interested in this section of WBW data Screenshot 2023-08-14 at 2.17.42 pm.jpg
The random locations sharpness testing indicated that the magna cut and Zen Wu maintain sharpness. Interestingly the PM11 is also better than some at staying sharp. I have one PM V11 blade so I try some comparisons,

Curious about how "sharp" the buffed edges are, but not enough to buy a string tester, at this time.


Not suggesting this is sure fix for tearout, suggesting it might be factor in assisting and perhaps enough, for me, to acquire and try one magnacut blade. But no rush will happen there- (unless one gets a bit frustrated with tearout and annoyed enough with sanding -noise/dust/speed/consumables)


Cheers

Martin

The one-two punch for tearout elimination while smooth planing is to set a sort of coarse shaving - measured not by thickness, but by effort - and plane that. And then to back off of depth and take a series of thin shavings. You get to define thin, but it must be thin enough that shavings can't lift.

This is routine sharpness, though, and special alloys don't make any difference in this process. What they provide in longevity is generally disproportionally increased in sharpening time (for the worse), especially when nicking is considered. To make claims like some of the various distance quotes on edge life takes planing an already planed surface, so it's representative of a theoretical potential, but this isn't something reached in day to day work. A lesson I learned the hard way.

it's more typical to plane relatively heavily and then take the thin shavings with a fresh edge. Getting the fresh edge quickly is more important than abrasive edge life, though a fresh strong edge does have sharpness considerations. For example, 3V's typical suggested spec is 59. This is too soft, and it rolls too easily, and when it nicks, it nicks more deeply but the nicks are a kind of rolled edge and less of a break. It doesn't really matter - the roll is probably worse.

Thus, 61, which is considered an alternative temper for 3V is a better choice for planing - it gives up a lot of its toughness between 59 and 61, but that doesn't matter unless you're making crowbars. Due to its composition and small carbides, edge life is dependent a lot on hardness (same for AEB-L), so it's a good trade.

For an idea of what nicks look like from a maple inclusion, here's an older picture of V11:
https://i.imgur.com/vuyz0Ho.jpg

And another one of nicks gained through planing cocobolo.
https://i.imgur.com/hVS0o7y.jpg

The second is an iron of my make (XHP), but same thing. it's not any harder, but about the same, and I guess the contaminants were bigger and rounder.

Five or six of these nicks with deflection and a plane won't enter a cut. I was testing 6 irons when I found the inclusion shown in the first picture. you can't see it in maple, you can just tell that you hit it by the lines all over the work and sudden cut stoppage. All of the planes ceased to cut within a few strokes. I later learned how to adjust geometry so that you could plane through this.

it's perhaps not easy to believe what I say if it doesn't agree with other stuff described - like constant references to mitigating tearout with sharpness. The cap iron mitigates tearout. The only question is when you go to the very thin shavings (no cap iron reset, so not tedious), do you have enough sharpness left. Uniformity is key in that situation, because it's what you see. An iron like V11 planing past the edge life of O1 will not have the edge uniformity to leave a finished surface.

Lastly, no nicking - right, it does not have any ...or at least not much...impact on tearout. What it does is rob you of productivity enormously. is it critical? It's a hobby, so probably not. But nicking will give you the wrong ideas about edge longevity and it sends people toward things like high speed steel irons at high hardness, where what really occurs is perhaps the nicking will be a little less deep due to iron hardness.

In my test, one of the irons was a laminated japanese tsunesaburo type - blue #1. It had its own issues (large carbides sparsely spread around in it - tungsten carbides), but it was hardest along with a chinese high speed steel iron, and those took the smallest dents in the maple inclusion. They still ceased to cut.

Speaking of magnacut - if you were in the states, you could've had mine. I bought one just to analyze the steel's longevity and carbide fineness and get an idea/feel for it. Unfortunately, its characteristics won't really move the needle and the Lake Erie iron made from it that I got was underhardened at the tip. After grinding it back a pretty stiff amount, it worked fine. I later tested it for hardness (62.5). No clue what happened at the edge, but probably heat. The steel is very novel from a technical standpoint - Larrin is relatively local to me, though I've never met him. He tested some samples for me when I was getting an Idea of how good my heat treating is. What he did to maintain a super fine structure (finer than even O1, far finer than V11 and about as fine as 3V and AEB-L) has never been done before to my knowledge, and it allows an iron to have toughness above A2, far above V11 and still have reasonably high hardness. If you don't sharpen it with diamonds, it doesn't suffer much because the carbides are only about a micron. In V11 5 or pairs touching for 10 or so isn't uncommon.

However, what the iron didn't do was outperform anything in terms of sweetness of cut, and I don't have a visual connection - V11 has more "bite" in the cut as it wears. This ultimate fineness in particles doesn't really translate to anything useful for woodworking beyond a point, and it seems to take away some snappiness of the edge. 1084 steel (0.84% carbon, very plain steel) even provides tactile feel compared to 1095 (typically 0.95-1% carbon, very plain).

