Thread: Thin shavings

the contest / measured record is apparently about 1/4th this thickness in yellow cedar. I was already aware that wood is critical for this and in the US at least, alaskan yellow cedar is the choice.

Beyond that, it would have to be an ideal piece of it. I'm not going to purchase something like that, though.

but I'm fairly sure I could match the record if there was something at stake, and probably others could, too. A big challenge in chasing it would be getting a micrometer accurate enough without spending a ton of money. I don't think that's doable, nor would be the idea of traveling just to do it and maybe with a western iron, it would be a bit hard to do freehand.

I suppose if you're the competitive type, making ultra-thin shavings would be a fun way to spend your time. I consider being able to take 1-1.5 thou on a regular basis a reasonable test of blade & plane & my sharpening technique, but as you say, it depends entirely on the wood as to how thin you can go. With many of our coarse hardwoods, shavings just won't hold together below around 2 thou, so it would be an exercise in frustration trying to make continuous, full, sub-thou shavings from them, but someone with enough persistence & skill could probably do it & prove my inadequacy.

Also, as you say, the need to make super fine shavings in 'normal' work is debatable. I like to get the job done reasonably efficiently, so it's handy to be able to take thicker shavings where possible, & what the cap-iron was invented for. But I just cannot do that with some of our woods, it's either take tediously fine shavings or finish with scraping, or both. Whatever gets the surface I'm after with the least faffing is all good to me....

Cheers,

I'd say it's pretty much a definite in that nowhere in the last 400 years of woodwork will you find evidence recorded of a contest to see who could create the thinnest shaving. Which, pretty much spells out that it's not important in any way to any woodworking field ever, either as a professional or a hobbyist. But if there's those that love that stuff... more power to them. In the end, it doesn't matter if it doesn't serve a practical purpose, it's about enjoying what you do.

This reminds me of a spoof April 1st advertisement from Veritas where they were advertising a vacuum powered shaving extractor attachment for hand planes. The premise being that waaaay too much attention was being paid to how thin and pretty the shaving was instead of how the planed surface appeared; so the vacuum removed the waste from view and stopped distracting the user.

Originally Posted by Chief Tiff

This reminds me of a spoof April 1st advertisement from Veritas where they were advertising a vacuum powered shaving extractor attachment for hand planes. The premise being that waaaay too much attention was being paid to how thin and pretty the shaving was instead of how the planed surface appeared; so the vacuum removed the waste from view and stopped distracting the user.

I don't think that was their premise, but rather that it makes no sense to attempt to add dust collection to hand tools. Which is what makes it dippy.

In terms of shavings (this isn't a shot at your statement, but rather a counterpoint), the texts before 1900 definitely described the shavings. I haven't seen them talk about tearout, but thin shavings have a lot of information in them. Not like 3 ten thousandths thin, though they also do, but rather smoother shavings in general. When they are continuous all the way through length and width, they tell you that the surface has no appreciable tearout. If you're taking a 1-2 thousandth shaving and it's breaking apart or has voids in it, you'll probably be in for significant sanding. it's less easy to see that on the surface than it is in the shaving. Same as thin shavings that split - they'll - along with broken apart shavings - rob you of time two different ways. the volume of wood you get to remove (which is a pretty good measure of work done) drops, and then you also get stuck dealing with a surface that needs a lot of sanding.

this kind of sharpness to get 3 ten thousandths really isn't needed to do good finish planing, though. I don't know what is - it depends on the wood. Sometimes a washita will do it and sometimes finer than an 8k waterstone is nice. In really nice mahogany without ribboning, probably less than a washita is needed.

Discontinuous shavings rob you of all kinds of time, though - and also result in uneven thickness removal, which means subsequent shavings can end up battling the same. Deliberate planing probably looks kind of boring, but it can be a lot more efficient.

Certainly we have to look at the wood, too. This is just my personal opinion on results - I'll look at the wood until the planes are nearly done, checking the shavings just to see how well the plane is set. I'll check the try plane to see if the shavings are showing any breaks - they shouldn't be, but in bad wood, sometimes that happens and the tearout will persist until smoothing. Smoothing is two steps - one with the cap iron set and shavings influenced (straightening, whatever), and then one without resetting the cap iron, just reducing depth to very thin shavings, and one or two passes. I'll rely on what the shavings look like at that point to catch tearout that I can't see, but that is a pain if you want to use a single grit of sandpaper. I don't care for too much scraping, as it always threatens flatness and can be seen in a gloss finish.

To see how much it does, plane something flat, scrape only the tearout areas and then scrape the whole thing and then put light finish on it and planing. The depth of scraping around tearout is pretty drastic.

