Thread: Quality aftermarket replacement hand plane blades. Originals are too thin

i did some more looking and would love to be able to tell you guys I learned something smart about mn65, but we don't seem to use it in the west (no biggie - we don't get silver steel at retail, either, and I'd love to have some of the alloys sold as silver steel - it's cheap and would make a wonderful chisel and probably good plane irons).

However, I just can't find anything other than data related to its structural use and hardness and tensile strength at various austenitizing temperatures (as in, how hot is it made before it's quenched).

It should have potential to be decent, but I can't get enough information to find out what decent is because blades aren't the intended use.

Originally Posted by IanW

David, I think the equation balancing hardness, wear characteristics & sharpenability is one we each have to solve for ourselves & will depend on what woods we work with & personal preferences. We've discussed this before, and my attitude these days is that a blade that is hard, but easy enough to sharpen is a 'good' blade, even if its wear characteristics don't quite match the very best possible. But I've come to this attitude very slowly after many years of chasing the perfect blade, i.e. one that sharpens easily but holds its edge forever. One experience that started turning me back to more 'average' hardness was a blade that took forever to refine on my oilstones. I'd used oilstones ever since I started woodworking, and had a couple of lovely Arkansas stones I'd picked up in Canada as my 'finishing' stones, but they really struggled to put the edge I want on that blade. I had similar problems with my first PM-V11 blade, it just took too much effort on my oilstones and pushed me to water stones, which cut far faster, but require more time spent keeping the darned things flat (always the trade-off!). Granted, the edge may last longer with harder steels, but the dullness sneaks up on me & the extra difficulty of re-sharpening discourages me from just slipping it out for a quick touch-up. The result is I reckon I spend more time using a sub-optimally sharp blade with these steels than I do with 'softer' blades which tend to lose their keenness over a short period, but are far easier to touch-up quickly, so they get maintained better.

Lately, I've been having a bit of a love affair with 1084 for plane blades. After some initial difficulty getting the stuff to actually harden (we had a long discussion about it at the time & preheating the oil seems to be the key I was missing). Since then, I've had a run of excellent blades. I'm tempering very lightly, no idea what hardness I'm ending up with but they hold an edge very satisfactorily with no hint of chipping so I'm getting them somewhere near optimum. And being so easy to touch-up means I have no hesitation in doing so as soon as I think they have gotten a little dull, so while I may sharpen more often, I spend more time using truly sharp blades!

For a novice like me, the 'simple' steels have a lot to offer - semi-idiot-proof, yet capable of making blades that are comparable to commercial blades at a fraction of the cost. Plenty to like there....

Cheers,

My thinking out loud here has less to do what can make a suitable blade (pretty much anything that's good or decent can make a suitable blade) and more to try to gather the angle as far as the decision that's made.

For questions about the luban and others, though, it starts to devolve into how does it compare to O1 at 62 hardness -what are the cost parameters, what's the potential and is it being offered fairly in line with those.

I think once you're comfortable with 1084, it's as practical as anything, though. if it were offered for $75, I'd start to squint again.

I guess I'm getting to the point where if someone says "can you recommend a luban blade". I'll get tied up in guessing and certainly not worth buying one or one of the blades from woodcraft. I'd just be a little offended if woodcraft tries to sell them for $50 US made out of either T10 or 65mn.

i could use or make tools out of anything in a wide range and be happy with them, though - even if I get idealistic once something is considered premium, or when I'm making tools and it's the 200th chisel (it's easier to get pickier as you get more under hand - though it's a minor detail for someone working wood - it just has to be decent and predictable).

Originally Posted by IanW

David, I think the equation balancing hardness, wear characteristics & sharpenability is one we each have to solve for ourselves & will depend on what woods we work with & personal preferences. We've discussed this before, and my attitude these days is that a blade that is hard, but easy enough to sharpen is a 'good' blade, even if its wear characteristics don't quite match the very best possible. But I've come to this attitude very slowly after many years of chasing the perfect blade, i.e. one that sharpens easily but holds its edge forever. One experience that started turning me back to more 'average' hardness was a blade that took forever to refine on my oilstones. I'd used oilstones ever since I started woodworking, and had a couple of lovely Arkansas stones I'd picked up in Canada as my 'finishing' stones, but they really struggled to put the edge I want on that blade. I had similar problems with my first PM-V11 blade, it just took too much effort on my oilstones and pushed me to water stones, which cut far faster, but require more time spent keeping the darned things flat (always the trade-off!). Granted, the edge may last longer with harder steels, but the dullness sneaks up on me & the extra difficulty of re-sharpening discourages me from just slipping it out for a quick touch-up. The result is I reckon I spend more time using a sub-optimally sharp blade with these steels than I do with 'softer' blades which tend to lose their keenness over a short period, but are far easier to touch-up quickly, so they get maintained better.

