Quality aftermarket replacement hand plane blades. Originals are too thin [Archive]

IanW

18th December 2022, 09:10 AM

I know the Chief loves the old HSS blades, & so did I when I had a couple. They are/were excellent blades and are about the same thickness as originals, so you can be sure they'll fit old Stanleys & Records without problems. They are pretty easy to sharpen and hold an edge very well, so there's nothing not to like about them, except they're hard to come by now. They haven't been made for at least 35 years or more, but if you do stumble on a good one at a sensible price, grab it!

The majority of after-market blades are only a little bit thicker than the old Stanleys & Records (~0.10" [~2.5mm] vs ~0.08" of originals are typical figures given), but I've struck one brand (IBC) that was thicker than the rest, it was about 3.2mm, iirc.

Much has been written & said about possible problems with thicker blades. One is the cap-iron screw may not reach through the blade enough to get a good grip on the CI. In my experience, this is pretty rare & I have only struck it once or twice. In my case I had a few spares & soon found a screw that was long enough.

A second problem is the adjuster cam not engaging the cap-iron slot properly. This is highly variable, many will be quite ok, but occasionally, especially if the slot (&/or cam) is old & worn, you'll have trouble. The cam will only reach the edge of the slot & you'll find the thumb-wheel has to be spun a ridiculous amount to get the blade extended or retracted. This backlash (the number of "slack" turns between moving the blade one way or the other) may be excessive & annoy you. There are several possible solutions for a worn cam with excessive backlash. One is to simply ignore it, which is the 'solution' I favour. My nice old type 11 #4 has about 4 full turns of backlash due mostly to an over-large cam slot & it doesn't bother me in the slightest, but if you like to change the settings on your planes a lot you might be moved to addressing it - there was a recent thread on the topic.

Lastly, if the mouth is especially tight, you may not be able to move the frog back enough to allow a workable mouth gap. This one is pretty uncommon (at least in my experience), but reliable authority says it happens. Unless your plane is a rare & collectable example, I'd have no compunction about taking a file to the mouth & opening it a little if that were genuinely the case. Most old mouths are pretty beat-up & could do with a bit of tidying-up!

There may be some argument about this, but imo (all else being equal), the thicker after-market blades can improve the action of your typical old Bailey plane, the extra mass of the blade-assembly gives them a more solid "feel". How much difference it makes, I suspect depends on user perception & how good the plane's frog is (i.e., how flat it is in the couple of areas that really matter), so you may or may not notice much change, but I certainly remember noticing a big difference the first time I put a thicker blade in an old workhorse #5.

IMO, (and other mileages will vary! :; ), Hock blades are an excellent choice for your first foray into after-market blades. They are just pretty ordinary O1 steel, nothing flash, but tempered to a sweet spot that sharpens very easily and holds that edge very well. I've not (yet) had any problems fitting them to old Stanleys (my oldest being from the 1911-1918 era).

If you want extra tough, the (relatively) new PM-V11 blades from Veritas are slightly thinner than their A2 blades or Hock blades and should not be a problem to fit to any Bailey type plane. The trade-off is they are more expensive & harder to sharpen properly whatever Veritas claims, especially if you use oilstones - no problem if you use diamond plates and/or water stones. I have a couple and they are great, but I wouldn't fit them to all of my planes, I'm quite happy with the other less expensive blades when working with "sensible" woods that don't take the edge off your freshly-honed blade on the first swipe.

That's my take in a nutshell, but I suspect you'll get plenty of other opinions.... :)

Cheers,

bruceward51

18th December 2022, 09:30 AM

I agree with the Chief - the thickness of the blade has nothing to do with blade thickness - it is all about the hardness of the steel. It is a juggle between really hard steel that is very hard to sharpen and softer steels which sharpen easily but don't hold their edge for very long. I think a lot of us (including myself here) come up with our own ideas on how to improve things that have worked perfectly well for over 100 years. In my case, I found out that it was the user needed improving, not the tool.
Once I realised that you had to sharpen up (planes and chisels) a lot more than you think you do, and got myself a honing system that is quick and easy - it made a lot more sense. It also depends on the timber at hand. I have had some stuff that took the edge of my plane in 10 strokes. I now sharpen up several times a day if I am using the tools a lot.
As the Chief says, there is a lot more to modifying a plane to take a thick blade than it seems at first glance. If you are using standard Stanley or Record planes, you will probably find a thicker blade will raise the chip breaker to a height where the depth adjustor will not engage properly. Have a close look and you will see that the adjuster passes up through the slot in the blade and engages with the chip breaker, nit the blade itself.
One other thing worth checking - if you have old planes, check that the blade is not worn out. The whole iron is not hardened, just the first few cm. If it has been sharpened a lot (20 years of constant use), or subjected to over-zealous grinding, it can wear down into un-hardened steel. See this blog post ReHardening Your Plane Iron - Paul Sellers' Blog (https://paulsellers.com/2022/10/rehardening-your-plane-iron/) He is a bit long-winded at times, but talks a lot of common sense. He has a follow-up post about re-hardening the iron, but I think I would just get a new one.

Mr Brush

18th December 2022, 12:31 PM

I have a Clifton 2" blade, complete with their 2-piece cap iron and a custom made longer cap-iron screw, which is surplus to requirements if you're interested? This whole assembly drops straight into a Record #5 (and presumably some Stanleys too), and was a popular upgrade for the crappy Record blades. It's good steel, holds an edge well, and transformed my very first plane (modern Record, before I knew any better...) into a very good user.

Since gathering a collection of Veritas and LN planes the Record hasn't been used in years; I'm throwing the plane out in the latest shed cull, but the Clifton blade/cap iron assembly is worth keeping if someone wants it?

I can take pics if anyone is interested in buying this. In very good condition, and the blade is still pretty much full length.

Mountain Ash

18th December 2022, 05:04 PM

What else are you "culling"?

Mr Brush

18th December 2022, 05:21 PM

I'll be listing some Veritas and LN planes that I don't use much in the Market Place next week . I only mentioned this Clifton blade here in case the OP might want it as an upgrade to a Record/Stanley plane.

IanW

18th December 2022, 06:34 PM

... This whole assembly drops straight into a Record #5 (and presumably some Stanleys too)....

..And will fit most Bailey type #4s as well as both take a 2" blade.... :)

Cheers,

Ozymandiaz

18th December 2022, 06:49 PM

PM sent re Clifton 2" blade assembly

D.W.

19th December 2022, 03:38 AM

See this blog post ReHardening Your Plane Iron - Paul Sellers' Blog (https://paulsellers.com/2022/10/rehardening-your-plane-iron/) He is a bit long-winded at times, but talks a lot of common sense. He has a follow-up post about re-hardening the iron, but I think I would just get a new one.

Paul's instructions on hardening set you up for failure. ignore them. To do things properly wouldn't take any more effort, but he sets you up to make a warped, unevenly heated, underhard iron that won't be much good.

This is sort of paul's specialty - to pretend he's an authority on something he isn't and send people out thinking they're getting different results because they're not as good at it as he is.

IanW

19th December 2022, 08:07 AM

Paul's instructions on hardening set you up for failure. ignore them.....

That's a bit harsh, perhaps, though I agree heating a wide blade in the open like that with a single torch is likely to be a bit hit & miss. It's hard to get the whole width evenly heated and keep it that way 'til you can quench it. And from my own experience with thin blades, there's certainly a high risk of warping if you don't dunk carefully in the quenching fluid.

However, it clearly worked for Mr. Sellars. I guess you could say it's a simple intro to heat-treating if you just want to see what happens when you get some tool steel red-hot & cool it quickly. If you use an old blade that is of little value to begin with you have nothing to lose, but if you want to get serious about heat-treating, some sort of small furnace sure makes a big difference (more even heating much more quickly) & is likely to give you much more consistent results.... :U

Cheers,

Mr Brush

19th December 2022, 08:37 AM

D.W.

19th December 2022, 09:06 AM

Well said. No harm in dabbling with a scrap blade before investing in expensive equipment to do it properly.

Im sure we've all been watching "Forged In Fire" on TV recently, seeing even "expert" bladesmiths stuff things up in spectacular ways despite having access to all the required toys. My wife and I have got very good at commenting on their quenching based on colour (too hot, too cold) and predicting the outcome. :rolleyes:

Actually, if you watch the last or next to last episode of season one, Murray carter is on it with another truly talented smith, and they put on a clinic. the commentators at the table question a few of the things murray does, but they look ideal to me - the guys hosting just don't have the right kind of experience to judge what murray does, and have probably done most of their bladesmithing with a furnace.

there are technical things that just won't work out with what paul is showing, and I'd forgotten earlier, but someone sent me a blog post of this or something where paul insults the tool company tradesmen and talks about how the irons end up not done that well because of low pay or low resources. These were factory done blades sold to professional users. I've literally never seen a stanley blade that wasn't properly heat treated.

I didn't see FIF until showing someone chisels here and they mentioned it. it's clear that in later seasons, they intentionally went with less competent smiths because the clinic that murray put on is interesting only to people who know what they're looking at. Otherwise, it's boring, and the work is too high quality for someone to imagine they could do it.

As far as color temperature - it's very uncommon for someone to soak a knife on there at a temperature that isn't too high. Some of that could be lens related on TV, but the quality of the heat treating is so bad that I think that's what they want - something that you can differentiate.

Equipment-wise, there's little more that you need vs. what paul uses, but he doesn't have a clue why the way he's using it is so dumb, and I don't think he really cares - it's not his objective to provide good information, but rather to convince people that he is or that he's "demystifying" things and then curate the comments on his pages (or probably an hourly employee or two does that) to make sure nothing outs his gimmick. I've bought more expensive equipment, but I do a better job heat treating literally with two small torches of the TS berzomatic type. The bigger forges and then the furnaces are intended more for a dull soak, but trouble happens when that's not done accurately.

Specifically, I'll give you a couple of things that will go wrong with what paul does:
1) the iron is heated unevenly - it will probably warp (you should have an even color temperature tapering off only in length)
2) there isn't enough heat in a mapp torch to get an iron evenly heated end to end - there probably would be enough even with something like a used soup can to house the heat. It would've been easy to add that. that will lead to incomplete conversion and perhaps detrimental grain growth in overheated areas. The result will be underhardening (again, it will leave you short of just buying a low cost iron)
3) any old oil is OK for O1 steel or any types that need to transition slower. it won't be fast enough to finish the job (couple with the underheating) on something like a tungsten water-hardening steel from the early 1900s
4) the bevel is left on the iron. If the iron is fully heated properly, it will warp. the more plain the steel, the worse the warp. The result could be an iron that's not usable at all pretty easily
5) there's no shielding for the iron in the toaster oven. toaster ovens don't make a nice linear heat, they cycle on and off. Edges and bevels need to be shielded or they'll temper much higher than the rest of the tool

There's no chance of matching the quality of heat treat that was done at the factory. The materials needed to do the job are almost there. It could be explained in a way to do it properly and people would have success doing it (save water hardening steels encountered accidentally - they're going to be a little soft no matter what and the conversion will leave behind an unstable component that's not converted).

the guy bothers me because sometimes I think he wades in on stuff and toots his horn and bags some trade who did an excellent job - that he couldn't match...I think he does that on purpose. but there's some component of him that is not genuine no matter what. I don't believe that. In this case, he's pitching the something for nothing gimmick, claiming that the job was done well, and people who listen to him will get bad results and think it was them or perhaps run around saying "well, the quality of the iron was probably bad" (it wasn't).

D.W.

19th December 2022, 09:13 AM

That's a bit harsh, perhaps, though I agree heating a wide blade in the open like that with a single torch is likely to be a bit hit & miss. It's hard to get the whole width evenly heated and keep it that way 'til you can quench it. And from my own experience with thin blades, there's certainly a high risk of warping if you don't dunk carefully in the quenching fluid.

