Thread: Luban planes

Having done a bit more digging through the interwebs, there is such thing as the Quangsheng/Qiangsheng V4 model. We know Luban's come out of their factory, but they make at least the Luban and Wood River lines, so they could conceivably had other lines. Anyway, V4 isn't new - it's been around for quite a few years. Maybe some places in the world managed to get their superior line. No places in Australia have it. Anyway, whether the lateral adjustment has a bearing or not doesn't really matter - it's more a thing about whether you're getting the factory's top line or not.

Re: new vs old planes, I think DW is dead right about anything past a Bailey being overkill. Planes aren't precision tools. there's no need for surfaces to be 1/1000's flat. Further, why does a tool that has been used to build furniture for generations need to be flattened? If it was flat enough back then, it's flat enough now

it's not so much that they aren't precision tools - it's that all parts of them aren't precision. If they're reasonably close to square, they'll shoot ends no problem.

I do like them to be flat or slightly convex on the sole, though, and not concave - so I won't even pretend that I don't flatten my smoothers (I've learned to do it quickly) and jointers. But it really depends on what you're doing - if a plane with a flatter sole works better and you do enough woodworking, laziness will be a good guide.

A thicker iron and a thicker cap iron generally does well when there's a plane setup problem, but there are lots of poorly understood things - like rob talking about the milling marks under the bed of the frog. that stuff makes no difference unless the frog actually moves. It makes no difference if the frog is perfectly flat as long as the iron beds at the top and bottom of it and not just in the center (the cap iron flexes the iron, anyway - there's no area of contact, there are just points or lines).

The interesting thing about planes in general is other than avoiding concave soles on smoothers, planes would be better if they were less precise but biased toward where things should fit. The frog should have contact in spots and materially biased below plane where it shouldn't contact (LV does this with the bed of their BU planes - I asked Rob how they never have irons high centering on the jeweled surface on BU planes as I'd found making planes that getting them to work well is a matter of biases, and even small tolerances the wrong way is bad. He responded that the bed is jeweled and pretty, but the center of it is milled slightly hollow to make sure the fit is good).

The other side of the precision coin is that a huge number of planes were used for site work or coarser prep, and in that case, flatness adjustment isn't needed. It's only an issue with facing boards, edges, and true finish smoothing.

There's also a downside to perfection with crisp milling - the friction is terrible. Change to bronze or mild steel from cast and it gets even worse. Change to planing end grain and it's another factor worse.

The interesting things about thicker irons and caps is that a couple of non-stanley manufacturers tried to market them several different times. Nobody wanted the planes (union and ohio put bigger irons in planes, and lakeside rebadged some of those and sold them through montgomery wards and mail order places - they were more cumbersome for a site worker and they tried to make up for the thicker irons by making them a little softer - at least as far as I can tell. That didn't go over that well. Stanley had kind of nailed everything other than smoothing for a cabinetmaker (and pushing the performance of a smoother up a little to be good for cabinetmaking by flattening the sole by filing or lapping only takes about 15 minutes. I've never met an experienced woodworker who actually does a lot of planing who cares about backlash on an adjuster, but it's a selling point to a beginner. The more a user uses planes, the less adjusting they do (the cap iron negates the need for constant adjustment) and it's something you usually do while thinking or looking at wood being planed.

All that said, I have had two LN planes that were at the edge of their spec with soles hollow in their length. You could lean on them and flatten them, but we don't want to lean on a plane in use - and leaning on a plane doesn't do anything until both ends are on the board. They were very difficult to use to plane a flat surface. I sold one of them (a #8 - disclosing that it was right at LN's tolerance, and the buyer didn't care), and I'm much further along (it would be fair to say I'm arrogant about plane design and use) and I flattened it myself until it was dead flat to a starrett 35-380, and then sold it and used the correction as a selling point in an ebay listing (some guy from france bought it for more than the list price here in the US by a comfortable margin - I lucked out there. )

I wouldn't trust WR planes to be any more accurate than LN, for sure (I doubt they are) - what do you do if you're a beginner and you get one 2 thousandths hollow in the length? When you try to match plane a board, it'll have gaps at the end - there's no way a beginner can correct something like that, so people get planes and lump them into categories that "this kind works well, and that kind doesn't". If someone got the LN 62 that I flattened, they'd just assume that the plane type didn't work that well. Most other planes that I got from LN were so close to flat that I don't have a feeler that could find anything on them - it's just the odd one here and there (two for me out of probably 12).

