Thread: Scraping a No 5 0n youtube

That Nelson plane is in spanking condition! Looks far better than many an example I've seen that would've been less than half its age. And even more amazing to me is there doesn't seem to be a single worm hole on it! With so little wear evident anywhere, it looks like it took a very early retirement.

But I'm certainly not the least surprised by the workmanship. Professional plane-making started a good 100 years earlier so by the time it was made, there had been plenty of time for methods to be refined & passed on.

The wedge caught my eye; the deepest cut out escapement I've seen - Nelson obviously liked to provide plenty of room for shavings to exit! The "prongs" or side extensions on the wedge are so long & fine they look fragile, yet they are both intact, not even a chip visible in the pics. I've seen a quite a few wedges with those bits either broken-off or damaged.

Have you used it much, or is it solely for exhibition? I've always wondered about those offset handles, and how they'd feel in serious work. It was around the time that plane would have been made that the fashion started to change & handles were positioned centrally. One of my old tool books mentions it but only as a dating guide & gives no suggestions as to why the switch occurred. Seems unlikely to me that methods would have changed significantly. The really big changes in woodworking were still half a century away, so was it simply a shift in fashion??...

Cheers,

I used it some. it came with a ward and sorby iron combination. the pair fits, and I have no idea if it was pieced together and sold that way or just fitted by someone in the past.

It works well - but the offset is fairly minimal so it's hard to notice.

I made a panel raiser at one time in the past and at the same time thought it would be a good plane to test the side handle thing - I have no idea what I was thinking. It's a skew double iron panel plane made out of a badger iron set, immediately blew its right abutment which I fixed by screws and the whole short handle off the side of the plane thing is downright hateful!

I have another plane about the same age - made in baltimore - but it's single iron - that one may be slightly earlier, perhaps 1825 - the handle is in the center.

Whatever was in the water by then, they'd apparently decided not to offset the handle much and I don't remember thinking much about it in use.

It wasn't expensive (in relative terms) for a guy like me who likes to make planes. it was $100 and apparently everyone in england thought that was outlandish because it was listed for several days. I paid the cost to have it shipped to the US which was probably a total of about $150.

I just checked it - I leave wedge and iron out of planes, even when they're that old. it'll need the sides let out a little bit to get the wedge in, which isn't a terrible thing - it'll still be a snug fit if I use it again.

here is a picture of the wedge as now.

I have mathieson and other planes from after this probably leading up to near 1900, and I had a griffiths that for the life of me, I can't remember why I sold. They're all almost identical in the mortise and even though this plane is a little earlier, they had it figured out.

here's the crux of things - when I started making planes, it took little time to figure out where to terminate wedge fingers and such to have no trap on left or right. The planes will all plane edge to edge any thickness shaving on any wood, even trash, and not plug. Nicholson's text suggested that at least at his upbringing, the corners of the irons should be relieved just a little to eliminate the chance of a clog. Buying this allowed me to see that at least a few decades later, the makers in England had already figured out the same thing - and just about everyone does it the same way.

another good example of if you're some guy in a garage who buys good working planes and then does something as well as you can based on what works best, you're just retracing what was already done at that point - but there is comfort in assessment when you see confirmation like that.

Larry Williams used to always assert that a 1 5/8" single iron little smoother was the same as a significantly bigger double iron plane because "they will clog". In truth, double iron planes clog much less easy, especially at the corners - so I wondered if he'd read that and took it as fact, or it's something he just felt like would be the case because a poorly fitted cap iron and wedge fingers will cause trouble. They just never made any decent plane from this time on that had such a fault, and if a plane develops it due to wedge distortion, it's just time to make a new wedge.

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I sort of miss having larry around. I think he's retired now, but you could get him mad and then he would tell you everything he knew. I hate to admit it, but most of the time that's the case with me, but lately I haven't had as much hook or interest in doing that and I wonder if the end is near!! I've never experienced the level of "wait, why bother".

I mention this because when I started to make planes, I tried to reason through what the wedge should be. the plane and the wedge if flatsawn should, in theory, move together. I made my first wedge this way and then went and googled plane pictures and saw one of the clark and williams planes, which also had a flatsawn wedge. OK, good, settled.