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

I'd say it's pretty much a definite in that nowhere in the last 400 years of woodwork will you find evidence recorded of a contest to see who could create the thinnest shaving. Which, pretty much spells out that it's not important in any way to any woodworking field ever, either as a professional or a hobbyist. But if there's those that love that stuff... more power to them. In the end, it doesn't matter if it doesn't serve a practical purpose, it's about enjoying what you do.

Contests outside of doing work are probably related to marketing stuff or clubs (like kzeroukai). I think competitions like this never happened until industrialization. One of the things that still goes on in the states and england and has for eons now is "plowing bees" or plowing competitions (ploughing in England, I guess) where farmers bring their stuff to a common field and compete in who can do the best job plowing.

It's a pleasant waste of time for me to do it for an hour in the shop - I'll leave it to the folks who will travel, etc, to do that if they want. that's beyond my level of interest.

I kind of view the whole hobby as a pleasant waste of time. It certainly hasn't saved me money to do woodworking (net) or time. the lowest floor of my house would seem a lot bigger if I didn't have hobbies, too. Especially woodworking, guitar making and toolmaking.

There's a charity angle to the competition that is getting done here, apparently. It's not a big thing like a polo match, but the few bucks that are required or requested on the entry sheet are donated to a charity.

The one part that's of importance, though - it's not the case that fine shavings aren't useful in woodworking. Fine shavings are the last part of finish planing. How fine? i don't know, as I've never measured them. It's far faster to two a two step smoothing process with very fine shavings being the last step than it is to sand or do anything else shy of having a very fine wide belt sander. How important that is may have something to do with how miserable one finds sanding. Sanding to me is one of the most mind numbing aggravating dippy things - it's top of the list for least liked things in the shop. I'm sure there are people who find it meditative.

Originally Posted by IanW

I suppose if you're the competitive type, making ultra-thin shavings would be a fun way to spend your time. I consider being able to take 1-1.5 thou on a regular basis a reasonable test of blade & plane & my sharpening technique, but as you say, it depends entirely on the wood as to how thin you can go. With many of our coarse hardwoods, shavings just won't hold together below around 2 thou, so it would be an exercise in frustration trying to make continuous, full, sub-thou shavings from them, but someone with enough persistence & skill could probably do it & prove my inadequacy.

Also, as you say, the need to make super fine shavings in 'normal' work is debatable. I like to get the job done reasonably efficiently, so it's handy to be able to take thicker shavings where possible, & what the cap-iron was invented for. But I just cannot do that with some of our woods, it's either take tediously fine shavings or finish with scraping, or both. Whatever gets the surface I'm after with the least faffing is all good to me....

Cheers,

I think you'd be surprised, save one thing - wood that has a lot of runout in it due to wild grain will definitely be a problem. I'll perhaps see what I can get out of a harder wood today. We don't have much that grows above SG 1 in the US, but central american and brazilian wood is available here for relatively low cost, so something like Gombeira (Coracao de Negro | The Wood Database (Hardwood)).

gombeira doesn't have an official hardness test, but it does have strength and stiffness numbers. I doubt much is harder, including Quebracho that is lauded for its hardness. I wonder if it is based on one seemingly errant test like Buloke, which is referred to based on that test and not other tests that show it softer.

Difference for gombeira is even though it's more dense and stiffer than buloke, it's not hard to find in straight billets. I don't what the tree is like that buloke and other australian woods come from, though. gombeira is a stroke of luck aside from the grain being a little ugly. It's unbelievably stiff and hard, not that expensive, and the tree that it grows from is not small.

Wamara and katalox are also found here - but they aren't mentioned as often as stuff like Gabon or true rosewoods because they aren't that pretty. Katalox is purplish, which I find kind of hard to tolerate visually - quite often not as straight as gombeira in turning stock and more of a pain to finish turn with a skew. Both katalox and gombeira are hard enough that you don't want to get stuck sanding them so even though they're a little slow on the last passes with a skew, it's far better to tough it out.

I have katalox on hand, too - or at least I think I do.

All of these, and quartered macassar ebony also comes to mind - actually reward you for sharpeness and tearout prevention because they're slow to sand. macassar can fracture between grains when quartered, which is always a lot deeper than it looks. I'm sure all are handled industrially with heavy machine sanding.