It takes a fair amount of experience to know where the biases need to be, and it'll never be interesting dinner table conversation.

As far as the V3 or V4, I recall discussions about whatever version it was that removed the LN copied parts (the frog design, etc, with square cavities) being touted as also including other improvements. I have no idea what they are. It could be stuff like putting the wheel on the adjuster (which makes it easier to game the wheel to be several thousandths narrower than the punched slot in the iron instead of lots narrower - that makes the plane feel like it adjusts better).

When Rob says the iron is "like A2", I have no clue what he means by that. It's not common in china (HSS and carbon steels are - A2 is kind of in between). It's possible that they have something similar, but a savvy user willing to plane with an LN iron and the WR iron in the same board for about 30 minutes alternating irons every 100 strokes or so would be able to suss out how close the WR effort is to A2.

I think for you guys in australia, if the WR plane was half of LN, it starts to make sense. If it's not, I don't know what you're really getting. The smoother is cheaper than LN's smoothers here by a good margin, but it's still expensive for what it is and the odd person here or there who really gets heavy into woodworking and uses planes for several hours a week will get tired of the weight. I started the same way (wanting to like the weight - kind of heavy handed even though there are bigger folks), but I cannot deny that within a half hour of dimensioning, I will pick up a bailey smoother over an LN smoother or an infill 100 out of 100 times.

In my neurotic goings on - it's probably not clear why one cast iron plane and another would be drastically different in friction. I can only state a guess - that perfection in machining has more grip than lack of it, even at the same weight (then once you start changing metals, things can go downhill - like the LN bronze smoother - if you're not paying attention, you can waste a lot of energy making the sole warm, but it's a beautiful plane and if one ever wants to build planes, an admirable bar to test your own goods against. Actually, as good as any. Mild steel on infills, also grippy...

...but the difference between using planes some and using them a lot in a mostly hand tools regime exposes the perfectly machined tools, and stark in some cases. For example, based on the description of various planes, if you were making a bunch of door panels and planing the end grain to a line (this can usually be avoided with accurate hand sawing, but not everyone is there right away), you'd think this was ideal for something like an LV BU Jack or LN 62 (or in this case, one of the heavy WR planes if nothing bU is available, because "well, it's a heavy plane and it'll blast through the end grain).

The work is actually far more quickly done with a wooden continental smoother or a stanley 4 - the idea that you can take more off with a heavy plane in each stroke is an illusion on something like this. You can just quickly use the four in rhythm and the skip/chatter that you can get on end grain from friction doesn't generally occur. With the larger plane and more weight, and especially fresh perfect machining, it's agonizing in comparison.

But that is the difference between having four or fourteen panels that you clean up the ends on and what I call the "Wood show effect".

The "wood show effect" is what happens when you compare two planes at a woodworking show. If you plane the same wood with two planes for just a few strokes, the heavier plane feels smoother. It starts easier, it seems to go smoother through wood (what's occurring though is that you're not feeling minor imperfections - the weight ,though, can make it start easier, but in use with not much experience, you learn to start a plane). The first tools that I made were some wooden planes, and then some heavier planes, and then infills. I thought with the infills, I'd really have foolproof hand tool woodworking. If I tested what I use now (two wooden planes most of the time, followed by a stanley 4 - sometimes a metal jointer for match planing or wood harder than beech), I'd choose the heavy plane. In the process of doing a lot of hand tool work, I generally choose the opposite and most folks will unless the planing is a lot like wood show planing (a minute or two of strokes here and there).

Cosman and LN need to cater to the wood show crowd. That's who's buying and just wants something that works out of the box. The WR plane exists (to my knowledge) because of supply issues from LN that ultimately led to a split between WC and LN. WC's president at the time posted on woodnet or another forum that they were hoping to find an american foundry to cast their own line of planes, and then later couldn't find one - that's not a surprise here. LN is in maine - maine is probably one of the few places where you can step back in time for small industrial type operations like small casting foundries.

