Stupid!

Being in a hurry, not clamping down stuff. While cleaning out a joint, my chisel slipped right into my thumb. The chisel was sharp....

Stupid! The damage isn't too bad, just a fleshwound. But this easilly takes a week to cure.

Routers!

This is why I hate routers!

I wanted to make a nice detail on the corner of the styles. A quarter round cutout with a round nose bit. One moment of not being attentive and the damage is huge. It happened in a split second. Luckilly this piece is long enough to cut off the damage. But there is more damage in the other pieces with torn splinters from the edges.

Sigh, I really need a few hollows and rounds. Routers are horrible, dangerous, loud and dirty.

Windows

It's time to put all else aside and start a new woodworking project. The shed in the garden needs some new windows. The current ones are mostly a shell of paint with a little bit of crumbly wood inside. These are the ones to be replaced.

They don't look too bad in a picture, but trust me, they are crap.

Now, I almost know nothing about outdoor woodworking and how to protect it from the environment. So I asked around on woodworking.nl and I browsed around in the library. This little book from a consumers organisation, published in 1994, is actually quite good and detailed. Especially important, it has local information, about how things like this are made in our country with currently available materials.

So I got myself some prefabricated window stock. This is almost all made from Meranti, a kind of wood I haven't worked with before. It should be more wheater resitant then pine, which was used mostly in the past, but it gets painted anyway.

Meranti is sold in standard sizes for windows with all the rebates allready cut. These sizes are a bit too bulky for the walls of a shed like this. My walls are only 10 cm thick, while the walls from a normal house are more like 30 cm. I also want to change the looks of the window a bit, letting them deeper into the wall, so it doesn't have the same "flat" look as the old ones. This means that I have to change the standard sizes.

A bit of work for the tablesaw.

Here I have been cutting the sloping deck of the lower window sill. My saw doesn't reach far enough, so I had to remove the rest with a chisel and clean up with a plane.

Meranti is weird stuff. Very soft and light weight. Splintery and loves to tear out. With the famous chipbreaker technique it is no problem to plane though. You must handle the wood carefully, because it dents easilly.

The importance of a flat plane sole

The sole of a hand plane needs to be flat. There are three reasons for this.

To be able to create a flat wooden surface, the sole needs to be flat. The skill of the user plays a part in this too of course, but it is difficult to create a straight edge with a concave jointer for example.

To be able to set the plane to a fine shaving, the sole needs to be flat too. This is particularly obvious in a wooden plane, which tends to develop a bump in the sole behind the mouth. This lifts the edge up from the wood and you need to adjust the blade deeper to get a cut. When the plane only wants to take thick shavings or nothing at all, this is something to look at.

The third reason is reducing tearout. The front of the mouth pushes down the shaving before it gets cut, so it can't lever out a splinter ahead of the cutting edge.

How flat does the sole need to be? According to Clifton, the premier British plane maker, the sole needs to be flat within 0.075 mm. Here is how they check this: Clifton sole flatness. For the first two reasons mentioned above this is plenty flat enough. Wooden surfaces rarely need to be flat to machine room specs. But it stands to reason that the third reason asks for more precision. How can the plane sole prevent tearout if it isn't pressing down on the shaving? And 0.075 mm is about three times as much as a thin smooter shaving.

When I first did my tests as mentioned in the previous blog, the mouth size test was very disapointing. There was almost no difference between an open and a very tight mouth of only 0.05 mm. The measured results are in this diagram. The diagram shows shaving thickness versus surface quality. The surface quality is scored from 1 to 3: smooth, rough feeling spots, real tear out.

On close inspection with my straightedges, I finally found a gap between straightedge and plane sole, in front of the mouth. I really had to look just right, have a light behind the straightedge. My straightedge is manufactured according to ISO 874/2, acurate to at least 0.02 mm over 50 cm. Not quite good enough for Clifton, but I double checked the measurement with a beveled edge straight edge which should be more precise. Mine is Russian though, so I can't verify the standard it was made too. Anyway, my measuring equipement exceeds what is generally available in a woodworking shop.

This is the gap I was looking at. Clicking on the image will enlarge it. I couldn't measure it with any of my feeler gauges, it certainly passed the 0.075 mm test easilly. A piece of aluminium foil is about 0.015 mm thick and barely squeezed through the gap between straight edge and plane sole. For the American readers, one thousands of an inch is 0.025 mm.

