Lie Nielsen plane blades

**tonyw** · 1st December 2011, 12:56 AM

My experience is like yours, Scribbly. I am treating this as an educational exercise. I originally got some cypress to make a timber rack in the shed, which I bought dressed and left unfinished. Then I bought some more undressed to extend the rack and also decided to make a high stool/chair to use in the shed for when I want to sit in front of my workbench. Where there are no knots, it planes easily and I get a nice glossy finish off the plane. At the knots, a simple card scraper leaves a good finish. My HNT Gordon smoother with the blade in BU mode seems to work also, and would keep the surface flat, but it feels a bit harder to use.

**IanW** · 4th December 2011, 09:51 AM

Originally Posted by Scribbly Gum

Knot free cypress planes quite easily in my experience. Knotty cypress on the other hand is a pure mongrel.
The knots are like iron and the wood itself is very brittle, so the reversing grain around the knots is very unforgiving. ........

I found that scrap of cypress I knew was kicking about. It does have a couple of half knots , so I tried a few different planes on it, just to see. To my surprise, a freshly-sharpened blade in my #7 did just as well as the high-angle smoother(57 dgrees) I tried. There was quite a lot of picked-out grain around the knot, while the rest planed easily, as Scribbly noted. I could not see a difference, whichever plane I used. But the damage wasn't too deep, and about 12-15 passes with a freshly burred scraper got it clean. As you can see - it does scrape pretty well, producing nice long curly shavings. I wouldn't get that result on a piece of Hoop or Crapiataa pine!

Cheers,

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