From the outset when WR tools started to show up, there was a website called "QStool". (quanghsheng). That was before there was any luban or anything being marketed that I can recall - someone who worked at a WC store sent me a link to the site. At the time, the planes had copied a lot of the LN attributes - appearance, etc, and some of that became more neutral (most notably, anything that looks brass/bronze colored on an LN tool was changed to nickel plate or chrome or whatever WR does, but the QS tool site listings boasting of the array of goods that they make didn't change color scheme because those non-WR versions were intended for overseas sales, and if they're going to come from, for example, axminster in the UK, why would they care about LN's sort of trade dress / signature look.

The same site also copied or nearly copied some of LV's tool designs, and certain retailers that sold part of the veritas lines had the cajones to list both on their site and were slow to stop selling the chinese stuff when LV protested and threatened to pull their own stuff (or something along those lines). That gave an idea of which was more profitable to sell.

As far as the weights of the planes, I would (Without proof) assume that the WR versions are a little heavier than LN's versions to win the spec sheet war. Beginners will make the "safe" choice and buy the one that's heavier, flatter, squarer, harder, whatever it may be.

@D.W. as always your replies are not just food for thought, but the meals served up by an Italian nuna... massive, fulsome and hearty. One needs to loosen the belt! I leave them digesting the contents for ages....


On Quangsheng, there was an article in the AWR some time back, plus a youtube video I cannot find, with in depth review of their processes, procedures and a good factory tour. They are a company that really cares about their products and work bloody hard to get a products set right.

After seeing the factory tour I was terribly impressed.

I think if the factories are given the spec and the budget to make something, they can do it. It may take a little bit of learning (But WR is around long enough now that they could've made more accurate planes than LN if they really wanted thanks to the lower costs in china. The HSS used by woodwell is longer wearing than A2 by a fairly large amount and not a lot harder to sharpen, and that could've been used - it's all over the place over there).

If the tools aren't arriving to match LN's spec, I'd put it on woodcraft rather than facilities over there.

There's also an assumption that's antiquated assuming that working conditions are terrible everywhere over there and employees are miserable or not skilled. I'm sure you're right about the factory that makes WR planes, I haven't seen the video. I did see a video of the eastman guitar factory at one point and there are people in clean well-lit working spaces (that don't look like automaton work areas) doing work by hand and without a fake smile. They're working at a normal pace, and when watching that setup vs. some of the ultramodern jobs here in the states in manufacturing (fender's factory tours can be seen - their employees aren't miserable, but the job at eastman looked far more human and less CNC this and that and lower skill at fender, aside from the custom shop and perhaps the buffer at the end of the process...).

I hope what I mentioned above about the planes generally not being as accurate overall as LN (things like the squareness and the undercut of the cap iron that rob mentions - those happen because nobody requires that they don't or pays to make sure they don't) isn't seen as a shot at the chinese. It's a shot at the business arrangement.

The chinese watch shops can make an indistinguishable rolex daytona copy for about $1700 retail that authorized dealers can't spot with a loupe (I think steel daytonas are about $20K now). They could make a plane to a third of LN's tolerances if it was required (it's not, of course).

(too, i have to apologize a little bit, I guess, for comments like mine about planing end grain to a mark - maybe not many people really want to do that. I still have a bunch of infills and once in a while, it' snice to get one out, adjust it and plane with it. When I make something, I hate to dimension with machines - I feel like i'm getting cheated out of a clear head - which is what dimensioning by hand gives me - and lots of "feels" that you don't get to experience with machines. It's the draw of working by hand to get to the point of getting those "feels", where you're engaged and then just in a flow of some thinking but not too much, and a lot more judgement by feel. A couple of times when I've set out to dimension something hard (be it a rosewood plane blank, or guitar neck blank, or even just flattening one panel), I'll have a norris panel plane out thinking "I'm just going to use this" and about halfway through, I put it back. great plane to use on something like a guitar blank to remove some surface imperfections, but not so great for 20 minutes. Little things about various planes get easy to notice and you get spoiled - even something like wooden jointers. I have try planes that are 22-24" (some mine, some vintage - they work the same because I copied the vintage proportions). Jointers are about a pound or two heavier, but the noses are longer and they are nose heavy. The second good plane I made was a jointer - I assumed with the slickness of wood, I'd use it a lot. I rarely use it because it works the top strap on your forearm while you're planing and that's OK for 10 minutes - it does that because when you lift it, you have to resist the nose dropping and it's levered out far due to proportion/weight/length.

