Thread: Insufficient bench planes ;)

Went with the #8. Looking forward to not dropping that big fella on my foot (because you know that a foot would sacrifice itself, diving between the plane and the concrete, if it ever came to that - a true hero).

Sorry for all the swings, roundabouts and flat-out U-turns! Thanks for bearing with me. Always fun to talk tools though .

Cheers,

Dom

You have the bronze 4. It's the best production smoothing plane made at this point (supposing you know how to use the cap iron).

I'd put the money somewhere else.

If you PAS (plane acquisition syndrome..) the best way to mitigate it is to start making planes.

Dom,

Coming into this one a bit late, so I've only read the beginning of the thread. I apologize for redundant information.

I've screamed into the void enough about suggesting you try an antique plane, so I won't do that anymore.

It looked like you were receptive to the cap iron discussion back in the first couple of posts, so I'll attempt to follow up on that some...

It sounds like you don't have a traditional pitch bench plane. Why is this? I firmly believe that a polished, steepened, closely set cap iron on a 45 degree pitch will smooth any wood in the world with or against the grain.

Let me be clear... I say that with enough confidence to allow that statement to beget this one:

Any and all steeper frogs offered by Lie Nielsen or Lee Valley are nothing more than marketing. They are fake news. They have absolutely no reason to exist and only do so to sell more planes.

**exhales deeply as if a tremendous burden had been lifted**

Now that is not to say that any steeper plane blades are useless. A single iron plane, either in the bevel up or down configuration, has to be steeper in order to have an effect on the tearout. But when the cap iron is available, there is nothing that a standard pitch fails to achieve which the york pitch does. The steeper pitch only comes into play when the cap iron is at a more "standard" position, i.e. you're not really using it.

I can't really comment on whether or not the steeper frog AND the cap iron is a bad thing, but I can comfortably say that it's not really achieving much, if anything positive, because there's nothing left to gain once you engage the cap iron.

I learned to use the cap iron a couple of years back, and have never gone back.

So I'm going to make an oddball suggestion to answer your question...

Why don't you consider a 5 1/4 sized plane in a standard 45deg configuration? Hear me out... A year ago I would've told you this plane had no place in my shop. Then I found a good deal on one (a Stanley for US$60) and decided I would try it out. In case you don't know, a 5 1/4 is the same width as a 3 but is a bit longer than a 4. It's like a miniaturized version of a 5.

And I am absolutely in love with this plane. I really can't say enough positive stuff about it. It's a unique experience for me. Usually when I decide I'll give a plane a shot just to be able to comment, it doesn't really change my opinion all that much after I pick it up. This is not the case with this plane.

I have it set up with a super close cap iron, so it's a smoother, and I find myself using it to smooth long panels, so as to keep them straighter, but the place where it really excels is edges. If you build a cabinet in solid hardwoods, there is inevitably a point when you need to lay the thing on its back and true up/smooth the front of it where all of the corners and dividers meet. I firmly believe that the 5 1/4 is the best size for this. It's long enough to maintain a flat plane, and it's narrow enough to safely and comfortably ride along edges.

Seriously, it's a great size, and it's ESPECIALLY a great size for someone like you, who already has two smoothers. It was my third as well, and part of me was convinced I'd end up selling it, but not now. I'll never let go of it.

Otherwise, I'd say get the 3. I think you'll get more use out of a more narrow plane than a wider one. I still suggest the standard frog. As opposed to getting the steeper frog, which circumnavigates the need to develop your skill with the cap iron, just get the standard frog and willfully accept the challenge of learning to use the cap iron.

My AU$0.02.

Cheers,
Luke

Originally Posted by Luke Maddux

Any and all steeper frogs offered by Lie Nielsen or Lee Valley are nothing more than marketing. They are fake news. They have absolutely no reason to exist and only do so to sell more planes.

In their defense, they're selling to a market of people who generally don't do much planing. If you attend one of their events, you'll find that their average buyer is probably struggling to plane anything, and consider relatively common woods like curly maple to be a challenge to plane.

That end of the market isn't looking to learn anything new, they want to buy a solution to the problem, so they'll end up in two places:
1) bevel up planes (which work)
2) high pitched plans (which work)

The only trouble is the planes make a trade off - limited use and limited capability in exchange for ease.

