Thread: Are these cast steel blades any good

I've got a number of these blades that I use often. I don't know if they're laminated but they are very good blades in my opinion.

Most UK blades including Mathieson from around then are laminated tool steel for the first inch or a bit more. And most are very good unless they have been mistreated. Ive had one laminated blade that was bad and I assumed it was mistreatment that caused it. It may have been a dud from day one? No idea on that .

You didn't mention, but I assume the irons you have are of the tapered type. There are parallel types too, but those were used on infill planes and are less common.

The cast steel extends to just bellow the slot. The rest of the iron is wrought iron. The lamination is obvious once the iron is clean. When new, these irons were about 7 3/4" long and at least 2" of that was steel.

Cast steel takes a very keen edge and works very well. Mathieson planes and irons were excellent quality tools, it was a Scottish firm.

Rafael

The short answer to your question is Yes, Mathieson blades are excellent
I think that they would take issue with being labelled "English" though, being made in Glasgow.
I haven't come across any sub-par steel from Mathieson.
The blades will almost certainly be laminated.
Mathieson chisels are exceptional as well
Tom

Originally Posted by Scribbly Gum

I think that they would take issue with being labelled "English" though, being made in Glasgow.

Sorry Scotts . I should know better.
I was in a Scottish pub once and said something like that that and luckily there was only one other bloke in there. He went OFF in a big Scottish way.

"Your Not in F'ing England here !"

I'll go edit it out.

My suggestion would be to use one of the blades & see what you think of it. There are several factors that work together to make a blade "good", including one's own particular preferences & what you'll mostly use it for. Those old chunky blade/cap-iron combinations certainly have a very solid feel when going about their business. They probably won't handle gidgee & bull-oak as well as a PM-V11, but are likely to be perfectly acceptable planing sensible woods.

I once wanted to build an "authentic" early style infill around one of those old blades and acquired a couple with that in mind, but they were all tapered and as raffo pointed out, a tapered blade doesn't work well with a lever-cap, it tends to make them 'jumpy' when setting by tapping. I discovered this when I used a (modern) tapered blade with a lever-cap, it was extremely difficult to set for a very fine cut going from zero to a hundred at the slightest tap & needing a hearty whack to back it off. I soon replaced that blade with a parallel type!

Cheers,

They are excellent blades, probably both those and ward are as good as anything ever made.

they are going to be water hardening steel if laminated and probably oil hardening or something similar if not (like O1, but a precursor).

Everything I've ever gotten with that style of mathieson cap has been laminated water hardening steel.

Edge stability is superior to anything marked A2 or V11, but planed length in feet would probably be 40% of V11 (in theory) and 65% of reasonably hard A2, 80% of high quality O1.

the reason for that is there's almost nothing in it that's wear resistant other than iron and iron carbides. That's also the reason for edge stability - there's nothing in terms of harder carbides to start a crack and propagate it. This isn't speculation, it's documented fact.

Translation, you're more likely to use these blades, sharpen often, but never faff with nicking, and in planing anything like rough wood, they will be superior to V11 (very high carbide volume) or A2 (carbides about the same size as V11, but more dispersed and fewer).

what ian refers to in terms of buloke, etc, is a function of hardness. If they're a point or two softer than V11, they just need a few extra degrees of angle to avoid deflecting. I found pretty quickly once I started modifying edges with a buffer that you can take a very vanilla plain steel iron, buff the apex and round it very slightly (same as a razor and strop principle - the strop adjusts the apex on a straight razor so that hairs and dirt don't dent it), and even silica won't do much to damage an edge, let alone wood.

I was somewhat amazed with V11's edge life in a planing test I did - it will plane for a very long time. When I put it to use in regular work, I was far less impressed and my experience again matched what I saw from it working wood from middle (never used it in a jack plane) through smoothing. that is, there are other factors in actual use more important than abrasion resistance unless there is nothing in day to day work that would challenge an edge.

I dug through my pictures as I've had a bunch of mathieson stuff, but most of the tapered irons are a slightly different style.

however, the mark on that and the style looks familiar.

https://i.imgur.com/bWk1vTZ.jpg

this is an infill plane that I got from England. it's a casting with probably a tool catalogue lever cap and screw in it and a suspiciously well-designed and executed pair of lighter color infills that are dense wood. Norris, for example, would've had dark stained rosewood or folks would've finished it and the top layer oxidized.

That said, this is my favorite panel plane to use of all panel planes I've had (which includes a bunch of norris planes, a mathieson actual planes and a spiers). it's just got proportions and balance that a lot of infills don't have.

....

And it has one of those irons in, tapered instead of parallel (and it was relatively cheap - the whole thing - compared to anything norris, mathieson or spiers).

I was initially concerned as it's nice to have an iron with a crisp edge and good hardness in a plane that's going to do sort of fine to fine work in hardwoods. you irons may be different, but the tapered iron in this plane would be no good if it was any harder - it's a delight just as it is. Hard, but easy to sharpen with a very stable edge. it's honed and sharp and defect free in a minute. And if you work with any infill plane for long and plane 15 minutes or so heavily, you're ready to appreciate that minute stoppage and the stability of the edge not presenting a guessing game as to how much damage exists and how long you have to hone it out.

Ok, now I'm partially reliving my past, but you'll see the significance. in the same set of images, same iron:

https://i.imgur.com/XTi7xYw.jpg

Limba. Soft as my belly.

But full of silica. Like really full of it and a real pain to plane. Silica is worse for plane irons than just hard woods (it's harder than any wood by a long shot). it deflects the edge, nicks it and leaves little wings of steel that feel like a burr going all over the place and suddenly the overall effect is an edge that won't enter wood even though it's got little wear. it also leaves dings about 1-4 thousandths deep, and we typically sharpen off about a thousandth of an inch with a routine sharpening - at least people with experience do. to sharpen off 3 or 4 thousandths of edge life is a LOT of work.