I think if I made planes for sale, people would love to buy the jointer because it's the biggest. It looks great and weighs 9 1/2 pounds - it's a full size truck with manual steering when you need to haul a box of tissues sometimes, though.

Not long ago, I saw someone relaying commentary from an old joiner that they used the jointer only for a few strokes to match long edges and called it a "mankiller" - I'm guessing it caused repetitive stress injuries like tendinitis.

Interestingly, a 28" wooden jointer in good shape is also relatively difficult to find compared to 20-24" planes. Wooden planes tend to wear a little more in the sole between truing so I would say a 24" plane gives you results more like a #6 in flatness, and a long jointer is probably more similar to a stanley 7. What's annoying to me in an hour or two is probably career limiting to someone working every day in the past. What's less clear to us is when does it matter.

I can give a small example - I can plane with a stanley four and an LN bronze four. They feel drastically different but the surface is the same. In easy wood, they do feel relatively similar, but in wood where there is tearout occurring, if it's very small, I can't feel it on the LN. It's just bliss. But unless I'm sanding or scraping, there's some imperfection left. I can feel all of that on a stanley plane. It's like a corolla vs. a cadillac. You'll know the road is bad on the former, but the latter may just keep you half asleep and happy.

Originally Posted by yoboseyo

Having done a bit more digging through the interwebs, there is such thing as the Quangsheng/Qiangsheng V4 model. We know Luban's come out of their factory, but they make at least the Luban and Wood River lines, so they could conceivably had other lines. Anyway, V4 isn't new - it's been around for quite a few years. Maybe some places in the world managed to get their superior line. No places in Australia have it. Anyway, whether the lateral adjustment has a bearing or not doesn't really matter - it's more a thing about whether you're getting the factory's top line or not.

Why would you assume that the V4 is superior? Why can't it just be 'different'? Isn't it possible that the V4 is just another retailers effort to differentiate the plane they're selling from the others that the factory produces. Maybe V4 is the planes sold by Dieter Schmid Fine Tools in Germany, which they have branded Juuma (their home brand) - JUUMA Smoothing Planes | FINE TOOLS. These planes have a brass frog and lever cap and Cherrywood handles that differentiate them from the Luban and Woodriver branded offerings from other retailers. Are the Juuma planes 'superior'? Probably not, they're just different.

almost certainly from the same factory. Kind of took the color scheme from LN (but the original did, too). Interesting tossing in the bronze frog.

I don't know my metals very well, but I presume that "stress relieved gray cast iron" is just regular stuff,
and presume the QS, Lie-Nielsen and Veritas are made of ductule iron, if I'm not mistaken.
The ductile iron is seemingly unbreakable, as demonstrated with a hammer on a certain video which seems to be taken down.
I'm guessing poor Chris was made do it.

I thought the QS were slightly less than half the price of the LN tools!
If I wanted a cheap ductile iron plane, I might shop around.

Even if something was out, it doesn't appear like say... making those cheeks thinner or whatever needed is much of an issue,
like it might be with a vintage plane.

Taking end grain shooting boards out of the equation...

I suspect shooting thick long grain of denser material, along the bench is where this might be wanted,
(just to rule out the blade moving on its own accord, if that's a thing, and nicer to observe a non skewed iron)
but for stuff that thick, one can use other methods for planing, as that might be a bit tough to plane...

Keen to see if any of you who use a straight iron or close cap profiled iron,
notice any lateral movement of the iron when shooting long thick edges,
I haven't had the chance to try this on my unfinished Scandi bench, and my composite one needs a board underneath.