And then after making the plane, I found rift or quartered in *every single old plane* i had on hand, which was considerable at the time because I'd bought a whole bunch to try to figure out what worked best so my making odds would be as good as possible.

I *think* the reason the wedges are quartered, is so they don't get mis-sized vs. the iron and so that the fingers don't dry differentially from the plane body and lose their tight fit against the sides. if that fit is lost, there's nothing you can really do to avoid the clog issue. On cheap lower level planes from time to time, I'll find one of the fingers has dried hooked in over time. and the wedge needs to be remade no matter what unless one would want to set an absolute laziness world record and cut the finger off and laminate a sliver on the length of the wedge and make it two tone.

Lastly, I also thought "by now, a plane probably from 1835 should not move that much and I won't have any issues". that nelson plane cracked much further than it had already the first two days it was here, despite it being summer and high humidity. I filled the cracks with a paste of linseed oil and wax and today when I ran my finger over the body, I can feel that it expelled some of the wax. At the time, I'd already fitted the wedge once by relieving the sides and now it would need it again if I were to use it.

Wood is never dead!

I have to say that I have enjoyed this post. When I watched the youtube I immediately recognized the tool. I had scored one from my late father-in-law's shed some years ago. I believed that it was a scraper based on past experience but had no real idea of its actual intended use. He was a fitter and turner with a company that made specialized machinery. So, with the video and then mic-d's post showing the Sandvik tip it all made sense. I will have to hunt down a stone and give it a try!
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This conversation had me thinking about my planes. I have five go to planes spanning 40 plus years: 1) Bedrock 605 with PM11 blade. Been the go to for at least 35 years. 2) Veritas Rabbet Plane with fence. Bought around 2013. Fence is never taken off. It's used primarily for jointing. 3) Bedrock 604, with PM11 blade. New to the herd and proving it's worth 4) Veritas Low Angle Block plane. Had it for at least 40 years. Gone through an 01 and on its second PM11 blade. 5) Veritas Low Angle plane. Bought it with the block plane. Been displaced by the 604. Never really took to the low angle smoother, though it got a lot of use.

Tonight, I pulled out my 12" engineers square and had a look at how flat all of them were... Not one of them is flat. All have at least 0.5mm plus gap somewhere along that 12 inches. And I can say, I have absolutely no problem getting any project flat or the boards jointed straight... with any of them. Maybe the boards aren't straight, but who cares if they're mated more than enough to satisfy my needs and the tolerances of the glue. Woodwork is more often than not about: close enough. And never about getting anything 100% perfect - that's not possible with a product that never stop moving, or you can reduce effort. When you look at some of the best furniture in the world and you see the roughness of the work in areas you're not suppose to be looking, you'll realise that.

The common denominator of them all is a good blade. Don't obsess over thousands of an inch of flatness. Get rid of the crap Stanley et al blade they put in their planes and pimp it out with a HSS or better...

The veritas plane has a 0.5mm error?!

I've measured new stanleys - well, Ok, little used type 19s and 20s in jointer form. they typically are about 2 thousandths hollow in their length, which I would assume is an artifact of the manufacturing process.

you and I will not use those planes on a long edge to match plane unless you don't mind a gap. If the error was the other way, it doesn't matter.

something is wrong - did you mean .05mm?

0.5mm is about 2 hundredths of an inch.

I think we're still getting confused here with what makes a difference vs. what is your preference. I'll make two of my planes as accurate as possible. its' a commitment of an hour or slightly more usually for a long jointer and about 20 minutes for a smoother. The difference in performance afterward is noticeable and if working by hand, quickly paid back.

if other folks don't like to do anything but pick planes that work well and leave it at that, that's fine. truing soles pre-cast planes would've been a regular activity, though. it would've been needed due to wear and to a smaller extent, perhaps seasonal movement. It would be difficult for someone to plane a trying plane and get a continuous shaving when truing a sole if there is a hollowness of even a few thousandths. It wouldn't be that difficult for someone to plane the ends off instead and leave the middle high.

Yes, a sole out by 0.5mm does seem a tad extreme - that's 20 thou near enough & well within the visible range! But before pronouncing a plane sole out by that much won't work, you need to know just where the low spots are. it's not necessarily a killer, as long as the toe, mouth & heel are sufficiently co-planar it will work - Japanese planes are deliberately biased so (though maybe a bit less than .5mm?). You do need a well set-up plane (& a compliant wood) to produce consistent 1 thou or less shavings end to end of a 1M board, but your average shed denizen has little need of 1 thou shavings & is perfectly happy with 3 or 4 thou and even a bit of tear-out. That's not so hard to manage even with a sub-par plane.

