Thread: Fine tuning a bench plane

This may not be that well received by some, because youtube has gone the way (probably 10+ years ago) of the charismatic algorithm satisfiers, but...

There's nothing in this video that's really either new or better than anything else, and it is deficient in two places:

1) the cap iron isn't addressed. The front edge of the cap iron is pretty ratty, there's burring left along it, it's not matched to the iron and for whatever reason, it's very steep (it's not a particularly great example of a cap iron given the wall of a front it has), but it could've been polished and made to work better

2) typically the frog needs nothing. I've had, out of 100? one plane that had slag on the frog - either from someone being near a welder or from an issue at the factory. The iron doesn't bed on the frog. The paint doesn't really matter for performance, but it is abrasive and will make the iron hard to move. The paint could've been quickly stripped and that would've been plenty.

Lapping frogs on planes is one of the dippiest things anyone can do with a plane unless there's a burr on a frog that's creating friction. The supposed worst frogs (later type with less surface, and a factory belt sand finish) are often the sweetest working and adjusting planes of the group.

But the guy talked clearly, in order (which is beyond me) and is quirky. The substance just isn't there beyond what's been around since at least the early days of VHS.

While I've only seen one frog that had a tiny foreign dot of slag, I"ve received a bunch of planes that have been "improved" by prior owners in a way that creates unnecessary loss of metal or problems that can't be reasonably fixed.

"The iron doesn't bed on the frog" ??

Not in the sense that people think it does. the iron is bent under tension and under use, and it will flex and move while in use, anyway. There is some sense that it should bed evenly across the frog, but where you want it bedding is up at the top of the frog and evenly across the back of the bevel. a good line of contact at the bevel and another point near the top of the frog and you will have good performance and good adjustability.

So, this may lead you to a question - on the jeweled frogs on something like an LV BUS where there is some tolerance, why do they make a dead flat jeweled frog surface? The answer is, they don't. How do I know? Rob Lee told me.
LV mills those surfaces with a bias so that the center of the bed area is biased hollow away from the iron.

This is sort of a principle of plane building in general - if you have a plane with a dead flat bed, the iron should have some bias in it (the stanley irons generally flex to get this hollow in the back as soon as the cap iron is tensioned). If the iron is milled perfectly flat, the center of the plane bed should be scraped so that the iron doesn't high center on it. When you get to something like a wooden or infill plane, a good plane will both bed well and adjust predictably.

The old tapered plane irons before, let's say, 1900, are always shaped with a hollow in them (curvature) to do this - to make sure that if a plane moves a little bit, the iron doesn't contact the bed where you don't want it to.

Long story short on the stanley planes, the frog needs to have a couple of the right contact points. The idea that we should get heavier and heavier irons to try to get two "flat surfaces" together is logically attractive, but practically inferior.

Wow!!!! Thank you. I had no idea, and why did it take me this long to learn this.

The voices with the most practical and highest resolution experience are often not going to be the loudest - and certainly not the ones tied to promotion, algorithms or linked amazon sales (or trying to drive people toward a paid online "woodworking masterclass" or something).

I'm pretty loud, though. I don't have a friendly catchy manner and I guess don't really want one - I want to learn and kind of find the people who really want to go deep on a few things, too, rather than shallow on many.

What's pleasing to me in my narrative above, though? I worked through making planes, fixing planes, observing what works better and why, and ultimately when I said to Rob Lee "I don't know how you keep the bias on the right side - hollow rather than humped if you machine the whole bed in an attempt at flat" he told me they don't, they bias it, too. He could've withheld that. Sometimes the joy in understanding how things work and what makes them good isn't really discovering new, it's discovering something and finding that you were on the right track.

I think the comments about biasing are well known among experienced makers, but much of the internet is not really interested in getting that deep and the people who make the most money on self promotion and draw the biggest crowds are the ones who avoid that.