With my timbers, which is likely similar you folks, shooting end grain on my timbers wipes the edge
out too quickly to notice, and my matching shooting board for my spare 5 1/2, needs a bit of a fettling again.
There is a lot of variants to think about should one make a few matching blocks, but fair enough most don't need to do that.


Tom

Another question - when comparing early vs later Stanleys, one of the things that stand out the most is that the earlier ones had a solid frog and the later ones have thicker castings. Are either indicators or more accurate machining, and do either have advantages in practice? I've heard debates both ways that later planes are more about cost-cutting (yet that's inconsistent with thicker castings), but also have better tech. DW, I do note that you mentioned on both fronts that contacting the full frog is unnecessary, and heavier planes are not an advantage.

I suggest forgetting about the age of the plane or what type it is, and specifically look around for
ones with thick castings, which is a surer bet if there's good photos.
Apart from checking for no hairline cracks, chips of the mouth, and some other niggles...

Most noticeably from a picture in front and behind to see the plane hasn't been lapped really badly for a start.
This one is just about what I'd call a good enough photo from the front, a thick sole with fairly thick cheeks too.
Plenty of meat there, should I need to do something about errors that prove problematic down the road.

I like the later stanley planes better - the belt sanded frogs are good enough once the iron is under tension. What I don't like in bench planes:
* frogs that don't go all the way to the casting (common in some older types and non-stanley makes)
* tiny adjuster wheels, especially if they run backwards (you could get used to that)
* really soft irons (I can make an iron in an hour, though, so it's not a big deal - I don't even bother to buy them now as nothing on the market is better than good quality oil hardening stock with simple heat treatment and an appropriate temper temperature)

As far as the frogs go, it's not so much that a full contact across a face isn't necessary, it's that even if the face is perfectly milled, you won't get it, and what you absolutely don't want is some kind of defect that causes contact to be away from the bottom of the iron near the bevel.

But it is true that flattening can be desirable, and later stanley types are hit or miss with irons (the most recent mex. stanley that I bought just for something to experiment with isn't a great plane, but the iron is fine. I really like the T-20 stanleys, but the irons are terrible. Trouble in the states is that a lot of the stanley 4 planes have gone up to about $80 in the last two years.

A soft iron can teach a person a lot about using a plane, but I think that's only for the few who really want to learn that much. I learned more about planing when making do with a soft iron (intentionally) than I ever did from a thicker iron. Softer irons won't hold their apex, so you have to learn to use the cap iron to take a shaving thickness they'll last at and then suddenly you've become multiples more productive with a plane when it has a good iron in it. But the round top irons that came in planes from the 70s are definitely very soft.

Originally Posted by Tom trees

I don't know my metals very well, but I presume that "stress relieved gray cast iron" is just regular stuff,
and presume the QS, Lie-Nielsen and Veritas are made of ductule iron, if I'm not mistaken.
The ductile iron is seemingly unbreakable, as demonstrated with a hammer on a certain video which seems to be taken down.
I'm guessing poor Chris was made do it.

I thought the QS were slightly less than half the price of the LN tools!
If I wanted a cheap ductile iron plane, I might shop around.

Even if something was out, it doesn't appear like say... making those cheeks thinner or whatever needed is much of an issue,
like it might be with a vintage plane.

Taking end grain shooting boards out of the equation...

I suspect shooting thick long grain of denser material, along the bench is where this might be wanted,
(just to rule out the blade moving on its own accord, if that's a thing, and nicer to observe a non skewed iron)
but for stuff that thick, one can use other methods for planing, as that might be a bit tough to plane...

Keen to see if any of you who use a straight iron or close cap profiled iron,
notice any lateral movement of the iron when shooting long thick edges,
I haven't had the chance to try this on my unfinished Scandi bench, and my composite one needs a board underneath.

With my timbers, which is likely similar you folks, shooting end grain on my timbers wipes the edge
out too quickly to notice, and my matching shooting board for my spare 5 1/2, needs a bit of a fettling again.
There is a lot of variants to think about should one make a few matching blocks, but fair enough most don't need to do that.