Lately, I've been having a bit of a love affair with 1084 for plane blades. After some initial difficulty getting the stuff to actually harden (we had a long discussion about it at the time & preheating the oil seems to be the key I was missing). Since then, I've had a run of excellent blades. I'm tempering very lightly, no idea what hardness I'm ending up with but they hold an edge very satisfactorily with no hint of chipping so I'm getting them somewhere near optimum. And being so easy to touch-up means I have no hesitation in doing so as soon as I think they have gotten a little dull, so while I may sharpen more often, I spend more time using truly sharp blades!

For a novice like me, the 'simple' steels have a lot to offer - semi-idiot-proof, yet capable of making blades that are comparable to commercial blades at a fraction of the cost. Plenty to like there....

Cheers,

Not too much of consequence here - but I looked further - no suppliers of it in the US at typical retail amounts, but it's made its way into chinese made camp knives and such, and on ebay as spring steel (sold at spring temper).

One of the sellers had the listing in AU dollars, but one never knows if that could be because google tied my history of talking about it with an australian forum. I still have problems getting aliexpress to give me english instead of turkish, and I think it's because of the turkish neighbor next door who works professionally with lasers and orders gobs of stuff from aliexpress. one never knows these days.

nonetheless, that means you could try it easily. The heat treatment regime is just as simple as 1084 and it's got a fair bit more Mn in it - it should love warmed vegetable oil.

only concession I can think of is because of the distance, it's just a little more than 1084 is here, and it's listed only in 1mm increments. 2.5 would be dandy, but my listings are 2 or 3.

I don't play with 1060 or 5160 - they're not quite up to snuff for us, and even 1070 is lacking. But the data sheets make claims about improvements in strength (edge stability for us) and hardness over spring steels with less Mn.

there is not enough carbon in for any significant carbide formation, so there is no "this long or that long" to get carbon in solution - like 1084, it can just be heated (1500F on the data sheet here) and quenched.

Like I mentioned, it's already spring temper, but it's not any more hardenable than O1 steel, so a quick heat would draw the temper out.

I'm more curious than anything about the hardness claims - they were 60-64 for T10. the alloy changed to something with substantially less carbon and the spec remains the same.

I did have trouble with thicker irons, so here is the story.

Shown are four irons. The two at the top are shop made, the bottom two are Stanley and Vaughan & Bushnell.

The first one is 1/8" thick and the second is 3/32", O1 steel, I cut them and David heat treated them. The Stanley one is 0.08" and the second is 0.074". The V & B is a thinner than usual, the plane still works pretty well though, shown in the V & B planes posts from a few weeks ago.

The 1/8" iron is for a Millers Falls #18. Notice that I had to move the frog back quite a bit. I also had to file the front of the mouth to create a bevel and allow clearance for the shavings. I don't know if I ended up making the mouth bigger, but it is now bigger than the typical 3/16". The plane works fine, but it needed a lot of fiddling.

The other bench plane in the picture is a MF #9 smoother. This one has the 3/32" iron. The 1/8" irons were my first shop made irons, after that experience I bought 3/32" O1 bar stock. I think in this case I moved the frog back just a little bit and did not file the mouth. The mouth size is 3/16".

20230516_114332.jpg20230516_113819.jpg

For a standard Stanley iron, here's an #S4. The mouth is smaller than 3/16". I placed the 3/32" double iron in this plane just for this picture. It seems like it fits, there's enough light to indicate that this iron will work.

20230516_113918.jpg20230516_114020.jpg20230516_114052.jpg

Lastly, the Veritas after market irons are 0.1". Here's a Stanley #3 fitted with this iron. The mouth is less than 3/16" and the front of the mouth was filed in a similar manner as the MF #18. The frog was moved back as well. The iron is very close to the front of the mouth and I can take fine shavings without choking.

20230516_185316.jpg20230516_185135.jpg20230516_185248.jpg

Both planes I filed were choking initially.

