Aussie Woodwork Forum Decides Which Handplanes are the Best!

[outback]

Barry, I'll drop those planes back, as soon as I'm finished with them.

[Barry_White]

Well I only wish that Mr White would share some of his pattern making knowledge with us.

Perhaps a few photos on the basics Barry?

Where does one start on the basics of Patternmaking.

Well back when I was making patterns the Kodak Box Brownie was the camera of the day and I couldn't afford one so there is no pictures of the basics but Issue 42 of the Australian Wood Review on page 53 has an excellent article on what patternmaking is about. It also has some excellent pictures of some patterns.

http://www.woodreview.com.au/backiss...s/issue42.html

As the article says that the most popular timbers used for patterns were straight grained stable North American timbers such as yellow pine and sugar pine as well as jelutong.

These were beautiful timbers to work with very fine grain and came in planks 600mm wide and 50mm thick and 6 metres long and we used to get a delivery of timber every fortnight.

My patternmaking involved making all sorts of patterns including Ford gearbox and diff housings, huge transmission gear boxes for the electricity commission, patterns for the spigot and socket ends for concrete pipes up to 8 feet in dia. as well as all sorts of small patterns for and including gears and pulleys etc.

[Barry_White]

Barry, I'll drop those planes back, as soon as I'm finished with them.

The sooner the better Outback

[craigb]

Yes I know the article you refer to Baz. It was a good read too and was the reason I thought to draw you out about your skill.

It amazes me that before the days of CNC all that precision industrial stuff was made from patterns in wood produced by blokes like yourself.

It certainly puts my poor woodworking efforts to shame.

Perhaps you have a chuckle to yourself now and then over the bollocks we go on with on this board. :eek:

Cheers
Craig

[Barry_White]

Perhaps you have a chuckle to yourself now and then over the bollocks we go on with on this board. :eek:

Cheers
Craig

On occaision I do but I also admire the skills of everyone on this bulletin board and some of the beautiful work created by them and many only just starting out and I have learnt many things myself by belonging to the forum.

Patternmaking as a trade is as you say is getting passed by, by technology and CNC machines, but as a trade it teaches so many different skills such as woodturning, carving, joinery, finishing, modelmaking, metalworking and draughting. Back when I started because of the lack of power tools we learnt to use all the hand tools as well as how to care for them.

The thing that really amuses me is the talk about sharpening and we had to learn how to sharpen with just a six inch grinder and an oilstone and to sharpen HSS drill bits by eye. No fancy jigs or diamond stones or whet stones in those days.

[bitingmidge]

Bazza,

I am curious about the lack of planes now.

As I recall I have a #4 because I wasn't strong enough to push a 5 1/2 through green hardwood given that our blades were not quite as sharp as yours , although every chippie on the job had a 5 1/2 and not much else. I'm talking about framing/fixout carpenters here.

Occasionally you'd see a 6 or 7, but I'm guessing they were all relatively expensive, certainly I didn't know any "better" and by and large was perfectly happy with my one little plane.

Joiners or shopfitters certainly had a better selection, along with a need to flatten longer pieces when fitting fine doors etc. I don't think anyone actually thought about it let alone got excited?

On reflection the work I did was small in scale, with rarely a straight bit more than 300 long (spars excepted) and I would have thought pattern making was similar, and that you would rarely have a need for a larger plane, but a block plane might have been useful?

My uncle was a patternmaker, and I don't think I have ever seen a more disparate and "under kept" bunch of tools in my life... he did have a selection of moulding planes though.

I'm not looking for debate, just curious.

Cheers,

P

[Barry_White]

Bazza,

I am curious about the lack of planes now.

As I recall I have a #4 because I wasn't strong enough to push a 5 1/2 through green hardwood given that our blades were not quite as sharp as yours , although every chippie on the job had a 5 1/2 and not much else. I'm talking about framing/fixout carpenters here.

Biting
Interesting enough I don't think a No. 7 was any harder to push than a No. 4 but the No. 7 gave a much flatter surface but patterns were never made from hardwood. We used mainly yellow pine and sugar pine and these were beautiful timbers to work with and never had cranky grain.

Occasionally you'd see a 6 or 7, but I'm guessing they were all relatively expensive, certainly I didn't know any "better" and by and large was perfectly happy with my one little plane.

Every patternmaker I knew owned a No. 7 Plane. I can't remember what they cost back then but I know all I got in tool allowance was 4 shillings a week. (40 cents). About the only place to buy tools in Sydney at the time was Pauls in George Street.

Joiners or shopfitters certainly had a better selection, along with a need to flatten longer pieces when fitting fine doors etc. I don't think anyone actually thought about it let alone got excited?

On reflection the work I did was small in scale, with rarely a straight bit more than 300 long (spars excepted) and I would have thought pattern making was similar, and that you would rarely have a need for a larger plane, but a block plane might have been useful?

Patternmakers certainly did small work where the No. 4 was ideal as well as a block plane. In the pattern shop where I worked we used to do some very big patterns. eg. Transmission gear boxes for Borg Warner and the electricity commission. The sides of these gear boxes would have flat surfaces up to 2400mm x 1200mm and after the timber went through the planing machine all the ripples from the blades had to be removed because the slightest imperfection would show up in the casting.

By the time you made the pattern as well as the core box to create the inside of the casting this could take anything up to six to eight weeks to complete with up to 3 men working on the pattern.