However, it clearly worked for Mr. Sellars. I guess you could say it's a simple intro to heat-treating if you just want to see what happens when you get some tool steel red-hot & cool it quickly. If you use an old blade that is of little value to begin with you have nothing to lose, but if you want to get serious about heat-treating, some sort of small furnace sure makes a big difference (more even heating much more quickly) & is likely to give you much more consistent results.... :U

Cheers,

I'm not sure that he'd get most of the iron hot enough and transitioned fast enough for warping to be a problem. but that will result in a failed iron that's relatively flat. According to him, it worked, I think if you got the iron in hand and used it, you'd find out that it didn't.

it's not difficult to do heat treating by eye and match book for a lot of steels. you only really need a furnace when you get into steels with vanadium or niobium in them, or when you're looking to temper in the 1000F plus range.

I think furnaces are actually more difficult to use. I know for sure I've matched or bettered book on a few steels (because I had them heat treated - it actually caused some controversy that i did because I did it with successive heats instead of a soak, and I'm pretty sure my grain is finer). A fine job could've been done with about the same equipment paul is using, but I don't think he knows enough to do it.

The first couple of things i heat treated, I got advice from Raney Nelson and watched a larry williams video. It was pretty much "do this with O1". larry overheats it a little bit but probably not long enough for it to be a problem. raney gave me a pretty narrow range to work in and then said "but you will never be able to make an iron that's an equal of a commercial iron" (that also turns out to be false). if I'd been given advice that failed, I don't know if I'd have stuck with it. Here's the important part - to do it properly (which isn't that difficult) makes the difference between something you'll use and something you'll put aside. there's already enough literature online telling people that they'll fail at it and it should just be hired out, or that they need to buy something expensive (only if you need to heat treat something feet long like a sword).

I'm assuming you mean an electric furnace when you mention furnace, vs. a forge.

IanW

19th December 2022, 10:25 AM

....I'm assuming you mean an electric furnace when you mention furnace, vs. a forge.

No, I meant a simple "coffee can" furnace, or forge or whatever you like to call them:

520530

As you say, it doesn't need much to contain the heat for small objects, but a bit of insulation boosts things considerably. For my first attempt I used straight wood ash, which I made into a mush & tamped around a bottle in the can. It was ok as a refractory material but started to flake a lot after a few uses, so I re-packed with ~50/50 ash & plaster of Paris, which has proven a lot more durable.

As with everything, there is "perfection" & there's "good enough for purpose". For an amateur mucking about with cheaper steels there's little to lose & much fun to be had - you should get a decent temper at least one time out of 3 if you use "easy" steels like O1 & the like. The good thing about heat-treating is you can always try again if you're not happy with the result. I've had great success with 1084 steel sold by a knife-making supplies place here in Oz. It was billed as the steel to try if you know nothing, & that described me very well so I went for it. So far, I've made quite a few small plane blades that have proven excellent in use - they are perhaps the easiest of all 'cos you only want the business end hardened. To save hard grinding, I've been applying about 1/2 the bevel while still soft - one blade warped a little, but I'm pretty sure it was due to a bad first plunge, most have remained as flat as they started.

I would never guarantee success every time, but both 1084 and O1 have given me good results, which is pretty satisfying for someone with as little experience as I have. I was dubious about how well such a "simple" steel would hold up in the fairly demanding role of being a plane blade, but they seem to be wearing just as well as some of my good commercial blades.

I will stress that I have only attempted smaller blades so far. I have a large O1 blade I cut out yonks ago that I have not attempted to treat. At 5mm thick & 65mm wide, it's far too large for my limited gear, & I suspect far more likely to warp or end up unevenly hardened even if I managed to get it hot enough, so I'm going to find someone who knows what they are doing to finish that one off ... :U

Cheers,

D.W.

19th December 2022, 10:52 AM

You might have luck with it (bigger blade) if you can turn it quite a bit while heating. This kind of thing is what's advised against by the furnace crowd, but with our eyes, we can see and evenly heat a lot.

1084 is sort of an oddball steel. It can be heated and quenched and gotten into a usable state. But it has no protection against grain growth so you can end up with something good enough, but much much better is available for something like a smoothing plane It can easily be tempered and left around 62/63 hardness if the grain is fine.

An updated steel (80crv2) with chromium and vanadium will almost always yield better results.

the reason 1084 (as you probably know) is recommended for beginners is because it doesn't have any carbides to dissolve, but the knife makers take this too seriously. In fairly simple steels, carbide coarsening isn't really much of a thing other than large spheroidized steels which are really left like that to be easily machined.

Plus, the knife folks don't like O1 that much, so the woodworking community that would benefit from hearing a lot about how easy it is to heat treat kind of loses out. O1 and 1095 both have high hardness potential but low toughness potential. 1084 has high toughness potential, but I doubt many beginners get much with it. 15 seconds of overheating a color shade past ideal can literally triple or quintuple the grain, which results in an iron that needs to be tempered back pretty far to not chip.

I've experimented a fair bit with it, because you can shrink the grain back without too much trouble. I'll spare everyone that talk, but I suspect that 1084 is even more plain that much of what was used in vintage tools before bessemer process. I think the ore that people favored had natural nickal or chromium in it, and perhaps even traces of vanadium and such things.

Yes on the half of the bevel before hardening - you can still get warp on 1084 like that, especially if you dabble into parks 50 and really drive the hardness up. why bother? If you can really keep the grain small and drive it up in hardness, it is biting sharp and will wear a little longer. If it warps so that it's cupped in its width on the flat side, that's the effect of the bevel - the wider the iron, the more drastic it gets, quickly.

so the amount of bevel you impart for a favorable bias changes a little. For something like A2, it probably doesn't matter at all. For O1, you can have half a bevel and little effect. For true water hardening steels quenched fast, much more than half a bevel and you'll probably end up with an unusable iron.

this all sounds complicated not for you, but for someone who may be reading for the first time. For O1 steel, a clean quench of vegetable oil that's not too thick, a torch (TS4000 or TS8000 - preferably the former, and give up on the idea that the igniter will work for long), a can and one of those "pick up" magnets that you can get at cheap tool stores.

And a couple of pieces of scrap steel at least or perhaps a tray with sand in it to put the item to be tempered in.

You can make an iron as good as hocks with good quality O1 (starrett, bohler, etc) and nothing more than that. pretty easily.

derekcohen

19th December 2022, 12:21 PM

Paul's instructions on hardening set you up for failure. ignore them. To do things properly wouldn't take any more effort, but he sets you up to make a warped, unevenly heated, underhard iron that won't be much good.

This is sort of paul's specialty - to pretend he's an authority on something he isn't and send people out thinking they're getting different results because they're not as good at it as he is.

I’ll add my voice to David’s comments that Seller’s advice is nonsense - there is absolutely no way that you can get a plane blade hot enough with a single MAPP torch heated in mid-air (where 99% of the heat is being lost). A small part of the steel will heat, and then that section will lose its heat (and colour) the moment the flame moves to another spot. The heat needs to be contained to be effective, such as a simple insulated can forge. I suspect that the choir Seller’s is preaching to will never attempt this, and therefore never discover this.

Regarding the O1 Clifton blade, I have one of the hammered originals, and use it in a Stanley #3. It sharpens easily and takes a great edge …. but it does not hold it long in West Australian hardwoods when compared with PM-V11 and A2. I am prepared to sharpen it more often. The idea of finding an old stock HSS blade is a pipe dream. Great blade but l-o-n-g since there being any availability. They were last made about 40 years ago. My advice is, if you want a decent blade for a Stanley and are prepared to pay the little extra, is get a PM-V11. I believe that Carbatec sell Veritas Stanley Replacement blades.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Mr Brush

19th December 2022, 05:10 PM

OK, since the Clifton blade is apparently crap, I'd better keep it for myself. Offer withdrawn.

derekcohen

19th December 2022, 05:44 PM

Mr B, I did not say the Clifton was crap - I use one by choice and have PM-V11, etc from which to choose. It is, however, not a steel to hold an edge as long as more abrasion resistant steels. It does so long enough to do some good work. Just don't expect it to keep up with a Veritas, LN, etc. with more abrasion-resistant steels.

Regards from Perth

Derek

D.W.

20th December 2022, 12:04 AM

Clifton's O1 shows two things in Brent Beach's test:
1) the grain is a bit larger than the other O1 irons. That could be an artifact of forging heats. I don't know what hand forged means in their terms because it's obviously not done by hand, but maybe they were using drill rod, heating it and smashing it or rolling it themselves and then normalizing it with a heat and quenching it.
2) the level of wear that it takes suggests it's on the softer side vs. some O1 irons. I don't know what their spec was, but it's not 62 or it would've worn more slowly

I'm supposing both of these because the characteristics of the edge match that, and they touted that the irons were hand forged. And it was fairly common to tease low warp out of O1 by terminating the tail end of the quench (the opposite of cryo treating, which is chasing hardness). Joel at TFWW talks about heat treating O1 in house, and I think they use a furnace or a salt bath, but he mentions removing the items so that the last couple of hundred degrees are either eliminated or they occur at room temperature (I can't remember which).

Long story short, the O1 irons could be made to have the same edge strength as V11 and hold up equally well in hard wood, and have somewhat better edge stability (resistance to nicking), but O1 can't be made to wear longer abrasively if either iron isn't defective.

It's also possible to make an iron softer by tempering higher, but it's not really done with O1 (vs. limiting quench hardness to result in lower hardness, even if that's just a matter of manufacturing ease) due to something called embrittlement. that is, there's a point around 450F tempering with O1 where it both becomes softer and easier to break at the same time.

O1 and V11's hardness potential and toughness are about the same. woodworkers use the word toughness for strength. toughness isn't something we want in droves in woodworking tools - we want tough enough with as much strength as possible usually.

so, does that mean the cliftons are coarse grained? Only for O1 - it's still finer than A2 or V11. Coarseness is almost not seen in O1 because manufacturers get bar stock from a source in a certain condition and then run through a heat treatment process based on the condition of the steel as received, and without forging, that doesn't involve grain growth heat.

Forging is an interesting topic - rolled bar stock is already forged. the carbides are in tubes pointing the length of the iron. thermal cycling will modify them and make them more round and potentially smaller (the grain of the steel around the carbides definitely gets smaller), but I doubt there's much benefit to that for O1. In plane irons, I don't think I could tell the difference between a starrett or bohler iron that was just heated properly and quenched vs. one that goes through thermal cycles. there's nothing really wrong with forging, especially if shape changing is needed, but the chance that grain will be as small as good bar stock (that's had the grain controlled in the rolling process) is not very good unless very intentional thermal cycling follows. As an individual, you can learn to do this in a forge, but in an industrial setting, it costs money and time.

I don't ever heat chisels to forge heat, but I do shape them at lower heat. the reason i don't get rod and reduce it to make chisels is because it wouldn't improve the chisel, but it would a good bit of risk. Grain size doesn't have much influence on strength (it can actually result in higher hardness if that's being chased, just by a little), but it has a huge influence on edge stability and toughness.

so, there's a chance that someone else could grow the grain on O1 somehow? Probably not much - heat treat ovens usually have programmed schedules in them, and I'd be surprised if they didn't have cycles to handle the incoming conditions of O1.

this obviously isn't a going concern for clifton now - they use A2. Even O1 is moving to the list of steels heat treaters won't work with in the US. When it started to replace water hardening steels, it was considered very stable, but now with stuff like A2 and XHP/V11, it's seen as unruly.

I think clifton was probably making O1 irons before most of the boutique makers were selling much, so it's hard to criticize them - when we know they were in financial straits - for not buying a bunch of competitors' irons and making sure they were matching them.

Hock's irons are quite good, but a little undertempered. If you take up hardening and tempering and have good temperature control, you can bring them back a step and they're better irons, but beginners like hard tempered irons due to the perception of initial sharpness being higher - no tendency to hold a fine burr when sharpening. Like japanese tools.

