Thread: Hand Plane and tearout help

Your planes can be made to work; you need to persevere but also you may need a better understanding of how the frog is bedded in the sole. Post WW2 Stanleys were made with steadily declining manufacturing tolerances; the most obvious place where costs were cut is in the gap around the central rib that protrudes through the centre of the frog. Originally the rib and the inner sides of the frog had matching machined surfaces; the whole point of the rib was to prevent the frog moving laterally. Yours will have about a millimeter of clearance on either side and has allowed your frog to become twisted to one side; this is the reason your blade is very heavily skewed to one side and needs the lateral adjuster hard over.

If you remove the frog completely you will see four machined surfaces on the sole with matching areas on the frog. Ensure these are all clean; then colour in the ones of the sole with a whiteboard marker. Replace the frog and using hand pressure give it a twist and a rub back and forth then remove it and look at the sole again. Ideally you will see all four surfaces will have had the ink rub off and be transferred to the surfaces on the frog; this shows that the frog is fully bedded into the sole. If the ink is still showing on one surface then that one is sitting low and needs to be either raised using bedding epoxy or the others lowered by filing or machining; however I would suggest that if your frog cannot sit flat on the sole you should just replace the plane; they are incredibly common and easy to get hold of.

I’m not going to discuss “sharp” as that is a rabbit hole all on it’s own but I will comment on the cap iron/chip breaker. You say it hardly ever clogs… unless it NEVER clogs it’s either not sitting flat enough on the blade and you’ll need to work on it some more or it’s way too close to the blade edge and you’re trying to take far too deep a cut. Ignore the mouth size for now; that’s a variable you can work on once you know first you’ve got a flat sole, a square frog, a sharp blade and a properly set cap iron.

If you have the funds try this for size; go to Carbatec and purchase a Veritas iron and chipbreaker set. Yes this is expensive BUT it will eliminate any potential blade issues you’ve been unintentionally adding to your woes. And if you get totally fed up with the whole shebang you can sell it on.

G'day

If you think you are overthinking planes, you are safe with us, friend...

I cannot improve on anything the poster above has said. I would just like to offer that I think I was in much the same boat as you not long ago. It is about persistence. But you will make progress if you hunt down help and keep trying.

The only other solution I've seen is adding a back bevel to your blade to effectively increase the angle of attack. I have not done so with Bailey-pattern planes. I would though endorse learning card scrapers in any event. They're cheap, lifetime skill, will get you out of a pickle. They can also get in small places and near edges in ways that a plane cannot. They are also just the ticket for clean-up jobs like finished surfaces (where the finish might otherwise clog in the mouth of a plane and make a mess). There is a bit of a knack to them but you can teach yourself in an afternoon.

I would also suggest that you either pay top $ for a Veritas or Lie Nielsen... or fettle up dogmeat Bailey-pattern planes for $20-$30 off ebay/Facebook. In the in-between stage (Luban, Woodriver, etc) you will still not have the confidence there is nothing requiring fettling up. Given you've started, I would keep going with what you have. It's very satisfying to eventually turn the rusted dogmeat into a purring Cadillac.

Chris

I can't give you many suggestions on the plane. Very inexpensive simple steel can make a good blade from a foreign country for 30 cents more than a bad one, or even less. So inexpensive planes can be fine.

the cap iron is your way out of this. open the mouth to about 1/16th of an inch when the iron is set so that it's out of the way, make sure everything is tight, and put the cap iron right to the edge, back it off then just a little (tap the cap iron screw or do it by hand, whatever you need to do) and then plane wood and find the thickness where the shaving goes straight.

If you have calipers, you'll want to start somewhere around 5 thousandths. If not, you'll want this to be around a sheet of office paper or a little thicker and stiffer than that, but not too much.

If this is rough going, make sure the front surface of the cap iron isn't rough. If it is, use a stone or something to polish it a little bit without changing its shape.

if you plane wood the wrong direction with the cap set, depending on how it's set, you can still get some fuzziness, but you shouldn't get any appreciable amount of tearout - maybe very minor in the very worst of woods.

Otherwise, the plane should stop you in your tracks instead of actually tearing out.

Carriage, you are making progress, even if it seems frustratingly slow!

