Thread: Some Video's on setting cap irons.

Somehow, Steve Elliot was left off of the credit line for that video. Bill Tindall and Steve Elliot did a significant amount of work with people who don't speak very good english to dig up that video, or we wouldn't have it. It's decent machine proof that the cap iron has an effect, but don't take it too literally.

The best way to learn to use the cap iron is to allow yourself to plane with nothing else for a month. It will take less than a month to figure it out well, first to eliminate tearout, and then after that, to do so in a way that doesn't tax you as a user too much (which is the case when it's set too close).

You shouldn't have to convince too many people that it actually works at this point!! The first video was a very good demonstration of why double iron planes eliminated single iron planes almost entirely until amateurs came to the market and became the primary market for hand tools.

That Japanese footage is great.

So how do I check the chipbreaker angle on my old Stanleys?

Originally Posted by Theodor

That Japanese footage is great.

So how do I check the chipbreaker angle on my old Stanleys?

Use your old stanley planes with the chipbreakers exactly as they came with the plane. If they are rusted or scuffed, you can polish that out, but you should leave the geometry of the cap iron as it is (and with a curved profile the way it does). It's probably the best-designed profile there is.

Here's a very short video how you can easilly set a chipbreaker very close to the edge when you don't manage very well by just looking at it.



I set the edge on a piece of hardwood (maple probably in this case) and pushed the chipbreaker down until it touched the wood. Then I actually measured the distance under a microscope and it was about 0.15 mm. Doing the same on a piece of pine increased the distance to somewhere around 0.3 mm.

However simple this is, I still prefer to look at the reflected light and set it "freehand", because sometimes I set it a little closer, sometimes a little further depending on the wood to be planed. But when your eyesight isn't so great anymore, this is a usefull alternative.

Originally Posted by Theodor

That Japanese footage is great.

So how do I check the chipbreaker angle on my old Stanleys?

By the way, there's a reason not to just set the cap iron on an old plane based on the information in the video. The video information is for the benefit of Marunaka's planing machine, and not for a hand plane. There was a supplement intended to describe how to set the cap iron in hand planes (that isn't in the video), and the advice was to watch the formation of the shaving (as in it begins to straighten out when it's getting worked by the cap iron) instead of setting a specific distance.

Same for the angle of the cap, if you're using a machine, the 80 degree front edge recommendation is not necessarily going to be the best thing on a hand plane. What works is better just determined through use. Until then, don't do anything you can't reverse (e.g., don't hone a big flat on the front of your stanley cap iron).