But finish planing these is really a different bag than just sharpness as some can have silica, too, which leads to a need for edge modification just to be able to finish plane them without splitting shavings immediately and going back to the stones in 20 strokes. When I put together the unicorn article, i found (I think I used V11) no ability to plane 75 feet with an edge in silica laden cocobolo if the edge was just typical two planes meeting at 35 degrees or so. After buffing the apex off of the iron, I stopped at either 300 or 400 feet and the plane was still cutting without splitting shavings and the iron showed no edge damage. A very useful experiment. The issue that killed the first edge wasn't wear, it was deflection around pocks made by silica particles. It takes surprisingly little of it to prevent an iron from entering a cut. The identical thing that causes double edge razor blades to fail while straight razors can be stropped to shave for a year and refreshed with 5 minutes of very light honing on the slowest cutting of stones.

OK, so I couldn't find anything of gombeira that isn't a 3x3 blank or an already turned cylinder.

but I did find kingwood. Kingwood sticks out in my mind as one of the biggest pains to plane because it's brittle between the grains and for some reason, it is extremely resistant to blades entering the cut. if you can get them in the cut, they will ride along OK but any excuse to come out of it and they don't want to go back in.

planing a thick shaving is out of the question. I've found anything that's described as having a blunting effect on the wood database seems to have this property. It must blunt power tooling faster.

Kingwood is far too expensive for anything other than handles and scales and other such things, maybe a step below another nosebleed hardwood here - snakewood. Gombeira is inexpensive, but doesn't look as nice as either of those.

Anyway, I planed this billet with a 6. On the left side of this picture are shavings as you would see if you don't work down to a fine shaving.

https://i.imgur.com/miLnf1V.jpg

Industrially, if kingwood was cheaper, at this point, you'd blitz it through a belt sander - like if making guitar necks or fingerboards? i don't know, I haven't made a fingerboard out of it yet. Just handles.

it doesn't seem like it will plane unless you persist with a few more very thin shavings. It is very contrary.

The shavings on the right are very thin shavings (same plane as the maple, not resharpened, but shouldn't need to be) along with one regular "finish smoothing" shaving.

The regular shaving is 1.3 thousandths. At that, it is already showing some desire to break out on the surface between the late wood bands. what a pain.

First thicker:
https://i.imgur.com/TeEICNr.jpg

the three thin shavings, one of them is full length and looks good edge to edge, so I measured that one so as not to bias the "test". it is .0005". The challenge remains getting the plane to enter the cut and not doing anything bad.
https://i.imgur.com/U74lDUB.jpg

To work through things like this if you are going to use a lot of hand tools and hope to minimize sanding is something you will learn from. Just maybe not what you'd expect. I didn't expect that 13 ten thousandths vs. 5 ten thousandths would make such a drastic difference in surface quality. In order to get to the latter, you do have to work through the former, though.

I doubt you will find many pictures of things viewed through a continuous kingwood shaving. The rings are so close on it that it's hard to ever find a real "flatsawn" side on anything of size. This turning blank is rift, so all of the sides have rings.
https://i.imgur.com/liX096K.jpg

As tedious as it is to plane, it would be tedious to sand - especially with an ROS (which could leave a stray j hook somewhere on the surface), because of its hardness. it's a sensitizer and an eye irritant, but it doesn't really cause problems if you're planing it rather than sanding.

Another one where I think the hardness rating is a bit suspect and probably differs a lot on the face vs. between the rings. 1.2 specific gravity.

the data sheet info for kingwood says the same as gombeira - that it will take a great polish. If you look at the thinner shavings where the tearout is averted, you can see the wonderful bright polish just on the shavings.

if you can turn it cleanly, you can pretty much avoid sanding if you want by riding the bevel of a skew a little. it comes off like it's been coated with glass, just like gombeira and if you can make an edge that holds up well, it won't really have much for anything on it tool mark-wise.

When i buy stuff from brazil, I almost always buy guitar blanks or turning stock. Anything else and you could just about get anything for grain orientation. These woods in the 1.1-1.2SG range will crack given even the slightest excuse. When they are wild grain due to poor sawing or salvaging logs that aren't straight, good luck using them later for anything but a bowl stabilized with some kind of adhesive.

they do plane great when they're wet, but it's a big risk to strip the wax and plane them without completely recoating them, so I don't bother.

I've toyed with a couple of different woods, not having anything that would be ideal for an actual contest. No white pine, no uniform wood of that nature that isn't junk scrap, whereas something ideal would probably be air dried and almost dry.

it's funny how some woods that seem really uniform aren't once you get to micro levels. Beech, for example - seems really uniform. Nope. at half a thousandth, there are very pronounced rings. hard rings and soft wood between them is a no go for really pushing the limits.