Learning to set up a plane for top performance does take some time because you don't know at first where the problems actually lie, as you have clearly figured out. The "humps" you describe from your smoother sound rather like blade chatter to me, and Chief Tiff has obviously thought along similar lines. Cheap planes are often poorly machined and also, it's not uncommon for frogs to have been swapped between planes without making sure they actually match properly. If your investigations do show that the frog isn't sitting fully on all of its mating surfaces, you have a major problem, I think. Unless you have some fitting experience, it's far from an easy task to sort that one out, but very easy to make it worse (damhik!). IMO, the best course you can do is put that one aside for a day in the future when you feel you have the skills to tackle it, and start over with a more promising candidate. You can make a dog of a plane work well if you know what you are doing, but it can be frustrating & off-putting when you are not certain where the problems actually lie.

Getting cap-irons to work to the max is quite a challenge for a beginner. You really do need to get the toe of the cap-iron mating perfectly with the back of the blade - our brittle, short-fibred, hard, woods will find their way under the tiniest of gaps, causing a very rapid decline in performance. Getting the mating end of the CI dead straight isn't easy & the blade itself must obviously be dead flat where they meet. Make sure the flat under the toe of the CI is relieved slightly so the very tip remains firmly in contact with the blade surface as it is forced forward a fraction by tightening the screw & lever-cap.

Whilst on your P-plates, my advise is not to expect ultimate performance straight up. Start with your cap-iron set back at least 0.5mm, and see how you get on. We were taught in school to set cap-irons at a "fine 32nd of an inch", which is a bit under 0.8mm. That isn't close enough for absolute tear-out control, but with moderate to thin shavings & a sharp blade it will work well in woods that are not too recalcitrant. There are some pieces of wood that simply will not yield absolutely tear-out free surfaces to the best-fettled plane on the planet, so don't start with something like that - work your way up from easy to "difficult" woods. As you get the hang of things and sort out the fine details you can work your way forward with the CI, but as with most things, you'll find the law of diminishing returns applies.

While straight or rolled shavings are a useful guide to cap-iron performance this is not absolute by any means in my experience. You can set the CI & produce straight shavings on one wood & without changing a thing it will produce wavy shavings or roll them up like a parchment on the next piece. The feel of the plane as it cuts & the surface it leaves are better guides, imo, but it takes a while to learn the "feel" of the cut. It takes a lot of practice to be able to get the best out of any plane - even a Lie-Nielsen can be a dog in inexperienced hands. If you stick with it, you will improve pretty quickly to the point you can get the job done efficiently & well enough, but you'll keep on improving, albeit at an ever-diminishing rate, for the rest of your life.

Given our often very uncooperative woods, it's understandable why many folks in Oz settle for HNT's high-angle, single iron planes. At the expense of more rapid blade wear, you get acceptable performance in the majority of cases without all the faffing around. A well-fettled, double-iron plane at standard pitch can give you the best results for the least effort in about 90% of cases, but there are times when I find a high-angle plane gets me home quicker & better. There are no absolutes in this business........

Cheers,

Gordon's planes became popular because nobody knew anything about the cap iron. It's not that hard - I sound harsh when I talk about it, I guess, but it's a gift in a plane and it should be used.

The scenarios mentioned don't have a lot to do with day to day work. As in, changing woods or taking the plane apart - we sharpen the planes, we set the cap iron and generally plane something. By the time we're planing other wood, it's probably time to sharpen again.

In the case of a smoother set up to smooth, you'll have other problems, even with a single iron. For example, the pattern of wear differs or at least in magnitude and you can partially wear an iron on a hardwood and turn around and find you can't plane a softwood very well. You have to take the plane apart to sharpen - just another example of...well, knocking the plane apart and sharpening often is generally a good thing - there's a whole host of reasons.

If someone is intending to plane little - ever - then getting or making a few steep iron planes is OK. But if any volume of planing is going to be done, they are so inferior in every aspect except initial concept that it's just not a very good idea to spend any significant money on planes of the type.

I wish I could show everyone in person how to plane, I can't. it goes on at length here because we're talking about something that is just a simple feel thing and I can't verbally describe the feel well, but once someone gets it, it's just there for good.

the only reason we don't hear more about it from groups like LV isn't because of Rob, but rather an incompetent technical advisor. And Lie Nielsen started with the frogs, and they're going to keep going with it. They're aimed at a group of people they don't even trust to use a dry grinder.