I came to this by experience. I believed the machined frog thing, but then my experience observing WWII era planes and maybe slightly post didn't match the "common knowledge" that surmised if something cost more to do, it was better. The experience and the feel and seeking to solve problems is where you end up retracing the steps of someone who did it before rather than just having that summary level knowledge.

What's the usefulness in planes? A better design needs to be made less precisely, and when it's made equally or even less works better. Works better planing, adjusts more reliably and then the next step after that is it continues to work better when there is wear in a tool's life cycle or if there is typical seasonal movement.

Japanese planes have their biases, too, they're just not identical to western planes. Wooden planes aren't identical to lever cap infills and those aren't identical to stanley type bench planes, but there's enough commonality in them to gather what the biases are and what they may be. Purposeful biases simplify things and make them better without necessarily being visible.

Originally Posted by D.W.

....... Long story short on the stanley planes, the frog needs to have a couple of the right contact points. The idea that we should get heavier and heavier irons to try to get two "flat surfaces" together is logically attractive, but practically inferior.....

It took me a while to figure this out, but I'd read an article in a very early FWW about how important it is to have the frog flat to some tolerance more applicable to moon rocket gyros than hand planes, and as a tyro, I read every word in FWW as Gospel. Logic & empirical evidence gained through making planes was telling me that blades should only need support at the two pressure-points, but I was reluctant to abandon the dogma & accept the obvious until I discovered Karl Holtey made planes with "2-point" blade support. I also found out thanks to Bill Carter on one of his videos, that many old English box mitre plane blades are only supported on the sole bevel & at the back, there is no 'infill' forming a blade bed.

I was still reluctant to let go the belief that the wooden bed of an infill provides "damping" and needed to be in close contact with the blade, but a couple of years ago I screwed up the bed angle on one of my infills; the stuffing met the back of the sole bevel precisely, but the angle of the wood was about a degree less than the sole bevel. To fix it I would have to have done a huge amount of careful filing, which is not only very tedious & very awkward on an assembled plane, it risks altering the mouth opening due to the tight space for a regular file, so I borrowed the Holtey idea. The Holtey plane I saw was a single-iron, & he didn't have to worry about a channel for the cap-iron screw head; he set a brass disc about 12mm diameter just under where the lever-cap screw bears, about a mm proud of the bed. My plane has a cap-iron screw channel, so I put two 6mm brass studs either side of the channel (you can see them in this pic):
Horn & grip mod b.jpg

Now the moral of all this is, there's more to bedding plane blades than meets the eye, imo. It took a bit of trial & error to get the studs to just the right height to lift the blade just enough to get full support along the toe end, but not create any "spring" in the blade assmbly, but eventually, I got it as good as a very similar plane with a near-perfect bed. As I got it close to 'right', I could notice a distinct improvement in the solidity of the plane, most noticable on hard woods. I'm using a thinn-ish blade in this plane (Veritas O1 for a #3) and a light Bailey style cap-iron, whereas the infills & woodies of old had much thicker blades and cap-irons. That changes the mass/resonance equation & makes them much more solid even if the bedding isn't perfect. I made a single-iron infill early on with a massive blade, which worked fine, despite my bedding being less than optimum (which I discovered some time later).

The Bailey chip-breaker is a very clever design for the Bailey frog system because it doesn't flex the thin blade when screwed together, or at most, puts a very tiny flex in it. But it's less rigid than the old Spiers et al blade assemblies, and will flex a little when locked in the plane. So you can have a perfectly flat, machined frog like the ones on my old type 11 Stanleys, and the blade assembly can flex enough when the lever-cap is locked-down to ensure the support is firmly under the two main pressure-points. So a dead-flat frog works - it would work just as well if it were slightly dished (emphasis on slightly), but it's easier to machine or lap a flat surface than a dip, so if you have an urge to fiddle with your frog, make it flat, is my advice....

