Stanley Bailey #4 Blades

[dbubnich]

I have had a bit of fun over the last few weeks learning how to get an old Stanley #4 plane working nicely trying to flatten out a fairly highly figured jarrah slab. Unfortunately I hadn't realised how deep the tear out was in taking off the bulk of the material to flatten the slab and now finding it is taking a long time to try and get a decent finish.
I have worked through and flattened the sole, moved the frog forward to close up the mouth, sharpened the blade with a 20 degree back bevel and am now able to get a pretty nice long shaving off across the length of the slab; however the edge on the blade only seems to last for about 2 to 3 minutes before it is noticeably dull and the quality of the shavings starts to drop and I can start to feel the stripes of reverse grain again which also seems to result in a reduction in the finish.

Just wondering if there is something else to try to get an edge that will last a bit longer or if that is a limitation with the standard Stanley blade and I'm just in for a few long days of spending more time sharpening and re-setting the blade then actually using the plane!

I have been sharpening with wet and dry on a glass plate up to 3000 grit and then finishing on a piece on a leather strop.

[derekcohen]

Where about in Perth are you? I am in Rossmoyne, and you are welcome to bring your plane (and Jarrah board) to my workshop, where I will check over the blade (which may be okay, but the sharpening and set up may be the issue), and show you the alternative blades. Further, there are relevant techniques for planing Jarrah with Stanley planes to prevent tearout. Let me know.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Fergiz01]

Hey mate I can see that you're in Perth. You'd be welcome to come round and try out a HSS and PMV11 replacement blade to see the difference before you commit any of your hard earned. I'm in Gosnells, send me a PM to work out details if you'd be interested. Suffice to say I have replaced the blades in all my planes for the very reason you have described. Thanks, Zac.

[Fergiz01]

Ha ha Derek beat me to it. I'd take up his offer, I have been to Derek's workshop and he is a wonderful host. Just try to keep your chin off the floor during the tour. Kind regards, Zac

[IanW]

I'd say you are likely to get things well sorted, dbubnich, if you take up either offer.

Just a couple of points for others in similar situations:
1) A 20 deg. bevel is good for "sharpness" but as you are finding, it doesn't last long on the standard Stanley blades when they are put to planing abrasive woods like most of our eucalypts (& close rellies, since Jarrah is now classed as Corymbia instead of Eucalyptus). You may be able to improve the sharpening interval by putting a small secondary bevel on the blade, say 30 or even up to 35 deg. You will almost certainly notice more cutting resistance with steeper bevels, but you may prefer to accept that cost to improve edge longevity.

2) As Zac said, any of the aftermarket blades will give you better edge-holding, some considerably more (e.g. Veritas's PM-V11) blades.

3) All of the aftermarket blades are thicker than original Stanleys & Records, which gives the plane a more solid feel.

IMO, fitting a "modern" blade is the best & easiest 'upgrade' for a Stanley or Record bench plane. The original blades are fine if you only plane softer woods, and there are many who remain perfectly happy with them, but they probably don't plane eucalypts too often... :;

Cheers,

[derekcohen]

I'd say you are likely to get things well sorted, dbubnich, if you take up either offer.

Just a couple of points for others in similar situations:
1) A 20 deg. bevel is good for "sharpness" but as you are finding, it doesn't last long on the standard Stanley blades when they are put to planing abrasive woods like most of our eucalypts (& close rellies, since Jarrah is now classed as Corymbia instead of Eucalyptus). You may be able to improve the sharpening interval by putting a small secondary bevel on the blade, say 30 or even up to 35 deg. You will almost certainly notice more cutting resistance with steeper bevels, but you may prefer to accept that cost to improve edge longevity.

2) As Zac said, any of the aftermarket blades will give you better edge-holding, some considerably more (e.g. Veritas's PM-V11) blades.

3) All of the aftermarket blades are thicker than original Stanleys & Records, which gives the plane a more solid feel.

IMO, fitting a "modern" blade is the best & easiest 'upgrade' for a Stanley or Record bench plane. The original blades are fine if you only plane softer woods, and there are many who remain perfectly happy with them, but they probably don't plane eucalypts too often... :;

Cheers,

Hi Ian

I thought that the OP mentioned a 20 degree backbevel.

