Thread: Scraping a Plane - shocked at the speed

Originally Posted by auscab

With cast iron, It gets a skin of harder metal around the outside when cast. I assume that's the metal cooling faster on the surface in contact with the mould as its poured. And deeper in like 3 mm or 4mm in its softer because its cooling slower.
When castings are done, and machined surfaces are needed, thicker areas are left to be machined off later to a uniform softer part. To make the machining easier or possible I believe. That's part of the pattern making process, leaving the extra thickness where needed.

So these hard soled or patchy soled planes are where this hasn't been done, or the maker got a finished product by not worrying about that possibly? Plane soles would have to be machined after the molding process wouldn't they? Or are they just flattened with some type of abrasive on cheaper planes?

Is there a foundry process where a new casting is taken from the sand and re heated and placed in a slow cool environment to anneal? Is cast iron similar in heat treatment to a carbon steel is what I'm wondering. Can it be annealed or hardened? I'm not suggesting to start re heat treating plane body's. Just curious if if works that way.

I'm not sure on gray cast, which these planes are - they're definitely finished after casting, but only the new ones look like they have been hit with some kind of surface grinding wheel.

the ones in my experience that are hard are hard all over. It may have been a preference or a quality tout.

Not sure how the hardness is chosen. My anvil is a 50 hardness (through and through or at least for practical purposes) ductile/nodular cast product. But i have to admit I know nothing about how they harden or are hardened. the list of cast specs is so huge it's hard to tell what it's all used for.

Originally Posted by auscab

With cast iron, It gets a skin of harder metal around the outside when cast. I assume that's the metal cooling faster on the surface in contact with the mould as its poured. And deeper in like 3 mm or 4mm in its softer because its cooling slower.
When castings are done, and machined surfaces are needed, thicker areas are left to be machined off later to a uniform softer part. To make the machining easier or possible I believe. That's part of the pattern making process, leaving the extra thickness where needed.

So these hard soled or patchy soled planes are where this hasn't been done, or the maker got a finished product by not worrying about that possibly? Plane soles would have to be machined after the molding process wouldn't they? Or are they just flattened with some type of abrasive on cheaper planes?

Is there a foundry process where a new casting is taken from the sand and re heated and placed in a slow cool environment to anneal? Is cast iron similar in heat treatment to a carbon steel is what I'm wondering. Can it be annealed or hardened? I'm not suggesting to start re heat treating plane body's. Just curious if if works that way.

I recall someone explaining this about cast iron on here in the dim dark. I don't know about planes and slowly cooling the casting but I've heard larger castings are often left to weather in the yard for months or a year for the stresses to 'balance' (can't think of a better word) before machining. May have been an apocryphal story.

I've wondered about work holding a plane when they machine the sole/cheeks. It takes surprising little force to distort an iron sole ( I can get different spotting just by torsioning the tote and knob as a test I did - there's a post on here somewhere about it and someone did the experiment with better metrology than I did). EDIT Oh here 'tis Hand Plane fettlers should read this
I had bad pitting machined out of the sole of a #5 1/2 with a thick casting, thinking I was clever; it came back concave. Which is not the worst I've heard. Two people have told me their planes were machined right through the sole at thin points - tapped holes etc. I imagine that at the original factory work holding might be done using the mount points of knob/tote/frog maybe.

Originally Posted by D.W.

I'm not sure on gray cast, which these planes are - they're definitely finished after casting, but only the new ones look like they have been hit with some kind of surface grinding wheel.

the ones in my experience that are hard are hard all over. It may have been a preference or a quality tout.

Not sure how the hardness is chosen. My anvil is a 50 hardness (through and through or at least for practical purposes) ductile/nodular cast product. But i have to admit I know nothing about how they harden or are hardened. the list of cast specs is so huge it's hard to tell what it's all used for.

Those anvils. The face on them lasts well does it ? Are there any reports of that type that have been chipped on the face?
I know I've seen chipped or even snapped in half hardened faces on older anvils. Sometimes just the hardened face not the whole thing.

Ive always wondered what machinery Stanley/ Bailey would have had back in the 1870s onwards for finishing plane soles. The latest stuff I would reckon. That'd include metal shapers and surface grinders as well as mills. It must bethe surface grinder that finished plane soles? But you wouldn't think the error in flatness would be there with them. Its probably the creep that cast iron can do or the way planes are stored that is the cause of out of flat soles on the quality older planes?

So, the ones that chip on the face are highly hardened steel, either because the steel layer on an older anvil is super hard, or because the top and edges work harden over time and then skip off. I would guess the soderfors anvil that I have (cast steel, but the top does look like a separate layer of tool steel) is upper 50s hardness. no stray strike does anything to it. If it was 275 pounds, I wouldn't have a new anvil (it's 125).