My uncle was a patternmaker, and I don't think I have ever seen a more disparate and "under kept" bunch of tools in my life... he did have a selection of moulding planes though.
P

The article in the AWR comments that patternmakers were better paid than other trades. I never saw any evidence of that. In fact I have never seen any boss play fast and loose with the company till especially where employees were concerned.

So as far as some patternmakers where concerned and probably in other trades you bought as few a tools you get by with and borrowed what you could from the more concientious tradesmen who bought more tools.

As a fact of life is that some people look after their tools better than others. I still have quite a few of my patternmaking tools such as all my paring gouges and chisels and other hand tools. As I mentioned in an earlier post I have lost a few to people who have borrowed them and never returned them. I now have a policy of never lending tools to any one, but in this day and age there is no excuse to borrow tools because by comparison today wages are so high and tools are so cheap

[silentC]

Patternmaking as a trade is as you say is getting passed by, by technology and CNC machines, but as a trade it teaches so many different skills such as woodturning, carving, joinery, finishing, modelmaking, metalworking and draughting. Back when I started because of the lack of power tools we learnt to use all the hand tools as well as how to care for them.

I think this is one of the sad things about progress. I'm sure that the casting shops are glad that patterns can be made to precise dimensions without needing to employ a shop full of tradesmen to get there. All they probably need now is one guy who can program the CNC machines and away you go.

I was talking to a mate the other night. He did his trade in the States as a machinist in the 60's. By the time he owned his own business, CNC was common. They shelled out thousands on CNC lathes and other machines. Most of what he learnt as an apprentice went by the board and he basically became a computer programmer. The lathes had doors that enclosed the entire works, so all the operator did was install the cutter and chuck the stock, then they closed the door and pushed a button.

I suppose that from a commercial and safety point of view, keeping at an arm's length from the coal face is probably a good thing. It's just a shame that so much skill and knowledge is becoming irrelevant outside the hobbyist world.

[Barry_White]

I suppose that from a commercial and safety point of view, keeping at an arm's length from the coal face is probably a good thing. It's just a shame that so much skill and knowledge is becoming irrelevant outside the hobbyist world.

Silent
Another upside of technology and with computers and the internet without it this Forum wouldn't be around and all the people that are on it would not be able to feed off one another to each ones benefit.

When you add it all up there is hundreds of years of skills being brought together in one place and you only have to read some of the comments of members on how they have learnt how to do things instead of floundering around in the dark.

[bitingmidge]

I think you are both right Silent and Bazz (that way I get suck-up points from both! )

Even at the front end, the "craft" has disappeared from the drafting process and with it the thought process that was once used to communicate, which after all is what a drawing is supposed to do!

Bob Willson's box plan is an example of how a CAD draftsman is removed from the process, the machine drawing could easily communicate to another machine - it was good enough for that, but the information required for a human to build the thing took almost as long to interpolate as drawing the thing properly would have in the first place .

On the other hand as Bazz observed, I am one of many who has been able to fill in a lot of the gaps from my "book learnin' " through sucking up other's experience on the WWW.

For instance, being self taught in matters of the trades, before I found scary sharp a few years ago, I was sharpening like a proper tradesman, on concrete with a bit of a finish off with an oil stone Of course then I didn't wince as I cranked the plane through a great dollop of epoxy either..

Cheers,

P

[Barry_White]

Even at the front end, the "craft" has disappeared from the drafting process and with it the thought process that was once used to communicate, which after all is what a drawing is supposed to do!

P

This is so true. My last job before I retired was with a shed manufacturer and the Manager who took over from me was a draughtsman by trade and learnt his trade on the drawing board before Cad programs. He is a true craftsman and pedantic with his drawings which he carried over into Cad.

The other draughtsmen that were there learnt their trade mainly on computer although at tafe they do do some board work they are basically computer people.

The manager drafty was constantly frustrated with some of the poor drawings produced by these other draftys.

I don't believe their is any subtitution for learning any trade from a practical standpoint other than using the hand tools of that trade. Book learning just doesn't cut it.

[silentC]

Even in the wonderful world of computer programming, which has been around on a large scale now for at least 30 years, technology has replaced skills that were once held in high esteem and replaced them with computer-corrected sloppiness.

My very first bit of programming was done on a sheet of paper on which you encoded the machine instructions. This sheet (or sheets) of paper was then given to a data entry operator who would key them in on the one and only terminal screen and your program would then be compiled and executed. If it failed, you had to fix the problem on paper and go through the process again. This was time consuming and frustrating for all involved but you became pretty proficient at 'desk checking' your code.

Now, you have automatic syntax checkers, step through debugging, code optimisers. This allows any idiot to write reasonably good functional code. Take the sytax checker away and they would be stuffed. This leads to an attitude of sloppiness because you rely on the machine to fix your stuff-ups for you. It means that the output from a commercial point of view is better and cheaper. What it breeds though is a generation of programmers who haven't got a clue how or why their code works, it just does.

Take them outside the square and they are stuffed.

[LineLefty]

Your right Silent. We had get a programmer write us a program to extract jpegs from avi files, attach GPS info and name and place them in a file structure. We were talking about 2-3terabytes of avi files so each line of code had to be repeated millions of times. The slightest bit of redunant code added an enourmous amount of processing time.

Two younger programmers were able to get some code to work but it took ages until we got a more 'experienced' guy to cut the lines of code down by about 50% which reduced processing time accordingly.

I guess the younger guys relied heavily on autocoding features....or were just crap. And yes, thats a LOT of jpegs.