Veritas small scraper plane

[Lyle]

Hello all. I bought this from Carbatec a good while ago.
I have tried all I can to make it work. Even read the instructions carefully. :wink:
At best I get shavings and then dust after a few strokes. Surface is crap, to put it mildly.
Tried freshly sharpened blades. My own sharpening skills, and one a mate sharpened. Trying to take blade sharpness out of the mix.
One of my troubles is that the blade doesn't seem to hold in position.
Instructions say, turn it upside down and place blade in, then tighten cap to hold it there.
Turn plane over onto flat surface , bring blade down to contact flat surface.
Then tighten/adjust the blade screw to make the blade bow.
Adjust in or out the blade screw for cut.

My troubles are that if I adjust the blade screw out to soften the cut the blade falls out.

I'm orf to Carbatec on Thursday. See if they can help.
In the interim, can anyone with one of these offer suggestions as to what if anything I'm doing wrong.

Thanks in advance.
Lyle

[Mountain Ash]

Do you have a photo?

[Lyle]

This is the plane.
But I've thrown out the shavings and dust.
I've had a mate check it out too.
Both scratching our heads....:?

[Chief Tiff]

Hmmm...

Firstly; what timber are you using it on? Softwoods like pine and big grained soft hardwoods like cedar and pawlonia never scrape well. You want proper hardwood for this.

1: Totally loosen off the camber adjustment screw with your screwdriver.
2: Insert the blade from below; push it all the way home and tighten the big brass lever cap knob thing.
3: Place plane on flat surface, now loosen the big brass lever cap knob thing until the blade can be pulled down to touch the surface. You want the blade to be able to slide up and down but only under pressure and with no discernable play or rattle.
4: Once you are happy that the blade is touching the flat surface TIGHTEN the big brass lever cap knob thingy. Proper tight; thumb-&-forefinger-gripping-firmly tight.
5: Now you can sneak up on the camber adjustment screw with a screwdriver.

You need MUCH less camber than you might think; on a Stanley 80 I can get shavings with the merest hint of a turn. Try winding in the screw until you can just feel it hit the blade... and then try it just like that. If no cut; then tighten the screw ONE DEGREE only at a time until it does or until you've turned it maybe 5 degrees... if you've put 5 degrees of a screwturn on it and it's still not cutting then the blade wasn't actually flush with the sole at step 4. Back it off again and return to step 3.

If you are still struggling to get shavings instead of dust then I'm afraid my thought would be that you and your mates idea of what constitutes a sharp blade (with or without a properly turned hook) may need revisiting.

[NCArcher]

Veritas Scraping Plane - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDhIkq8C6Is)

Vic gives a good run down of setting the veritas scraper. I suspect it is your sharpening and in particular turning the hook.

[Lyle]

I'm happy to be told it is my sharpening that is letting it all down.
I had followed that link. I could feel the hook, via the nail scrape as he shows.
I'll try the tightening the cap as you say.
I've resharpening the blade and will try again.
Hmmm. I am using pine as a trial. I'll try something else now.

Thanks for the suggestions.
Lyle

[IanW]

......Hmmm. I am using pine as a trial. I'll try something else now.....

I suspect that might have been 99% of the 'problem' Lyle, so hopefully, you are making shavings now. As the chief says, scraping any soft wood (be it a conifer or a 'soft hardwood' like cedar) is a big challenge. It can actually be done, but not until you become very slick at setting up your scraper for maximum performance & you'll probably never be able to do it consistently (at least I can't!).

Fortunately, it's rarely necessary to scrape soft woods, they can almost always be tamed with a standard bench plane much more quickly & conveniently. "The harder the wood, the better it scrapes" is my rule of thumb though there are exceptions as with any "rule", some hard woods scrape poorly, though the majority respond well.

At the risk of banging a certain drum, I'd suggest that scraper planes have a rather limited repertoire and are infrequently needed in most workshops. About 20 years ago I bought the big LV scraper thinking it was going to be my salvation when preparing woods like gidgee & she-oak. At first I used it quite a bit for surfacing woods that defeated my bench planes, but PM-V11 blades and more constructive use of the cap-iron relegated my scraper to more & more down time. I still use card scrapers a lot but the scraper plane sits in its place in the tool chest for very prolonged periods nowadays.

There are certainly a few jobs where scraper planes or scrapers are unbeatable, for example jobs like marquetry and inlay where you are dealing with woods of different hardness & grain direction.....

Cheers,

[Lyle]

Ian, you hit the nail on the head. That is exactly what I wanted this scraper for.
Carbatec Sydney tomorrow to get some help.
Lyle

[IanW]

OK, hope somebody there understands the beast & can put you right. I've never used the small scraper myself, & could only give 'generic' tips.

One thing I wondered about is whether you might be overdoing the burr on the blade. The blade is set at a fixed angle on the small plane like yours so I suspect the burr angle on the blade is pretty critical. If you've used card scrapers, you'll know that you can lean the scraper forward a bit to get it to cut if you overdo the burr a bit (which I find beginners tend to do). Not having any adjustment on the frog angle means you'd need to get the burr very close to spot-on for best performance.