In the case of the smoother set, even if it is going to be used to plane several different woods, you adjust the shaving thickness. The straightening of the shaving means a lot - enough that it's worth shooting for to understand the setting of the plane, and the untranslated paper from K&K that followed the machine research said that the length of the shaving can be measured to understand if the cap iron is set right. When the shaving straightens, it's shorter.

The whole thing isn't an advanced concept and shouldn't be described as one.

Hi C. You are in the right place here. Part of the enjoyment for me comes from getting a rusty chunk of metal back in working order. And this keeps the intial purchase price low. And as mentioned before teaches you much in the process. I found that waterstones made a big difference to me getting blades sharp and this combined with a well fitted cap iron goes a long, long way to getting a lovely finished surface straight from the plane.

Originally Posted by Carriage

It would feel like it would dig in, then slip and continue, moreso in the against the grain section of the board. This would leave little humps that were hard to see but you could feel.

i have found that skewing the plane or my stroke diagonally, so that the blade has somewhat of a sideways slicing action, helps a little with this sort of thing around tricky grain. i imagine experienced woodworkers do this automatically without thinking about it, but i still need to think about it

You know I tried waterstones over the holidays for the first time (after having always used diamond plates). The objective I had was I was going to flatten a pile of chisels and it seemed efficient to use an easily refreshable abrasive for high volume work, rather than go through piles of sandpaper sheets on a plate or removing the slurry generated with oilstones.

Did the standard thing of the basis King set of the 300, muddy 800, and a finishing stone, and a flattening stone.

Made a little tray with a cookie tray on some cork rubber as a stone holder. Set up near a sink for cleanup.

Got to work and... OH MY GOD THE MESS DO PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO THIS

*** this is not a sharpening post this contains nothing about sharpness ***

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Hi C. You are in the right place here. Part of the enjoyment for me comes from getting a rusty chunk of metal back in working order. And this keeps the intial purchase price low. And as mentioned before teaches you much in the process. I found that waterstones made a big difference to me getting blades sharp and this combined with a well fitted cap iron goes a long, long way to getting a lovely finished surface straight from the plane.

Not a fan then........?

So I've had another look at this this evening. The short version is that I'm making progress.

So I started by having a look at the frog as suggested. I think the plane is perhaps worse than you guys were thinking.
IMG_20220719_190716564_HDR.jpg
IMG_20220719_202602085_HDR.jpg
Maybe 2-3mm around the center ridge? It also looks like there aren't pads per se at the front and one of the back ones is ridged. I moved the cap iron back a little bit as I think I had it under 0.5mm away gave it another go anyway with the same results.

I then decided to give the Stanley that the aforementioned blade came from, which I disregarded probably because I thought my other plane was okay. I flattened its sole, which was relatively quick,and just put it back together and adjusted it. It took a bit of adjusting but I eventually got some very thin shavings, even with a very wide mouth and managed to clean up a small offcut that I was getting tearout on.
Here's the stanley for comparison:
IMG_20220719_202931407_HDR.jpg
IMG_20220719_202538108_HDR.jpg

Also, the mouths (the stanley is the larger cleaner one):
IMG_20220719_202720146~2.jpg

The plan is to continue with this one. I haven't spent a lot of time with it yet and there are things I still want to review but it's already more promising. Also I think I'm still having some issues keeping the blade straight when sharpening but that's much easier to diagnose and adjust.

Thanks for the help everyone

I actually liked the feel, soft noise and feedback. I also liked not having to worry about pressure (I always stress about accidentally knocking diamonds off my plates with higher pressure, particularly with small items). Also while flattening is more frequent, it's much easier than flattening an oilstone.

But a practical issue for me is my sinks are inside the house, stone and the slurry seems to embed. I enjoyed them but it seems you need a dedicated setup and careful workflow to avoid mess.

But I do see the stones in a drawer now and each time think... HOW DO PEOPLE EVEN...

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Not a fan then........?

You are not the first to dislike the mess and without running water and a sink I kind of agree with you.

Originally Posted by Carriage

Hi,

I'd still consider myself relatively new to woodworking and was after some advice on hand planes, tearout and some other problems.

Mostly of been using pine and a bit of tassie oak that's been fairly straight grained and clear and haven't noticed any problems. I've also used some knotty macrocarpa cypress but I'm painting that so I've just used wood filler.