I sold my magnacut iron after it's sat unused for a very long time - on ebay - and need to drop it off at the post office today. I will give you an illustration of nicking and productivity. I don't know if planes ride on the ridges of nicking a little bit, but same effort in an iron with a couple of small nicks will yield only a fraction of the wood removed for same effort - important to me because I like to work entirely by hand, and things like that start to undwind why people think you can't. it's not tedious submicron issues, it's the many micron issues that you can actually see.

OK, so here's the bit on nicking separately. I don't remember which iron - it's either chinese HSS or V11 - I think it was V11. It doesn't really matter - the solution never occurs by changing alloy.

(picture headers help me out here...thankfully ....this is an iron of my own make, identical to V11. Carpenter CTS-XHP, which you can't really obtain easily at this point anyway)

https://i.imgur.com/hVS0o7y.jpg

That's the same picture as above with the nicks. They occurred in cocobolo sharpened with a bevel angle of 32 degrees or something. Give a degree or two. Found out later that my templates are off, so let's say 33-34. Should be a strong edge.

In cocobolo with silica, which is common for cocobolo, rosewood, mahogany, etc, the iron stopped cutting reasonably within about 20 strokes.

This is the same iron with a lot of honing - perhaps a solid minute or two of heavy work on a medium coarse fresh diamond hone to get past the nicking - something few will do. I am accurate and probably more competent with something like this than most because of toolmaking. If you put a tool in a guide and honed this out, it would be 5 solid minutes of work to do it accurately.

https://i.imgur.com/jWNFBFW.jpg

So, in a rush, i did not finish this second edge as well and rather just got it close and then adjusted the geometry with a buffer.

i believe the shaving on the left is the "regularly honed" iron at about 20 shavings.
https://i.imgur.com/JZviysE.jpg?1

The shaving on the right is the buffed iron, which is less well finished, but at 75 shavings, and it showed little sign of needing to stop.

This concept of preventing damage that occurs at the very apex will unlock long planing intervals with normal steels in very very hard woods. There's nothing special about this XHP iron other than that I wanted to see if you can heat treat it in open air and get close to LV's irons - and you can, even though the heat treat schedule would say you can't. My iron had approximately the same edge life - double that of O1 - in a planing test. To actually get it in regular work without planing already planed surfaces isn't going to happen, though.

At any rate, the shaving on the left is probably 1/4th the weight of the shaving on the right, the surface left from it is worse, and you have to fight the plane more to stay in the cut. It's (nicking) a huge thief of effort, one that you have to measure and count a little bit to believe it.

The test would've been the same with O1 of reasonable hardness (>60). Cocobolo in this case was about 1.08 or 1.1 SG (heavier than water). I wouldn't modify the edge for regular wood, but I would if nicking is an issue for any reason.

Over the years, I've bought a large number of exotic irons - they were each novel and then the novel part wore off and I put them aside. There are fixes that are more commonly mentioned (back bevels and things), but those are also very detrimental to actually getting anything done. This type of edge modification off of the buffer limits clearance slightly, but it gives back longevity beyond the lost clearance many times over, so it's a good trade - and it does it without increasing angle.

Increasing angle is a sort of quick fix for small areas, but using something like a 60 degree effective pitch to plane 75 board feet of wood for a project is a no go.

In years past, I thought this cocobolo board was unplaneable. Magically, after more experience planing and with little things figured out along the way, it's not that bad. Not easy, but not bad. I could certainly make a small table out of it if I was crazy, and plane it.

I didn't go and look at WBW's test earlier - I know he's a shill. But I saw someone say something about magnacut being longer wearing or better in a planing test than V11 (CTS-XHP) and saw a picture of the magnacut and "zen wu" irons and figured we'd find out that he had individual affiliate links to those two irons, at least.

What I didn't expect was to find out that he had affiliate links only to those two irons.

First, the idea that V11 planes less long than mangnacut is false. The idea that it is less keen in the cut is factually false. I didn't test any of this stuff with strings, I tested it by hand. Magnacut does not have the abrasion resistance to last with V11 in a test and like AEB-L, it doesn't quite have the bite in wood that V11 does as the wear continues. At 61/62 hardness, magnacut will come up short of XHP by 10-15%. Of course he's apt to say "oh, the LE iron blew everything away" along with the Zen wu - he has an affiliate link for only those two right in the comments. They probably pay a pretty strong affiliate commission.

"one of the viewers sent me a lake erie iron". Maybe it was the manufacturer - sent along with affiliate agreement.

Pitiful. I think it's a shame that people think he's a legitimate information source.

https://i2.wp.com/knifesteelnerds.co...0%2C1536&ssl=1

He's got a claim that the LN iron betters V11 - hocum. Look at the catra test results.