From the standpoint of a retailer, that fends off the folks who would otherwise ask piles of questions and who want instant gratification.

what really doesn't make sense to me is why anyone would buy a 50 degree frog (except that it has a cool name ... "york pitch"). A friend of mine bought that frog for a 5 1/2 and all it does is make the plane a bit harder to push, and doesn't eliminate tearout. 55 degrees is OK, but still not as capable as a cap.

I'll bet they don't see too much service needed after the sale of a frog, but the only one steep enough to mitigate tearout (55 degrees) makes for a miserable smoothing plane compared to common pitch with a cap. It makes the plane look dopey from a profile view, too, but that could be forgiven if it was superior.

After making my post, I realized that Lie Nielsen cancelled the 5 1/4 sized plane. That's a shame. It looks like Lee Valley makes one, but they've modified it (of course... fixing what wasn't broken. Classic Veritas.) from the original proportions so it's wider and that kind of ruins what I liked about it.

So if I managed to pique your interest with my hype about it, your only option is a Stanley.

So yeah... the No. 3. Standard pitch.

Originally Posted by D.W.

That end of the market isn't looking to learn anything new, they want to buy a solution to the problem, so they'll end up in two places:
1) bevel up planes (which work)
2) high pitched plans (which work)

Oh I totally agree. I still think they should sell skills and not solutions, but whatever. Such is capitalism...

With that in mind, I think, based on his previous posts, that Dom is a serious woodworker who wants to properly use his tools, so I hope he will give the cap iron a chance.

A friend who got me into woodworking is their typical customer (maybe not typical, but who they push the high pitched frog for). He's been woodworking for 25 years, at least, but not much hand planing (more of an uber accurate normite). He likes to plan builds and make drawings (before it was the normal thing to do now, like with sketchup) and set machines up so that whatever comes off of them pretty much needs minor fitting, assembly, sanding and finish.

I cannot get him to use the cap iron. He is an engineering supervisor by day and his wife is an attorney. He's looking for LN to provide him with a tool that works out of the box with nothing more than sharpening, and in sharpening, he's looking for no grinder and super closely graded abrasives, so he has gone over his woodworking lifetime from king stones, to shaptons and now to honing films. The idea of nuance to him is a turn off, big time. Fortunately, when I finished building my skew infill shoot plane, he bought it.

It's not that I haven't bought LN products (i've had a boatload, and still have some), but he's the kind of guy who buys something and does what they prescribe.

IRC hearing someone say (who went to an LN event) that LN advised that the cap iron works, but it's too fiddly.

They also don't want people dry grinding. From their perspective (a room that's probably more than half full with rank beginners who will return a blue-tipped iron), I get what they're after. At their margins, they're still taking operating loans to expand (the last time they expanded, IRC Tom describing the process of seeing what they could get for loans). It's a tough environment to do business in the US, and support and service are a lot of overhead.

Their planes are so tight, solid and good, though, that I like to have one on hand to alternate back and forth between it and a freshly made infill or a newly refurbished older infill to see if I can tell a difference.

I've never bought a high angle frog, but in the instances I've gone to them for customer service, they've gone embarrassingly (on my part) beyond what I'd expect. At one point, I wanted to buy boxes for the used LN planes I'd purchased, and they wouldn't allow it. They just sent them instead.

The bronze 4 is a little heavy compared to vintage planes, but given the forum I'm on and the penchant for people to work 1800-3000 janka woods, it's welcome in that situation. It's the best production smoothing plane I can think of. Not because the bronze is better in use than iron, but because there's little that can rust on it.

Originally Posted by Luke Maddux

.......I can't really comment on whether or not the steeper frog AND the cap iron is a bad thing, but I can comfortably say that it's not really achieving much, if anything positive, because there's nothing left to gain once you engage the cap iron.........

I can, but with caveats, of course!

This is based on mucking about with a couple of my own infills, so don't extrapolate too freely on commercial models. What I found was there seemed to be some benefit from a cap-iron on the 55* bed angle plane in terms of surface finish, but you definitely can't set it super-close (nor do you need to). As Derek or someone pointed out way back in the thread, if the cap-iron is too close you add to the amount of push required, with little extra benefit in surface quality, that I could see. Also, in the case of my plane, the combination of very close cap-iron, fine shavings, and limited throat made for more choking.