The ductile cast is not as hard, and a stray hammer strike will mark it, but not like an uhardened anvil.

They say ductile cast will not work harden, and if that's the case, it shouldn't lose its edges and send little shard missiles through the air. but I think the face of it could distort a little over time just because 50 hardness isn't enough to prevent a little half moon from an errant hammer strike, or inattention to something being on the anvil (like scale or something else that makes a very minor mark).

If I leave a chunk of scale on the soderfors anvil by accident, it just ends up burnishing the face.

Any substantive marks on the ductile cast are from my daughter two handing it with a 4 pound cross pein hammer. I overestimated the accuracy the kids would have. Each wanted to hit hot steel and each completely missed the steel, even with two hands. But they applied plenty of power!

by the way, what I read was that the fact that the face won't work harden is seen as a detriment. the old school guys on the blacksmith forums that actually do decorative work like the anvil to work harden so the bounce is better. For me, it really doesn't matter either way. If the anvil is 80-85% bounce instead of 90-95, it really doesn't make any difference. for someone working all day and used to a legit cast steel anvil, it may make a material difference.

Originally Posted by CWC

It’s probably a bad idea but due to my own frustration of trying to figure out how to taper grind a homemade handsaw I’ve been thinking of trying to scrape, in varying thicknesses, an old saw to see how it would work. Spring steel won’t be as easy and I’ll need to figure out what kind of flat surface would work.

Could this not be done with a drum sander? Before the teeth are set. Send it through on a sled with a backstop. Double the slope of the sled for the second side. How you make the slope on the sled? Double side tape the appropriate spacer - veneer/card etc under the sled. Double it for the second side. Maybe.

Originally Posted by mic-d

Could this not be done with a drum sander? Before the teeth are set. Send it through on a sled with a backstop. Double the slope of the sled for the second side. How you make the slope on the sled? Double side tape the appropriate spacer - veneer/card etc under the sled. Double it for the second side. Maybe.

I tried something like that on a roughly ? 1 1/4 x 3/8 "or 1/4" ? wide strip of mild steel .
I have a table saw that was missing what is called a filler strip of mild steel in the left side of the table. The saw has two mild steel filler strips left and right of the blade and you can remove one or both to run a protractor fence in the slot, if you don't use one or both of the better method of using another fence that screws to the sliding table. They are called the Double mitres. The saw is Wadkin PK.

Anyway the original filler strips were fitted and surface ground down in place so the fit and finish is perfect on a finished saw. Fitting a later one to solve the missing strip means either fitting and getting the whole saw top re ground at a machinist place or making a strip as close as I could to the missing one and reducing it myself. I thought of using my drum sander to take the roughly .8 mm off to get it to size and started feeding the strip through many many many times and it was very slow at removing steel . I swapped new 80grit paper onto both drums and continued on for an hour, measuring along the way.
And then I gave up.
It did a very quick job of leaving a fresh sanded finish to the surface of the mild steel but I was not getting very far with the roughly .8mm removal. Two or three more hours and a few more paper changes would probably have got me there?
I ended up doing the best I could with my angle grinder on the underside of the new strip and left it at that.

Rob

Originally Posted by auscab

I tried something like that on a roughly ? 1 1/4 x 3/8 "or 1/4" ? wide strip of mild steel .
I have a table saw that was missing what is called a filler strip of mild steel in the left side of the table. The saw has two mild steel filler strips left and right of the blade and you can remove one or both to run a protractor fence in the slot, if you don't use one or both of the better method of using another fence that screws to the sliding table. They are called the Double mitres. The saw is Wadkin PK.

Anyway the original filler strips were fitted and surface ground down in place so the fit and finish is perfect on a finished saw. Fitting a later one to solve the missing strip means either fitting and getting the whole saw top re ground at a machinist place or making a strip as close as I could to the missing one and reducing it myself. I thought of using my drum sander to take the roughly .8 mm off to get it to size and started feeding the strip through many many many times and it was very slow at removing steel . I swapped new 80grit paper onto both drums and continued on for an hour, measuring along the way.
And then I gave up.
It did a very quick job of leaving a fresh sanded finish to the surface of the mild steel but I was not getting very far with the roughly .8mm removal. Two or three more hours and a few more paper changes would probably have got me there?
I ended up doing the best I could with my angle grinder on the underside of the new strip and left it at that.

Rob

I guess that metal is not wood

metal is a funny thing. Wood, you can always figure out how to work with normal tools, even if it may involve strange things like modifying the apex of an iron to deal with silica.

metal, it works easy, and then the next thing you get that seems similar, progress would be measured in 100 times as many units of time.