When I tested plane irons, LN's A2 iron bettered (my) O1 by about 25%, regardless of the test. V11 doubled O1.

Also, when planing wood, there is no way to get a consistent test other than rotating irons through the same pieces of wood. My first V11 beech durability test yielded about 2100 feet planed. After that piece of beech was planed away, I switched pieces and ran a separate test of XHP (my iron) against O1. My iron planed 4050 feet and I thought I had really made something great. But instead of planing 1050 feet, the O1 iron (same that planed a little over 1000 in the first test) planed 2100 feet.

Imagine not accounting for that potential error.

Interesting posts DW good to know. I deff need to look more critically at this stuff.

qwertyu - not on you at all. I think it's unreasonable to expect everyone to be able to navigate a minefield without going pretty deep in the info. And when you go and try to interpret the spreadsheets the way they're presented and with a string test, either the stuff is intentionally misleading, or it's just detached from real world work in the wood.

The way it's presented is sort of this false test thing on YT. I don't know if there's legitimacy to the tests or not in everything, but the point is to spend a day doing a "test", create the sense that you're doing a service, and then promote something you're affiliated with. Perhaps not everything in this case, as the DFM iron didn't make it into the "final group". It probably would've outlasted all of the other irons in a planing footage test even though it feels a little weird in a plane iron.

Without counter information and experience, there's just so much data in the WBW tests giving the impression that they're definitive, and the glowing "testimonial" remains. Which sort of tipped me over the edge. Magnacut irons are good, legitimately really good and interesting. If they were better than anything else, I wouldn't have sold my test iron off on ebay. There's nothing about them other than stainlessness that isn't a trade off that causes the proposition to be neutral vs. O1, though.

it just makes me a little sad for the hobby that no voice is ever going to be as loud as the few pigs who push their way into the trough every single time because they are never full.

D.W.
Please let me criticize you a bit.
1) You constantly complaining and neglecting different youtubers, thats fine, but rarely pointing on mistakes. Mostly telling that they just want to earn money. Maybe just point out one or two mistakes so less critically thinking fellas could check it out.
2) Your post are long. Very long. And somehow difficult to read.
3) In your videos you are talking a lot and going on same thing several times with different words.
But I am not native speaker and not very smart, so may be this is the problem.

Soooo, I want to thank you for posts and videos. For me its is the side of true masters of tools and less of the video shooting.
As I am seeing this I learned from paul sellers like guys that woodworking exists, and now its time to take it to the next level. Hopefuly.

Originally Posted by sshiva

D.W.
Please let me criticize you a bit.
1) You constantly complaining and neglecting different youtubers, thats fine, but rarely pointing on mistakes. Mostly telling that they just want to earn money. Maybe just point out one or two mistakes so less critically thinking fellas could check it out.
2) Your post are long. Very long. And somehow difficult to read.
3) In your videos you are talking a lot and going on same thing several times with different words.
But I am not native speaker and not very smart, so may be this is the problem.

Soooo, I want to thank you for posts and videos. For me its is the side of true masters of tools and less of the video shooting.
As I am seeing this I learned from paul sellers like guys that woodworking exists, and now its time to take it to the next level. Hopefuly.

Hi, sshiva - I definitely never put the effort into making videos that are sort of accessible - or I should say compact with widespread appeal. They're "accessible", but tedious. It's taxing to try to go into what really matters and really figure that out vs. just turn the camera on. The opposite end of that would be the sellers and wright and so on, where the information is only cursory, but the videos are voluminous. The end for each of those is different - wright wants to get you to buy things. The wood whisperer wants you to buy things. Paul wants you to buy his classes instead, but give the idea that "oh look at me, and how much information I give away".

I think what really drives improvement isn't about videos or learning from other people, it's getting the basics and expecting them to always improve (e.g., always improving what you can sharpen, how fast, how consistently, etc...but that happens not from learning a new video, but from what your hands and mind see when you sharpen and how you can refine it). But especially, then finding something you want to make so well that you'll really wear away at things you could improve on a little at a time.

I have limited topics in my videos, too - but that's intentional, and realistically, YT was a drastically different place when I first started posting videos -I wanted to post videos of things that generally weren't well described rather than trying to attract a steady audience and turn on the advertisements. there was no documentation on building double iron wooden planes, and there would be a question here and there on forums where someone asked for a source "like whelan's book, but that covers making double iron planes". This seems trivial now, and once you're a good maker, you don't really need much for step by step documentation - you just need to know which design will leave you with a plane you'll use vs. pat yourself on the back and then put it on the shelf again in favor of using something else (this is a really important thing, though!! Being competitive with yourself for your own pleasure).

