Thread: HELP - Hand Plane woes

Sharp needs to be really sharp like shave the hair off your arm sharp. Some pics of your setup would help. Picture says a thousand words and would help us find out whats not working.
Regards
John

Typical "blunt Blade" you may want to reassess your sharpening method.

Second the above - even with an unsuitable angle or crap steel you will get a few shavings before it went blunt.

What the above are saying is the ticket: for a hand plane you need not just kitchen knife sharp but razor sharp.

Thanks guys..

yeah I thought so. I bought a veritas honing guide and some diamond stones (missus says i have more dollars than sense)....
I'll try again and give the blade a more thorough grind...
thanks
Joe

Joe, the finest diamond stone generally used goes to 1200 grit. That is close to where I start honing. I end with a 13000 waterstone. You need to be around 8000 grit for best results. If you cannot run to another stone, get the Veritas green compound (crayon), scribble it on smooth, flat hardwood (or MDF) and finish your honing on this (equivalent to 50K grit).

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by Joe Gadget

I have a Stanley #4 hand plane that is giving me grief. I keep getting awful curls out of it (when I can get curls - sometimes I get sawdust). I have tried everything I can think of. The curls are ragged not smooth and very chalky not like thin paper....

I have sharpened the blade.
I have adjusted the chip guard up and down.
I have adjusted the frog

but the bugger won't give me nice wood curls, not even from a soft piece of pine.

I keep thinking it's the blade, but I got a new blade and the same thing was happening.

Anyone got any ideas?

Funny, I had almost the exact same issue almost 20 years ago with a new Stanley #6 which would only produce dust vs a LN #5 which would produce nice shavings -- the "test subject" was the same length of hardwood, and both blades had been subjected to the same sharpening regime.


So IMO you need to go back to the absolute basics

1. is the plane's sole flat -- not "sort of flat', but "really flat"? If not you will need to flatten the #4's sole with the frog and blade installed and tensioned -- but the blade retracted so it doesn't protrude through the sole. Use PSA abrasive affixed to a really flat surface to flatten the sole.

2. is the frog properly bedded? Regardless of the #4's age, never assume that the frog is properly bedded. Use a file to get the mating surfaces to bed properly.

3. hone the part of the chip-breaker (about 2 mm(?) thick) that contacts the back of the blade so that the chip breaker is a very good match to the back of your blade.

4. round the leading face of the chip breaker so that the shaving existing the mouth leaves at the appropriate steep angle to avoid tear out. I can't tell you the exact angle as when I fettled my planes a long time ago we just sort of honed the lower curved face of the chip breaker to make it smooth curved surface. The action was to pull the chip breaker along the stone whilst lifting the leading edge to polish the curvy bit.

5. Now you can worry about how sharp is sharp when it come to the plane's blade.

.

Once the above had been done with my Stanley #6, what had been mostly dust, became the desired gossamer shavings.

.

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There's an adage that a "poor workman blames his tools", which in my opinion needs to be restated to "a poor workman doesn't know how to fettle his tools."


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let us all know how you get on

C'mon folks, even a not-so-sharp blade will give you shavings on anything but cast-iron! For the first 25 years of my woodworking life the finest stone I had was a hardware-store India - I don't know what grit size it was but it was certainly not 8,000, not even half that fine, but it made blades plenty sharp enough to make quite tolerable shavings.

Granted, a dull blade won't cut well, but it has to be extremely dull not to cut at all. In my experience, the most common cause of the symptoms described is too steep a sharpening bevel so that there's no clearance behind the cutting edge. The fact that the same problem is occurring with a new blade tends to rule that out (assuming you didn't alter the factory bevel too radically) but might be worth double-checking that your final bevel is something less than 35 degrees or thereabouts. Are you hand-sharpening & tipping the blade up too high & creating a large secondary bevel at too steep an angle?

If your new plane has a defective sole, it will not work properly, but again it should do something. With a slightly concave sole & blade set for a fine cut, the plane will cut at the beginning of the stroke, then stop cutting as the sole becomes fully engaged & lifts the blade above the surface. If the sole is slightly convex, you probably won't even notice because the plane will typically still cut ene-to-end unless it's really out of whack. I've never come across one that is so bad it won't cut at all.

Someone with experience could probably pinpoint the cause of your problem in a few seconds, but I well remember the frustration of fiddling with one particular plane for hours early in my career, trying to get it to work. The good news is that when you do eventually figure it out, you'll have learnt much about what makes a plane tick....

Cheers,

Thanks for the advise everyone.
Thanks to both Ian's for some great advise... lots to consider..
I used a 25 degree angle for the main bevel and a midge more for the secondary...

I did use the new blade before sharpening it, just to see..

i'll try some of the suggestions and get some photos uploaded if i can't figure it out.

Thanks again

Im with IanW on this one. While I respect Deriick as a fine woodworker, tradesmen for a hundred years sharpened their planes with a low-tech oilstone and produced very good work. It is something in your setup. Are you sure you have it set up correctly, with the bevel down? I made this mistake when I first started out. It is so basic a lot of people forget to mention it.
I suggest you watch a good basic video like this one from Paul Sellers:

Sharpening and Setting the Bench Plane | Paul Sellers - YouTube

I admit to being a follower of Sellers, who I find provides good no-nonsense advice for people starting out.

If you hold the cutting iron under a light, with the business end pointing straight at you, can you see a line along the edge? If so, you don't yet have it ground to an edge.

I'm pretty sure it's the chip breaker.
I was watching a youtube video by "wood by wright" and he demostrated a problem with the chip breaker not being flat and clogging up..... and wouldn't you know it... .looked exactly like the problem i'm having...


How to Fix Chipbreaker Clog on a Hand Plane Iron | Woodworking tip - YouTube

Joe - I think I was in your boat. I taught myself hand planes from Youtube videos. I had this constantly and it sent me spare because I would do everything right, and still clogging.

I ended up with the smallest feeler gauges not able to enter but still get clogging.

It is so annoying because if you've perfectly sharpened your iron, adjusted it laterally for a perfectly square cut, and all the rest, to have it just clog up and require pulling apart is a pain.

James Wright's video is good and accords with generally the advice I've seen. I've seen a good tip from Derek on using the honing guide on the chipbreaker (flipping it over).

Some additional things to watch out for are:

1. If the back of the iron is not perfectly flat, then practicably imperceptible defects in the flatness will cause problems as they won't "mate" with the chipbreaker. I have found this causes a problem when roughing when you're taking relatively large cuts - fibres can pry open the chipbreaker. Either back off the chipbreaker or perfectly flatten. Same goes for the "ruler trick".

2. If you've closed the chipbreaker right up, I've found for me you really need to back off the cut depth. It can only be learned through experience how many turns of the adjustment wheel will make a big difference when cutting. But it really needs to be done gradually.

Thank you Cgcc
Yes it has been doing my head in... I haven't had the time to fix the chip breaker yet (was playing with my thicknesser yesterday), but when I do I'll hopefully post some photos of clean shavings.... lol

If it's not a problem with the plane itself then consider the bench. I had a friend that was having the same "problem with his plane". Some curly shavings, some sawdust. It turned out that he had a wobbly, or racking workbench and the timber was "jumping" - it was fine when he tried it on his kitchen bench.