bendy cap irons

[G S Haydon]

I agree that Custard's plane is a fine one. Having said that if the primary objective is good surfaces and good workflow the video illustrates that experience, practice and understanding are the most important factors.

The only word of caution to anyone reading this thread is that the "new" (as in buy one from the merchants today) Stanley Bailey has in my experience been very poor quality, hollow plastic handles etc. It could be made to work but for £50> it's not a good use of time and money.

 

[D_W]

I agree that Custard's plane is a fine one. Having said that if the primary objective is good surfaces and good workflow the video illustrates that experience, practice and understanding are the most important factors.

The only word of caution to anyone reading this thread is that the "new" (as in buy one from the merchants today) Stanley Bailey has in my experience been very poor quality, hollow plastic handles etc. It could be made to work but for £50> it's not a good use of time and money.

Yeah, bad deal here, too - the new one (12-904). Same price as the old ones in good shape.

I found one a couple of days ago for $20 and ordered it, though. Just curious, personally, but wouldn't suggest the thing could be cheap enough any other way to justify even shipping cost.

They make one even worse, too. Look up the 12-204, it's the same thing except it appears to be as cast with no finish work an any show surfaces.

And the gobs of second line planes where a distance of the iron is suspended with no support, $0 is too high of a price unless one has use for the screws.

 

[G S Haydon]

Yep the 12-904 was a dog! Could be made to work but I could not be bothered, and that's saying something for me!

 

[D_W]

well, that backfired some. the plane that I got is old stock and UK made, and doesn't look to be that poorly made. The lever cap cam is a tight, that's all I can see technically wrong with it.

I'll see this weekend. It's not like I'm going to keep it (plastic handles and such), just more out of curiosity. Probably shouldn't waste my time with it.

 

[Tony Zaffuto]

I doubt there has been a plane made that can't be made to perform, though the quest is always cost/benefits accreued of spending $$$$ on a cheap plane to the point the amount spent exceeds on of the moderm premiums available.

About a half dozen years ago, I took one of the Harbor Freight planes, #3 size, bevel down, that cost around $10 new, American. I had one of my toolmakers make a new A2 blade for it, quarter inch thick, I made a new brass lever cap. My machinist also ground the sole flat, cleaned up the blade bedding, squared the sides to the sole, as well as grinding off "HF" and "Made in ?". Tote and knob stripped easily to reveal a nice, tropical looking wood, that really looked nice with some oil. The sole was bead blasted and then painted mmu favorite color, Clifton green, with the edges of the sole polished bright, like a Clifton. I also replaced parts of the adjuster mechanism with readily available, well made brass parts.

Net ffect was a #3 size plane that was a nice little smoother. It could easily take .0015" shavings all day, tear out free. What was my rolled up costs? I figured maybe about $85.00 of shop time and $5 a $10 of raw materials. Bear in mind, in my manuafacturing plant, I have a complete CNC machine shop (6 machining centers), manual style mabchine shop to support the CNC's as well as my powder metal presses & furnaces. I also have a complete tool making shop and batch heat treating furnace.

Sometime, I can make a video, if anyone wants to let me email it to them, to poet here. Like Charles, I'm very old school and posting pics, etc., does not come to me.

 

[D_W]

I doubt there has been a plane made that can't be made to perform, though the quest is always cost/benefits accreued of spending $$$$ on a cheap plane to the point the amount spent exceeds on of the moderm premiums available.

About a half dozen years ago, I took one of the Harbor Freight planes, #3 size, bevel down, that cost around $10 new, American. I had one of my toolmakers make a new A2 blade for it, quarter inch thick, I made a new brass lever cap. My machinist also ground the sole flat, cleaned up the blade bedding, squared the sides to the sole, as well as grinding off "HF" and "Made in ?". Tote and knob stripped easily to reveal a nice, tropical looking wood, that really looked nice with some oil. The sole was bead blasted and then painted mmu favorite color, Clifton green, with the edges of the sole polished bright, like a Clifton. I also replaced parts of the adjuster mechanism with readily available, well made brass parts.

Net ffect was a #3 size plane that was a nice little smoother. It could easily take .0015" shavings all day, tear out free. What was my rolled up costs? I figured maybe about $85.00 of shop time and $5 a $10 of raw materials. Bear in mind, in my manuafacturing plant, I have a complete CNC machine shop (6 machining centers), manual style mabchine shop to support the CNC's as well as my powder metal presses & furnaces. I also have a complete tool making shop and batch heat treating furnace.

Sometime, I can make a video, if anyone wants to let me email it to them, to poet here. Like Charles, I'm very old school and posting pics, etc., does not come to me.

I remember the brief craze for those HF planes. That's the best turnaround I've heard for one, though - quarter inch, too!!

I'm hoping that this UK 4 takes about 20 minutes to make it work well. The curiosity has more to do with fascination with how good a plane can be just with the iron and cap iron prepared properly, when the rest of the plane is really nothing to write home about (maybe that summarizes the wooden planes I make, too - since someone else made the cap iron and iron!!).

