Thread: Well trod path - Kanna compared to Bailey..

Martin, there are a few Japanese plane enthusiasts on the Forum, but I'm not one of them, I'm afraid. I've had my work cut out learning the ways of European style planes, which means mostly Baileys with a few block planes thrown in, and so Japanese planes remain an almost complete mystery to me.

I have always wondered how difficult it is to set the 'loose' chipbreaker on these planes - getting it all in position with an even, precise setback of the chipbreaker seems like it would take quite a bit of practice to master. Having the CB act as a wedge as well seems like a good idea (for masochists!) doubling the pain of getting everything set correctly.

Viva the fixed chipbreaker & screw-adjusted lever-cap, I say....

Cheers

Hi Ian

Cannot say I have have handle on setting the chipbreaker depth, masters may have better technique. As mentioned I marked a line on the blade to set the position. as I couldn't see the blade tip down the throat. Maybe in the future I use depth gauge or double square- (now that I thought of that idea).

Interest for me is exploring lower pitch blades, (without ponying up for veritas custom). The Japanese planes are pitched use they bruise soft timbers, leaving exceptionally shiny/ translucent finish. Lower pitch blades should be "easier" to push as well. The testing thats done to date suggests that the chipbreaker seems remain able to control tearout when set correctly (tight and steep) on lower pitch blade as well as it does on 45 degrees and may add the two plus's mentioned.

Intending to experiment further on and off and maybe at some point build/modify a custom frog to suit- if I can see a plus, that justifies the effort.
Have access to a mill and bandsaws - but no lathe.
And I guess I would need to acquire on of these - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/174824052266
(or be crude and cut off a wedge from the base of a frog)

Scratching a mild itch from back in the days when I read everything about how to optimise hand planes..

You set the chipbreaker by driving it close and then observing the shaving while taping it to final set. As you get it where it should be, the shaving straightens. the kawai video guys made a separate paper for planes that didn't get translated until much later. They referred to finding the set this way and seeing when the shaving shortens. they measured the length - you don't have to- when the shaving straightens, it actually ends up shorter than the work piece.

When you find a good set like that, make a pair of marks - one at the top of the chipbreaker onto the iron and another one arbitrarily above - maybe a 16th or so. Just scribe it with a metal scribe or something. you can set to the first mark later and have a good idea by eye how close you're getting to the second.

As you sharpen length off of the iron, you might need to do this from time to time.

Use of the chipbreaker is common in japan - if you see a guy following a machine planer and planing an architectural beam, the shaving is coming straight up out of the plane. it's not really possible to do the job nearly as well or efficiently without the chipbreaker.

Why it isn't taught more by japan tool gurus to westerners says more about the guru - not many are doing much work vs. pulling in students. There's one in the US who claims to have "self apprenticed" but the way he words it isn't as clear as it should be.

If someone teaching hand tools hasn't gone through a phase where they built considerable board footages of things entirely by hand, they'll have incomplete knowledge. it's a lot less surprising to see a guy in a blue jumpsuit who is just going and putting his time in at work doing things in a way that's a lot more legitimate - the guy is doing actual work and it's not hard to see what gets it done faster and cleaner.

Ah, thats why Kanna prefer the laminated blades - provides a soft spot on the base marking the blades. .

David's advice on setting the chip breaker by the shaving produced makes good sense, and I'm sure it would become second nature with practice. I'd use a mark on the blade to show me the approximate setting, but the final setting would still be a matter of trial & error for me because I work with a very wide variety of woods and I've found over & over that optimum setback for one wood will simply not work for another. (I generally have two smoothing planes on the go when working 'difficult' woods, one with a CB setback that is a compromise, "all-round" setting for initial smoothing & another with everything optimised for that particular wood).

Something to be aware of in your search for the optimum bed angle is that low cutting-angles may do a superb job on softwoods (or softer hardwoods for that matter), but often cause more tear-out on wild-grained hardwoods (you can easily demonstrate this using a BU plane with high & low sharpening bevels). You may or may not be able to compensate by careful setting of the CB on a 35* BD plane; with some of our more ornery woods it's often easier for me to give up planing even with my "best" smoother at a certain point & reach for the scraper...

You also need to be more watchful of the clearance angle on a low-pitched BD plane - for hand-sharpeners like me it's all too easy to let the secondary bevel angle sneak up as I touch up between regrinds, to the point where there is insufficient clearance. Your plane will polish the wood alright, but it won't make shavings...

Cheers,

dirty little secret - one of my motives for figuring out the chipbreaker was to harness the bright finish from a japanese plane without tearout. if you don't have perfect wood, a single iron japanese plane will make most of the wood so good that even a pinhead defect somewhere will look terrible.

it wasn't to be - the chipbreaker and the iron aren't connected, so really fine adjustment is not to be.

However, I could not find the blue denim jumpsuit guy in white gloves I mentioned earlier because the video is in japanese.

to do the penultimate finish work even with the willy wonka moving chipbreaker that doesn't hold its set when you change depth is really practical. you set the cap iron one time, you plane a whole lot really well and then you take it apart when you resharpen and wash and repeat.

Raffo has one of my japanese smoothers - I think it might be one that I trimmed the wear away in the front on a stamped dai (inomoto or someone). not kosher in terms of looks, but you can actually see the chipbreaker.

When I got enough stamina or better neural development to use english planes almost indefinitely dimensioning (left and right handed, I guess) that was the end of it quickly.

Totally by chance when screwing around with the unicorn method, I buffed the bevel of an iron and the resulting burnished effect on a planed surface was at least as bright as any japanese plane I've ever used. I guess that makes it a sneaky trick, but if dripping wet brightness is wanted on a surface, it does the trick.