When it came to the 60* bed on the plane I finished recently, I could not discern any improvement to surface finish with a cap iron, and it most certainly caused the plane to choke more, at any setting. A plain blade sans cap-iron not only gave as good a result, the shavings tended to exit cleanly if thicker, or at least not choke as readily when very fine. One flaw in my very basic, non-controlled experiment is that the plain blade is thicker than the capped blade I used for comparison. I don't think that should make much difference, both are pretty solid chunks of metal, but I thought I should declare it.....

If you go back & read the posts in one go, you get the distinct impression that plane size preferences are deeply personal (as I've always maintained). The only way you can really discover what sizes suit you & your work is to have & use them a while. There is no rule of thumb that works for everyone. I'm a smaller plane person, I tried a 4 1/2 for a while & hated the great cumbersome brute - a #4 has been my go-to smoother for at least 30 years. I can give a few rational reasons for why I'd use x or y for a given task, but in all honesty, the decision on which plane to reach for depends on pure, irrational intuition (or which plane nearest in size to the one I want is sharp & ready to roll! )

Cheers,

Thanks for the ongoing and interesting discussion and opinions guys. I'm been absorbing as much information as I can get my hands on the last couple of years and am always receptive to more; particularly from people I trust (that's you guys).

Luke, your extreme conviction on the effectiveness and utility of the cap-iron is assuring; as is Derek's. Perhaps Co-incidentally, Derek's reviews are what convinced me to buy my Veritas Bevel Up planes; which I think will still have a place, even if I end up with a bunch of bevel-down. I have been playing with the cap iron on my #4, and continued to do so this weekend whilst building a shave-horse, and on some very figured and cranky blackwood and I'm certainly getting good results; it's just that you don't know what you don't know. As you rightly point out I don't have a standard pitch frog or a middle-pitch frog to compare my 50deg frog against so despite getting good results there is always a question of - would one or the other be even better? I can only rely on other peoples experiences and observations at this point. I'll definitely give get a standard pitch plane to try soon.

What adds to the confusion is that even on other forums, some seemingly "key-players" advocate the effectiveness of the cap-iron on a standard pitch plane and yet in other threads mention they keep a 55deg plane around "just in case" the 45 struggles. Then you have statements that the cap iron can effectively add 10-15deg effective pitch, which if true, may potentially still not be enough on a 45deg plane and extremely nasty timber - you also get the benefit of a tight-mouth on a plane setup without a close-set cap-iron. In addition, it's unclear to me if setting the cap-iron extremely close results in more resistance to the cut than simply using a steeper pitch and a set-back cap-iron. All I'm saying is that I think it's something you have to work out for yourself to some extent, through experience - which in this area I clearly don't yet have. As much as it might be a waste of money to try various configurations, I think it's also of benefit to get first-hand experience and rule these things out for yourself.

Thanks again for the interesting discussion.

Cheers,

Dom

Actually, I do have one 45 deg BD plane - The LN 10 1/4 Bench Rebate plane! I actually really love this plane but haven't used it on hardwood yet; just cypress. I also really like the narrow form and ergonomics of this plane in general, so I may indeed like the 5 1/4 that Luke suggested. So many options! Luckily, fate willing, I still have the rest of my life to explore them though .

Cheers,

Dom

Dom,

Yeah, that's strange that someone who is an advocate of using the cap iron would also advocate steep frogs. I've never had tearout using the cap iron on a plane, but maybe they're talking about planing something like crotch material or something? I honestly don't know.

I now see you said you got an 8. I actually recently got an 8 again after selling my LN several years ago. I said I'd never get one again, but, as luck would have it, I found a particularly old and particularly well taken care of 8 for a particularly good price ($75 US shipped. A steal over here)... So it followed me home.

I really do like the 5 1/4 so I hope you get a chance to use one. If nothing else, I'd be interested to hear others feedback. I may actually make a post about it soon. If you ever decide you're interested, shoot me a PM and I'd be happy to look for one on this side of the Pacific for you. $60-80 is a typical price. Hell, if it would help convince you to try out vintage planes I'd even clean it up for you before I sent it on its way .