I've only had one Lee Valley O1 iron, but it was also too soft for O1. I never asked rob why they do that, and I wouldn't expect he'd love to give much of an explanation. it could just be in making it really easy to sharpen on oilstones, but the trade isn't so good. LV could easily make the O1 the same hardness as V11 if they followed similar process quenching (I would guess V11 gets cold treatment at the end of the quench as every V11 iron that I've seen is at the upper end of the hardness range for XHP). It's just a coincidence, but it is also a steel that doesn't really gain much by being made soft, so there's no reason that it would be improved if it was dropped back. It's possible to get to the hardness they seem to be without cryo treatment, but it's easier with it, and far easier to hit a very narrow hardness range with cryo treatment.

if they sold liquid nitrogen at the grocery store, I would use it. they do not, so I do not.

D.W.

20th December 2022, 12:20 AM

D.W.

20th December 2022, 12:26 AM

comments above aren't a shot at tools for working wood for not chasing the tail end of the quench - I think they are making some things like spoon bits and such and it's one thing to deal with a little warp in a plane iron or chisel. It'd be another thing entirely to deal with it in drill bits that we'd probably prefer be a little easier to hone, anyway.

Long drawn out explanation above - it's a statement of what is about clifton, the why, not "they did a bad job". the latter is subjective.

what shouldn't be lost in this is how easy it is to do good O1 steel in the garage:
1) buy good bar stock
2) create some kind of heat housing structure (even if the first tries are an uninsulated can
3) uniformly heat what will be treated - uniform from the start, not create a hot spot and then try to make the hot spot bigger
4) get what's going to be quenched to nonmagnetic then as quickly as possible for the next step (test with a cheap pick up magnet that won't be hurt in the heat, but don't leave the magnet in the heat, of course - just use it to check magnetism quickly)
5) as soon as the steel is nonmagnetic, heat it another half or full color shade as quickly as possible (this should not be more than about 15 or 20 seconds)
6) quench straight into oil. If it's cold and the oil is thick, preheat the oil a little bit so it flows well. if you're worried about cracking an iron at the slot, get the iron in the oil just to the slot and not further at first, move it laterally side to side and then once it's got no orange, move it further into the oil. moving the iron like a boat paddle will result in warp. No turning, no paddling at least until almost all of the heat is out
7) if you want to get good hardness, have a jar of cold water, and as soon as the oil has drawn as much heat out of the tool as it can, put the business end of the tool in the water for about ten seconds and then the entire tool (an iron in this case)
8) you can throw the iron in the freezer then if you want for half an hour before tempering. the colder the iron gets before tempering, the better the edge quality (stability) will ultimately be.

Temper twice for an hour between 375F and 425f, depending on your tastes. A toaster oven is fine , and probably better than a kitchen item. if you see the bevel of a tool or edges tempering a different or darker color than the rest of the iron, it's a sign that the toaster oven is cycling, thus the advice to put an iron or whatever else in between two other pieces of scrap steel so that the outside bits take the brunt of temp variation. if you temper only once, it won't make much if a difference on O1. Twice is a little better.

375 should result in 62/63 temper, and 425 60/61 hardness. You will be able to tell the difference between the two pretty easily

if you buy O1 stock or anything simple and this doesn't work, it could be because the steel is factory made coarse spheroidized (large grains with large carbides to be easy to machine). it's probably better to just avoid that when you're a beginner. Bohler and Starrett aren't delivered like that, but Buderus often is.

There's sort of an OWT that all steel should be quenched as soon as it's nonmagnetic. it's true that complete lack of magnetism shows a phase change and steel is hardenable. There aren't many steels where the best temp for quenching is right at nonmagnetic, though. O1 is better when it's a little higher. Quenching immediately is a way to avoid growing grain, but what I showed above won't grow grain and it avoids "people being human furnaces" trying to eyeball a soak temperature - that's impractical.

D.W.

20th December 2022, 01:10 AM

The process I just described will generally result in something better than you can buy, and you can use it on anything that you can cut, file, drill or grind.

I know Ian and some other fancy :) folks have mills and such things, but I don't have any of that stuff and am afraid I couldn't learn to use any of it well out of general intellectual laziness.

raffo

20th December 2022, 06:18 AM

David inspired me to give plane iron making a try. Starrett O1 bar stock is readily available here in the states. Cutting the slot for the chipbreaker is the most difficult thing, you may want to match the width of the slot to the lateral adjustment lever for a nice tight fit, so the lever doesn't flap around. It's also important to pick the right stock thickness. If you want minimal to no monkeying with the plane's mouth, use .08" stock, that's what I will use in my next batch. Stock 0.10" thick may require filing of the mouth and/or backing up the frog quite a bit. 0.10" and 0.125" bar stock is what I used in my first attempts and I ended up not liking going through all the plane fiddling.

I asked David to do the heat treatment for me, I've not set up for it yet. I plan to make some more irons, a set of chisels and kitchen knives. I'm driven more out of curiosity than any desire to become a tool maker or a youtube celebrity. The key message here is that, at least in regards to some cutting tools, the process and the materials are very accessible to anyone with a basic set of tools: a ruler, a hack saw and a file. Once one gets past the nonsense of thinking one needs to pound a bar of steel on an anvil to make some tools, a lot of possibilities become available.

520552520553520554

A couple of irons, after heat treatment.

520555

Rafael

IanW

20th December 2022, 07:43 AM

.....I know Ian and some other fancy :) folks have mills and such things.......

If you are referring to this Ian, I certainly don't have a mill or any "fancy" metalworking gear. I have a small, very basic metal lathe (which I suspect any serious metalworker would consider a toy) that I use to make thumbscrews and threaded inserts. But that's it, hacksaws & files do all my "mill" work. I don't even have a linisher, which I've noticed you mention, so my metal working is even more 'hands-on' than yours.... :)

Re the Clifton blades - I had a Clifton #4 for quite a while & the thing I disliked about it was simply its mass (which was touted as one of its strengths when they first appeared). But for someone used to the lighter old Stanleys from the early 1900s it felt heavy, so if there was any prolonged smoothing to be done I would always pass it up in favour of my Stanley, even though it was capable of perfectly good work. I know one can't draw firm conclusions from a single example but I had no issues with its blade. In everyday use I didn't notice it being any worse (or better) than my early Hock irons, which I have always liked. If these are/were softer than they could be, they were still better than any original Stanley/Record blades I'd owned, holding an edge about 50% longer by my subjective estimate.

As you keep sayin' yourself, hardness is not the be-all for a plane blade used for routine work in reasonable woods, though it took me a lot of wasted time searching for the holy grail of the hardest blade on earth to come to this conclusion. I do have an extremely hard, cryo-treated blade & it's not quite the thrill that I expected. I keep it in a high-angle plane that gets used on woods that dull other blades in a few swipes. It hangs in there longer, but it still needs frequent attention, and I hate sharpening the damned thing.... :C

Cheers

D.W.

20th December 2022, 08:26 AM

ahh... I thought you were part of the mill club!

I talked to my good friend George over lunch here because he mentioned making something, and in the background apparently was a mill running on powerfeed. I'll find out what it is when it arrives in the mail. I thought as he was talking about it that it kind of sounds like cheating!!

In the world of plane irons, this would probably be waterjetted now, or if the steel allows, blanked like one or two per second :o

It takes me about half an hour to go from bar stock to do everything neatly, including filing the slot. not exactly viable.

I never had clifton but in the end sold most of my LN planes due to weight and friction, thus seeing the weights of clifton being even higher, just no go. Same with the wood river types - I remember liking that weight when there was a lot of thinking and less planing, but now it's the other way around.

If you say some of the cliftons were harder, I believe that, no problem. they may have varied by era, but would probably be close together within chronological groups. beach's showed signs as mentioned but a year later, that wouldn't necessarily been the case.

your right about my mention of hardness not being always "go for the top as high as possible" for each steel. I like to maximize hardness out of the quench, but that's different (if tempered back, it's more stable than lower quench hardness tempered back less to get to the same point). For rougher work, less hard irons, and for smoothing clean wood, then hardness is OK. As soon as the wood is full of nasties that ding edges, nothing really lasts that well and having something that grinds and sharpens easily is more important.

I like the term fair bargain for an iron's longevity in use vs. sharpening effort, but irons are like golf clubs. if you tell people that you have a club that will allow them to drive 30 yards further but 95% will shoot a higher score with it, far more than 5% will buy it, anyway.

bruceward51

20th December 2022, 08:29 AM

Paul's instructions on hardening set you up for failure. ignore them. To do things properly wouldn't take any more effort, but he sets you up to make a warped, unevenly heated, underhard iron that won't be much good.

This is sort of paul's specialty - to pretend he's an authority on something he isn't and send people out thinking they're getting different results because they're not as good at it as he is.

Not just harsh, but incorrect. Possibly one in 100 of Paul's posts are metalwork related and could possibly fall into this characterisation, the majority are good practical tips on building skills. But lets not get off the track. The main points of the post I pointed to are:

1. some timbers are very tough on blades
2. you can wear past the hardened section of the blade
3. How to check if your blade is hard enough

The original question was about an after market blade because the original would not hold an edge. The standard blades are perfectly OK and 90% of the problems are with the user
- unrealistic expectations of how long a blade should stay sharp
- inexpert sharpening and honing techniques
- knowledge and skill of planing technique
- tough Australian timbers

The thickness of the blade will not have any influence over its sharpness and how long it holds its edge. That is down to the steel in the blade. Thicker irons are usually used to reduce chatter, although I think that problem is also mainly a problem of technique.

D.W.

20th December 2022, 08:37 AM

I can't think of anything that paul advises that is actually better than any free source, and a lot of it is worse.

his metal advice is poorly given, but it's not a surprise. Intentionally ignoring other well known information is also poor.

I can't think of a single person who learned woodworking from paul or has spent a significant amount of time watching him, but doesn't struggle with his basic advice.

About half of the irons in planes that I receive for refitting are rounded over with poor polish at the edge and not enough clearance because people are following his advice to round the bevel. People fail other ways, too, but the clearance thing is a huge problem because people don't know why their planes aren't picking up a shaving easily.

His intentional idiotic advice in dealing with figured woods or really anything is also stupid - it cheats people out of being competent with planes planing nearly everything and minimizing much or any follow up. I deal on a regular basis with PMs or emails "paul sellers says ____ what do you think?" What they think is that I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm probably not the nicest guy in the world, and maybe for some people who fish with a bobber and hook, the advice sounds like regional fly tying, but I don't care to have to convince people that they're listening to an idiot only to have them ask for a bunch of help and then decide they're not going to try it.

There's something really fake about the whole act and it bothers me - because his dismissiveness about learning is really a matter of being very inconsiderate to people paying him.

Mr Brush

20th December 2022, 08:56 AM

IanW

20th December 2022, 09:43 AM

Christ - is this thread trying for the "Most Massively Derailed Thread, 2022" prize?

A simple query about sourcing replacement plane blades (go back and read the first post from OP) turns into an epic slanging match encompassing heat treatment of metals and the wisdom (or otherwise) of Paul Sellers videos.

Maybe someone can change the thread title accordingly?

Well, Mr. B, I don't think it has gone entirely off - the OP did mention a problem with longevity of edges. That aspect has rather dominated the responses, but it is more or less within original topic imo.

Remaining strictly 'on topic' is a perennial problem on this forum & all of the others I occasionally peruse. It's also a perennial problem for moderators to know whether they should step in or let them run their course (especially when we are all occasional offenders! :roll: ). Gratuitous insults, obscenity, & downright misinformation are no-goes & will certainly provoke a response from me or any other mod!

I used to worry about keeping strictly to topic 'cos it makes somesome snippet of info you vaguely remember a lot easier to find when it is closely related to the thread heading, but from very early on I found it was a losing battle. Now I take the view that if the OP objects to the way the thread is going, I will certainly try to politely nudge it back on, otherwise, let the discussion go where it will as long as it's within the spirit of the original post. Other mods may take a different view, but that's my take. Discussion is what we're here for, really - after all, how many good dinner conversations remain strictly on an opening topic??
:;
Cheers,

D.W.

21st December 2022, 03:21 AM

I'd have suggested irons, but I don't have full information for Aus. I also admittedly thought it was the OP who brought up sellers and his carnival wagon of "could be" stuff.