How much preparation you are doing is important - if you do the bulk of your preparation with machines & only want to remove the tiny ripples left by a rotary cutter, then just about anything should do that, even my ancient 110, which is no paradigm of planehood. If you are preparing rough boards entirely by hand, you want all the help you can get & well-tuned, appropriate planes, will make your day go much easier. But it's quite possible to plane up a couple of board edges to match sufficiently fit for purpose with a plane that is well shy of 'perfect' - did it for many a year when the only planes I had were a 110 and a #5, neither of which was a paradigm of plane excellence. Stubborness & persistence can do a lot. Most of the joints I made are still sound 40 years on.

Which brings me to the question of how "perfect' an edge- joint needs to be? Each glue type has a limit to how thick the glue between the substrates can be without being significantly weakened. The 'gap-filling' ability of common glues varies considerably, but all glues work well within their tolerance range. If there is a clean match over the length of your edges (both sides), & no 'daylight' when the boards are held together (or with just a tiny bit of clamping pressure if you are making a 'sprung' joint), you are almost certainly within any glue's tolerance range, whatever type you are using.

There are a lot of variables in woodworking and a lot of ways of achieving acceptable results without having 'perfect' tools. Some of us like to feel our tools are always operating at peak efficiency, others are satisfied if they just get the job done without busting a gut. There is no compelling need to be obsessive about fettling hand planes.

Obsessive is fine btw, if it's your thing & brings you satisfaction, after all, it's the obsessives who often discover things that make life better for the rest of us......

Cheers,

Originally Posted by Huon pine fan

I have to say that I have enjoyed this post. When I watched the youtube I immediately recognized the tool. I had scored one from my late father-in-law's shed some years ago. I believed that it was a scraper based on past experience but had no real idea of its actual intended use. He was a fitter and turner with a company that made specialized machinery. So, with the video and then mic-d's post showing the Sandvik tip it all made sense. I will have to hunt down a stone and give it a try!
20240223_140526.jpg20240223_140533.jpg

Just check the edges of the insert. With that one the cutting edges are on the short sides. The edges are radiussed when honing to give relief on the corners and more specific scraping

Originally Posted by IanW

Yes, a sole out by 0.5mm does seem a tad extreme - that's 20 thou near enough & well within the visible range! But before pronouncing a plane sole out by that much won't work, you need to know just where the low spots are. it's not necessarily a killer, as long as the toe, mouth & heel are sufficiently co-planar it will work - Japanese planes are deliberately biased so (though maybe a bit less than .5mm?). You do need a well set-up plane (& a compliant wood) to produce consistent 1 thou or less shavings end to end of a 1M board, but your average shed denizen has little need of 1 thou shavings & is perfectly happy with 3 or 4 thou and even a bit of tear-out. That's not so hard to manage even with a sub-par plane.

How much preparation you are doing is important - if you do the bulk of your preparation with machines & only want to remove the tiny ripples left by a rotary cutter, then just about anything should do that, even my ancient 110, which is no paradigm of planehood. If you are preparing rough boards entirely by hand, you want all the help you can get & well-tuned, appropriate planes, will make your day go much easier. But it's quite possible to plane up a couple of board edges to match sufficiently fit for purpose with a plane that is well shy of 'perfect' - did it for many a year when the only planes I had were a 110 and a #5, neither of which was a paradigm of plane excellence. Stubborness & persistence can do a lot. Most of the joints I made are still sound 40 years on.

Which brings me to the question of how "perfect' an edge- joint needs to be? Each glue type has a limit to how thick the glue between the substrates can be without being significantly weakened. The 'gap-filling' ability of common glues varies considerably, but all glues work well within their tolerance range. If there is a clean match over the length of your edges (both sides), & no 'daylight' when the boards are held together (or with just a tiny bit of clamping pressure if you are making a 'sprung' joint, you are almost certainly within any glue's tolerance range, whatever type you are using.

