Thread: HSS plane blades - Academy Saw Works?

I have a single Berg iron. It is perhaps the hardest blade (in a woodie) I have ever come across. I doubt that it is typical.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by derekcohen

I have a single Berg iron. It is perhaps the hardest blade (in a woodie) I have ever come across. I doubt that it is typical.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Derek

Swedish steel. Interesting. I have it in the back of my head (plenty of room there by the way) that the Japanese have in the past, and maybe the present too, sourced Swedish steel for production of their famous woodworking tools, the blades or which are as hard as any (and as brittle as any) so I am wondering why you would think a single blade is atypical. In a way, that is slightly off topic, as you have said it is all about a balance between sharpness, edge retention, edge performance on the work itself and of course the ease of sharpening rather than who can make the hardest blade.

I don't think we should forget that a blade that suits one timber may not suit all timbers. Life, in woodworking, really is not easy. For example, the planing competitions so loved by the Japanese are performed on timbers very different than so many Aussie hardwoods.

Perhaps what we are seeking in the thrust of this thread is the best "allrounder."

Regards
Paul

About 6-8 weeks ago I received a letter from Paul at Academy saws with a list of what he has left for sale. Unfortunately I have disposed of it but I’m certain there were no Stanley bench plane blades left. Mainly Stanley/Record block planes from memory.
For what my opinion is worth I would get Veritas PM V11 blades
Ross

Originally Posted by yoboseyo

What are clues in identifying them, if they are not marked as such?

Titan's were only ever HSS; look for this logo:

Titan.PNG

Originally Posted by China

Look closely at the blade if it has a join then 99% it is HSS tipped

The join is fairly obvious and easy to spot:

HSS iron.jpg

On Ebay right now, there is a “Shaw” HSS tipped iron in there. This actually pre-dates Titan irons. That plus the two cap irons made me consider putting in a bid but the high postage costs for the rest of the items (ie junk) put me off.

This isn’t a recommendation to buy this by any means but shows how gems can crop up here and there.

Hand Plane Parts Collectables | eBay

So I bought a Stanley No 7 plane from an eBay auction recently but I had yet to use it. I just happened to need to use it tonight so I went to take the blade to the sharpening station. Guess what I discovered?

Just wanted to express my gratitude to you all - without your forthright advice I would never have known!

BTW, this is an absolute bitch to sharpen! I am just flattening the back now - not the whole thing but just putting pressure just under the bevel. I had drawn some lines with a sharpie to see where I am grinding but there's a hollow in the centre and it does not get smaller. I am using a 400 grit Atoma diamond plate.

20190923_214238.jpg20190923_214310.jpg

Originally Posted by yoboseyo

So I bought a Stanley No 7 plane from an eBay auction recently but I had yet to use it. I just happened to need to use it tonight so I went to take the blade to the sharpening station. Guess what I discovered?

Just wanted to express my gratitude to you all - without your forthright advice I would never have known!

BTW, this is an absolute bitch to sharpen! I am just flattening the back now - not the whole thing but just putting pressure just under the bevel. I had drawn some lines with a sharpie to see where I am grinding but there's a hollow in the centre and it does not get smaller. I am using a 400 grit Atoma diamond plate.

Some times you get lucky! Nice bonus.

What’re the odds!

Yeah, all my Titans have a slight hollow on the back of the iron too. When I honed my first one I thought it might have made on a friday arvo, by the fourth one I realised it must be either deliberate or they just had really sloppy manufacturing processes. It’s not a biggie, you only need the tiny bit that is doing the cutting to be flat and polished. Have a read up on back-bevels, a badly concave (or pitted) iron can be resurrected by adding a back bevel of one or two degrees. Japanese irons and chisels are deliberately manufactured with hollow backs to make honing easier.

Out of interest, the Stanley HSS irons are generally much flatter.

Originally Posted by yoboseyo

........BTW, this is an absolute bitch to sharpen! I am just flattening the back now - not the whole thing but just putting pressure just under the bevel. I had drawn some lines with a sharpie to see where I am grinding but there's a hollow in the centre and it does not get smaller. I am using a 400 grit Atoma diamond plate.......

As MT says, sometimes you get lucky - not only the famous HSS blade, but one with virtually no wear.