YT is now a medium where the algorithm favors the curated market created by the alternate reality - as in, if James manages to sort of pull the shirt over the head of people he's about to turn toward something he wants them to buy, it creates a reliable market for YT and advertisers. The content is created at a level that will catch the most fish in the net, and hopefully the ones who are buying and not looking at something like a plane iron and saying "you know, I have enough experience to know that nothing has been created in plane irons in the last 100 years that really improves what we can do with a plane. So I don't really need to consider buying another iron".

I don't know who could carry the torch to getting people to the next level for themselves - we have to do it for each other, I guess, but the outcome we have probably shows what'll win. And the number of folks like you - wanting to bump through, is a minority. But you can do it - even if you never find the right source.

I was very lucky in 2010 that George Wilson (who I didn't know at the time) asked for my phone number, called me, and said "there are things you could do better, and here's what they are". He was kind of telling me that instead of malingering at that sort of "past paul's instruction, now what" limbo that I needed to do better work and that he could see potential. He didn't tell me that I'd become a fine worker, because I'm not that. George is a fine worker. He told me what would look better and why - in that case, the subject was a scratch made closed backsaw handle. I was so insecure that I thought by talking so much, I gave the impression that I was capable of more than I'm capable of and I'd be outed as someone with enthusiasm that went well beyond ability. But George was right about what he thought I could do. It was eye opening, and though I've talked to him a whole lot since then, it's scarcely about "what should I do" - most of the talk is not related to woodworking and I like to hide my stuff from him and then get his opinion after I'm done. Like making chisels - i didn't want him to know I was doing it because I was afraid he'd ask to see the chisels (which I'd still like to improve on further). I wanted to have them right before he saw them and then perhaps he'd give me an idea to tip them aesthetically over the top without it being something prissy like measuring sides in thousandths or some other nonsense that doesn't make or not make a good chisel.

I think this may not clarify much, but it's a contrast to what's the next honing guide, and my belief that everyone who wants to make this transition from jumping from one method to the next, or one purchase to the next, can make the transition into making things - in some cases, a lot of something that you're motivated to make so you can see your own improvement. Then the world becomes a more generalized place (what looks good, what doesn't, what feels good to use or be near if it's furniture instead of tools, what generates a natural preference from me and others vs. what doesn't...I (you) will figure out how to do it). And your methods will be different than someone else's in some ways. As would mine. My enormous fascination with sharpening finely and quickly is because it's really important in the context of actually working by hand. What I've learned from it could work backwards to working with power tools and 20% by hand or whatever, but maybe it's not that important for someone who wants to do that. it whittles all the way down into little, but differentiating things - like if I were to make another dozen bench planes, I would use an incannel gouge for most of the work rather than a flat chisel. In 2012 or 2013, I was good at sharpening, but I wasn't fast sharpening things like incannel gouges and preventing them from getting chipped edges.

I'm going on at length here, and your criticism of my ways of going about communicating things is entirely fair. But I'll use the gouge in this case as one more thing to compare. it's demonstrably better for side grain and end grain work on tools and furniture, but few people can sharpen them proficiently. In the context of making things, it's somewhat important. But if I were to go out and make a blast video intended to snag half a million people and it said "YOU NEED THIS TOOL!" and showed an incannel gouge with a revenue token link, most of the people watching would probably not need an incannel gouge. I would much rather motivate someone to get to the point where the gouge makes a difference than get the people who don't need one to buy it and parrot what I said.

What took so long for me to realize that an incannel gouge is the tool of choice for a lot of flat work? Not being able to see someone professionally use a gouge making planes vs. a chisel. Steve Voigt got a video from the hawley foundation or whatever it may be (that's now public) and the guy doing a demo of planemaking is clearly a production professional using a gouge. And he's not an especially careful worker, so 10 years ago, I would've wondered how someone with such heavy hands on the work could even keep a gouge sharp. I learned that a patternmaker's gouge was just the thing on guitars, then used it on furniture chancing into an easy way to sharpen them and keep them from chipping, and when Steve said the work was done in the video with an incannel gouge, it sort of sparked that in my mind. I'd used one only on the in-handle mortise on a plane. we don't see many of those videos of a professional working to push us along. These days, people would want to know the brand of the gouge and a link to buy, and some sanitary napkin would put up a video with a revenue link and nobody would learn to use it. And that makes me crabby.

It's easy to set me off with people like Wright because he's not a guy retiring from 30 years of woodworking with sore elbows, shoulders and hands - he's a guy who used to float around woodworking channels with little accomplishment (I don't know what his background is, maybe someone else knows. most of these influencers are like me - except I'm not an influencer - with some kind of white collar background). When I clicked open the actual wright video yesterday and saw the sheet, I first thought "OK, i'll be set off when I find that the winning stuff is among a bunch of affiliate links to collect money", but the smell of factually incorrect stuff, maybe some unintentional, but far reaching and influential - really set me off.