Thread: The Unicorn method

separately, here is a video I made last year. I don't remember exactly what I said in it, because I remember feels.

There are two pieces of wood used here (I don't keep intentionally nasty woods on hand because they're not practical for making things, so cocobolo, gombeira, ribboned bubinga, etc - that's the worst stuff I'm likely to have because it's useful for tools and guitar necks).

Bad Planing Woods 2 - Block Plane Bubinga and my Worst Cocobolo - YouTube

here's the feel part of this:
1) the #18 block plane that I'm using is using site-work type stanley irons. They are very soft. *very* soft - as soft as you'll ever find in a plane iron that can still be used
2) because of the softness, the #18 was kind of a hard plane to use. Sharpen it to an apex, and the apex deflects pretty quickly and it just never seems that sharp and never holds the edge that well
3) "unicorn" it and the tip of the apex is removed and what's left behind is very good for just ...well, severing wood. Plenty sharp enough and unchanging other than wear. Suddenly, a site work cheap stanley block plane iron will plane anything I have in the shop (it will plane this cocobolo board, but quartered bubinga, no problem). The softness makes it lightning fast to refresh, too.

I used a stanley 4 then to work the board of cocobolo I mentioned elsewhere (this one is loaded with silica and I'd put it aside years ago assuming I might use it for small infill planes or resaw it into guitar fingerboards). This is an unusually heavy piece of cocobolo - near 1.1 SG dry. Cocobolo is all over the board -some has little silica and planes well, and some is like this one where it's very dense ,but the earlywood is powdery. You have to cut the latewood rings but not crush and fracture the earlywood. The silica makes the edge deflect and fail and then the earlywood crumbles. My first go with this years ago was to buy high speed steel chinese irons (they're good, and they're very hard).

Modifying the tip of the iron is probably on the order of 4x as effective as changing steels and all you have to do is hone wear out, which is a fraction of the amount you have to hone off to remove damage, and you have to do the honing much less often, plus even a very inexpensive soft tool steel iron will outlast HSS sharpened to any angle with a point/apex.

I figured after using this for chisels (before being pushed to work it out for planes) that it would also be good for bevel up planes, but I don't really use bevel up planes, so I don't talk much about it. It's just dandy to negate the idea that we all now need 63+ hardness irons and that we have to go up the ladder in high carbide alloys for them to hold up, too.

I am pretty safe in saying that while the fascination started with M2 irons (perhaps with the stanley tasmanian irons, even, but there were HSS irons here long prior that never really caught on - like "revilo" types (probably tungsten HSS) in planes - I have one of those in an old infill - works fine but is a little softer than much of the modern HSS stuff to make it a little more accommodating to sharpening and grinding....at any rate, if geometry was better understood and more easily manipulated by the masses, there would be no high speed steel irons for hand planes.

Separately, I used to be sparing on flattening planes, to the point that I didn't check a lot of them. For site work on pine, this plane would've been fine enough. I never liked it (the 18 block plane) and didn't really work through it to find out why it was kind of hit or miss. It takes a little getting used to in a heavy cut to not push forward and pry up the lever cap causing the plane to come apart.

As we discussed in one of the other threads, sometimes the profile on a sole can be out of flat and it's delightful for planing. On this one, the mouth was up from the rest of the sole a little bit and it just needed very quick lapping (as small as it is, you can just literally lap it on a lap in a minute or two). That was a huge differentiator - if I'd have seen how hollow the mouth was (looked partially due to wear from dirty wood or something) from the sole, I'd have fixed it earlier.

I doubt stanley envisoned anyone planing bubinga or cocobolo with it, but it'll do it just fine. By the time these were made, most of the sales for stanley were probably made to carpenters and house fitting folks.

I don't want to be "that guy" who says ultimately it's not a big deal to flatten planes (because a low mouth bias isn't something that needs to be fixed at all), but when something like this can be fixed on a lap in minutes, and long planes can be fixed in less than an hour, I just don't see the point of not making things work well. There's never a recommendation to lap frogs or any of that stuff because it really doesn't make a difference on a plane unless that plane is outright defective. In about 100 planes made by stanley or of stanley types, I've seen one plane with a frog that needed to be corrected - it had some kind of casting slag stuck on the surface of the frog and that was corrected in about 10- seconds with a file - it was an odd little pinpoint of metal that someone else had lived with without issue for probably 50 years, but it was annoying (about the size of a grain of sand, but clearly propped the iron off of the frog).

What kind of buffing wheel and compound would you recommend?

These are ones I can get locally

Polishing Wheel Buffs | Total Tools

Polishing Compunds For Cutting Or Polishing | Total Tools

Stitched rag or stitched cloth. No sisal., no loose calico.

Green or white compound bar, either, would be fine.

Originally Posted by D.W.