Can't say I recall my HSS Stanley iron being all that much worse to sharpen than regular Stanleys & Records. I was still using oilstones at the time, and they cut it ok, it wasn't until I started using blades of A2 steel that the oilstones had to be retired. P'raps Titan hadn't quite sorted the tempering process in the early days and some went out a little harder than they need to have been.

By "flattening the back" I assume you mean the 'front' (as it sits in the plane ). As Chief Tiff says, you only need the first 2mm dead straight & flat, to form a good edge and a flat seat for the cap-iron. Many blades are deliberately ground with a slight concavity ('dished' might be a better description) so that only a couple of mm around the perimeter is flat. As you sharpen & polish your blades, the flat wears back with the edge, so you don't need to spend endless hours flattening metal that doesn't need to be flat. Japanese chisels are well known for using this principle. Over the past year I've bought a heap of Quangsheng shoulder plane blades to use for some projects & they are ground similarly - makes life easy!

OTH, if the concavity is right across the cutting edge, that's bad news - the cap-iron won't sit tight right where it needs to be at its best and you'll have shavings getting under it. That stops things working very promptly. If this is the case, it might explain why your blade has so little wear?!

Or, it may have been caused by over-enthusiastic 'flattening' on an un-flat stone. A goodly while ago, I acquired a coarse diamond plate because I'd heard how flat they are and how quickly they remove metal, etc. It was a 'good' brand (cost me a coupe of years worth of my annual tool budget at the time!). It removed metal quickly, alright, but somewhere, somehow, the plastic backing warped slightly and it developed a teeny bit of convexity across its long axis. I didn't discover this until I lapped a couple of wide plane blades on it and produced a couple of wide-sweep gouges. It took me 5 times longer to re-flatten the damned things than to cause the concavity! I'm a lot more wary now, & constantly check my stones against each other for flatness...

Cheers,

I think the blade is new, as it still had factory grind marks. Probably factory process variation.

I had flattened the back now up to the apex. Now the problem is the bevel is convex - 2 bits in the corner aren't being touched and the edge isn't straight. Is edge straightness a problem I need to be paying speial attention to to correct, or will it straighten up as I flatten?

Should've I started with something like 80 grit sandpaper to flatten it instead of starting on a 400 grit sharpening stone?

Originally Posted by yoboseyo

I think the blade is new, as it still had factory grind marks. Probably factory process variation.

I had flattened the back now up to the apex. Now the problem is the bevel is convex - 2 bits in the corner aren't being touched and the edge isn't straight. Is edge straightness a problem I need to be paying speial attention to to correct, or will it straighten up as I flatten?

Should've I started with something like 80 grit sandpaper to flatten it instead of starting on a 400 grit sharpening stone?

Might be the previous owner thought bugger this, these HSS are just too difficult to resharpen, and went back to using the original softer HCS blade.

What is your sharpening system? The faults you are describing can be attributed to sharpening techniques and equipment. I demonstrate with several types of guide and know that I can make a $100+ Veritas MkII guide put a camber or a skew on an iron with sloppy technique while making a $12 (inc shipping) Fleabay Special hone dead square.

Your 400 grit diamond stone is more than adequate for truing up an iron; the lowest I've ever gone to was a 150 grit diamond plate to de-fornicate an old Record laminated iron that looked like it had been hand sharpened on a concrete floor.

Originally Posted by Chief Tiff

What is your sharpening system?

Just using the Atoma 400 for flattening. I have a 1k and 5k ceramic stones but they haven't touched this blade yet.

I need to clean the gunk off the Atoma because it has seen too many tools that have recieved their first sharpen in 50 years.

Other than that, I have an angle guide, but I stopped using it as I find that I am capable of maintaining an angle - I can see with a Sharpie.

I really think it's the blade that's high in the middle. I am working it down slowly but it's getting truer. Literally spent an hour on it last night but I am slowly eroding away at the dull patches

For clarity's sake, are you talking A or B? Camber.jpg

Both cambers can easily be created by the sharpener. If A, I would just take it to the grinder & straighten it (I prefer to start with a hollow bevel anyway). If B, then good luck! Getting a cambered back truly flat by lapping is the stuff of nightmares. It tends to get worse rather than better....

Cheers,