Cheers,

The person who got me into woodworking was a 100% adherent to fine woodworking. I didn't end up going that direction based on accumulating experience, but it's also not normal to make infill planes, double iron bench planes and now forged chisels heat treated in the open atmosphere with a forge welded bolster (and there's room for aesthetic improvement there yet, but performance is unlikely to get much better as far as the steel and the heat treatment go).

At any rate, like anyone else who keeps building planes, at some point you get to what works better and start ignoring all of the magazine articles, etc, because you realize you're past them. And then little things like "how could two brass buttons be enough to bed an iron, it looks flimsy" become clear. Though less clear to me is how the buttons don't move with the bed.

A novel bias in the bed of karl's planes or in the irons would've served karl better, but that kind of "not flat" bias is a bit of a leap for a modern machinist. Karl went down some odd ratholes on technical stuff, too, choosing very tough metals when toughness isn't really that important past a very minimal point - strength is. So he ended up with S53 steel in some planes, a which is a horrible point. It has technical merits that might seem good for planes, but they're just not.

I adore karl, though. Why? Because he was absolutely pushing to do things the best he could and when he couldn't find screws that suited him, he made them - every single part. I could never do the metal work to the level that he does.

...

to the stanley bed - almost every tutorial that I've seen doesn't address the things that make a stanley plane work better and more consistently with less effort, except for sole flattening, but for anything other than roughing planes, to get the sole very close to flat is an enormous effort reducer for a hand tool only woodworker. You can joint and match joints without using a straight edge and the plane will communicate by feel when a board is flat down to probably less than a thousandth.

The frogs are always fast enough unless there is weldament or some foreign particle on them and the later frogs with fewer contact points, and belt sanded finish are just fine. For the planes to work well, friction on the bed from a scuffed or rusty surface or on the iron from roughness is a far bigger detriment. But the desire to lap the frog is something people can't seem to get away from and if anything, they're putting a bias in it in the wrong direction. Not that it will really matter unless it's really grotesque but they're literally pulling their zipper up when they're trying to undo their pants to wee, so to speak.

It's the chasing of matching whatever you can find that's the best that leads to solving the little problems. First, eliminating tearout, then getting a more solid feel, then getting a more solid feel and getting dead predictable adjustability and then examining what happens when the plane moves and whether or not you can increase a bias to give some extra tolerant for that. A good plane doesn't make much extra noise, but doesn't have to be bulky to do it, and will stop a user in their tracks before it will do something untoward. I think everyone gets to the same point in almost the same way if they go far enough and compare enough options.

The difference on the hand tool side vs. the power tool side is there is constant expertise being thrown at hand toolers by people who don't know that much about the tools and use mostly or sometimes all power tools. Can you imagine someone making a post and saying "I have a drum sander and it seems to have accuracy problems and I"m getting frustrated" and getting the response "you don't know what you're talking about. drum sanders don't need to be accurate. in my day, we used drum sanders and nobody ever did anything to make them accurate or set them up. This thing about setting up power tools is a modern fallacy".

Originally Posted by D.W.

..... Though less clear to me is how the buttons don't move with the bed. ....

The 'buttons' are two short brass dowels inserted in the bed. The bed is glued & pinned in the body, so it's certainly not going anywhere.....

I'm talking about wood movement. When the bed moves over a long period of time - and they will. A skilled user will just true the bed at that point, but will a holtey plane buyer be willing to do that.

At the time, I couldn't get in my head why points of contact were better than a whole bed, but now having made planes, to have less contact surface and more control of what it is, it would've made the adjuster work more smoothly, too.

In my own planes, no adjuster. I've never seen an infill plane that's improved performance wise with an adjuster, but it's expected in a lot of cases because the planes are expensive. I learned like many other that the norris adjuster is junk compared to the bailey adjuster when it comes to functionality.

Originally Posted by D.W.

I'm talking about wood movement. When the bed moves over a long period of time - and they will. A skilled user will just true the bed at that point, but will a holtey plane buyer be willing to do that.....