The list of irons goes like this:
1) stanley stock, learn to modify geometry if the iron won't stand up to wood - I can teach this. However, the OP expressed a preference for thicker irons (and yes, a discussion of actually fit probably is appropriate, but not everyone wants to fix the problem that way)
2) if searching for plain steel a little thicker - hock O1
3) if not plain steel, cryo A2 (hock or LN) is OK, V11 is fine (don't know the cost there).
4) if willing to take a risk and do the prep, the chinese irons that are HSS with a braze between the iron and the body. I've gotten them three different times. The first two, the irons were all very similar. harder than they say they are. the irons sold on chinese sites like alibaba that are solid likely won't show up in the same hardness - they have been soft in my experience and there are other reasons that they can be a gamble. the third time I got irons of this type, though, they were painted black and well harder than the ones that are already harder than they say (and the ones that are harder than they say - a sample that i actually prepared and used before passing it on tested at 65.5 average hardness by an experienced professional tester using a versitron. the last ones must be 68 or something. that's the risk. They were $7.50 shipped each, so the loss isn't a big deal).

For the OP, coming from someone who has heat treated several hundred things, it's an avenue to go down to fix something only if you want to get good at it. Which isn't that hard to do, but it won't be as cheap as buying one or two plane irons. I went down it to make an iron for an infill bullnose that didn't have an iron at all - it worked well right away with assistance from larry williams showing a how-to in a video.

I can't make the case that it's going to be economically gainful for the average person to make their own irons until they start making tools where non-standard irons (or in quantity) are really difficult to get.

IanW

21st December 2022, 07:50 AM

.......I can't make the case that it's going to be economically gainful for the average person to make their own irons until they start making tools where non-standard irons (or in quantity) are really difficult to get.

Amen to that. While you can do it without a huge initial outlay, I'd say the more basic your setup, the more hit & miss the product is likely to be, & the steeper the learning curve. If you get lost in the rabbit warren of tool-making, making your own blades is likely to come up at some stage, but unless & until that happens, it will be far more economical & far more reliable to go with commercial blades.

To sum up & address the OP, my impression is that there is a wide choice of replacement blades from various sources. While some blades may be "better" than others (and how much "better" matters depends heavily on what woods you typically work with & how often you use hand planes), I have not come across any of the known brands that I'd consider inferior or unusable.

If your plane is a stock-standard Bailey type, you have a 95% chance any of the replacement blades you can buy here will drop straight in your plane or at most, require minor adjustment of the frog position providing you use the existing cap-iron. If you want to use one of the replacement cap-irons, you may strike trouble, but again, there is a fair chance it will fit & function as it should. And imo, unless your existing cap-iron is damaged beyond redemption, or some previous owner has substituted with a CI that doesn't match your plane, there is little or no point in replacing it. If the current cap-iron fits well, it can function as well as any of the after-market cap-irons whatever manufacturers claim & in some cases better because it was made to match your plane's adjuster...
:)
Cheers,

D.W.

22nd December 2022, 01:35 AM

I think my process mentioned above, even if it just ends with a single heat dipping in oil and no fridge or anything and a kitchen oven will result in very consistent blades. but it relies on being able to overshoot heat, not on stretching to get it.

if I total up a paint can and some kind of wool, cooking oil in another can, and a TS4k torch - not absolutely vital that it's one of the bernzomatic torches, just that some larger torches or other similar types discharge as much or more gas, but not at quite as high of a temperature.

At any rate, it will be difficult to not make a blade as good as you can buy with the above, but it requires getting known O1 steel and being kind of brand loyal once you find something that's good.

Very different than reheating old irons, which is also not hard, but there's no guarantee that the old irons won't be a tungsten water heating type of steel, or something more similar to drill rod that comes up short in cooking oil.

I think the real dynamic is - "do I want to learn the skill, even if just at this basic level". If yes, then it's worth it to pick this up. the cost of the materials is about $80 if you line a can with kawool, then plus O1.

the setup that I use to match or better book on several steels is two torches (though I have a two burner stainless "real forge" that I don't use), and I've added a two-stainless-exhaust forge to go with the paint can type. the two stainless exhaust type is only needed for long items like kitchen knives or long paring chisels. All it is is one wide piece of exhaust pipe, a layer kawool, and a narrower inner pipe for more concentrated heat - especially necessary for stainless.

Back to the dynamic - if it's "i don't really care about this hardening and stuff, I just want blades" just buy the blades.

eddie the eagle

22nd December 2022, 08:54 AM

***TLDR - contact details for Paul Williams/Academy Saw Works?

Hi all,

Read through the thread in its entirety. Had this typed up yesterday, but then the laptop battery died.

From mine, the slightly thicker blades offer greatly reduced chatter resistance/increased stiffness at the cutting edge. edit - you may need to back the frog off a bit to get the mouth opening right, but the curve of the grind doesn't interfere with the blade/frog/base geometry.

Paul Williams (Academy Saw works) used to make Stanley blades in M2 that I swear by. Just went looking for his contact details to buy a couple, but can't find them. They were/are bulletproof and went at least half an hour's hard work on old growth hardwoods before needing to be sharpened.

Does he still make them?

Otherwise, is there a HSS blade available still as a direct swap for a stanley blade. Setting up at work to touch up jarrah and recycled hardwoods for kids. Last thing you need mid-class is to break for resharpening.

(Yes, I could make one as a metallurgist, but if they're already available... ...)

Back to the pre-Xmas house cleaning mayhem.

Regards,

eddie the eagle

22nd December 2022, 09:03 AM

The thickness of the blade will not have any influence over its sharpness and how long it holds its edge. That is down to the steel in the blade. Thicker irons are usually used to reduce chatter, although I think that problem is also mainly a problem of technique.

In my experience - thicker blade / less chatter meant more stability at the edge/less vibration/ bending and a slightly prolonged edge, but it's academic. Chatter is also cap iron tension, lever cap force, flatness of the frog and flatness of the blade and technique (angle of attack of the plane to the timber.) Once again, academic. If all flat and firm, minimal chatter, but you can't stop flutter at the cutting tip in a thinner blade.

Mainly I use thicker 2.5mm M2 blades for better surface finish and longer time between sharpenings. A well set up plane helps. I flatten the frog surface also in setup.

eddie the eagle

22nd December 2022, 09:06 AM

D.W.

22nd December 2022, 09:22 AM

Don't forget you've got 5-10 seconds post quench to flatten the blade if you want, DW, when you drop below the nose of the TTT curve and wait for martensite to form.

If you have a flat steel heatsink, you could cool it on that if you're quick enough and have something to apply pressure with quickly.

(Either that, or look how they keep razor blades flat in heat treating as another option - that's a 2 hour rabbit hole to disappear down.)

I quench the top part of the quench in fast oil (even with O1) below black heat - this is not something I would suggest a beginner do - it's not necessary on O1 which doesn't need to transition as fast. Anyway, I have two pairs of aluminum quench plates and after getting the top end of the quench done as fast as possible in the first two or three seconds, I transfer the iron or knife, whatever it may be, to the quench plates and - no kidding - stand on them. and finish the tail in water and transfer to freezer.

there is a very short period of time, as you say, where major warp could be addressed, but it's uncommon for me to have much warp to deal with on plane irons, and usually on knives, it's in the handle where I've not heated past an inch or two in the tang, and that can be hammered flat later since no material will be removed.

At any rate, it's definitely the case that with good O1 heated evenly, the top end of the quench doesn't need to be done at 1095 or razor steel speed, so there shouldn't be much warp. and you're right, there is a fraction that you have in time where if you aren't pushing to hit the tail of the quench as cold as possible, you can adjust straightness. I'm usually chasing "poor man's cold" at the tail of the quench to maximize hardness, though.

the lower the tail, the more time you have to get to it - potentially hours if using liquid nitrogen, but the freezer is the best I have here, so it needs to get water cold and then into the freezer with no spare time.

......

but that's all things you kind of experiment and work on - keeping things flat in process, and shouldn't distract from my mention earlier that O1 can be done much more simply with something that won't cause divorce as the quench oil and cooling to oil and then still air before tempering is fine.

chasing cold at the tail vs. ambient temps gets about 1 point of hardness extra on 26c3 (not sure about O1, but I don't use O1 that much at this point), and potentially two vs. the strategy of terminating the quench a little early and allowing finish in still air. With really poor hardenability, it may not finish the job in the critical 2 minute or so period to reach the tail.

D.W.

22nd December 2022, 09:30 AM

I chase these things (fast quench, 26c3 for chisels instead of O1, etc) out of being competitive, though. I think most people aren't going to get so wrapped up in it. I want to be able to take a chisel that I make and have a lot of headroom for tempering and then have it hold up better in use than anything that can be purchased, and at least as well as anything I can find historically.

eddie the eagle

22nd December 2022, 09:30 AM

comments above aren't a shot at tools for working wood for not chasing the tail end of the quench - I think they are making some things like spoon bits and such and it's one thing to deal with a little warp in a plane iron or chisel. It'd be another thing entirely to deal with it in drill bits that we'd probably prefer be a little easier to hone, anyway.

Long drawn out explanation above - it's a statement of what is about clifton, the why, not "they did a bad job". the latter is subjective.

what shouldn't be lost in this is how easy it is to do good O1 steel in the garage:
1) buy good bar stock
2) create some kind of heat housing structure (even if the first tries are an uninsulated can
3) uniformly heat what will be treated - uniform from the start, not create a hot spot and then try to make the hot spot bigger
4) get what's going to be quenched to nonmagnetic then as quickly as possible for the next step (test with a cheap pick up magnet that won't be hurt in the heat, but don't leave the magnet in the heat, of course - just use it to check magnetism quickly)
5) as soon as the steel is nonmagnetic, heat it another half or full color shade as quickly as possible (this should not be more than about 15 or 20 seconds)
6) quench straight into oil. If it's cold and the oil is thick, preheat the oil a little bit so it flows well
7) if you want to get good hardness, have a jar of cold water, and as soon as the oil has drawn as much heat out of the tool as it can, put the business end of the tool in the water for about ten seconds and then the entire tool (an iron in this case)
8) you can throw the iron in the freezer then if you want for half an hour before tempering

Temper twice for an hour between 375F and 425f, depending on your tastes. A toaster oven is fine , and probably better than a kitchen item. if you see the bevel of a tool or edges tempering a different or darker color than the

375 should result in 62/63 temper, and 425 60/61 hardness. You will be able to tell the difference between the two pretty easily

if you buy O1 stock or anything simple and this doesn't work, it could be because the steel is factory made coarse spheroidized (large grains with large carbides to be easy to machine). it's probably better to just avoid that when you're a beginner. Bohler and Starrett aren't delivered like that, but Buderus often is.

There's sort of an OWT that all steel should be quenched as soon as it's nonmagnetic. it's true that complete lack of magnetism shows a phase change and steel is hardenable. There aren't many steels where the best temp for quenching is right at nonmagnetic, though. O1 is better when it's a little higher. Quenching immediately is a way to avoid growing grain, but what I showed above won't grow grain and it avoids "people being human furnaces" trying to eyeball a soak temperature - that's impractical.

Concur absolutely.

Comments below may give some food for thought.

The double temper/freeze is to remove retained austenite, which then turns into brittle martensite when you apply energy during use of the blade. Leading to brittle blades only at the tip. Highly recommended double quench/temper. -60°C is easy to attain with dry ice if you need at a reasonable cost (or free if you know someone that has frozen meals delivered.)
The magnetism change doesn't actually show a phase change. It's the curie temperature of iron which is at 770°C. This is close to the ideal soak temperature of a 1080 steel or most high carbon tool steels.
Larry Williams uses a better indication of phase change. When the steel transforms from it's low temperature form (ferrite) to its high temperature form (austenite), it shrinks by 0.15/7.85 ~ 2% in volume. This means that the brittle oxide on the surface flakes/bubbles off all of a sudden as the steel it was bonded to shrinks suddenly. At this point, you can safely say it's fully austenitic, but either this or magnetism is good enough for backyard heat treating.
As I said on point 7, you've got a few seconds to get the part flat after quenching, as martensite takes time to form post-quench. It's not immediate unless you get to room temp. Can slightly straighten parts if needed, but nothing drastic. Give it a go on a knife you don't care about if you want. Use a bit of railroad track as a flattening source/heatsink. Put a second bit of track on top.
edit: Saw your reply above as I typed mine.