If this is correct, the plane is cutting at 65 degrees (regardless of the angle of the primary bevel). In other words, a scraping cut. The heat generated will dull the blade quickly. To the OP: Incidentally, closing up the mouth will not make any difference to tear out if the cutting angle is 65 degrees.

Ian, I would generally agree with your suggestion of a higher angle primary bevel to strengthen the blade, but we do not know what the current angle is. Let's find out.

Taming tearout with a Stanley is best done by closing down the chipbreaker. The chipbreaker needs to be set up (prepared) for this.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[IanW]

......I thought that the OP mentioned a 20 degree backbevel.....

He did! :B

Somehow I missed "back" & assumed it was the total grinding bevel (which would be rather acute, but ok with a secondary bevel on softer woods). Oh well, my comments were addressed to anyone else experirncing similar problems as I assumed the OP would be likely to take up one or the other of the offers.

Note to self - clean glasses before reading posts....
:doh:

[raffo]

I have been sharpening with wet and dry on a glass plate up to 3000 grit and then finishing on a piece on a leather strop.

Sandpaper is a long and tedious method for sharpening and leads to long interruptions. Try using a fine India stone and a strop, see how your surface is and go from there.

[dbubnich]

Thank you all for the kind words of advice and assistance. In reply to the comments above:
- Derek, thank you for the kind offer, that would be great to be able to work through it with your assistance. I am up in the hills so not too far away.
- Zac, thank you also for your offer.
- Zac and IanW, I had a look at the PMV11 blade and chip breaker combo from Veritas but was indeed wondering about the actual benefit for the cost without knowing whether it would be the solution. Thank you for the feedback from your experiences.
- With regard to the sharpening, I had done a 25degree primary bevel with a 30 degree secondary bevel (which is getting rather large by now).
- I had gone with the 20 degree back bevel as the frog has a "40" cast into it so I had assumed it was 40 degrees rather than the standard 45. I'll admit that I didn't check.
- With the chip breaker It took me a few rounds of honing the edge to get a neat fit to the blade to avoid any shavings pushing up in between and this now seems to be working well. I did read about putting a particular angle on the bottom edge of this to assist in pushing the shaving back into the surface to prevent tear-out; however found it a bit hard to judge exactly what I was achieving on the rounded nose.
- Hard to measure but I would guess I have been setting the chip breaker around 0.5mm. With the back bevel I was trying to slide it right up to the edge of the bevel but assumed if I overlapped it I'd end up with shavings trying to push into the gap again.
- The only other thing I had found was to try and keep an amount of rotation on the plane to avoid hitting the strips of reversed grain square on but rather slice across it.

[IanW]

.....
-...... I did read about putting a particular angle on the bottom edge of this to assist in pushing the shaving back into the surface to prevent tear-out; however found it a bit hard to judge exactly what I was achieving on the rounded nose......

That is a bit of a tricky one. With the old-style Stanley chip breaker, the upper part lies flat on the blade when screwed on, which means it's the same as the bed-angle when assembled to the blade. So when establishing the angle, you can judge the initial angle to hold it on the stone, or the angle at which to hold a file as you begin the stroke, which you rotate slightly. My experience suggests there is a reasonable margin around the "ideal" angle (if there is such a thing as "ideal"). If you work with as wide a variety of woods as I do, you'll discover no single angle suits every type of wood you plane. There are always compromises! Derek will be able to check the angle you have, so you should at least get that optimised pretty quickly.


......Hard to measure but I would guess I have been setting the chip breaker around 0.5mm. With the back bevel I was trying to slide it right up to the edge of the bevel but assumed if I overlapped it I'd end up with shavings trying to push into the gap again.......

Therein may lie one of your problems. If you are setting the CB even .5mm back from the edge of the back-bevel, it is unlikely to be doing anything to control tear-out, the shaving will be turned by the back-bevel before it meets the CB. With a 20* back bevel, you have an effective cutting angle of 65*, which by rights should be controlling tear-out pretty well of itself, so I'm at a loss to figure out what's going wrong in your case. There are some pieces of wood that don't read the rules & simply will not plane cleanly no matter how well set up your plane is & perhaps your bit of Jarrah is in that category. I've not found Jarrah a particularly difficult wood to plane myself, but I've only worked with a relatively small amount of it & every species can throw up a mongrel or two. Rowed grain can be especially challenging, when the grain directions are very markedly reversed in the alternating strips. I've many a time given up & hauled out my scraper plane - so far I haven't struck anything that defeats that...