If you still want to use after market irons, lean towards 0.1" or less to avoid having to monkey with the plane too much. If the depth adjuster becomes an issue, you can fix the problem by buying a new yoke. Check out my friend Jeff Warshafsky's yoke and other replacement parts (Replacement Plane yoke — Wood By Wright). There's a solution for every problem, I suppose.

Rafael

But I went to the shop late last evening after having made a replacement iron for a "new" (to me) stanley type 20 #8. The iron is .105 for no reason other than that's what I have on hand at the moment in 80crv2 or O1, or pretty much anything other than CTS-XHP.

I'm pretty much done acquiring planes for good now, I have what I like and figured the filing thing was academic, but would you believe it - the late make stanley will not take a .105 plane iron, which is interesting because it means the margin for use of the stock iron wasn't that much.

all on a plane that is supposedly sloppily made with low tolerances.

I gave it the old norris treatment - filing the mouth slope in the upper casting forward to make room for the cap iron and it still needed a little more help by actually widening the mouth beyond that. took about 15 minutes total. I'd prefer that much margin as it is now even with the stock iron, anyway, as it's not going to get much use smoothing and taking see through shavings.

This is perhaps only the fourth or fifth plane I've had to file, though don't and haven't for some time replace irons in stanley planes unless there's a reason. This plane's iron has been abused to the point that it actually takes me less or the same amount of time to make a new iron vs fixing the original.

Originally Posted by D.W.

......I'm pretty much done acquiring planes for good now, I have what I like......

Wish I had a $ for every time I said that in the last 40 years!

The #8 is one bench plane I've never aspired to have - it's a mighty beast & probably no more effort for a strong young fella than the #7 is for me, but even 40 years ago I thought it was just too much plane for the sort of stuff I was making. There have been a few occasions when it might have been a better choice than the #7 but far too few to earn it a space in my tool cupboard (it wouldn't fit, anyway, so I'd have to make another & I've definitely sworn never to do that again... )

Cheers,

Oh, it's definitely a one trick pony for me. For match planing fat 4/4 rough sawn stock. Definitely not a need with a 7 on hand, and the 7 is much preferred if face jointing bad quality wood. Otherwise even then, I prefer a beech plane.

Everything about an 8 is a little more awkward than a 7 if you're trying to do really neat and precise work.

This is a forum, so I'm aware that within a short period of time, this post will pretty much slide into the ether. I figured I'd post a picture of "doing the norris" to the back of the mouth. At this point, the mouth isn't opened at the casting at all and a thin strip remains so that when I level the bottom, the mouth won't become uneven.

Capture - honed.jpg

You can see for all of the criticism of the type 20s, the mouth isn't at all large. In fact, even after filing this "norris" style mouth adjustment, it needed to be opened further, which has solved the problem. I don't file much and won't use a thicker iron than this, so it's not in danger of becoming garish.

but if in stout shaving taking, I can feel the "e-brake" like resistance of shavings making the turn rubbing the mouth, I will open it a bit further. this generally seems to occur around the point where the mouth is twice as wide as the shavings are thick.

I call this the norris because immediately after figuring out the cap iron, I looked at the insides of tight mouthed infill planes which "have a tight mouth, which was more important than the cap iron", I noticed that the castings were filed like this in the direction of the bun. Specifically to allow use of the cap iron. I think the tight mouth on infill smoothers was maker's pride, but we'll never be in the room with the makers, so who knows.

Originally Posted by D.W.

....I call this the norris because immediately after figuring out the cap iron, I looked at the insides of tight mouthed infill planes which "have a tight mouth, which was more important than the cap iron", I noticed that the castings were filed like this in the direction of the bun. Specifically to allow use of the cap iron. I think the tight mouth on infill smoothers was maker's pride, but we'll never be in the room with the makers, so who knows....

As I recall, Norris cap-irons are quite thick so they do need a fair bit of clearance to get the blade into action when set close. It took me a while to figure out the geometry of cap-iron & front of mouth when I started making planes, and I'm not sure I have it totally sorted yet, but at least I have solved most of the choking problem I encountered with #1 - it was a real pest at first!