(but back to my original question - does anyone know if Paul WIlliams' Stanley replacement blades are still available?)

Thanks in advance.

D.W.

22nd December 2022, 10:49 AM

believe it or not, the first bevel edge chisels I made, I cut the bevels first, they went banana and I would hammer them flat as quickly as I could. I still have some of them -they still have burnish marks from the hammer.

Push it though time-wise and one chisel becomes two. I really liked hand filing the bevels, but it's not to be. I heat treat the chisel flat now and grind the bevels later, it's not too bad.

Larry's video is the first thing I saw. There's a problem with seeking flux bubbles for phase change, though - some irons and some steels will experience pretty radical grain growth if you chase temp that high. 1084 and 1095 will both do it, unless you get 1095 with enough additive elements to prevent it. 1084 that I've been able to find has pretty much nothing in it other than manganese. 80crv2 is a little harder to get to top hardness, but it can get to about the same post temper points and won't grow grain. the two O1s that I've used much of, or three, I guess - add precision marshall, they are all pretty tolerant of a fast temperature overshot.

which is what I like to shoot for. get to nonmagnetic and then chase a temperature overshot depending on what the steel will tolerate.

26c3 isn't super tolerant, but compared to 1084, it's pretty forgiving in terms of grain growth.

yes on the tempering - I didn't go into it around the discussion of O1 because there wouldn't be much RA compared to other things like AEB-L where the RA will actually lead low temperature tempers to increase hardness after quench. I'm guessing the cryo between tempers is claimed to do all kinds of things, but it probably maximizes the change to martensite in a muted version of what it does after quench.

I have pretty good luck with AEB-L out of the forge, and XHP (V11) does OK, too - both with a lower temperature pre-quench (which is still high for stainless) and then just pushing fast for a high heat. the knife expert here in the states who is actually local to me hates this, but it works well. I got banned from the knife forum here for pressing the issue and wanting to talk about this method and show actual test data. They think that even if I'm able to produce samples (some are better than book - like 26c3 - book hardness, 30% better toughness at same hardness vs book). When I refused to go along with the "ultimately everyone gets a furnace so that they can make knives out of maxamet", it didn't go over that well. Nothing wrong with a furnace, but you can't thermal cycle 26c3 three times and quench it all in a total of 5 minutes, and the results would probably be worse than I get.

This will sound like foreign talk to a bunch of folks here - I'm no metallurgist, but I went bonkers snapping samples and manipulating grain size - I thought I really had something that amateurs might like, but you can't get past the front door if there is someone moderating who sells knives. They believe discussing this stuff is irresponsible because someone will think you can do it and sell knives professionally.

it's a little humorous here that I could've dialed down the dork meter and written something very clear and useful that paul could've referred to, but he's such an egotistical that there's no way he'd ever do something like that. And personally, I wouldn't really want to do something gainful for him - I don't think he has honest enough intentions.

D.W.

22nd December 2022, 10:56 AM

Also, I'm aware of some of the high carbide volume steels that have a triple temper schedule. some of the furnace schedules for the steels based on their data sheet look like they could last a 24 hour day.

and, I couldn't get anyone on the knife boards to sort of follow that what makes a good chisel (26c3 is dandy) and what makes a good knife (52100 if in carbon steels) isn't necessarily the same. there's just nothing gained increasing carbide volume in bench chisels - (look away derek!)- V11 chisels are not remotely close to my chisels in a same task test and take twice as long to sharpen because their carbide volume reduces edge stability (want that in chisels) and adds to abrasion resistance significant (harder to sharpen, and no use for the abrasion resistance in chisels).

did I say already? I learned ultimately that the chisels need to be made like straight sided firmers, I'll chase hardness with a very fast upper part of the quench and then chasing a cold tail, and then grind the bevels onto the chisels after they're hardened and tempered - with a steel that doesn't have a lot of abrasion resistance, they can be ground cool without issue.

https://i.imgur.com/g4t36uU.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/rPmneB7.jpg

If you look closely at the second picture, you can see the lands that I ground freehand on a contact wheel. I've got one more trio of pictures for you since you may be the only person who will appreciate them.

D.W.

22nd December 2022, 11:05 AM

By some luck, I actually have some grain pictures from 1084 - because I sent samples to be tested without snapping them just using the same overshot as 26c3 - they (1084) came in harder than expected and undertough.

so, I figured I'd heat several slivers at various overshots past nonmagnetic. that's where I learned that relatively minor overheating can cause a lot of problems. so, the trick is thermal cycling to shrink grain as much as possible and then only a very small overshot.

This is the control sample - heated to non-magnetic and snapped (good quality annealed stock):
https://i.imgur.com/SaYUxnq.jpg

this is 1084, same stuff, same session - held 15 seconds over temp. 15 seconds!!
https://i.imgur.com/ZBoW8ya.jpg

that's unbelievable grain growth for that short of a period of time. this next skill isn't necessary for this topic, but this is for your benefit and not for someone starting out (who should follow good O1 stock, quick temp overshot to ensure conversion and then reasonable quench). I have learned to cycle thermally very quickly in the forge and tighten the visual grain viewed under a small scope. so this picture is the same sample that had grown above after I think four thermal cycles - they are subcritical, but I think they're not truly subcritical - I undershoot nonmagnetic just barely and probably some phase change occurs, but I then quench to black and repeat. very quick.

https://i.imgur.com/U4UmJxN.jpg

if your thermal cycle brings grain back, you know you can always correct something that warps by annealing and starting over and there will be no real consequence.

This discussion is for relatively simple steels, of course. Once you get into coarse chromium carbides and especially vanadium, niobium,etc, the stuff all has to be put back into solution, which isn't something someone like me with a forge is going to do.

I can refine the voestalpine annealed grain in 26c3 a pretty visually significant amount, and the result of doing that is a chisel that behaves like very good japanese white 1 chisels.

D.W.

22nd December 2022, 11:06 AM

(except the paring chisels that I made can be like japanese chisels with better toughness than white 1, resulting in a solid steel parer that can be malleted as hard as you want and spring a whole lot in paring use without any threat of breaking).

IanW

23rd December 2022, 07:15 AM

........ (back to my question - does Paul WIlliams, Academy Saw Works, still make replacement HSS blades?)...

Nope Eddie, he announced he was retiring about a dozen years ago and has disappeared entirely from the scene.......

Cheers,

D.W.

23rd December 2022, 08:51 AM

Nope Eddie, he announced he was retiring about a dozen years ago and has disappeared entirely from the scene.......

Cheers,

it's too bad this kind of stuff is hard to coordinate.

I just read a day or two ago that peters now uses cryo for everything, and not saying this cynically, I think they probably found that it's harder on complex steels with a high soak temperature to do without it and not have unhappy customers.

so, something like M2 or 4V could be ordered at spec and done pretty safely. It's the water and oil hardening steels that are suddenly becoming risky (as I've done a lot of water hardening steels, I've kind of puzzled about how someone doing hundreds of things a day could stay focused - always to be assured that "oh, they do them perfectly and they offer straightening", finding out later on the knife boards that there's a lot of cracked stuff, missed targets and warped ...

but back to this situation - ASW was making M2 blades, but they're not hard to make. There just isn't much specialty market.

so, where is a white knight who will get opinions from knife makers and perhaps have irons milled in M2 or CPM 4V, have 10 made, and then sell 9 for the cost of all 10. Everyone would win aside from inconvenience for the organizer.

M2 is an ingot steel, obviously, but not terribly coarse grained unless you get low cost chinese steel from an unknown supplier. T1 is also an interesting option, but probably not as safe. 4V is safe and probably better than m2, but not cheap.

D.W.

23rd December 2022, 08:58 AM

(crucible M2 here from a sort of higher cost knife specialty retailer would be about $17 per blade. A little less in higher volume.

Some steels are really sensitive to hardness in terms of avoiding chipping but M2 isn't one of them)

eddie the eagle

23rd December 2022, 04:32 PM

it's too bad this kind of stuff is hard to coordinate.

...

but back to this situation - ASW was making M2 blades, but they're not hard to make. There just isn't much specialty market.

so, where is a white knight who will get opinions from knife melakers and perhaps have irons milled in M2 or CPM 4V, have 10 made, and then sell 9 for the cost of all 10. Everyone would win aside from inconvenience for the organizer.

M2 is an ingot steel, obviously, but not terribly coarse grained unless you get low cost chinese steel from an unknown supplier. T1 is also an interesting option, but probably not as safe. 4V is safe and probably better.

Potentially a white knight. I've done this sort of thing for the state before. $15k of specialty work.

I'm making a 20-24" norris style jointer and need a blade to fit. Current plan is 01, but I'm open to ideas.

Paul Williams' blades were excellent.

I live close to Bohler Uddeholm, have a commercial heat treater 4 blocks away and might be able to get something to a saw doctor for grinding the back flat.

It would be on a cost recovery basis, with 120٪ of estimated cost to me up front, and I'll refund surplus post despatch. Been bitten before with people pulling out at the last minute, and then piece rate increasing - eg: same cost to run a furnace for 50 or 80 items, but the cost per item increases and I had to wear the cost.

Will have to find a local machine shop (saw doctor even?) to mill the slots. Whilst I can do the machine work, I don't have the time to recommission a mill. Be a minor risk on the heat treatment, but these guys are good so minor. It'd have the hardness guaranteed, assume toughness OK.

Let me do some sums mid-Jan when all factories return to work..

Thoughts?

D.W.

24th December 2022, 12:49 AM

Will have to find a local machine shop (saw doctor even?) to mill the slots. Whilst I can do the machine work, I don't have the time to recommission a mill. Be a minor risk on the heat treatment, but these guys are good so minor. It'd have the hardness guaranteed, assume toughness OK.

Thoughts?

I read the heat treat chart for M2 - it's something that a furnace would do on schedule almost without thought, and then it's a matter of quench preference, but it doesn't need a fast quench, so all methods should yield about the same result. Options are things like pressurized air (more atmospheres, more cooling ability), oil quench to black and then finish in still air.

Whatever the case, if you're starting with good stock and the furnaces is allowed to do its thing, and you choose a hardness target like ASW had, the blades will be indistinguishable. Toughness is only a problem with bad stock or errors.

I can't think of a much better steel than O1 around 62 hardness for an infill.

I think at the outset of something like this, a group buy is a no-go. If you get money ahead of time, you'll be badgered, and if you get money later, too many people will back out and "left over from a group buy" sounds like unwanted custom underwear.

the recipe for it, I believe, is fronting the money.

I recall seeing ASW blades for around $100. This is insanity, but it means that if you get good stock and chase the right spec, you won't have much trouble selling anything over a longer term, especially as word gets around.

but fast or high volume or group buy seems like a no.

Heat treat here has a batch cost and then a smaller variable cost. So if you do something like heat treat four irons, it costs a lot. If you heat treat 20, it costs less per iron. if you can do the milling and grinding on your own, that's obviously a lot better. I've never hired out work because there's never a batch of something to do it with and try as i have, I just can't find higher wear steels that are as practical for significant planing as the more plain alloys. However, there is obviously a strong market for specialty blades, or we wouldn't have V11 and 10V, and now in the US, Magnacut being offered at retail (basically CPM4V in characteristic, but extremely stainless). the idea of popping an iron in a guide and then putting off the time to the guide again and advertising the ability is a net that catches fish.

GRadice

28th December 2022, 12:17 PM

I don't think anyone has mentioned yet: Hocktools.com (http://hocktools.com) make thicker replacement blades. I use them in my Stanley planes.

AJOE123

6th January 2023, 09:26 AM

Philly planes in UK make blades ; recommended by Jim Hendricks.