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

this one may not be immediately obvious, but if you click the image full size and find a dark spot, you can see the silica particles sitting in pores.

With not much modification to the tip (a little bit of buffing the tip of the iron), this iron will easily plane through the silica without taking any damage, leaving a smoothed surface with no lines.

I chased this kind of result early on by the same methods others do - buy more exotic alloys and higher hardness if I could find them. It slightly lessens the depth of the edge damage, but then unless you grind it out (which is needed quickly), the time to correct the damage is more.

if an iron isn't woefully soft (nothing mathieson made with any older age was soft), the fix is geometry and not alloy.

High speed steels and air hardening steels were around when planes were still generally sold to professionals, but they never got any market share until boutique buyers were the market. nobody day to day would tolerate the trade offs that come with more abrasion resistant steel in a significant volume of work, and the variation in steels in the older irons is mostly marketing. "electro boracic" or "chemical steel" or whatever else. these paralleled razors. there was brief attempt to market tungsten-added steels to razors, but razors need edge stability and nothing with carbide volume of carbides harder than iron has it. Stainless razor steel is engineered to avoid formation of significant carbides - or put differently, to try to get the same fineness as these older steels.

Originally Posted by Picko

I've got a number of these blades that I use often. I don't know if they're laminated but they are very good blades in my opinion.

I have no experience with such blade but when I ground a new bevel on them, there was a clear and distinct line that would indicate two different metals. What made me question it was the line wasn't straight, but these blades also still have hammer marks in them that indicate a lot of hand forging... Hence the question to the collective...

Give it a go and put a new bevel on the blade and see if you can see a line when you shine a direct light is shown on the bevel.

Originally Posted by IanW

SNIP
Cheers,

So you seem to be a prolific tool maker, and make some really nice sh%t. So do you sell any of that sh%t? Asking for a friend

Originally Posted by D.W.

SNIP

You're posts are wordy, but you're a freak of nature. In a good way

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

I have no experience with such blade but when I ground a new bevel on them, there was a clear and distinct line that would indicate two different metals. What made me question it was the line wasn't straight, but these blades also still have hammer marks in them that indicate a lot of hand forging... Hence the question to the collective...

Give it a go and put a new bevel on the blade and see if you can see a line when you shine a direct light is shown on the bevel.

they were made in factories with some type of power hammer, but if there is an uneven line, often the case that the blade was inserted on wrought manually, then heated, forge welded and then hammered to shape as close as possible before grinding. the weld is set and then the shaping is done with the hammer, so getting the shaping done by hitting every part of an iron the same amount and keeping a perfect line, not so likely.

Later laminated material was probably rolled (much cheaper) and then cut and shaped as the bulk work became cheaper to do by cutting and rolling vs. skilled rough work vs. skilled finish work, and later yet, improving the hardenability of steels (how slowly they could cool and still be hard) eventually just made it cheaper to make solid irons.

It's interesting when you look at the cap irons (I've had one or two old enough to be wrought iron on the cap iron with an inserted bit at the front), all of the makers boasted when something was "all steel". It was an improvement, but less hand labor involved. Since it was an improvement, nobody cared about it. We make judgements now about things being better or worse based on whether or not they were cheaper - steel got cheaper, and industrial process improved and mathieson and ward made solid steel cap irons first because they didn't need to be hardened. Even if steel got cheaper, when it was water hardening steel, making a full hardness plane iron 3/16" thick was a no go.

I can't make a case that laminated iron is better - a wrought iron bitted cap iron that's not all steel definitely is *not*. The all steel version was both cheaper to make and better.

I also can't make the case that the steel now is "better" than what was in the laminated irons. It's different to suit manufacturing process. It didn't last as long, but professionals wouldn't have cared about that - they would've abhored an iron that was hard to sharpen or had nicks in it. the laminated steel bit in an iron (like these mathieson irons) may not have even been understood from a chemical process fully, but the makers would've known where to get the ore that made a hard iron that looked superb when you snapped it and didn't nick, and sharpened on everything in common use.

https://i.imgur.com/vGxX2OJ.jpg
here's what V11 (CTS-XHP) looks like as it wears. Those dots are chromium carbides. They are what gives it long edge life, as initially, this looks like a smooth white surface, but as the steel wears, the carbides are exposed and they fight wearing out (they're round) and leave a little comet of protected steel behind them. When you seen an advertisement that says that it's the finest grained steel available or some other implication because it's powder metal, compare it to this - lowly 1084 steel worn similarly cutting wood.

https://i.imgur.com/91mfOWI.jpg

or O1:
https://i.imgur.com/aN1U0w1.jpg

(look at the hollow worn in the back of the iron here and you can make out carbides just in the back - there are some there. O1 is pretty highly alloyed compared to a lot of water hardening steel, but nothing compared to V11).

you can't make too many value judgements about how the irons feel - XHP (V11) still cuts sharply with the "million BBs" look at the edge. But it's certainly true that the stability at the very edge is not as good because cracks form in the carbides and then move out into the matrix that surrounds them.

You can make blanket statements about something like the mathieson irons "they will not last nearly as long as V11" (true, especially in ideal situations). But their virtue is elsewhere. I have the opportunity to have a couple of these older irons XRFed (to find out their composition). They will be very plain if I follow through with it, but I the ore that they were made from will have more alloying than 1084, and less than O1.

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

You're posts are wordy, but you're a freak of nature. In a good way

The freakiness is not a fit for most people - I get that. it'll be governed going forward to only cases like this (and maybe not) where I've got a lot of poo in the lagoon on what's being discussed.