I'm inclined to agree that very tight mouths can be more hindrance than help on a bevel-down blade fitted with a cap-iron, but they sure make a difference on a BU job. I managed a really tight mouth on the box mitre I made a few months ago and it doesn't seem to choke at all. Without the cap-iron impeding egress of the shaving, it just keeps flowing through very nicely. There are trade-offs, though, the ridiculously fine mouth only allows for a shaving of 3-4 thou max, any more than that & the blade closes the mouth up completely & choking does happen. And it can't control tear-out quite as well as a close-fitting cap-iron - I tried a few 'head to heads' with my 'best' smoother & the smoother energed the winner, not by as much as I expected, but still the winner....

Cheers,
Ian

I thought I posted a response to this, but I'm cranky thanks to things unrelated to woodworking and may have gotten sidetracked.

The early norris and spiers planes - like earlier than the point where Norris went sideways and started having R. sorby make blades and cap irons in a fat clunky way - the early ones had cap irons identical to those in better wooden planes. They had a lot of clearance and probably were not financially feasible once pennies got tight and a stamped much fatter round cap iron was the norm. The later norris planes gave up on the tight mouth to go along with that, though, so it's not a real big problem and some of the later beech planes (especially the try planes) can be tolerable.

the early planes had a very short blunt tip and then the rest of the cap iron got out of the way quickly so that the forward filed mouth provided plenty of clearance. Blunt isn't a great choice of words, it was a small rounded tip to do the chipbreaking on fine shavings and then not a lot of fatness both for plane feeding and probably because it's a better profile combination in heavier work (where the cap iron design would've showed up on wooden try planes).

it's impressive once you get a full picture of what's going on with the various designs tied together, and then showing skill and tight work keeping the mouth from being too open and sloppy.

It's also a little interesting because I can't think of a precedent to have the mouth done neatly and up close to the cap iron like that except in keeping the wear tight (and at an acute angle to the bed side of the plane rather than making the wear short or vertical or something).

Yeah, ok, my Norris experience is very limited, just one late-model A5 that I had for about 15 years, which did indeed have Sorby running gear. If I ever get my hands on an early "classic" model I'll be very keen to investigate its guts.....

Cheers,

I have a few norris planes right now, and have had more in the past. Sometimes, you can't justify keeping them all!!

Three of my early planes were two A5s and an A1? The latter was a late plane with the U channel bottom that someone sold as almost unused - a dealer in England. They ripped me off by not showing the side of the plane with the paint worn off, and made it look new by having it finely surface ground all the way around, but you take you lumps sometimes. All three of those had the adjuster, but the "ripoff" plane was actually reasonably nice to use as a try plane. It was 17 1/2 inches long and about the weight of a stanley 6, and the behavior of the adjuster is a bigger deal with fine shavings than it is with try plane like shavings.

Point being, they gave me familiarity with later norris irons and caps.

The earlier ones were generally Ward and look like the thinner one in this picture.

https://i.imgur.com/Rcz1HtF.jpg

I sent this to steve voigt years ago because in a wooden plane, the fat chipbreaker version needs another 5 degrees of wear, which doesn't look that great. This becomes something really critical in wooden planes as if the wear is wrong, just making the mouth bigger doesn't alleviate clogs until the mouth is garishly big. The extra 5 degrees does the trick, but the wear gets to looking close to vertical and the plane looks cheap.

Modern wooden planes get around this by making the wear lower - like the ECE types and so on. They have huge tall sprung chipbreakers, but get around troubling with them by finagling the plane. i suppose at this point with the user pool, it doesn't matter.

the early norris planes were probably sold to cabinetmakers who did a lot of work in the shop without power tools - turn of the century or shortly after. As time went and you got to wartime and shortly after, I don't know what the dynamic was. In the US, around 1900, the tool supplies switched over from english style tools to site tools for the most part. You could still get all of the stanley planes, but wood planes had disappeared other than junk. Things went to factory across the board very quickly here - probably over a matter of a decade and I think the better of the two chipbreakers here that you'd see on an 1800s wooden plane or a 1900.

Anyway, the difference between the two shown - both are old - is also that the lower chipbreaker works as well for smoothing but is easier pushing by a lot when taking a thicker shaving. That doesn't matter if nobody is taking thicker shavings. Norris started with this ward type, and mathieson looked the same and so did spiers. And things changed over time probably as hand fitting and finishing got to be less and less. It's cheaper to just make a fat one because you have more room for error with fatter and rounder and taller.

you can see how the contour of the thin one would do very well if you do nothing more than file the front of the mouth away toward the bun - it's an easier situation than the wear in a good wood plane leaning back toward the bed and since the cap iron of the elegant design existed, it looks like norris and others took advantage of what it offered.