D.W.

7th January 2023, 05:06 AM

I don't know who jim hendricks is, but I only see tapered and snecked plane irons on philly planes.

AJOE123

9th January 2023, 08:44 AM

Parallel irons ; uncut.
Snecked irons as an option.
No irons cut for Stanley types.

johknee

13th May 2023, 10:05 PM

Chief Tiff

13th May 2023, 10:30 PM

They’ll fit… I bought a 3mm thick HSS iron for a 3 years ago; it was a little hard to get the cap iron screw in but it did go in the end. You’ll need to back the frog off a fair bit too to clear the mouth. You should NOT need to open the mouth up… like I stupidly did :doh: I sold it a couple of years ago with both the thick HSS iron for smoothing and the original thin iron ground with a camber for using the plane as a scrub, you just had to swap out the iron to use it either way; no need to move the frog.

raffo

13th May 2023, 10:33 PM

3mm is more than likely too thick and will need the plane mouth to be filed open. Even 0.100" blades will barely fit. In addition to that, if you want to use them with a closely set cap iron, the shavings will choke because the gap at the mouth is too narrow. They also will need the mouth to be filed to allow for the whole range of operation of the plane.

D.W.

14th May 2023, 12:14 AM

Revitalising this thread.

Can anyone recommend or discourage me from buying one of these replacement plane blades (https://www.finetools.com.au/products/replacement-blade-for-no-4-and-no-5-bench-planes)?
They're a replacement for Luban planes. I'm after some blades for some a no.4 and a no.5 stanley.

Edit: that was stupid. They're for Luban planes. They won't fit stanley/records, will they? 3mm thick blades!

some they might, some they won't. With a 3mm blade, you'll add additional backlash to an adjuster.

In my experience, the older the plane is, the greater the chance that the mouth is smaller at a maximum. 3MM is about .118". some planes will start to get tight even at 0.1", but those have always been early planes for me.

Just as a matter of fit to how the plane is designed and dealing with the adjuster and things of the like, without really going way deep science project and tabbing the cap iron or something so that it has fingers coming down between the iron to catch the adjuster lower, i'd personally stick to 0.1" and below for a standard stanley plane.

As far as luban blades, do they state what the steel is? I saw references in the past to T10, which is almost the same in composition as W2 currently available in the US. It's a more plain steel than O1, would have slightly shorter edge life, but if it's got reasonable hardness, it could be pleasant. Production control and nailing 1% plain carbon steels is probably not great, though - it's not as easy as more highly alloyed steels unless the heat treat is done by hand.

the other reference that I saw as Mn65, which is just a 0.6-0.7% carbon plain steel with additional manganese. I would guess that the manganese is added to make it easier to harden. the amount of manganese is up into the O1 spec range - that addition in O1 has a lot to do with why it's used now and W series steels aren't - ability to quench slower means easier to deal with industrially. There is a trace of chromium in it, too, which also helps hardening and probably adds a little bit of toughness. Steels in that range seem to work better if they're a couple of points short of 1% steels (meaning if T10 would make a nice blade at 62, I doubt Mn65 would. it could be made to 62 hardness, but the edge would suffer for it in actual use - the better you compare it, the more it would be noticeable).

Bottom line with these, if you find them in something thinner, then the question is whether or not they're inexpensive - if they're in the $10-$20 price range US, that's where they should be.

D.W.

14th May 2023, 12:31 AM

Just my opinion here, I looked up T10 on alibaba. It can be bought in coil or sheets and the coils are about $550 a ton. that's mill run, so it's not like you can just punch a blade out with a punch press or laser cut it, heat it and make it cold and throw it in a plane, but I would be surprised if the actual cost to make these blades in china was more than about $2 or $3 each ($US).

I see bench plane blades in T10 listed at 40-60 AUD. Someone would have to convince me they took japanese-like care in selecting the cleanest of all stock and dealing with the stock through all phases of heat treatment and tempering to command that.

i see mn65 listed as the alloy only for some oddball planes. I looked up mn65 to see what it's used for - it's a spring steel. the carbon level being much lower than T10 is intentional - springs can't have anything that initiate cracks, so the steel is starved of carbon a little so that all of the carbon remains in the matrix and forms on carbides. We tend to like steel that has a little bit of carbide volume in the edge. If i squinted at the use of mn65 long enough, four or five people would do a drive by and mention they love the blades, I'm sure, and steels like 60crv (0.6% steel often used in $2 chisels) can make a workable tool, but it's missing something compared to a really good tool.

IanW

14th May 2023, 10:37 AM

Hmmm, experiences seem to differ a bit here. I have used quite a few after-market blades in Stanleys & Records, and so far have not had a mouth problem (with planes, that is. :U ) The thickest after-market blade I've used was a full 1/8" (.125") thick and it certainly did cause trouble with the cap-iron screw being too short to get a decent grip, and also with the adjuster, which I solved by building up the tip of the cam a bit by brazing and filing it into shape (it was an old, well-worn yoke anyway). I don't recall having any mouth problems, but I'm fairly sure I was ok there & able to move the frog back far enough for a usable mouth. I don't think I have ever taken a file to the mouth of a Bailey plane except to smooth off the little nicks & spurs that some oldies acquire in their lives. But it wasn't an easy direct swap & most folks would not be equipped to deal with those problems so I expect you would want to avoid that situation.

I looked up the thickness of Luban blades (https://mcjing.com.au/hand-plane-blade.html) for their Bailey style planes and they are 3.18mm (0.125") thick, so you may want to proceed with caution. As D.W. says, post WW2 Stanleys seem to have more generous mouths, though I have two type 11s (~1911-1919) both of which happily received new blades that were thicker than their originals. In this case they were Veritas PM-V11 blades which are a teeny bit thinner than the earlier A2 Veritas blades I have.

In my experience, the cap-iron screw and adjuster yoke are the main concerns, as D.W. has also mentioned. Typical after-market blades are generally .10" thick or a smidgin thinner. You will lose a half-turn of thread compared with an old, thin blade, but the cap-iron screw should still engage fully in the cap-iron. You may get a little more backlash due to the adjuster cam not engaging fully, which you may or may not notice (or may or may not be bothered by!). I'm speaking from the experience of 20 planes or so over the last 40 years, and it may be a bit dangerous to make generalisations from such a relatively small sample, but I'll stick my neck out & suggest that blades of 0.1" or thinner are unlikely to cause you any problems unless your plane is an outlier, and you may get away with a 3.2mm blade with no major problems with a bit of luck. But given normal wear & tear & manufacturing tolerances, it's pretty hard to predict how well a blade will fit 'til you actually try it in your plane.

As far as quality goes, I've used quite a few Luban block & shoulder plane blades for planes I've made and found them of very acceptable quality & good value for money. I read somewhere that they are either A2 or something equivalent, but can't remember where & can't vouch for the veracity of the claim, but they do sharpen similarly to A2 (i.e. it takes a bit more effort to get a good edge on them compared with O1), and have much the same wear characteristics. I don't think you'll have any complaints about their quality....
:)
Cheers,

derekcohen

14th May 2023, 11:34 AM

D.W.

15th May 2023, 02:34 AM

As far as quality goes, I've used quite a few Luban block & shoulder plane blades for planes I've made and found them of very acceptable quality & good value for money. I read somewhere that they are either A2 or something equivalent, but can't remember where & can't vouch for the veracity of the claim, but they do sharpen similarly to A2 (i.e. it takes a bit more effort to get a good edge on them compared with O1), and have much the same wear characteristics. I don't think you'll have any complaints about their quality....
:)
Cheers,

so far, I've seen listings with T10 and Mn65. I thought maybe woodriver here sold A2 also, but not sure - that could've just been WC and cosman's line of blades.

the write up for Mn (which now appears to be what's in wood river blades, and maybe that will replace T10 for luban, too) claims 60-64 hardness. The actual limited specs that I can find suggest the extra manganese adds a bit to hardness vs. 1060 or 5160, and that it's an inexpensive spring steel. Lots of inexpensive steels make great woodworking tools and even razors, though. Probably more importantly, the extra Mn reduces warping and shortens follow up work.

if it's a click harder and we expect that it maybe is more like 1075, then 400F temper would put it at 60 and it doesn't reach 64 until tempered at 200-250F. It's very uncommon to have good edge stability at that.

T10 had the same hardness range.

Mn65's industrial sheet suggested a sweet spot of 58, but those sweet spots are often several points short of where we'd find the steel better for woodworking.

I've had quite a bit of experience now hardening steels from 0.6% carbon to in plain steels, 1.25% carbon. Sometimes, you can get odd results out of the lower carbon steels if there is nothing to form carbides and the additive elements slow the transition needed, but I would imagine 64 hardness and good behavior for Mn65 is not in the cards. 60/61 may be.

Beyond that, once plain steels get close to 65 hardness, they suddenly will seem much harder to sharpen - even on aggressive stones and could be harder to sharpen than 60 hardness A2.

i've got but one vintage iron that tested 65 in my data set, but I've got one or two more like it. They are ultimately boogers to work with and need to be tempered back, or I need to have an actual reason to temper them back. They're icy on stones.

IanW

15th May 2023, 10:21 AM

D.W.

15th May 2023, 11:18 AM

i did some more looking and would love to be able to tell you guys I learned something smart about mn65, but we don't seem to use it in the west (no biggie - we don't get silver steel at retail, either, and I'd love to have some of the alloys sold as silver steel - it's cheap and would make a wonderful chisel and probably good plane irons).

However, I just can't find anything other than data related to its structural use and hardness and tensile strength at various austenitizing temperatures (as in, how hot is it made before it's quenched).

It should have potential to be decent, but I can't get enough information to find out what decent is because blades aren't the intended use.

D.W.

15th May 2023, 11:48 AM

David, I think the equation balancing hardness, wear characteristics & sharpenability is one we each have to solve for ourselves & will depend on what woods we work with & personal preferences. We've discussed this before, and my attitude these days is that a blade that is hard, but easy enough to sharpen is a 'good' blade, even if its wear characteristics don't quite match the very best possible. But I've come to this attitude very slowly after many years of chasing the perfect blade, i.e. one that sharpens easily but holds its edge forever. One experience that started turning me back to more 'average' hardness was a blade that took forever to refine on my oilstones. I'd used oilstones ever since I started woodworking, and had a couple of lovely Arkansas stones I'd picked up in Canada as my 'finishing' stones, but they really struggled to put the edge I want on that blade. I had similar problems with my first PM-V11 blade, it just took too much effort on my oilstones and pushed me to water stones, which cut far faster, but require more time spent keeping the darned things flat (always the trade-off!). Granted, the edge may last longer with harder steels, but the dullness sneaks up on me & the extra difficulty of re-sharpening discourages me from just slipping it out for a quick touch-up. The result is I reckon I spend more time using a sub-optimally sharp blade with these steels than I do with 'softer' blades which tend to lose their keenness over a short period, but are far easier to touch-up quickly, so they get maintained better.

Lately, I've been having a bit of a love affair with 1084 for plane blades. After some initial difficulty getting the stuff to actually harden (we had a long discussion about it at the time & preheating the oil seems to be the key I was missing). Since then, I've had a run of excellent blades. I'm tempering very lightly, no idea what hardness I'm ending up with but they hold an edge very satisfactorily with no hint of chipping so I'm getting them somewhere near optimum. And being so easy to touch-up means I have no hesitation in doing so as soon as I think they have gotten a little dull, so while I may sharpen more often, I spend more time using truly sharp blades!

For a novice like me, the 'simple' steels have a lot to offer - semi-idiot-proof, yet capable of making blades that are comparable to commercial blades at a fraction of the cost. Plenty to like there....
:U
Cheers,

My thinking out loud here has less to do what can make a suitable blade (pretty much anything that's good or decent can make a suitable blade) and more to try to gather the angle as far as the decision that's made.

For questions about the luban and others, though, it starts to devolve into how does it compare to O1 at 62 hardness -what are the cost parameters, what's the potential and is it being offered fairly in line with those.