I can't deny that no matter how much I secretly like a little getting something to work well in 20 minutes, there are some subtleties that a beginner wouldn't follow, and though I'm low tooling for these, I'm still using a grinder and a piece of glass shelving that most people wouldn't bother to acquire.

And most of the people getting into this hobby aren't looking to pinch pennies, anyway.

 

[Tony Zaffuto]

Meant 1/8" David! I picked the thing up during the craze just to see how many American dollars could be put into a dirt cheap plane to make it perform. Seems to me, LV or some other mail order company did something similar years ago. Fact is, there is not a whole lot of difference between substandard, then OK and finally exceptional, maybe a spread of the HF plane at their cost, then with another $23-$50 and finally an additional $100 (includes a profit margin of about 25%. Bear in mind, that HF plane was described on US forums as a "gem", and had no chip breaker.

I was in your neighborhood again: hockey game last night and we spent the night (William Pen). Wife & daughter had to shop, naturally, so it was off to Ross Park. I hung out at Home Depot, nearly long enough to have several orange floor walkers follow me around.

 

[D_W]

Meant 1/8" David! I picked the thing up during the craze just to see how many American dollars could be put into a dirt cheap plane to make it perform. Seems to me, LV or some other mail order company did something similar years ago. Fact is, there is not a whole lot of difference between substandard, then OK and finally exceptional, maybe a spread of the HF plane at their cost, then with another $23-$50 and finally an additional $100 (includes a profit margin of about 25%. Bear in mind, that HF plane was described on US forums as a "gem", and had no chip breaker.

I was in your neighborhood again: hockey game last night and we spent the night (William Pen). Wife & daughter had to shop, naturally, so it was off to Ross Park. I hung out at Home Depot, nearly long enough to have several orange floor walkers follow me around.

I feel for you going to that mall. There's nothing cheap there!! I'm between the mall and the hockey stadium more or less.

If you go to that home depot enough, sooner or later you'll see a 6'6" cross dresser in high heels walking around the back or middle of the store. There's a harbor freight right down from me, too.

I can't remember why I didn't get one of those "gems", but probably because I was afraid of putting $40 into a $10 plane only to have a $10 plane!! (in those days, I would've bought a single iron plane).

I tend to think a lot of the opinions formed about "gems" on woodnet and other places are done without too much rigor (as in, if it's $10 and capable at all, folks get ecstatic. But it would get exposed smoothing an ash or maple bench top).

100% agree on the difference between substandard and exceptional being very small. A mechanical engineer friend of mine likes to say "you have to go out of your way to make it 90% good enough when it would be just as easy to make it 100%".

 

[Tony Zaffuto]

I gave the plane away after I got it working-to a handtool newbie, though I didn't tell him it was a HF. I generally stay out of HF.

Your engineer friend is spot on. In the case of HF, you have to wonder what exactly the market is? Earlier this week, I took delivery of a 3d printer, in order to take 3d renderings from Solid Works ( our CAD program) to a3d model. Can do this in metal or plastic, and the technology is amazing, being able to make fully useable items from a drawin in very short order. Just think, taking a Bedrock/Bailey frog and increasing or decreasing it a few degrees: the whole plane world will be turned upside down.

 

[D_W]

Well, I met my match with the 12-904 plane that I bought....met my match isn't really totally true, but I did have to do more than lap it and prepare the iron and cap iron. Defective with a capital D - the adjuster is much thicker than the adjuster slot is wide, so the iron literally is suspended above the frog as the cap iron can't go all the way down on the adjuster.

Reminds me of what my english friend says...how hard would it have been to make the adjuster narrower than the slot? How do you not notice a gap of a tenth of an inch between the frog and iron? It actually isn't too bad of a plane other than that, but it would actually be perfectly fine (despite plastic handles) otherwise. Five minute fix with swiss files, but not something the average person would have on hand.

Strangely enough, with the iron suspended almost a full iron thickness above the frog over the adjuster, the plane actually planed just fine, it just couldn't lateral adjust with anything other than a hammer because the iron was suspended above the end of the lateral adjuster. Felt solid and everything. Just not exactly the ideal third contact point.

With the cap iron filed, I can't really find any fault with the plane in use. Took about 30 minutes to prepare it for use, though. The plastic handles are unsightly but they aren't uncomfortable.

http://s30.postimg.org/6hoeikspd/Surface.jpg

(it's hard to make it out until you look closer, but that is the reflection from the window on a piece of curly maple. It's much clearer viewed by human eye, but camera phones seem averse to picking up reflections and the objects they're on at the same time. You can notice that the definition from the mortar between the blocks is clear. The shaving thickness for that surface was 3 thousandths, and I'd say no lines, but there are a couple of light ones on the wood from a nicked iron).

Strange thing, though, the sheffield iron in this plane isn't really that soft, and I expect that after I clean off my bench, it should work fine.

 

[D_W]

I gave the plane away after I got it working-to a handtool newbie, though I didn't tell him it was a HF. I generally stay out of HF.