By the time I got my scraper plane I had been using card scrapers for many years so I had a pretty clear idea of what I expected from the plane. Having that prior experience with hand-held scrapers helped a lot, but it still took me a little while to get the plane sorted to the point I could reliably turn out shavings & not strings or dust. Eventually, I did, and it's very satisfying to see those full-width shavings 1-2 thou thick rolling up into the escapement:

518755

Cheers,

[Chief Tiff]

The handles on yours are much prettier than the ones on mine…!

[IanW]

The handles on yours are much prettier than the ones on mine…!

:D Does yours look more like this Chief?: 518760

The scraper was the first Veritas plane I bought & I very quickly came to detest that rear handle! It was a case of either building up my bench to a silly height & developing a set of biceps to rival Arnie's, or figure out some way to lean that handle forward enough to make it comfortable to use on my bench which is much more suited to old-style plane totes. I reckoned the latter was the easier approach....

The catch is those two studs through the tote. If I leaned the new handle forward more, the back hole was going to come out halfway up the grip. A member on another forum who also hated her Veritas handle, simply ditched one & used a single stud in a more traditional shape. She reasoned if one stud worked well enough on a 62 it should be enough for her plane. However, I rather liked the structural soundness of the two studs & wanted to keep both, so after a bit of thought & some full-scale sketching, I came up with a different idea. I simply made a small bend in each stud where it exits the sole so they lean forward more & remain inside the wood.

I wasn't sure if it was going to work, so I was a bit hesitant to fool about with the original studs, but Veritas use nice, ordinary 1/4" N.C, for their studs, so off I went to the Big Green Shed for a bit of all-thread to cut up & fool about with. It turned out to be dead easy to get the bit of bend in the all-thread where I wanted it & I soon had two studs sitting at an angle that would fit inside a "real" handle. The wood I chose is some nicely-figured Myall - bone-hard stuff that demolishes plane blades & rasp teeth, but looks pretty spiffy when polished & perhaps most importantly, feels very nice in the hand.

It is much improved and far more comfortable to use (imo). Here's a comparison of the original & my modified version:
518759

But if you are used to looking at old Stanley handles, you will probably notice it is still a bit more upright than they were. I subsequently bought a couple more Veritas planes and they got the handle treatment straight off. I had more courage after the successful makeover of the scraper so I went for broke on my smoother & it got a handle which is a very close copy of an old broken 1930s rosewood tote that I keep as my model for "real" totes:

518761

The fool things a retiree can waste their time on, eh?
:)
Cheers,

[Lyle]

Well the Carbatec guys came through. Took three of them... but it is all good.
Most of the trouble was trying it on pine...
Then a tweak of the blade cap screw, then it was all OK. Nice wide feathery shavings.
They grabbed some walnut and Blackwood to try, EUREKA!!!
I bought a small burnisher to use on the small blade, ut with care it'll suit other scrapers too.

Thanks too all for your helpful tips and suggestions.
Lyle

[IanW]

:2tsup:
Very pleased that you've got it sorted, Lyle. I reckon scrapers should come with a warning, "Do not use this on pine or very soft woods".....
:)
Cheers,
Ian

[Lyle]

I'm comforted by the fact it took three Carbatec guys to sort it. :rolleyes:
Also it meant my sharpening was OK, not great but at least adequate to create good shavings.
Now to get better acquainted with it.:2tsup:
Lyle

[Mr Brush]

Also, as with card scrapers, a lot of people lean too hard on the burnisher and create a huge burr on the edge. Only very light strokes with the burnisher required to create a very effective cutting edge - less is more.

I only mention it because it took me a while to work that out :rolleyes:

I have the large Veritas scraper plane with both thin/bendy and thick/solid blades, and don't have any trouble getting it to take nice shavings these days. Mind you, the thin/bendy blade is by far the more useful of the two.

[IanW]

.... Mind you, the thin/bendy blade is by far the more useful of the two.....

That's good to hear Mr. B. For a while after I got my LV scraper plane I considered getting the thick blade. I had the idea that being harder it might last longer between sharpenings. But I dithered for a long time, & in the meantime, my experience with reversing the blade in a HNT Gordon rebate plane to scrape up to shoulders showed how quickly a straight edge wears when used like that. Even the very tough HSS blade I used in a small home-made high-angle smoother dulls quickly when reversed, so I now wonder what advantage the thick LV blade may confer?

In any case, I ended up sticking with the thin blade because once I learnt to apply the right burnishing angle consistently, it became very easy to set up & gave very satisfactory results. In fact, the "soft" blade lasts amazingly well on even the toughest woods, and by adding a touch more bow as it loses bite, you can get a lot of scraping out of each prepared edge...

Cheers,

[Mr Brush]

I'm the gullible fool who purchases all the options when I buy a tool......:rolleyes:

The thin high carbon blade is easier to set up with a good burr, and you can refresh the burr several times without having to go back to sharpening the bevel itself and starting over. Bowing the thin blade allows much finer control as the burr wears, and of course the corners of the blade don't dig in and leave tracks.

Setting up the scraper with the hard A2 blade is much more difficult, it blunts REALLY fast...... and you can't bow it. Takes much longer to resharpen too.

I was re-watching the LV video by Vic Tesolin after seeing this thread pop up on the forum. In the intro he mentions the two types of blade available, then puts the thick blade aside and never mentions it again. The rest of the demo is using the thin blade. I think that says it all.