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Thread: Shaving width.

  1. #16
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    A different take, perhaps more recent in time to what Brent Beach wrote https://www.popularwoodworking.com/w...-totally-evil/

    After the recent [2012] spate of discussions about a series of Japanese films on chipbreakers (here is the complete and translated film) and some encouragement from woodworker David Charlesworth, I decided to experiment with the position of the chipbreaker on my bench planes.
    Planes didn’t always have chipbreakers, and they did a fine job of making some of the most beautiful high-end furniture in the Western world. But after their advent, writers sang their praises on a regular basis as a great improvement.
    I never understood it. According to early books, you set the tool’s chipbreaker close to the cutting edge of your handplane, presumably to help reduce tearing. When I first started using planes, I followed those instructions, but I didn’t see much benefit. What I did experience was a lot of clogging.
    So I backed the chipbreaker away from the edge (about 3/32″) and focused on other ways to reduce tearing – the cutter’s sharpness, a tight mouth and the angle the edge was presented to the wood.
    The recent discussion of the Japanese films (which are not new), made it clear to everyone with an Internet connection that the chipbreaker had to be a lot closer to the cutting edge than I ever suspected. How close? The answer is itself a question: How close can you get it?
    Today I explained these ideas to a class of students I am teaching at the Dictum GmbH school of woodworking in Germany and asked all of them to help me examine this idea by setting their breakers as close as possible to the cutting edge.
    We set them by screwing them down tight and tapping them forward with a hammer – getting as close as we dared or as our eyesight would allow.
    The first results were interesting. The shavings we produced were surprisingly crinkled. Bengt Nilsson, a colleague of mine in the class, produced shavings on bubinga that looked like smashed up bacon.

    With our first experiments with chipbreakers on Tuesday the bubinga shavings came out looking like cooked bacon.
    But the surfaces of the wood looked nice. Other students had similar success – with no real tearing on a wide variety of species, everything from Scots pine to walnut to oak to beech to the bubinga. And this success was regardless of grain direction.
    Not satisfied, I took my chipbreaker to the sharpening room and honed a 50° secondary bevel on my chipbreaker. I polished it to #8,000 grit as well (why not?).
    That changed everything in the way the shavings looked. Instead of looking like a crinkle fry with a case of the bends, the shavings flew out of the mouth with a minimal amount of distortion. The surface of the wood looked as good as ever. Even on knots, reversed-grain bubinga, quartered and messed-up oak – you name it – the results were very good.
    Pieces of wood that I had been scraping the day before were easily planed with the tight chipbreaker setup. The only change in the setup was the position of the breaker.

    regards from Alberta, Canada

    ian

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  3. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by planemaker View Post
    Specific to users of wooden bench planes with traditional wedge abutments; if your struggling with a build up of shavings within the abutment lines of the mouth opening, the correct use of camber to restrict the shaving width should alleviate this concern.

    Wow thank you! This has been driving me nuts!


    Sent from my SM-T530 using Tapatalk

  4. #18
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    Good lord, Brent beach doesn't know much about plane design or actually using them. I am aware of his edge studies and like those, but until he gets a couple of hundred board feet of wood and works it with planes to make something (not douglas fir, wood that might be a little harder to plane), his opinion about what the cap iron does or doesn't do isn't worth anything.

    We have heard now for getting close to a decade that the cap iron will wear or need sharpened, or iron life will be shorter or some other nonsense. The reality is you will get more work done between sharpenings with less effort and be able to work with a duller plane and create a better surface. The plane will not feel duller to you, it will just work well to a greater wear point. In order to understand that, you need to do little more than use both types of planes heavily. not test shavings, not edges, not just smoothing, but actually use them. You will learn to smooth faster and more evenly by doing that type of work.

    In regard to the corners of a plane being addressed by cambering, it will help. The underlying issue is still there, and that is that there is something wrong in the design or fitting of a plane if it cannot feed a full width shaving straight on without some kind of problem. It is a better idea to fix that than it is to automatically remove 1/2 inch of the cut width from work.

    Larry Williams started the rumor that said width is unusable in double iron planes, but he knows little about using planes, too - he's not been able bodied to do it, and he does most of his work with machines other than a little bit of light finish work. Every single person I know who has used hand planes to do a lot of work, which is only a few, and not in a setting where they were limited to a certain type (for example, woodworkers at williamsburg are not allowed to use double iron planes, because the curators think they weren't common enough in mid-late 18th century there) - will end up saying what I'm saying. Brian Holcombe, Warren (who said it long before me, but we were too dense to take it in - plus Larry argued more loudly and Warren didn't care, because, what do you care when you're right and someone else just keeps going on in ignorance?).

    The planes that I examined before copying them and making double iron planes all fed full width, but each needed a little attention due to age (usually due to the wedge being narrower than the plane either due to mismatched wedges or movement of the fingers). Every single plane that I have made is made first with the iron straight across, then used in good and poor quality wood (each feeds a little differently - poor quality wood is more likely to jam) and must work with the iron set intentionally to the left, to the right and then centered full width without clogging.

    You can camber the cap iron or not camber it, it'll never touch the surface of the wood, so it doesn't matter if it overlaps the iron a little bit.

    If it pleases someone to camber the edges to solve a clogging problem, that's OK. It's not mandatory, however.

    About 1/3rd of the time, I did have feeding issues with a plane before adjusting the wear, etc, to eliminate them (I build them tight, if the wear was less close to the cap iron - or rather, steeper is more appropriate - opening the mouth and wear more doesn't necessarily improve feeding without garish amounts of removal , they would all feed fine). Each one of those was fixed to feed well in less than half an hour by adjusting the wear and making sure the cap iron's leading edges was proper (an overly-rounded tall cap iron is no asset in a wooden plane - they should be sprung only slightly with a long lower primary bevel after the first nominal part of their thickness. Some cheaper cap irons come tall and rounded like that. An older mathieson or ward cap iron will show the proper profile. More modern caps, like the ones found on ECE planes, often work OK because the plane design is biased to chase the wear down to a very low height. Almost non-existent. They're not expecting anyone to wear a half inch off of their planes, you could just buy another one.

    Both Warren and I have corrected Brent Beach (in communication directly to him, not in drive by forum posts), but he knows too much to learn anything at this point, if you know what I mean.

    he also doesn't really know much about stropping, and could stand a turn shaving with a straight razor for a year or two to understand it a little better. That hasn't stopped him from coming to final conclusions.

  5. #19
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    In regard to the wedge picture, the fingers should not be straight and blunt. They are tapered in width down to their terminus (fairly thin at that point) and matching the abutments and plane cheeks. No older planes are made with wide straight fingers....

    .. because they would cause feeding problems.

    The ends of the fingers should ideally be sprung against the side of the plane, though the plane may work fine without doing that. That is, taper the width of the wedge a little bit so that it's not piston tight against the side of the plane in its full thickness area, but so that the fingers are ever so slightly wider than the plane and sprung. This is an issue of hand fitting a wedge to a plane, a bias in favor of the maker (just like the hollow in the back of good quality irons to make sure they bed well).

    The reason that there is so much misinformation from people like Larry is because he doesn't know as much as he thinks he does about the topic. These nuances are the things that make a good plane, and without them, you can't really luck into it.

    I bought probably 20 old planes total when I was looking at planes and trying to copy what I'd refer to as good work. Every single good English plane and american plane had a wedge with tapered fingers as mentioned. I'm sure it was just a given known thing to make a plane that fed well on a full width shaving.

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