All of my later planes had mouths that were big enough that the cap iron style didn't matter that much.

too, it's not that uncommon to find one like the "good" one here that's had the front conditioned a few times and is pretty fat. Would've been trouble in a wooden plane, but one with the sole wearing would've alleviated the trouble. To find these caps in almost unused condition is a treat. once the front tip is prepared, they don't take damage, but if it's not prepared properly, they will and thus the "fixing" done by later users.

These little things are the true key to being able to work by hand and not add too much time on one off furniture type work. If the try plane is 25% harder to push and you have one try plane, you won't notice. if you have five, you figure out quickly which one gets through work more easily and by the time you accumulate all of the little nerd facts, you figure out that they were all in place in the 1800s in good tools, and work becomes pleasant and at a good rate rather than painful.

though it's probably only interesting to me, note how the thinner of these two is fitted by grind thinly both on the top, but the undercut is actually something that goes all the way up to the transition so that the cap iron can be sprung without having to be fat and tall and getting in the way of things.

The actual spring/room is about the same. Once caps went to all steel instead of being bitted, not all of them were made this nicely. Cut cost unbranded caps from sheffield could be thin and out of square or any manner of things. Older mathieson and ward are like this.

The later norris-made caps can be very fat and very round at the top. Someone slipped a later design cap iron and an I. sorby, so even though I don't have any of the newer norris planes any longer, I still have one of the newer norris caps. the no 13 is, of course, cast, and the mouth isn't fine enough for it to matter. I bought it to copy at some point and have in hand, but I've got too many things now that i'm "going to copy". It'd be wiser just to use it as it's cast, and about the size of a 4 1/2, but it is not ungainly or overly heavy at all. My version is a real beater of an already homely plane, though.

We have veered from after-market blades into a discussion of cap-iron geometry, but I think it's appropriate because there are also after-market cap-irons and folks need to understand some of the variables.

First, I think we should define what the "wear" of a plane is. It's the front part of the mouth that initially slopes towards the back of the sole. I can't show it on a regular plane but it's easy to demonstrate with a rebate. You should be able to see it in this pic, between the bottom of the sole & the black line:
Wear.jpg

This shape is desirable on a wooden plane because it allows the sole to be planed off a bit without altering the mouth opening, hence the name "wear". It isn't really necessary on a metal-soled plane because it shouldn't need serious work on its sole for the life of the plane. However, when you are making a plane in a backyard shed, it's hard to guarantee everything is going to end up just-so with the mouth for a few reasons, so I always leave 1-2 mm of the mouth vertical before it slopes forward to allow plenty of lapping.There's often a lot of file work needed to refine a mouth and I often leave a mm or so of the mouth vertical before it slopes forward. It can only be a small amount, because as you can see from Davids picture, a flat, blunt cap-iron as fitted to later Norrises could foul on the 'wear'. I've noticed a few old Stanleys had rounded fronts on the mouth, either due to careless manufacture or someone getting a bit enthusiastic with a file. That can interfere with a close-fitting cap-iron & may need to be addressed when fettling an old one (though it's not common in my experience, most of the old planes that have been in my hands had very generous mouths).

The thin, acute-angled iron on the top in the pic is far less likely to be a throat-obstruction if the mouth isn't ideal. After close to 20 years of making metal planes I'm still undecided on the ideal style for a cap-iron; sometimes I think the 'full arch' irons as fitted to Stanley/Records is the ideal style, sometimes I think the "single bend" style as shown above is better, for reasons that are too long-winded to go into here.

On a rebate plane like the shoulder plane pictured, I try to make them with 'wear' as shown because the all-brass sole of these may need a bit of lapping during it's life (more likely because of damage than wear) and it's important to preserve a fine mouth in these planes. (It's also a case of copycat because I've noticed a similar mouth geometry on some old Preston rebates.) Because of minor shifts in the parts than can occur when assembling, I don't always achieve such a prominent backward slope, but try to maintain some. With a low angle, bevel-up blade, it's unlikely to cause any interference. I've almost convinced myself that this mouth shape has a beneficial effect on the way shavings flow, but that's highly subjective & quite likely not correct, so don't quote me on that!

I think the point of this discussion is to emphasize that if you want peak performance out of a double-iron plane, you need to spend at least as much thought on the cap-iron & the shape of the mouth as you do on the cutter....

Cheers,