I think once you're comfortable with 1084, it's as practical as anything, though. if it were offered for $75, I'd start to squint again.

I guess I'm getting to the point where if someone says "can you recommend a luban blade". I'll get tied up in guessing and certainly not worth buying one or one of the blades from woodcraft. I'd just be a little offended if woodcraft tries to sell them for $50 US made out of either T10 or 65mn.

i could use or make tools out of anything in a wide range and be happy with them, though - even if I get idealistic once something is considered premium, or when I'm making tools and it's the 200th chisel (it's easier to get pickier as you get more under hand - though it's a minor detail for someone working wood - it just has to be decent and predictable).

D.W.

15th May 2023, 11:41 PM

David, I think the equation balancing hardness, wear characteristics & sharpenability is one we each have to solve for ourselves & will depend on what woods we work with & personal preferences. We've discussed this before, and my attitude these days is that a blade that is hard, but easy enough to sharpen is a 'good' blade, even if its wear characteristics don't quite match the very best possible. But I've come to this attitude very slowly after many years of chasing the perfect blade, i.e. one that sharpens easily but holds its edge forever. One experience that started turning me back to more 'average' hardness was a blade that took forever to refine on my oilstones. I'd used oilstones ever since I started woodworking, and had a couple of lovely Arkansas stones I'd picked up in Canada as my 'finishing' stones, but they really struggled to put the edge I want on that blade. I had similar problems with my first PM-V11 blade, it just took too much effort on my oilstones and pushed me to water stones, which cut far faster, but require more time spent keeping the darned things flat (always the trade-off!). Granted, the edge may last longer with harder steels, but the dullness sneaks up on me & the extra difficulty of re-sharpening discourages me from just slipping it out for a quick touch-up. The result is I reckon I spend more time using a sub-optimally sharp blade with these steels than I do with 'softer' blades which tend to lose their keenness over a short period, but are far easier to touch-up quickly, so they get maintained better.

Lately, I've been having a bit of a love affair with 1084 for plane blades. After some initial difficulty getting the stuff to actually harden (we had a long discussion about it at the time & preheating the oil seems to be the key I was missing). Since then, I've had a run of excellent blades. I'm tempering very lightly, no idea what hardness I'm ending up with but they hold an edge very satisfactorily with no hint of chipping so I'm getting them somewhere near optimum. And being so easy to touch-up means I have no hesitation in doing so as soon as I think they have gotten a little dull, so while I may sharpen more often, I spend more time using truly sharp blades!

For a novice like me, the 'simple' steels have a lot to offer - semi-idiot-proof, yet capable of making blades that are comparable to commercial blades at a fraction of the cost. Plenty to like there....
:U
Cheers,

Not too much of consequence here - but I looked further - no suppliers of it in the US at typical retail amounts, but it's made its way into chinese made camp knives and such, and on ebay as spring steel (sold at spring temper).

One of the sellers had the listing in AU dollars, but one never knows if that could be because google tied my history of talking about it with an australian forum. I still have problems getting aliexpress to give me english instead of turkish, and I think it's because of the turkish neighbor next door who works professionally with lasers and orders gobs of stuff from aliexpress. one never knows these days.

nonetheless, that means you could try it easily. The heat treatment regime is just as simple as 1084 and it's got a fair bit more Mn in it - it should love warmed vegetable oil.

only concession I can think of is because of the distance, it's just a little more than 1084 is here, and it's listed only in 1mm increments. 2.5 would be dandy, but my listings are 2 or 3.

I don't play with 1060 or 5160 - they're not quite up to snuff for us, and even 1070 is lacking. But the data sheets make claims about improvements in strength (edge stability for us) and hardness over spring steels with less Mn.

there is not enough carbon in for any significant carbide formation, so there is no "this long or that long" to get carbon in solution - like 1084, it can just be heated (1500F on the data sheet here) and quenched.

Like I mentioned, it's already spring temper, but it's not any more hardenable than O1 steel, so a quick heat would draw the temper out.

I'm more curious than anything about the hardness claims - they were 60-64 for T10. the alloy changed to something with substantially less carbon and the spec remains the same.

raffo

17th May 2023, 11:58 AM

I did have trouble with thicker irons, so here is the story.

Shown are four irons. The two at the top are shop made, the bottom two are Stanley and Vaughan & Bushnell.

The first one is 1/8" thick and the second is 3/32", O1 steel, I cut them and David heat treated them. The Stanley one is 0.08" and the second is 0.074". The V & B is a thinner than usual, the plane still works pretty well though, shown in the V & B planes posts from a few weeks ago.

The 1/8" iron is for a Millers Falls #18. Notice that I had to move the frog back quite a bit. I also had to file the front of the mouth to create a bevel and allow clearance for the shavings. I don't know if I ended up making the mouth bigger, but it is now bigger than the typical 3/16". The plane works fine, but it needed a lot of fiddling.

The other bench plane in the picture is a MF #9 smoother. This one has the 3/32" iron. The 1/8" irons were my first shop made irons, after that experience I bought 3/32" O1 bar stock. I think in this case I moved the frog back just a little bit and did not file the mouth. The mouth size is 3/16".

526013526014

For a standard Stanley iron, here's an #S4. The mouth is smaller than 3/16". I placed the 3/32" double iron in this plane just for this picture. It seems like it fits, there's enough light to indicate that this iron will work.

526015526016526017

Lastly, the Veritas after market irons are 0.1". Here's a Stanley #3 fitted with this iron. The mouth is less than 3/16" and the front of the mouth was filed in a similar manner as the MF #18. The frog was moved back as well. The iron is very close to the front of the mouth and I can take fine shavings without choking.

526010526011526012

Both planes I filed were choking initially.

If you still want to use after market irons, lean towards 0.1" or less to avoid having to monkey with the plane too much. If the depth adjuster becomes an issue, you can fix the problem by buying a new yoke. Check out my friend Jeff Warshafsky's yoke and other replacement parts (Replacement Plane yoke — Wood By Wright (https://www.woodbywright.com/shop/yoke)). There's a solution for every problem, I suppose.

Rafael

D.W.

30th May 2023, 09:58 PM

But I went to the shop late last evening after having made a replacement iron for a "new" (to me) stanley type 20 #8. The iron is .105 for no reason other than that's what I have on hand at the moment in 80crv2 or O1, or pretty much anything other than CTS-XHP.

I'm pretty much done acquiring planes for good now, I have what I like and figured the filing thing was academic, but would you believe it - the late make stanley will not take a .105 plane iron, which is interesting because it means the margin for use of the stock iron wasn't that much.

all on a plane that is supposedly sloppily made with low tolerances.

I gave it the old norris treatment - filing the mouth slope in the upper casting forward to make room for the cap iron and it still needed a little more help by actually widening the mouth beyond that. took about 15 minutes total. I'd prefer that much margin as it is now even with the stock iron, anyway, as it's not going to get much use smoothing and taking see through shavings.

This is perhaps only the fourth or fifth plane I've had to file, though don't and haven't for some time replace irons in stanley planes unless there's a reason. This plane's iron has been abused to the point that it actually takes me less or the same amount of time to make a new iron vs fixing the original.

IanW

31st May 2023, 09:47 AM

......I'm pretty much done acquiring planes for good now, I have what I like......

:U Wish I had a $ for every time I said that in the last 40 years!

The #8 is one bench plane I've never aspired to have - it's a mighty beast & probably no more effort for a strong young fella than the #7 is for me, but even 40 years ago I thought it was just too much plane for the sort of stuff I was making. There have been a few occasions when it might have been a better choice than the #7 but far too few to earn it a space in my tool cupboard (it wouldn't fit, anyway, so I'd have to make another & I've definitely sworn never to do that again... :roll: )
:)
Cheers,

D.W.

31st May 2023, 10:09 AM

Oh, it's definitely a one trick pony for me. For match planing fat 4/4 rough sawn stock. Definitely not a need with a 7 on hand, and the 7 is much preferred if face jointing bad quality wood. Otherwise even then, I prefer a beech plane.

Everything about an 8 is a little more awkward than a 7 if you're trying to do really neat and precise work.

D.W.

1st June 2023, 12:13 AM

This is a forum, so I'm aware that within a short period of time, this post will pretty much slide into the ether. I figured I'd post a picture of "doing the norris" to the back of the mouth. At this point, the mouth isn't opened at the casting at all and a thin strip remains so that when I level the bottom, the mouth won't become uneven.

526776

You can see for all of the criticism of the type 20s, the mouth isn't at all large. In fact, even after filing this "norris" style mouth adjustment, it needed to be opened further, which has solved the problem. I don't file much and won't use a thicker iron than this, so it's not in danger of becoming garish.

but if in stout shaving taking, I can feel the "e-brake" like resistance of shavings making the turn rubbing the mouth, I will open it a bit further. this generally seems to occur around the point where the mouth is twice as wide as the shavings are thick.

I call this the norris because immediately after figuring out the cap iron, I looked at the insides of tight mouthed infill planes which "have a tight mouth, which was more important than the cap iron", I noticed that the castings were filed like this in the direction of the bun. Specifically to allow use of the cap iron. I think the tight mouth on infill smoothers was maker's pride, but we'll never be in the room with the makers, so who knows.

IanW

1st June 2023, 09:59 AM

....I call this the norris because immediately after figuring out the cap iron, I looked at the insides of tight mouthed infill planes which "have a tight mouth, which was more important than the cap iron", I noticed that the castings were filed like this in the direction of the bun. Specifically to allow use of the cap iron. I think the tight mouth on infill smoothers was maker's pride, but we'll never be in the room with the makers, so who knows....

As I recall, Norris cap-irons are quite thick so they do need a fair bit of clearance to get the blade into action when set close. It took me a while to figure out the geometry of cap-iron & front of mouth when I started making planes, and I'm not sure I have it totally sorted yet, but at least I have solved most of the choking problem I encountered with #1 - it was a real pest at first!

I'm inclined to agree that very tight mouths can be more hindrance than help on a bevel-down blade fitted with a cap-iron, but they sure make a difference on a BU job. I managed a really tight mouth on the box mitre I made a few months ago and it doesn't seem to choke at all. Without the cap-iron impeding egress of the shaving, it just keeps flowing through very nicely. There are trade-offs, though, the ridiculously fine mouth only allows for a shaving of 3-4 thou max, any more than that & the blade closes the mouth up completely & choking does happen. And it can't control tear-out quite as well as a close-fitting cap-iron - I tried a few 'head to heads' with my 'best' smoother & the smoother energed the winner, not by as much as I expected, but still the winner....
:)
Cheers,
Ian

D.W.

1st June 2023, 12:23 PM

I thought I posted a response to this, but I'm cranky thanks to things unrelated to woodworking and may have gotten sidetracked.

The early norris and spiers planes - like earlier than the point where Norris went sideways and started having R. sorby make blades and cap irons in a fat clunky way - the early ones had cap irons identical to those in better wooden planes. They had a lot of clearance and probably were not financially feasible once pennies got tight and a stamped much fatter round cap iron was the norm. The later norris planes gave up on the tight mouth to go along with that, though, so it's not a real big problem and some of the later beech planes (especially the try planes) can be tolerable.

the early planes had a very short blunt tip and then the rest of the cap iron got out of the way quickly so that the forward filed mouth provided plenty of clearance. Blunt isn't a great choice of words, it was a small rounded tip to do the chipbreaking on fine shavings and then not a lot of fatness both for plane feeding and probably because it's a better profile combination in heavier work (where the cap iron design would've showed up on wooden try planes).

it's impressive once you get a full picture of what's going on with the various designs tied together, and then showing skill and tight work keeping the mouth from being too open and sloppy.

It's also a little interesting because I can't think of a precedent to have the mouth done neatly and up close to the cap iron like that except in keeping the wear tight (and at an acute angle to the bed side of the plane rather than making the wear short or vertical or something).

IanW

1st June 2023, 12:50 PM

Yeah, ok, my Norris experience is very limited, just one late-model A5 that I had for about 15 years, which did indeed have Sorby running gear. If I ever get my hands on an early "classic" model I'll be very keen to investigate its guts.....
:U
Cheers,

D.W.