Recently I've bought some shining gum that has some knots and accompanying changes in grain direction and I've been having some issues with tearout.

From what I can tell there are a number of things that can help with tearout
1. Sharp blades
2. Thin shavings
3. Having the cap iron closer to the blade tip to bend/break the shavings upwards
4. Closing the mouth so that there's pressure holding the wood down closer to the blade
5. Higher blade angle

1 and 2 seem universally agreed on, 3 and 4 seem to be more mixed in opinion but I don't think anyone says it makes it worse, just not better. 5 seems agreed on but typically needs different equipment and has tradeoffs.

If you close the chipbreaker and the mouth, the chipbreaker crowds the escapement and impedes the shavings coming out. So, open the mouth ... a closed up chipbreaker, just like a high cutting angle (e.g. 60 degrees), is not affected by a wide mouth.

I believe I'm getting 1 right mostly. I've got a double sided india stone, a double sided soft/hard arkansas stone and some leather mounted to some wood with green polishing compound as a strop. I can get my blades to cut paper reasonably easily. I was getting a camber on my blades that I wasnt expecting but it turned out it was the india stone wasnt flat across its width. I've flattened that now and it's better.

Slight camber is needed when smoothing to prevent tracks from the blade edges digging in. Slight - the amount of the shaving thickness.

I think my blades are okay but not 100% sure so potentially they could be become blunt quickly. I don't think this is the case though. One is the blade that came with my #4 that looks pretty cheap that I think was made in India. The other is from a plastic handled stanley that's marked made in England. I've used that one in my falcon pope #5 that I picked up used. The blade the #5 came with currently has a big camber on it so I haven't been using it for smoothing.

A moderate camber (radius of about 12") is used when removing a lot of waste. This is an important function of a jack plane. A second blade can be set up like a smoother's.

With respect to thin shavings, having sorted out the camber issues I'm largely able to get thin shavings.

With 3, I can get the cap iron close and I think the fit is good enough as I'm rarely getting shavings jamming in between. Worst case I can tighten the lever cap at a cost of harder adjusting.

With closing the mouth, this is where I got into a bit of a rabbit hole. I think due to how much blade I needed out for a thin shaving I suspected I needed to flatten my planes. I went and got a granite offcut, some sanding belts and some spray adhesive and spent some time. I think I've got them flat now as the blade projection is less and my 5 plane tends to stick by suction to small bits of wood now. As an aside, doing this has also raised questions on the straightness of my cheap combination square.

The area in front of the mouth must be flat. The toe, mouth, and heel must be coplanar.

I tried setting up my #4 with a smaller mouth and this is where I started having/noticing other problems. I'm unsure if it's directly related but I couldnt get the #4 plane to take a smooth cut. It would feel like it would dig in, then slip and continue, moreso in the against the grain section of the board. This would leave little humps that were hard to see but you could feel. ~30-50mm apart and not quite regularly. I also noticed that the lateral adjustment lever was very far to the side to get the blade level. Thinking that it might be the blade I tried swapping to the Stanley but it wouldn't quite fit. I think this was some bulges in the casting and the slightly different shaped cap iron (I swapped both together than just the blade).

There can be a number of causes. Amongst others:
1. Blade not sharp across the width.
2. Chipbreaker catching shavings.
3. Lever cap not tight and permitting the blade to move.
4. Bump on the frog's face allowing the blade to move.

My current thoughts are that this is perhaps not a very good plane and I've just started asking a lot more from it. When the blade was cambered with an open mouth on pine, things were relatively easy. It's hard to know if it's just not my ability/fettling though.

With the #5 and the stanley blade I seemed to be getting reasonably good performance but still little bits of more fuzzy tearout as well as one or two very small spots of deeper tearout and it would eventually stop taking shavings in that area. It also didnt seem to remove the little humps the #4 left but this could be to do with the length of the plane perhaps. In general I'm reasonably happy with this plane but it's still not perfect. It's also still useful for jointing smaller boards and larger removal with the cambered blade.

The #5 is longer than the #4, and will ride the top of the surface more than the #4, which will get into the valleys better.