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I did two planes by the end of friday - neither took that long, but the one on the left took at least 10 times as many sharpenings of the scraper tip and they needed to be brisk because of how much the cast was damaging the transition from face to flat on the scraper insert. I think it's carbon steel, but it could be HSS.

it was enough of a burden that I did most of the work in almost random directions (going across prior scrapings was just destroying the edge) and finished up almost in a low class "flow" that looks like water running up each end of the plane toward the mouth and then turning to flow out the side where the mouth is.

Seems like carbide would've been a better idea. never needed on the one on the right - would make the work on the plane on the left a lot easier.

I thought I might've kept a "DFM" toolworks 10V iron here that wasn't that great at stock hardness, and i rehardened to 64. the 64 isn't a hard hardness to find all over the place, but maybe the carbide array will be hard enough that it fares better on hard cast without resorting to looking around to find something carbide that i could braze to a shop made tool.

Most of the carbide scraper inserts of any size are about fifty bucks. I'm trying to reform my ways of wanting to try everything and then moving on to the next hobby.

actually, if you look at the front of the 4 1/2, this is the marples plane that was twisted and is super hard - you can see the very left area is untouched. Unless I get carbide, I'm not scraping the rest of the sole to get that out. Fortunately, the thing was like the other - filed and partially lapped to be functional so the scraping was a lot less than it would've been from scratch.

That plane also has the stupid lever cap front edge that's too fat to fit in the screw slot - so you have to go searching for something to separate the chipbreaker from the iron.

For most of my 17 years woodworking, I've used the lever cap to tension the cap iron screw - of course it has never resulted in any damage. I don't care at all for planes where the lever cap leading edge doesn't fit in the screw. The lever cap is, I'd go so far to say, a better tool on a stanley to loosen and tighten the screw than is some short length fat blade screwdriver where grip is less. there are types made just for planes, but not really a fan of them (I've got the LN one, it was a gift - it's pretty).

I've purchased planes where the lever cap was being used as a tool to do something untoward - perhaps loosen a lever cap and iron that were rusted due to inattention. Never checked to see if stanley said anything about using the lever cap on the screw, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. never looked because I'm not going to stop doing it.

China does have something for me - 1 inch square carbide machine inserts with decent thickness for $1 each. I've ordered those and will actually use the induction forge for something it's intended to do - braze inserts to tool arms. Except the tool arm will just be a piece of flat stock that I already have on hand waiting for a purpose in life.

$10 for 10 of them including shipping, so if they aren't useful, not as dumb as buying a $55 insert for a scraper I don't have, or a $100 version of the scraper with the insert and then using it once.

You will go better with carbide. It will still require regular honing especially on the hard soles. Bluntness creeps up on you, much like it happens with turning tools. You push harder and harder and then you rehone and wonder why you didn't do it sooner. You will need to be able to hone the edge to a mirror finish and the face should be highly finished too - should come that way. If you don't consolidate the facets to a high polish the edge will dull quickly because the brittle sharks teeth will break off quickly.

I just tested the blade that came in the anderson scraper - it's 68 hardness, but the scale from heat treatment is still on it, so that may be a bit high.

it definitely works better and cleaner with fewer burrs digging up a plane sole if the face and bevel are honed.

I believe the blades that I have are HSS- it'll be interesting to see how they compare. Luckily, I've got a gaggle of powered diamond and CBN stuff for the making of chisels. None of it is legitimate tool room stuff, but rotary discs in various levels of polish and then more static diamond honing stuff than anyone should have, so grinding and tooling won't be a problem.

Thanks for the tips. I've been considering whether or not it's worth polishing the face on the HSS and in the end, I think the fact that the surface finish is much finer and there won't be scratches is a yes.

I put a 6 in the vise over lunch, and it was never really fully lapped, but I did lap it (and it didn't need much - late thick sided 6 with rubber adjuster wheel - a surprisingly good and accurate plane from the factory). it had a slight bit of twist, but in reality, it's probably a thousandth. my other 6 that I lapped more carefully will be next, and then I will tart up a couple of old norris planes with cast soles (both #13s - one smoother and one uncommon panel plane).

I like it. As the stanley 6 sits after half hour of work, it's lightproof to a square edge on a starrett 380 (the one without a bevel). When I'm done, it'll be close to that when the thing is rolled up on its edge and backlit. Very pleasant and intuitive.

(I gather HSS is a little more tolerant of a less than perfect edge since it has far better lateral toughness - it worked pretty well just zipped off on a worn out 150 grit belt. but it works more smoothly if honed. i'm honing it only once noticeably dull and need to adjust to making the honing some part of the work rhythm so it doesn't get there - there being to "dull enough to notice")

The edge on HPF's bit has a curve. So a curve works ? And does the amount of curve matter? My carbide bits have a greater curve than that below I think? They are Ex thicknesser blades. The square knicker blades may be straight edged, Ill have to check.

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Rob