Stitched rag or stitched cloth. No sisal., no loose calico.

Green or white compound bar, either, would be fine.

Thanks!

Just another question, for the buffing wheel, so I need a tapered spindle for the grinder or can it just go on a 1/2" shaft?

Straight 1/2" shaft is fine.

I guess all you need is a chick name. I've been talking about such a method for at least 15 years, but using it for at least 20... Guess I should have come up with a sexy name for it and then I could have made videos of it... 🙄

Now don't get me wrong... I don't bemoan this guy... It's more comical how processes get recycled over the decades, centuries and millennia... I've long since moved on from this method to one that has been forgotten for at least couple hundred years...

Well, now that you've patted yourself on the back for making utility edges that you'd move on to a different method from, tell me what your process is and I'll tell you where it's not the same as this.

Carvers (At least a few that I'm acquainted with) have used only buffs for as long as I've been woodworking. And others assert that it doesn't make a usable edge (which is nonsense), but it's more common for someone not carving to grind and buff a utility edge that's not worth having.

There's nothing to move on to from this method - you just create an inferior edge any other way. I buffed with leather and felt wheels and discs starting about 15 years ago. They rounded over edges too quickly and generated heat.

It's kind of like the double iron. I've heard at least fifty times from people "who know all about it and have for 50 years" but they moved on to high angle planes and scrapers because "they work better".

Show us where you described this to anyone in a usable way, one that would get better results than stones - if you were "telling people" for years.

Originally Posted by D.W.

Well, now that you've patted yourself on the back for making utility edges that you'd move on to a different method from, tell me what your process is and I'll tell you where it's not the same as this. Carvers (At least a few that I'm acquainted with) have used only buffs for as long as I've been woodworking. And others assert that it doesn't make a usable edge (which is nonsense), but it's more common for someone not carving to grind and buff a utility edge that's not worth having. There's nothing to move on to from this method - you just create an inferior edge any other way. I buffed with leather and felt wheels and discs starting about 15 years ago. They rounded over edges too quickly and generated heat. It's kind of like the double iron. I've heard at least fifty times from people "who know all about it and have for 50 years" but they moved on to high angle planes and scrapers because "they work better". Show us where you described this to anyone in a usable way, one that would get better results than stones - if you were "telling people" for years.

Well to be honest I much prefer a good scratch to a pat thanks.Now I was being facetious with that post but being that it's the written word so much is injected by the reader - and often incorrect. However your first sentence and snippets throughout clearly sets a tone now doesn't it? One that doesn't encourage me to put the effort into telling you anything quite frankly...

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

... I've long since moved on from this method to one that has been forgotten for at least couple hundred years...

OK, I'm curious.

I spend a lot of time sharpening steel in one form or another.

I would very much like to know what you have moved on to?

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

Well to be honest I much prefer a good scratch to a pat thanks.Now I was being facetious with that post but being that it's the written word so much is injected by the reader - and often incorrect. However your first sentence and snippets throughout clearly sets a tone now doesn't it? One that doesn't encourage me to put the effort into telling you anything quite frankly...

Your choice. Perhaps you've done something similar in isolation and shared it with nobody. Perhaps what you've done is not functionally the same as this, but there's some record of you describing it. One of the nice things about forums is two things will happen if you stumble upon something good and take the time to explain it:
1) you'll have proof that you did
2) there will be people doing what you described and doing it with success

There's nothing else to move on to - nothing results in sharper, nothing results in better edge durability and nothing is faster. But you can do a lot of things with a buffer (some crude, some less so, some more tedious) that aren't the same.

Certainly, if you already have done this or the functional equivalent, you can point to #1 and #2 on this forum.

Originally Posted by D.W.

There's nothing else to move on to - nothing results in sharper, nothing results in better edge durability and nothing is faster.

That’s quite a bold and sweeping statement. It doesn’t bode well for objective experimentation.

It's the result of objective experimentation. The method is something I came upon by accident.

I haven't had an experienced woodworker yet object to that, though some don't like using a buffer and they're rounding the tip of a shallower chisel with a fine stone now. Same geometry. The buffer does a better job, but I get why some people are put off by using a buffer, because it doesn't feel very skilled. The simple fact in this case is that almost everything that needs to take a fine edge will fail first because the fine edge has its apex.

Commercial razor blades are a good case to look at. Every picture I've taken of razor blades shows defects at the edge if they're not cutting well or if they're older. The apex is too thin. But, you can shave with a straight razor for a year without rehoning it (despite the fact that the steel is older, plainer and not abrasion resistant - it's just silver steel rod or something just below white steel in japan in most cases). Why? Because stropping with a linen and leather eliminates the tip. It doesn't have any significant effect on the sharpness (it's probably an improvement because there's no tooth to the edge to catch skin behind the hair on a pore).