So with that rather large amount of background I think my questions are as follows:
1. Am I just asking too much from my handplanes and should I just be learning how to use my card scrapers properly? Or hand sanding...
Handplanes can be set up to plane with- and against the grain, and without tearout. Using the chipbreaker is one of the key factors; another is a sharp blade that holds its edge.
2. Should I keep trying to get the #4 to work or should I quit while I'm ahead?
The #4 (and #3 - my preference) are rock solid smoothers. They can be made to work.
3. If I should keep going, what should I look at trying to fix next?
It is a process of trial-and-error, but done selectively.

There are many videos to help here. One by Chris Schwarz:

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4. If I should abandon the #4, what should I look at doing in terms of what to replace it with/what to get? Do I even need a separate smoother at this stage? Should I even get anything?

Had I not had the above problems with the #4, I would have set that up for smoothing with a tight mouth and continued to use the #5 as a short jointer/jack depending on the blade. I've thought about a replacement blade (Hock? Ray Iles? Luban? Also, cap iron too?) for the #4 but I suspect the plane is still a limitation and it's a going to be good money after bad.

Alternatively, I've also looked into buying a better #4. Timbecon is nearby and have a Luban for $270 which I've heard are alright but still need a little work and then there's LN for $530 plus post but are supposedly ready out of the box. The thing is though, up til now I have avoided spending too much as I haven't been really sure how committed I am to woodwork as I have a number of other hobbies. Most of my tools are used, cheap or self built apart from my Veritas carcass saw. At this stage I'm not 100% sure where I'm at but I'm enjoying it so far so am a bit more on the fence. $530 does seem like a lot but $270 also seems a lot, especially if there's a chunk of work involved. Neither is strictly unafforable, more where I'd rather put my not unlimited disposable income. Also, I've heard thicker irons and oil stones dont go together well (still workable though?) and I also dont have a grinder so perhaps these are relevant considerations too.

I have a Stanley #3, a LN #3, a Stanley #604, and a Veritas Custom #4. They all work very well. The main difference between the vintage planes and the modern planes is that the latter are better made and the adjusters function more precisely, and they largely come ready to use.

Sorry if its too much to read. Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by banana

i have found that skewing the plane or my stroke diagonally, so that the blade has somewhat of a sideways slicing action, helps a little with this sort of thing around tricky grain. i imagine experienced woodworkers do this automatically without thinking about it, but i still need to think about it

yes, even with the cap iron set, you may go one way or another - if you're right handed, skewing opposite is a little difficult, but you can cheat just a little. If the cap iron is set, the plane won't tear out, but you can get a feel for something else going on - cutting into straws. As in, the grain orientation is getting close to the straws going straight into the cap iron (or in line with the bed angle or close). This obviously makes cutting the straws a little more difficult in the wood because it's as if you're trying to figure out how to cut a stick to length (cross cut) by running a blade down its length.

This is a feel thing, but even without tearout, with the cap set or really anything (same thing with high angle), you'll get a slightly dull surface. If you are planing just trash wood, there's no real way around it because the grain will change directions with several areas maybe being right into the plane's cap iron and others being agreeable in a fraction of the plane's length.

I can't say planing isn't useful - it drastically cuts the amount of time you'd scrape or sand and maybe limits sandpaper to one grit if you like to go that way .

If you adjust direction here or there with the cap set, you can do it without having to take a thin shaving, then save a few thin shavings for after everything is flat and if the wood is just absolutely horrid, even holtzapffel's text (which I just found last week) from 1875 refers to glamour horrible grain wood that's becoming stylish that really should just be scraped to a finish with a glass scraper.

This would be an example of wood like that, but I did plane it. It just offered an exceptional amount of resistance and I'm sure I scraped it before dumping finish on it. This is just a rack in my unfinished basement that is literally screwed into the wall to hold an old TV that was moved downstairs. That is, it's a junky screwed together rack and the wood is junky, but it was fun to plane. The whole planing process was only a couple of minutes from rough wood - it's more how awful the feel was and how it would amplify exactly what you're saying, searching for a direction where the resistance is less and the plane cuts as smoothly as possible.

https://i.imgur.com/WVfU06w.jpg

But I could freely plane without worrying about tearout. It was more about planing without wearout (me).

Not sure what a machine planer would do to something like this where there are voids and the knot is soft (for a knot, at least) and other parts aren't. A drum sander would handle stuff like this now with ease, but I don't have a drum sander.