Hi Ian

a 35 degree bevel down plane is indeed an ambitious goal- imagine the the toughness of the steel that needed to maintain a good edge with 23 degree bevel and 12 degree clearance angle.

Was thinking a 40 degree or so plane might save some work in pushing the plane around, if tearout performance remains adequate.

I also use a two plane process with one super optimal (a small number 2). Unfortunately experience suggests if the number 2 does resolve tearout my scraper skills will not do much better. Drag out the rat tailed sander at this point but that is a total powerhouse.

not the same video, but same demonstration.

this would be risk fodder without the cap iron set.

??????????#short #shorts #kanna#??? - YouTube

With it, it is routine feel work, just like it is with western planes.

Have a look at the shavings hanging over the sawhorse in this video:
Japanese woodworking - Hand Planing Beams to Finish them - YouTube

Same thing - they've been affected by the chipbreaker.

It'd be a big bummer to plane something like one of these beams and then get unexpected tearout in the center just as you thought you were done.

and one more
???????????? #05????????????Carpenter's work : Plane of beam and blade sharpening - YouTube

What's interesting is kato and kawai made a separate paper about setting the chipbreaker. i don't think the translation is great or maybe their paper was kind of vague because they couldn't give specific instructions aside from watching the shaving to see when it shortens.

But it appears at least in japan that such a paper in the early 1980s or so was making something public, not bringing something back.

the long paper and the video are intended as research for a planing machine, but everyone remembers the video and almost everyone takes from it that they should make a hand plane with an 80 degree chipbreaker and a jig to set it at 8 thousandths of an inch. which doesn't work very well in hand planing unless you only ever take one shaving thickness.

translating comments on videos leads to apparent folk lore that the chipbreaker was invented by blacksmiths to help when there was a crisis of too few shokunin and apprentices who said they could not match their masters.

Nobody seems to have a date.

I'd imagine someone in Japan received a dutch or a french plane that had a second iron (the early ones were also two separate irons not attached together, just one laid on the other).

At least we're not the only ones with weird folklore that can't just address economic reality - someone invents the chipbreaker. In an era when hand work was done for rough and middle work, you'd go out of business if you couldn't compete.

I'm sure blacksmiths in the US weren't fond of making chipbreakers by the late 1700s given that forced slotting of the plane iron and then making a second laminated iron at the time, one that had to have a hole drilled and a screw made when the use and make of such things wasn't common.

Here's David's plane. Testing on pieces of pine and applewood. You can see enough through the throat to set the chipbreaker and the successive approximation David mentioned should you really close for thin shavings. My own 50mm kanna is sitting on the side, a $30 purchase, it works.

I wasn't blown by David's plane, it needs a fresh sharpening, but I haven't got around to do it.

I'm not a user of Japanese planes, but I was able to set these two up well enough to not get tear out and get a bright surface on these two woods. They're fiddly planes, awkward to pull on my bench, my fingers get in the way and can be pinched if I didn't get them out of the way.

Regarding those videos, those shavings are not hard to get on certain kinds of pines. I don't know about harder more porous woods like oak, I don't get shavings that look like that, is it possible?

20231120_220530.jpg20231120_222231.jpg

if you had a giant otherwise near flat beam of cherry, you'd get similar shavings.

https://i.imgur.com/jr9O8ZI.jpg

not the same planing or the same type of plane even, but on long wood that's nearing completion, you do get big long continuous shavings. Once they're continuous left to right, end to end, like anything else, the whole thing is complete, or at least ready for finer planing.

There's a back story to the plane raffo has - I removed part of the wear - it wasn't made in a way that would allow the cap iron all the way down, but a lot of the dais in planes can be made with faults (pin too close to allow the cap iron at all, for example) and you have to address them.

I was set to get some experimentation with this plane just for sport on a legitimate project and it's got some kind of boutique blue steel that isn't that great to sharpen and it's really not that great in general. I planed a little bit with it, it chipped, I spent about 8 minutes of hand gnashing time getting it just right, and then it chipped again, I did the same thing, and I went back to planing and in another minute or two, it was splitting shavings.

if you have a nick on a western plane iron, you're in for about 3 minutes of grinding and then rehoning total. if you're going to "do it the right way" with a japanese plane and hand grind the bevel to get a nick out and then rehone, then it's 6 or 10 minutes every time.

it probably still had some nicking in it and who knows what level the fit was after sitting on the shelf for some fraction of a decade.

There are definitely adherents, but if you're working hardwood and doing it completely by hand, the nuisance of the nicking is a deal breaker. I have no interest in power grinding one, either - it's just a stack of heat generating wrought iron and would still be a pain.

Ok definitely have never seen those kind of shaving coming off Australian Timbers. The long shavings look kind of fun and the operates do not seem to pulling hard on their planes..

Did some further tweaking of the Kanna to get it working on hardwoods. The plane would not cut well hardwoods without flatten the sole - the Kanna seems to be sensitive to imperfections particularly when it is pulled hard . Had to dig up my flatting tile (from outside as plane flatting is messy and clean off the cobwebs).
Plane a couple of samples of hardwood that are are tearout prone The Kanna did a crediable job, even with the lower pitched blade.

Will look though my various parts and see if I cobble up a number 4 with short enough blade to suit dropping the pitch of the frog...(ie the blade will not collide - lateral will be an issue as well)

I'm nowhere an expert on these planes, but the Japanese don't lap these planes to set them up. They scrape them so that there are either two or three points of contact between the sole and the work.

Screenshot_20231126-100445_YouTube.jpgScreenshot_20231126-100420_YouTube.jpg

Hi Raffo,

Pretty sure it lap then scrape the concave section. Have not as yet tried the concave scraping step.

Have a bad habit of checking suggested steps- if I do not try before doing the I will never be sure what the 'suggested" step achieved.