Cheers,
Luke

Originally Posted by DomAU

What adds to the confusion is that even on other forums, some seemingly "key-players" advocate the effectiveness of the cap-iron on a standard pitch plane and yet in other threads mention they keep a 55deg plane around "just in case" the 45 struggles. Then you have statements that the cap iron can effectively add 10-15deg effective pitch, which if true, may potentially still not be enough on a 45deg plane and extremely nasty timber - you also get the benefit of a tight-mouth on a plane setup without a close-set cap-iron. In addition, it's unclear to me if setting the cap-iron extremely close results in more resistance to the cut than simply using a steeper pitch and a set-back cap-iron. All I'm saying is that I think it's something you have to work out for yourself to some extent, through experience - which in this area I clearly don't yet have. As much as it might be a waste of money to try various configurations, I think it's also of benefit to get first-hand experience and rule these things out for yourself.

Thanks again for the interesting discussion.

Cheers,

Dom

Keeping a 55 degree plane in case the cap iron isn't enough is bad advice. Here's the deal with the angle discussion:
* a cap iron will still improve the capability of a 55 degree plane
* the capability of a 55 degree plane and a 45 degree plane with a cap iron will be about the same.

Somewhere around 60 degrees is really where the cut becomes different, and is probably similar to a cap iron in tearout reduction, but edge life is short, there's no ability to do much other than smoothing and the plane has little ability to stay in the cut due to geometric considerations beyond simple edge life. So sharpening has to occur much more often.

If you have only a common pitch plane with a cap iron, you'll be able to do everything except in woods that just won't be planed (some ribboned woods with fragile dusty earlywood, there's nothing to do with them except sand), but those woods like that are rare (like quartered cocobolo) and not something you'd build much out of.

If you have other things, and aren't forced to learn to use the cap iron that well (which is unfortunate, because that will lead to wasting time) because you can back up to a crutch, then it might seem like the cap comes up short.

60 degrees on the cap leading edge is probably better than 50 if you do mostly difficult woods. I wouldn't go below 50 or much above 60 (get too steep, and the front of the cap smashes the chip back into the wood surface and leaves the wood feeling a bit hairy. It also limits your depth adjustment options without taking the plane apart. It's all or none (worked well in the K&K video because they had a fixed set, but sucks for actually hand planing anything).

Dom, you can't leave it like that ...

what was the other part of the LN order -- the bits that got you thinking about combining shipping in the first place?

Originally Posted by Luke Maddux

I now see you said you got an 8. I actually recently got an 8 again after selling my LN several years ago. I said I'd never get one again, but, as luck would have it, I found a particularly old and particularly well taken care of 8 for a particularly good price ($75 US shipped. A steal over here)... So it followed me home.

I really do like the 5 1/4 so I hope you get a chance to use one. If nothing else, I'd be interested to hear others feedback. I may actually make a post about it soon. If you ever decide you're interested, shoot me a PM and I'd be happy to look for one on this side of the Pacific for you. $60-80 is a typical price. Hell, if it would help convince you to try out vintage planes I'd even clean it up for you before I sent it on its way .

Cheers,
Luke

Hi Luke,

Why did you swear off the #8? Just too big/heavy? Do you think the extra length was beneficial for long lengths like table aprons etc? Or the width for gang-jointing table top boards? Or just for flattening large panels?

That's an extremely generous offer mate, I think I will likely take you up on it; thank you.

Ian,

As for the rest of the order, due to the time taken to make the plane decision I basically went through a parallel process of indecision and changes with the original items. In the end, the only thing that remained from my original order was a curved drawknife (also added a drawsharp after initially deciding it was a needless accessory / gimick - but later seemed like a very efficient way to sharpen the drawknife, which i'll need to do a lot).

Here is the hillarious part - I just got an email back from LN saying the drawknife isn't in stock and they'll hold my order until they have one. So I could still change my order in the meantime, or I may end up buying just the knife from Australia and leaving the rest altogether for now; since the plane was originally just an opportunity buy haha. .

Cheers, Dom

Cheers, Dom