After filing away the bump behind the mouth and a few swipes on sanding paper on a surface plate, the plane sole was repaired and no light gap could be seen anymore. I repeated the tests.

As can be seen (click on the images to enlarge them) the results are a bit better now, but certainly no where near as good as could be produced with a close set capiron. A mouth size of 0.3 mm is ineffective. In the curly wallnut only the 0.05 mouth improved the performance, and 0.05 is really tight! Maybe you can get better results with the Japanese plane sole configuration, where all pressure on the plane is concentrated just in front of the mouth, but my first efforts in this direction didn't improve anything, so I abandoned further attempts.

Conclusion of this experiment? A plane sole needs to be pretty flat, but to be able to control tearout with the size of the mouth of the plane, the sole needs to be absolutely flat with the front of the mouth pressing down on the wood. And even then the results aren't great. But a tight mouth can still be helpfull in combination with a higher cutting angle or a close set capiron.

Research project

The last couple of weeks I have been very quiet on this blog. There's a reason why. I have been busy doing a bit of research and research is often a secret business. Anyway, first part of the research is now finished and published on Steve Elliott's website. Knowing me, the subject can't be a surprise. Comparison of methods to avoid tearout when using a handplane. The link:

Surface quality for different wood plane settings

While you are overthere, don't forget to browse through Steve's site. It has very interesting stuff. He has a second one: Bladetest

He discovered and described how the edge wears in a handplane, and that it is different from edges in powertools who have been researched a lot. That is quite a feat!

An article in Popular Woodworking

Spring 2012 saw the Internet revival of the chipbreaker. When the video from professors Kato and Kawai were made available again, this time with an English translation, through the hard work and perseverance from Bill Tindall, it suddenly clicked for a lot of hand plane users. The chipbreaker, whos function was not very well known for everyone, was rediscovered. Its ability to prevent and repair tear-out in the surface of the wood can be seen very clearly in the Japanese video.

At that time I was experimenting with the chipbreaker, but to be honest, I wasn't very succesfull. I remember when Bill asked on woodcentral how far we had our chipbreakers positioned from the edge. That was the first time I ever really thought about this and I meassured a distance of 0.4mm. I certainly could prevent the worst kinds of tear-out with his setting but it was far from perfect. A little later Bill posted a link to the video and everything became suddenly very clear. I was still too far away from the edge.

It was an exciting time. Lots of people suddenly made public confessions about how perfectly allright the chipbreaker is. And then the question came up, why isn't this published in the leading woodworking magazines? Bill contacted me last summer and with a small group of people we sketched out some ideas. I wrote a first draft for an article and made pictures. Wilbur Pan also joined the fray and it was a lot of fun to cooperate, all over the Internet of course, because we live on different continents. Together with Wilbur I wrote the final version of the article, and Wilbur knows a few people at the Popular Woodworking staff which is always helpfull of course. And now, al the work comes to fruition, and the article is published in this months Popular Woodworking magazine. I'm proud and happy.

Many thanks to everyone involved. The staff from Popular Woodworking in the first place for making this possible. Bill Tindall for his perseverance. Ellis Walentine for his behind the scene work, and of course Wilbur Pan for the wonderfull cooperation.

Here are some links. First the Internet presentation of the article.

The video can be viewed from Steve Elliott's website: Review of capiron video.

And a blogentry with instructional video's I made back in 2012: How to use the capiron.

BTW, I am doing a bit of research at the moment and hope to have a first article available this weekend. Of course I will  announce it overhere.

18th century?

Among a bunch of old wooden planes I spotted the tell tale signs of 18th century Dutch moulding planes. The typical decorative gouge and chisel cuts on the front of the planes are quite short on the old ones and a lot longer on the 19th century planes. These planes are otherwise also old fashioned. The cutout in front of the blade on top of the plane is very deep and well defined. The later ones are usually quite mellow. The planes are made from beech which is exactly radial, also a sign of the better quality back in the days. And last but not least, the irons are thin, only 3mm near the cutting edge. Later ones are 4 to 4.5 mm thick.

But, I can't be sure because there is no makers mark. The only mark is PDO, which looks more like an owners mark to me. The mark doesn't look very old either.

If someone knows more about PDO, feel free to add a comment.