There are a lot of variables in woodworking and a lot of ways of achieving acceptable results without having 'perfect' tools. Some of us like to feel our tools are always operating at peak efficiency, others are satisfied if they just get the job done without busting a gut. There is no compelling need to be obsessive about fettling hand planes.

Obsessive is fine btw, if it's your thing & brings you satisfaction, after all, it's the obsessives who often discover things that make life better for the rest of us......

Cheers,

You've just reminded me of the other non-flat orientation to consider and that is convexity across the sole Very common with lapped soles since it's less stable in that short direction. With a smoother it means that much more blade needs to be relieved so you don't get train tracks. With a jointer it means a lot more work to keep your edge square and at the joint glue up, one of the things I hate is trying clamp a joint with non-square edges (even in short areas) with slippery glue and keeping the boards in line. I know some people plane the two boards together so that what ever angle you get is matched, but it doesn't stop the slippage. Not a problem now with a domino or a good biscuit.

Two more things to say on the flatness as you've alluded to Ian, I wouldn't care if a Jointer had this much of a gap in those areas (OK it mightn't slip will), flatness is irrelevant, what we're really saying is coplanar. And second, if you see daylight in the heel and toe the plane is really only as good as the next shorter plane that matches the flat area.

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Originally Posted by mic-d

Just check the edges of the insert. With that one the cutting edges are on the short sides. The edges are radiussed when honing to give relief on the corners and more specific scraping

A closer look suggests the long edge is a bit radiussed so it probably is a cutting edge. You could still use the short sides if you find the other a bit long. Whats the number on it? My first thought it was the 620-2520 looks wrong.

Originally Posted by D.W.

The veritas plane has a 0.5mm error?!

I've measured new stanleys - well, Ok, little used type 19s and 20s in jointer form. they typically are about 2 thousandths hollow in their length, which I would assume is an artifact of the manufacturing process.

you and I will not use those planes on a long edge to match plane unless you don't mind a gap. If the error was the other way, it doesn't matter.

something is wrong - did you mean .05mm?

0.5mm is about 2 hundredths of an inch.

I think we're still getting confused here with what makes a difference vs. what is your preference. I'll make two of my planes as accurate as possible. its' a commitment of an hour or slightly more usually for a long jointer and about 20 minutes for a smoother. The difference in performance afterward is noticeable and if working by hand, quickly paid back.

if other folks don't like to do anything but pick planes that work well and leave it at that, that's fine. truing soles pre-cast planes would've been a regular activity, though. it would've been needed due to wear and to a smaller extent, perhaps seasonal movement. It would be difficult for someone to plane a trying plane and get a continuous shaving when truing a sole if there is a hollowness of even a few thousandths. It wouldn't be that difficult for someone to plane the ends off instead and leave the middle high.

Ya went back and had a closer look... I was a wee bit out estimating by eye... Using paper as a rough gauge, that is supposed to be 0.1mm, the gaps are definitely not 0.5mm but they're probably 0.2mm and above. The gaps are easily seen with the naked eye. All but the bedrock 605 are concave and the veritas' seems to centre around the adjustable front, though the veritas rabbet plane has two spots where light is easily shone through. I've never pulled the front pieces or rarely if ever adjusted them, so I'll have to see if they've got stuff jamb in there... Needless to say relative flatness is still well outside what people here think is tolerable.

Originally Posted by IanW

Yes, a sole out by 0.5mm does seem a tad extreme - that's 20 thou near enough & well within the visible range! But before pronouncing a plane sole out by that much won't work

SNIP

See above, reviewed my estimate.

On a side note. Not knocking anyone but it's kinda funny to me that I've never looked at any of my planes in 40 years to see if they were flat till now. Though I'm obsessed with the back of all blades, chisels, plane blades ect... being dead flat.

From the point you made. Even if the planes were out by 1mm they will still work. No, I won't get a perfectly straight board, but as anyone that has a reasonable understanding of the removal of material with a hand plane, will be able to wrestle a board straight enough to be more than adequate for a project.