Tom

I think the plane that chris hammered was cast steel - as far as I know, the difference between casting steel and cast iron is carbon level (cast iron has more carbon). Too, when those planes came out, I think woodcraft asked $129 for them for a #4 smoother and sometimes put them on sale for about $99 or maybe even a little less. And the first iterations had the LN color scheme (not to mention whoever copied a plane just copied all of the LN milled attributes - or at least some of them). The scuttle here in the states was that some things about the earlier versions were undesirable - I refused to buy one to experiment, though - they copied LN's trade dress and I thought that was out of bounds.

One of the woodcraft store workers (not someone who would actually have corporate knowledge) implied that LN was OK with the whole thing at the outset, that there were experiments to try to figure out how to get WC more guaranteed stock as expanding an operation in the US took a loan and LN wasn't necessarily comfortable extending themselves at that point (that's a composite comment from that WC store worker and Tom Lie Nielsen, who later said that they would like to expand, but do it in a way that they are comfortable and that they were also waiting for the bank to agree. That sort of burst the bubble of all of the people who thought TLN was becoming rich by "selling a plane that should cost $100", which is nonsense in the first place).

I have a great deal of respect for TLN and Rob Lee. They could very easily try to design tools and have them made overseas (like bridge city) and just retail them here with a smaller staff and be more financially comfortable.

Just my opinion, as I have no knowledge of how woodcraft operates other than getting letters in the mail "would you like to open a woodcraft franchise? call us for details!" - I don't think LN could continue to keep prices relatively flat if they had to sell planes through a cost structure like that, and while the planes never lasted long on the ground here, they apparently left some of the retail stores without being paid for if they were just left out. At my local store (which went out of business, and then years later, another franchise popped up elsewhere), the LN tools were behind glass. I did actually buy the skew block plane there, but in the end in the US, it made no sense (change in pricing policy and sales tax makes them pretty much even now - you used to be able to buy internet 10% off and no sales tax, which is 17% total here). I got better service from most mail order places than I did in person at the WC store. It's just an antique outdated model and when you have a store like woodcraft or rockler, you can go once or twice and get all that it will ever make sense to buy from either. WC never has meaningful sales and Rockler's coupon offers are usually still higher than home depot which was just up the hill here (rockler also relocated).

I tried to patronize rockler over the years, but anything good left with aluminum and plastic and melamine trinkets following in its place. When I did my kitchen, I went there for blum hardware, but it was literally double the cost of getting all of the hardware from a blum authorized cabinet parts seller, which would've been a few hundred bucks extra for nothing.

A little tangent-ish there, but safe to say, the value proposition for the WR planes was a little different at the outset, but they were also a little more rough around the edges - the factory that makes them is certainly competent, but even when you are, it takes some time and feedback to get things the way you want, and for the longer planes, they must have trouble making them as the price makes little sense. Even the smoother at $200 plus tax is, to me, a really iffy proposition in the states, and given that I love a type 20 or any of the types just before that - stanley - it doesn't make any sense at all. I've lost context with what it is to be a beginner, but note from my comments above, even two out of 10 LNs would've left most beginners concluding that match planing edges isn't really possible. Just two thousandths of hollowness makes for a real problem on anything even panel length.

(and match planing or correcting squareness is also generally done accurately with a couple of thick shavings and then only thin minor corrections, not a gaggle of thin shavings. The thick shavings can be done with a less accurate plane and minor fitting done with a smoother - that combination is far faster than a "precision jointer" for all taking a bunch of thin shavings based on a DVD routine).

One of the woodcraft store workers (not someone who would actually have corporate knowledge) implied that LN was OK with the whole thing at the outset, that there were experiments to try to figure out how to get WC more guaranteed stock as expanding an operation in the US took a loan and LN wasn't necessarily comfortable extending themselves at that point (that's a composite comment from that WC store worker and Tom Lie Nielsen, who later said that they would like to expand, but do it in a way that they are comfortable and that they were also waiting for the bank to agree.

David, that store worker is making this up. I was not only deep in discussion with others on Knots at the time this was happening, but I also had inside information. Let us not forget that LN took WoodCraft to court, and won. LN also removed all their stock from WC stores. There was no collusion between LN and WC. This was a really nasty business at the time, with Veritas tools also being ripped off. There is absolutely no way that Rob Lee would have condoned this!

Regards from Perth

Derek