I'm sure the maestro will get you tuned up and it would be informative for the rest of us to hear what "fixes" your problem, so I look forward to a report of the doctor's diagnosis & prescription for a cure....
:)
Cheers,

[derekcohen]

Thank you all for the kind words of advice and assistance. In reply to the comments above:
- Derek, thank you for the kind offer, that would be great to be able to work through it with your assistance. I am up in the hills so not too far away.
….

PM me if you would like to bring along your plane and board.

Derek

[dbubnich]

Thanks again to all the words of advice in the above posts. I have tried to take it all on board and read a bit more (including Derek's sharpening guide on his website inthewoodshop.com). I was also inspired by Skywarka's success with the curly tuart, if that can be tamed than this should be more than possible. So a quick update on where I am at....and a few pictures as I always find them interesting and useful.

- I have found a bit of time to re-do the primary bevel (25 degrees) to remove the back bevel and sharpened with the same 30 degree secondary bevel again up to 3000 grit wet and dry

- This time I used a polishing compound on a flat piece of jarrah and kept the blade in the honing guide, using pull strokes only and then used the leather strop on the back of the blade. Using slicing paper to gauge the sharpness it appears to be a little better than previous method of free hand strop on the leather.

- I have pushed the chip breaker up so that there was just a tiny glint of blade left visible in the middle tapering to basically nothing at each edge.

- The result: I was able to get a shaving that ran the full length of the slab and come off in a fairly nice ribbon. The blade keeps its edge longer...still not fantastic and there is a noticeable improvement after 5 mins of use by taking the blade back out and refinishing on the polishing compound.

The good news is that the finish is coming up quite well (apart from the nasty tear out here and there), and it is pretty clear the difference between the two halves of the slab in the picture. The bad news is that with all the rain we had a couple of weeks back the slab is now just a bowed as when I started....but at least I have learnt a lot in the process, so not entirely back to square one!

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[Fergiz01]

Beautiful piece of wood that you have there. Glad that you're getting good results with your hand plane.

Shame about the slab moving but that's what happens - nothing you can do about that. Some have had success using C channel iron to keep things flat, although I've never tried it.

Cheers, Zac

[D.W.]

Thanks again to all the words of advice in the above posts. I have tried to take it all on board and read a bit more (including Derek's sharpening guide on his website inthewoodshop.com). I was also inspired by Skywarka's success with the curly tuart, if that can be tamed than this should be more than possible. So a quick update on where I am at....and a few pictures as I always find them interesting and useful.

- I have found a bit of time to re-do the primary bevel (25 degrees) to remove the back bevel and sharpened with the same 30 degree secondary bevel again up to 3000 grit wet and dry

- This time I used a polishing compound on a flat piece of jarrah and kept the blade in the honing guide, using pull strokes only and then used the leather strop on the back of the blade. Using slicing paper to gauge the sharpness it appears to be a little better than previous method of free hand strop on the leather.

- I have pushed the chip breaker up so that there was just a tiny glint of blade left visible in the middle tapering to basically nothing at each edge.

- The result: I was able to get a shaving that ran the full length of the slab and come off in a fairly nice ribbon. The blade keeps its edge longer...still not fantastic and there is a noticeable improvement after 5 mins of use by taking the blade back out and refinishing on the polishing compound.

The good news is that the finish is coming up quite well (apart from the nasty tear out here and there), and it is pretty clear the difference between the two halves of the slab in the picture. The bad news is that with all the rain we had a couple of weeks back the slab is now just a bowed as when I started....but at least I have learnt a lot in the process, so not entirely back to square one!

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So, this isn't meant to be taken negatively - but you'll find that as you move along if you keep up with this hobby, a stock iron like you have will work fine in jarrah or worse as you learn to accomodate it with the wood. The cap iron is a big help for two reasons - 1) it'll allow you to take a continuous shaving and do more accurate work much faster than a steep back bevel will allow, 2) it will keep the planing action a continuous shaving *for the iron's benefit*, which means less entering and exiting cuts that are inconsistent. That batters an edge a plane at a given sharpness will also stay in a cut more easily than it will constantly exit and re-enter cuts.