The straight razor hobby now (not experienced users, but hobbyists and people who don't experiment much) is full of folks using pastes and stones every couple of weeks. You end up wasting a fraction of an hour every two weeks if you go that route, and honing the razor away, and the sharpness is transient, for the same reason. It's not easy now to get shell and true linen, but it's not that hard if one looks. The principle is the same on a smaller scale, but you have to have both parts, just as with the method for chisels.

If the bevel gets fat but the edge is damage free, you still have dullness and more cut resistance. If the edge is rounded over the minimum amount needed to prevent damage and the rest of the bevel is not steep, you have an excellent edge - one that is perceptibly sharper, because within a few strokes of the other razor, it actually is. The uniformity remains and each shave for a year will feel about the same. The fix for this in the old days was to provide a "Razor hone" that was actually quite coarse - the job of it is to keep the bevel down behind the edge, but not to touch the edge (too coarse). This idea vexes a lot of people and the term "overhoning" means using something like this from the old days and letting it get all the way to the edge. The theories about what "overhoning" is on the shaving forums are endless, and they are stupid theories, but as with internet forums sometimes, once a moderator holds an opinion, they will legislate it as fact (and then send you questions by PM only). I haven't visited those forums in a while, they're full of beginners struggling to sharpen something that has a 17 degree apex (and that's actually fairly difficult compared to honing tools, so it's a rough place to start).

If something actually works better than the unicorn, of course, I'm open to it. It's just interesting that most of the fine edged things that have longevity, already employ a method of it.

I crack off at people who start with "i've already done that a million times" because they're lacking in the experimentation part that I've done (and observation from the experiments, and pictures of edges, etc). But no matter what you introduce, there will be a group that says "everyone has already been doing that a million years" and "that doesn't work, i'll bet you're just trying to make money" or some part of the latter two.

Here's a couple of pictures. The first is my straight razor (this is my daily razor when I'm shaving daily - it's been less lately). I don't know how long ago it was last honed. 6 months maybe, but the sides of the bevel look bright because of the burnishing of the linen and the edge shows functionally what happens when the strop has removed the apex (it doesn't look perfect, but it looks good. This is 150x true optical magnification, and the edge is sharper than some DE blades).

dw razor.jpg

The next is an astra blade after something like three shaves. Notice the damage starting. When you use a disposable razor, two things cause you to think it's dull:
1) the edge takes accumulating damage like this
2) soap scum builds up behind the edge itself and makes the razor act like it's got a fat bevel or fat edge when it doesn't

I saw an entertaining article last year showing the first, as if people weren't aware of it (either this picture or others predate that article. I've experimented a couple of times with honing DE blades, but the fact that they're not that hard makes it not worth the effort (the roundover has to be more if the blade isn't as hard, up to a point - overhard blades go back in the opposite direction).

astra damage 2.jpg

same magnification level. The notches are about 1/3rd to 1/4th the width of a hair. When you use a razor for a while, eventually you get larger notches.

You can see that their honing method is just to grind the blades and then hone the tip. Sounds familiar. The bevel of my straight razor is a couple of hundredths of an inch, but it takes up the entire photo, which is why the whole edge is kind of shiny, but the important part is just the crisp line at the edge (and noticing that the linen has worn the apex off, if a little unevenly).

For years, I did this to my razor thinking the "honemeisters" on the shaving forums were dippy - one razor is capable of lasting at least one person's lifetime if it's not honed all the time, and the shave is better.

But what didn't occur to me was that you could do the same thing with woodworking tools - shallow the bevel and strengthen the edge. Determine where the failure occurs, or not at all. What's poorly done in woodworking circles is discussing where the damage occurs and what needs to be behind it. AS in, if the damage is only ever occurring in the first four thousandths of an edge (which is about what I see under a microscope unless a tool is garbage), then you can steepen the part where the damage occurs, prevent it, and ignore the idea of the bevel behind it making it strong - until you get to an extreme point, that's not the case (so the hollow grind vs. flat vs. convex discussion of "bevel strength" is hocum. It's the essential old wives' tale - think of something, don't see if it's actually occurring, state it as fact). The point where the bevel behind the unicorn does start to become a problem is around 20 degrees or slightly less. I tried a footprint chisel ground at 15, which was two problems - one, the edge got pushed up into the bevel pretty easily, and two, it's not that easy to grind cleanly at 15 degrees.

Anyone hand honing a flat bevel is probably +5 degrees from where they actually think they are. When I hollow grind at 20, hone just the tip at 23 and compare to trying to flat hand grind the whole bevel at those angles, the edge is noticeably less keen - it's just not easy to hand grind a perfect 20 degree bevel and keep it day to day - there will always be some rounding and you'll be enticed to get heavy handed and exacerbate it if you have a nick.