2nd June 2023, 12:32 AM

I have a few norris planes right now, and have had more in the past. Sometimes, you can't justify keeping them all!!

Three of my early planes were two A5s and an A1? The latter was a late plane with the U channel bottom that someone sold as almost unused - a dealer in England. They ripped me off by not showing the side of the plane with the paint worn off, and made it look new by having it finely surface ground all the way around, but you take you lumps sometimes. All three of those had the adjuster, but the "ripoff" plane was actually reasonably nice to use as a try plane. It was 17 1/2 inches long and about the weight of a stanley 6, and the behavior of the adjuster is a bigger deal with fine shavings than it is with try plane like shavings.

Point being, they gave me familiarity with later norris irons and caps.

The earlier ones were generally Ward and look like the thinner one in this picture.

https://i.imgur.com/Rcz1HtF.jpg

I sent this to steve voigt years ago because in a wooden plane, the fat chipbreaker version needs another 5 degrees of wear, which doesn't look that great. This becomes something really critical in wooden planes as if the wear is wrong, just making the mouth bigger doesn't alleviate clogs until the mouth is garishly big. The extra 5 degrees does the trick, but the wear gets to looking close to vertical and the plane looks cheap.

Modern wooden planes get around this by making the wear lower - like the ECE types and so on. They have huge tall sprung chipbreakers, but get around troubling with them by finagling the plane. i suppose at this point with the user pool, it doesn't matter.

the early norris planes were probably sold to cabinetmakers who did a lot of work in the shop without power tools - turn of the century or shortly after. As time went and you got to wartime and shortly after, I don't know what the dynamic was. In the US, around 1900, the tool supplies switched over from english style tools to site tools for the most part. You could still get all of the stanley planes, but wood planes had disappeared other than junk. Things went to factory across the board very quickly here - probably over a matter of a decade and I think the better of the two chipbreakers here that you'd see on an 1800s wooden plane or a 1900.

Anyway, the difference between the two shown - both are old - is also that the lower chipbreaker works as well for smoothing but is easier pushing by a lot when taking a thicker shaving. That doesn't matter if nobody is taking thicker shavings. Norris started with this ward type, and mathieson looked the same and so did spiers. And things changed over time probably as hand fitting and finishing got to be less and less. It's cheaper to just make a fat one because you have more room for error with fatter and rounder and taller.

you can see how the contour of the thin one would do very well if you do nothing more than file the front of the mouth away toward the bun - it's an easier situation than the wear in a good wood plane leaning back toward the bed and since the cap iron of the elegant design existed, it looks like norris and others took advantage of what it offered.

All of my later planes had mouths that were big enough that the cap iron style didn't matter that much.

too, it's not that uncommon to find one like the "good" one here that's had the front conditioned a few times and is pretty fat. Would've been trouble in a wooden plane, but one with the sole wearing would've alleviated the trouble. To find these caps in almost unused condition is a treat. once the front tip is prepared, they don't take damage, but if it's not prepared properly, they will and thus the "fixing" done by later users.

These little things are the true key to being able to work by hand and not add too much time on one off furniture type work. If the try plane is 25% harder to push and you have one try plane, you won't notice. if you have five, you figure out quickly which one gets through work more easily and by the time you accumulate all of the little nerd facts, you figure out that they were all in place in the 1800s in good tools, and work becomes pleasant and at a good rate rather than painful.

D.W.

2nd June 2023, 12:58 AM

though it's probably only interesting to me, note how the thinner of these two is fitted by grind thinly both on the top, but the undercut is actually something that goes all the way up to the transition so that the cap iron can be sprung without having to be fat and tall and getting in the way of things.

The actual spring/room is about the same. Once caps went to all steel instead of being bitted, not all of them were made this nicely. Cut cost unbranded caps from sheffield could be thin and out of square or any manner of things. Older mathieson and ward are like this.

The later norris-made caps can be very fat and very round at the top. Someone slipped a later design cap iron and an I. sorby, so even though I don't have any of the newer norris planes any longer, I still have one of the newer norris caps. the no 13 is, of course, cast, and the mouth isn't fine enough for it to matter. I bought it to copy at some point and have in hand, but I've got too many things now that i'm "going to copy". It'd be wiser just to use it as it's cast, and about the size of a 4 1/2, but it is not ungainly or overly heavy at all. My version is a real beater of an already homely plane, though.

IanW

2nd June 2023, 10:16 AM

We have veered from after-market blades into a discussion of cap-iron geometry, but I think it's appropriate because there are also after-market cap-irons and folks need to understand some of the variables.

First, I think we should define what the "wear" of a plane is. It's the front part of the mouth that initially slopes towards the back of the sole. I can't show it on a regular plane but it's easy to demonstrate with a rebate. You should be able to see it in this pic, between the bottom of the sole & the black line:
526828

This shape is desirable on a wooden plane because it allows the sole to be planed off a bit without altering the mouth opening, hence the name "wear". It isn't really necessary on a metal-soled plane because it shouldn't need serious work on its sole for the life of the plane. However, when you are making a plane in a backyard shed, it's hard to guarantee everything is going to end up just-so with the mouth for a few reasons, so I always leave 1-2 mm of the mouth vertical before it slopes forward to allow plenty of lapping.There's often a lot of file work needed to refine a mouth and I often leave a mm or so of the mouth vertical before it slopes forward. It can only be a small amount, because as you can see from Davids picture, a flat, blunt cap-iron as fitted to later Norrises could foul on the 'wear'. I've noticed a few old Stanleys had rounded fronts on the mouth, either due to careless manufacture or someone getting a bit enthusiastic with a file. That can interfere with a close-fitting cap-iron & may need to be addressed when fettling an old one (though it's not common in my experience, most of the old planes that have been in my hands had very generous mouths).

The thin, acute-angled iron on the top in the pic is far less likely to be a throat-obstruction if the mouth isn't ideal. After close to 20 years of making metal planes I'm still undecided on the ideal style for a cap-iron; sometimes I think the 'full arch' irons as fitted to Stanley/Records is the ideal style, sometimes I think the "single bend" style as shown above is better, for reasons that are too long-winded to go into here.

On a rebate plane like the shoulder plane pictured, I try to make them with 'wear' as shown because the all-brass sole of these may need a bit of lapping during it's life (more likely because of damage than wear) and it's important to preserve a fine mouth in these planes. (It's also a case of copycat because I've noticed a similar mouth geometry on some old Preston rebates.) Because of minor shifts in the parts than can occur when assembling, I don't always achieve such a prominent backward slope, but try to maintain some. With a low angle, bevel-up blade, it's unlikely to cause any interference. I've almost convinced myself that this mouth shape has a beneficial effect on the way shavings flow, but that's highly subjective & quite likely not correct, so don't quote me on that!

I think the point of this discussion is to emphasize that if you want peak performance out of a double-iron plane, you need to spend at least as much thought on the cap-iron & the shape of the mouth as you do on the cutter....
:)
Cheers,

D.W.

2nd June 2023, 10:37 AM

As far as the stanley type vs. the old flat then round sprung part like the two I showed (one just more refined than the other), i think both are an even match in efficiency and effectiveness.

what's not obvious is that the rounding on the flatter single spring cap irons is very similar for the first fraction of a millimeter, at least.

In a stanley plane with a thin iron, the extra room on the best of the ward planes should be less of an issue. it's of value in a wooden plane and on a very tightly made infill.

there is one thing that's less than ideal in stanley cap irons, though, and that is by the time we get them, they can be sort of all over the board in how much steepness follows the initial rounded edge. I rarely do much to condition a stanley cap iron, but if much has been honed off of the front of one or one is bent very steep, they will offer no real benefit in planing, but they will offer a lot of extra resistance. Fortunately, that's as easy to tell as swapping cap irons and noticing not just effort, but how one feels vs. the other.

A good stock stanley cap iron that's got a nice gradual continuous curve from end to end with the hump offers the options wanted. Sometimes, you get a plane and the cap iron is blunter or has had a lot honed off, and you just kind of roll with it until or unless you find one better.

the long flat design of the single spring type originated with wedged planes, so, of course that long flat run is important to match the flat bottom of a plane wedge. For the most part, wedge fingers should end by the top of the hump on a wooden plane - it's of no concern anywhere else.

if you're wondering how I would've gone so far down the rabbit hole on this, it's much like anything else I tout - I know for a lot of people it won't make a difference. However, I have an in house wooden plane with a bed around 43 degrees and a purchased try plane (can't remember the name, might be greaves, but it came with a ward cap and iron) - it's bedded at 47 or 48 degrees. It planed much more easily. I was embarrassed to find that out, and I'm not a wonk for my own stuff. I found myself preferring to use the "store bought" plane. It really bothered me that somehow I'd missed something that made such a big difference in effort that a higher pitch plane planed the same work more easily.

And then at some point, I took a look at the two cap irons and installed the thin one on my plane and the relationship flip flopped. the proportions are close enough that the wedges may be in different depths by a little bit, but no big refit was needed just for the trial. I would make a new wedge to take advantage of the better of the two cap irons in a second if I had to.

the reason I say it's not that important is either is pretty efficient. if you're try planing cherry or beech or rosewood or ash, the difference in effort will be felt pretty quickly and you just migrate to what works better because laying on the floor from exhaustion just to use your own tools isn't really a thing.

Interestingly (to me), I mentioned when you have trash wood or very hard wood with poor grain or just stubborn planing, you can't take too much advantage of something like a wooden try plane, and I'll go to metal for that. Persimmon is a good example. It's not that hard, but it planes like it's twice as hard as it is. A nice 0.9 specific gravity indian rosewood planes wonderfully, even though at that density, it'll be approaching 3k on the dent test.

D.W.

2nd June 2023, 10:39 AM

by the way, this fits into the aftermarket study only because I guess I made an "aftermarket" 80crv2 iron and forced dealing with the feeding.

it's definitely true that correct use of the cap iron will extend the iron's life in volume of wood worked by quite a large amount. It's protective of the iron by controlling how the iron is fed. interrupted cuts and runout or tearout hammering an iron is faster damaging to an edge due to impact. It's bizarre that it's that big of a deal, but it makes a pretty big difference.

I don't want to lead beginners who don't have a handle on much down the road of believing that means they'll just like a stock iron better than a whiz bang super hard iron, but once you get a handle on this stuff, both the iron and cap are doing their thing and there's less reliance on a harder or thicker iron or one with more wear resistance.

truckjohn

2nd June 2023, 01:11 PM

My own experience is that a high quality chip breaker mated to a cheaper iron far outperforms an expensive iron mated to a junk chipbreaker.

As a result, my Stanley planes wear Stanley irons and Hock chip breakers.

Best of luck on your search.

Fergiz01

2nd June 2023, 03:13 PM

IanW

2nd June 2023, 05:15 PM

What's the difference in performance between a wide open mouth and a tight mouth, if both have a well set cap iron?

EDIT: I have ignored the mouth and made sure the cap iron is positioned nicely and had no real issues with performance. Am I missing out on something?

Zac, mileages are going to vary, but my opinion is, depending on what you're planing, you'd be hard-put to demonstrate much difference between a tight & a more generous mouth on a double-iron plane most of the time (but quite easily done with a low angle-bevel-up job!). In fact with many of our woods, if the cap iron is working at maximum efficiency, I reckon I'm better off with a wider mouth than a really tight one. Some woods are just too prone to choking in tight mouths. But there are occasions for me when the cap-iron needs all the help it can get, and my tight-mouthed infills do a noticeably better job with the same cap-iron setback. I'm assuming it's the tight mouth that's making the difference, but it could be some other variable I haven't considered.

I like my old Baileys for general-purpose work - they have pretty fat gobs which makes them more versatile for daily use on a range of tasks than my pinched-mouth infills, yet if their blades are sharp & cap-irons well-set they can match the best of my planes 95% of the time.

As I say, mileages will vary, so it'll be interesting to hear what others think.....
:)
Cheers,