The solution in hard woods for any practical purpose is modifying the very tip of the iron either with a loaded strop or a buffer - the former is easier to master, and the effect is significant enough that you can use the cheapest of hardware store irons on wood much harder than jarrah without issue. I used an iron available here, or that used to be available branded "buck brothers" for $3 and buffed the tip of it to round off the fragile apex and then proceeded to plane cocobolo with silica in it far longer than a V11 iron or A2 iron would last with any kind of preparation. Whether getting the feel for doing this edge prep is worthwhile depends on how much planing you'll do.

The practical side in planing (getting away from the sharpening part) this is that you have or will have it planed and i may bow when you're no using it right away. With another weather change, it may come back to flat again. If it moves a little such that it's a pain to re-plane it but not to bring it into flat to build with, just use it without planing it again and chasing dimensional movement. The only real time dimensional movement becomes a problem is if it's hard to hold the board in such a way that you can do accurate joinery on it. You can scrape it later if it gets some stray marks in assembly of whatever you're building and then burnish the scraped wood with shavings and it shoudl look fine.

Or you can do like most people do and finish sand it.

I perused guitar forums for a while a few years ago and got in some trouble for "being misleading and suggestion that you can use hand tools easily" on difficult wood. I didn't get in real trouble, just got a lot of flack from old timers who grew accustomed to using drum sanders for anything that was difficult to prep.

If you like the newer stuff, you can buy v11 or track down an academy saw works blade on the used market, whatever you'd like, but it's not necessary to plane anything that can reasonably be planed - it's just dancing around learning something that's really useful.

In the case of the buck brothers plane iron that I mentioned, I planed several hundred feet of cocobolo shavings with silica in the wood with that iron and was ready for a break before it really was mandatory to resharpen. Figure that was probably between 5 and 10 minutes of continuous accurate planing.

[derekcohen]

Daniel working the table top in my workshop. LN #4 1/2 peeling off streamers on some very hard and interlocked Curly Jarrah ...

https://i.postimg.cc/23pPRcYm/Daniel.jpg

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Mountain Ash]

What a great photo!! So is it the plane or is your fettling that makes such beautiful shavings?

[dbubnich]

Thank you to Derek! I had a wonderfully informative session last Saturday. Starting with a look at some of the amazing furniture Derek has made and trying to wrap my head around how accurate the joints can be, especially when working with curved and splayed surfaces in three dimensions.

It was interesting to work through the sharpening process with the hollow grind at 30 degrees and then finishing on a 1000, 6000, and 13000 stone (I think that was right?), it was a different approach than what I have tried and certainly appeared to get a sharper finish. We then had a look at how this would perform, which turned out pretty well; however it appears I have some work to do with another go flattening the sole.

Following this we got out the Jarrah slab and worked through re-flattening and finishing again. It was an eye-opener to try out the process using a No.7 instead of the No.4 and also proved to be much faster, especially since we never sharpened a blade more than once...the new PMV11 blade is sounding quite appealing!

Overall it was a great experience and has given me a lot to work on.

[dbubnich]

To reply to Mountain Ash, I think there is a lot of everything mixed up to get a good result, It was really nice to be able to experiment with Derek on the weekend to get a feel for what a well set up plane could do. Certainly for me there has been a LOT of learning how the plane is meant to work, and then working out to get it to work like that...each time I have another go at it and get something else resolved it feels better and achieves a better finish.

I have just come in from working on the sole of the plane and removed what appeared to be a very persistent hollow toward the back of the plane. With the blade still fresh from Derek's sharpening I was able to remove some extremely fine shavings with the plane gliding through the Jarrah with almost no effort at all. The result was a very nice finish.

Just for the fun of the challenge, I took a piece of Sheoak out of the firewood pile and made a new tote and knob...this was quite the exercise I found to work out the geometries and drilling through the tote at the right angle for the bolts. Also making the knob without a lath took a few tries to work out how to finish it. In the end I put a screw in the top, cut off the head and mounted it in the drill press. All worked out well and makes a much nicer feel that the original plastic!

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[Mountain Ash]

Hi Daniel. Sounds like you are not only learning a lot but enjoying everything at the same time. Love the modifications to your plane. If you look up Lie Nielsen tote templates online and print them out it can make re handling a lot easier.

[derekcohen]

Daniel’s handle and knob look terrific …. and the knob especially so since he made this without a lathe! I was amazed.

Regards from Perth

Derek