Case in point. It might explain why I often have to take a light pass or two, depending on board length, to get a jointed edge close to where I want it with the 605 - because it's convex... Which is anything less than, what I always thought, was about 0.5mm. If it's a softwood I might even let it creep out to more. Because, as anyone that knows wood, softwood will easily flex and conform and the glue is more than capable of holding. Also, as a general rule, I don't glue up boards wider than 4" as that's where inflexibility rapidly increases, and wood movement and cupping becomes more of an issue, YMMV. If it were hide glue and using the rub method, then I know that the gap filling quality of the glue is more than adequate to let the gap be about a third of what I would usually let slide if clamping and PVA glue. And I'd probably go with boards less than 3" wide. As I stated before, my manta is: close enough works just fine. And I'm betting, throughout the last 12000 years, most tradesmen have had the same mantra for the vast majority of their work, obviously excluding work for the extremely rich (and mentally ill) and royalty...

At this point I think I have, needlessly, high jacked the subject far too much. I learned a very good lesson years ago about woodwork from someone here, and that is: Whatever you want to do is perfectly fine. Go for your life because there is no wrong way - only your way. So, scrape away Mc Duff!!

Originally Posted by mic-d

A closer look suggests the long edge is a bit radiussed so it probably is a cutting edge. You could still use the short sides if you find the other a bit long. Whats the number on it? My first thought it was the 620-2520 looks wrong.

It's 620-2530

Originally Posted by mic-d

The second question first, that's my slip up, it should be concave curve planed on the wood, sorry for the confusion

First question is easy to show, hard to explain in words in a short way. But no nothing to do with the way the plane is held. Let me say first that the concave planing 'error' is a maximum. A flat plane will trend towards straight because of its stability in registering to the work, a convex plane will trend towards a maximum error (without user input) because of the instability registering to the work.

Look at an ideal case first where you've got a board freshly jointed off the jointer and straight and you're taking the machine marks off. You firmly register the toe of the flat plane on the flat wood edge. It registers positively because the sole is flat. You proceed with the pass and heel passes onto the wood. You could visualise there is now a gap behind the blade where the wood has been planed away, especially if you're still pressing down firmly on the toe (even using a hang ten method) because the sole is flat (doesn't step like an electric plane or a jointer). Then you bring weight and power more evenly front and back of the plane and the heel settles onto the wood so imperceptibly. This pivot decreases the depth of the blade ever so slightly, but I did the calculations and it is such a minute change as to be practically zero so it can be dismissed - it doesn't have any impact on the flatness of the planed edge. You finish the pass and exit the wood with most of the weight on the rear. The shaving is consistent along the length of the board, the board began straight and it is still straight. With a convex plane, what is registered on the toe at the start? It's a curve, but with weight on the toe the plane is probably rocked forward, making the depth of cut a little less at the start, then proceeds to a full depth shaving through the middle of the pass and the plane rocks back towards the end of the pass as weight shifts to the rear and the cut becomes shallower again. You've started a concave curve on the board which will only get worse with more passes. If you're just taking cutter marks off, probably inconsequential, but not if you're starting with RS timber.

Look at the following greatly exaggerated image of a plane sole, it shows the gist of how you may get to a curved edge with a flat plane but it requires a lot more passes, like what you need to dress RS timber. But for a flat #7 the curve depth is only 2mm over 2400mm and really only that maximum if the board is concave to begin with. If it's straight the first case above applies, and also for a convex board, if you manage some well made partial passes in the guts of the board to get an initial straight.
Attachment 535577

With a convex plane there is no getting around the fact that the effective blade projection is the sum of the projection right at the mouth and the depth of the convex curve of the sole. This leads to a greater error (depth of curve) on the planed wood edge by simple geometric arrangement of the toe-blade-heel. And because the sole is curved and unstable, the registration is more than likely to lead to the maximum error. While again, labouring the point, the flat sole is just the blade projection at the mouth, and the sole registers very positively so these errors are maximums and you can do much better than that.

Hope this helps clarify, it takes a lot of thought to write this economically!

Cheers
M

Reading this I am not sure the logic is totally correct in practise if the blade is say centre of the sole, then the plane would register first at the toe side and the blade would start to take a cut once the heel comes into contact and weight is shifted to that part of the plane (it is normal the heel side is a greater length to help flatten the timber), so you are effectively rocking the plane backwards reducing the amount of convex by say 50% and at this point the cut would move slightly higher but this would remain constant for the remainder of the cut. So for me a convexed plane would dish the timber at the beginning but then remain constant for the rest of the cut, unless you start moving your weight backwards and forwards making the plane register off different parts of the sole.