Cherry, I thought I probably really thin cherry shaving that would beat the .0003" above. Nope, just slightly thicker than that. I've never seen yellow cedar planed in person, but it must be some kind of spectacular to be as light as it is but not have voids or big differences in density.

the whole exercise did give me an excuse to get two of my favorite planes a little flatter on the sole, which will improve efficiency in regular work. Not enormous amounts, but having a plane before the smoother and a smoother relatively flat to each other cuts a lot of time out of preparing lumber and then finish planing.

I didn't try any japanese planes, and probably don't have the interest to dig any out as most of mine have sat due to neglect and are almost certainly in need of a lateral refit (the irons won't go in due to width).

I tried a guide - no real difference in terminal sharpness vs. careful freehand sharpening.

Originally Posted by D.W.

I've never seen yellow cedar planed in person, but it must be some kind of spectacular to be as light as it is but not have voids or big differences in density.

You never forget Yellow Cedar. I dragged a 4x4 by 5 foot chunk all the way to Australia when I moved here. Only for very special projects. 25 years ago it was a pretty good price, and then all of a sudden it went through the roof. Hate to think what it costs now, if it's still being cut.

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

You never forget Yellow Cedar. I dragged a 4x4 by 5 foot chunk all the way to Australia when I moved here. Only for very special projects. 25 years ago it was a pretty good price, and then all of a sudden it went through the roof. Hate to think what it costs now, if it's still being cut.

There are still bits of it being sold here and there on gilmer or rare woods or other places that literally sell individual pieces of wood in separate listings. I would guess that it's relegated to sort of being a novelty in any clear straight pieces, or perhaps a wood reserved for someone doing repair work where $40 for a piece of wood three feet long, an inch thick and three inches wide isn't a huge deal.

It's a west coast wood - I see listings for knotted siding at around $50 for a five foot length of basically construction lumber 5" wide, and other sites advertising that they will get you clear vertical grain paneling and siding to do an entire building if you want. It wouldn't be for the common man to say the least. Stuff like that probably ends up in boats, the same as teak and wide mahogany that's not found on the ground does. For people who don't care if wood is $50 or $100 a board foot.

There doesn't seem to be any organized retail of it, though. Too bad. It'd be interesting to see how much of an effect it has on thinning shavings further.

Comment about west coast wood maybe should be described. Anything that isn't local in the US and that doesn't have a lot of distributable retail value like curly maple or walnut wood could be findable in the west and never seen in the eastern part of the country. Presumably some of the wood distribution in australia is like that, too.

Curly maple used to be relatively uncommon on the ground, but the musical instrument industry has gone from using it as a one off type of thing for special guitars to wanting it in everything, so it's suddenly available all over the place. People wouldn't get the subtlety of AYC here in any building products outside of a few really wealthy folks at a marina in NYC or something, so I would imagine if you want to see AYC in person, you'd have to go to some boat wood dealer who caters to the wealthy. And perhaps endure some abuse about how they would never sell wood like that to a nobody. Brian Holcombe got a piece of it somewhere, but he lives in a pretty affluent area as far as I can recall - jersey across from NYC.

I made one last go at this before dropping it. Which I've said I'd do, so I probably will make another last go or forget about it at some point and not do it at all, who knows.

In my shop, I do truly have very little good 5/4 stuff that would be a good stand in for what the contest rules are. I didn't realize it until looking through my standard cherry pile last night, but I've got a huge wad of 8/4 lumber and some thicker, and almost nothing 5/4 or thinner. That would become an immediate issue if I had a furniture need (don't at this point).

This is shavings from the best piece of cherry I have. Figured on trying something that works well with razors, which is alternating the last strokes on a soft substrate. I also tried a guide earlier yesterday, but I'm better freehand than with a guide at this point when it really gets down to brass tacks. There are some feel things that are harder to do with a guide quickly.

https://i.imgur.com/7h9XKOD.jpg

That is the result - since the front shaving is the most solid of the group (there is a void in the wood where that pillow shaped hole is, so no such thing as an end to end continuous shaving will occur.

These shavings are so light, though, that I stuck some to the side of the paper towels just by touching. I would guess a couple of fibers grip the shaving and that's enough to hold them up.

https://i.imgur.com/GNSFa0x.jpg

A second picture viewing the paper towel roll through the shaving that was front and center (the thickest one, but also the only one that is otherwise end to end solid and left to right other than for the void).

https://i.imgur.com/7zkoUdq.jpg

That same shaving in the calipers. Darker room with light overhead, so it doesn't look as see through, but it's the same one. It's 2 or and something ten thousandths.

The sharpening procedure to get to this point takes about four minutes. I don't care for four minute sharpening routines, nor the level of hyper contaminant avoidance that is needed to not split a shaving at this thickness. The slightly stray anything that touches the edge would spoil this.