? I can't see any worse problems dealing with wood movement than in a 'regular' infill bed. In fact I would think it would be far easier to file a little off the brass studs or replace them with longer ones should that become necessary. However, the wood I've used in the plane above is exceedingly dense & well-cured is unlikely to move enough to need "correction" (hope I don't live to regret saying that!), or at the most only very minor attention, it has already been through a couple of our "deep cycle" seasons & so far, so good.

As to whether a Holtey owner would take a file to his prized possesion, I'm never likely to find out from personal experience. Besides, are Holtey planes ever actually used? Would they ever need fine-tuning???

Cheers,

all wood moves over time. You pick the orientation of it to try to minimize movement in a direction that you can't tolerate - like twist, or differential movement in a critical direction.

Wood obviously moves more the first few years after being cut, but it will continue to move for decades with seasonal shrink and spring back, gradually shrinking.

The more it moves, the worse the movement, thus much worse fit on norris beech planes than rosewood planes.

It's difficult to know the volumetric change of various woods without looking them up - sometimes it doesn't follow hardness or density linearly. If you look through reference material, you'll find that gaboon ebony has 2.6 times the volumetric shrink on average that mahogany has.

It seems kind of obvious after it's pointed out, but the two points of pressure under the lever cap are what seems to be the key areas to hold the iron. A slight bias to that effect will be formed when the chipbreaker is screwed in. A typical ~0.080" iron will flex. This configuration allows for loser tolerances in the flatness of the frog bed. A dead flat bed needs precision machining, but that only drives costs up and only useful add fluff to YT restoration videos.

Originally Posted by D.W.

all wood moves over time. You pick the orientation of it to try to minimize movement in a direction that you can't tolerate - like twist, or differential movement in a critical direction....

Of course - I'm reasonably well-versed in wood-movement concepts.

One thing you haven't mentioned is that the denser the wood, the slower the ingress & egress of water vapour. Shrinkage rates from green to air-dry or kiln dry are important for calculating the change in dimension during initial drying, but don't tell the whole story on subsequent behaviour under "normal" conditions. Dense woods take longer to reach EMC and also take longer to re-absorb water so they will be slower to respond & re-equilibrate after a change in RH. Before any significant moisture is absorbed, the season may have changed again & it's all going t'other way. That, plus being mostly enclosed in a metal body means very little dimensional change in any direction in denser woods, so if the infill wood was properly equilibrated when it went in, you should not get any significant net movement from the more 'stable' woods. I would suggest that the lower rate of moisture transfer is the main reason ebony infills don't squirm around as much as beech, rather than a simple coefficient of expansion relative to MC change in the wood might suggest.

I have a 'late' Norris with beech infill (the bed is beech & the handle is Mahogany). The bed has shrunk a teeny bit so it sits a finger-nail's perception behind the top of the mouth bevel. I put that down to the initial move from the climate of England to the much drier climate it now lives in (on average, that is - la Nina events such as we are currently 'enjoying' notwithstanding!). The little blip between bed & sole bevel hasn't changed in the 20-something years I've had it. On the basis of experience (& consistent with your assertions above), I reckon that to be no problem, since good blade contact is maintained at the two critical pressure-points. IMO, you'd have to use a very unstable wood in a poorly-seasoned state to run into too many problems with an infill bed. However, I'm not going to take up the challenge to prove that. If I do make any more infills, I will certainly try to use what experience has shown to be an appropriate wood that is as well-equilibrated as it can be and in the best-possible orientation for the stuffing! .....

Cheers,

I had three beech Norris planes. Two a5 smoothers and one a5 17.5" panel. All had significant fitting problems, but the adjuster was worse than the fitting issues. I've also had about 15 rosewood bed infills and it's common to adjust the beds so that the iron retracts evenly.

Karl was obsessed with the movement of wood and what ot would mean over time.