Your engineer friend is spot on. In the case of HF, you have to wonder what exactly the market is? Earlier this week, I took delivery of a 3d printer, in order to take 3d renderings from Solid Works ( our CAD program) to a3d model. Can do this in metal or plastic, and the technology is amazing, being able to make fully useable items from a drawin in very short order. Just think, taking a Bedrock/Bailey frog and increasing or decreasing it a few degrees: the whole plane world will be turned upside down.

When those printers first got public popularity, I figured we'd start seeing plastic trinkets manufactured by them, but I don't know if they're there yet.

What kind of definition can the printer give metal objects? A plane casting and frog wouldn't have to be very strong as far as metals go, so it might be an interesting thing to try.

 

[Tony Zaffuto]

I gave the plane away after I got it working-to a handtool newbie, though I didn't tell him it was a HF. I generally stay out of HF.

Your engineer friend is spot on. In the case of HF, you have to wonder what exactly the market is? Earlier this week, I took delivery of a 3d printer, in order to take 3d renderings from Solid Works ( our CAD program) to a3d model. Can do this in metal or plastic, and the technology is amazing, being able to make fully useable items from a drawin in very short order. Just think, taking a Bedrock/Bailey frog and increasing or decreasing it a few degrees: the whole plane world will be turned upside down.

When those printers first got public popularity, I figured we'd start seeing plastic trinkets manufactured by them, but I don't know if they're there yet.

What kind of definition can the printer give metal objects? A plane casting and frog wouldn't have to be very strong as far as metals go, so it might be an interesting thing to try.

Definition/detail is as good as the drawing. I bought the machine for rapid prototyping and design of prodcut to avoid leadtime to build prototype tooling to determine feasibility of design for powder metal process. We can do in hours what once took weeks.

 

[swb58]

Can a thread get further away from hand tools?

 

[Derek Cohen (Perth Oz)]

Can a thread get further away from hand tools?

I agree. I have yet to work out if a printer, or even a CNC machine, has any part to play in hobby woodworking. It has little to offer hand tool woodworking. On the other hand, CNC is no doubt a boon to the small pro shop where before carving needed to be farmed out, or protyping, in the case of tool making and printers. I have received plastic printed tools from Lee Valley as part of the design-to-production process, and they were amazingly accurate. Rob Lee has mentioned this on the forums on a number of occasions. I got to see the machines when I visited the factory in Ottawa a few years ago. It still amazes me. A Black Art. However, I do not see the point for an amateur such as myself. The joy of woodworking for me lies in the challenge realising a goal through my own efforts. This is obviously not a concern for those amateurs that are instead more focussed on output.

Regards from Perth

Derek

 

[D_W]

Can a thread get further away from hand tools?

Not intended to offend, though I think we've gotten past the original topic (as in, it's run it's course) and it's normal for ancillary discussions to be the only ones left.

Funny things about forums, Tony is often minutes from me, yet I've never met him and talk to him more storing text on a forum in the UK. Hopefully that'll change sometime. He's also got a technical business so 3d printing might not ever come up for me or most others, but it's part of Tony's business that will hopefully afford him some hobby fun (I won't tell the tax man!).

Just when I talk to like minded folks enough on here, and think that hand tools are getting real traction, I make a rare stop in Rockler (a hobbyist woodwork supplier here) and I see a demo for a small CNC machine with crowds of people around, and they're not just lookers as I can hear people talking about what they're doing with theirs. Using terms like "I carved", which is a confusing term to me when a machine is doing the carving.

 

[swb58]

Can a thread get further away from hand tools?

Not intended to offend, though I think we've gotten past the original topic (as in, it's run it's course) and it's normal for ancillary discussions to be the only ones left.

Funny things about forums, Tony is often minutes from me, yet I've never met him and talk to him more storing text on a forum in the UK. Hopefully that'll change sometime. He's also got a technical business so 3d printing might not ever come up for me or most others, but it's part of Tony's business that will hopefully afford him some hobby fun (I won't tell the tax man!).

Just when I talk to like minded folks enough on here, and think that hand tools are getting real traction, I make a rare stop in Rockler (a hobbyist woodwork supplier here) and I see a demo for a small CNC machine with crowds of people around, and they're not just lookers as I can hear people talking about what they're doing with theirs. Using terms like "I carved", which is a confusing term to me when a machine is doing the carving.

No worries, it was just a thought that crossed my mind at the time. You guys carry on . . . . . .

 

[D_W]

In a long dead post now, I was fishing through here for Custard's comments using the cap iron in a real world scenario, and noticed that this was about cambering cap irons.

I still don't see a reason for it, but I figured as an addendum for the 1.3 people who actually read this thread and were interested, the Dean of the cap iron in the US (Warren Mickley) who works in an area where the Amish dominate and manages to undercut them on jobs that can be done entirely by hand, pointed out to me that Nicholson suggested that the cap iron edge should be concentric with or parallel to the iron.

Charles Hayward appears to have said the same thing (whether or not it's just carried forward from Nicholson, I don't know. I don't know that it matters, but I'd sure like to know why nicholson recommends curvature to match the iron).

My thoughts on curvature are as follows (summarized from a very long discussion):
* it makes sense if the sole is curved
* It makes some sense if you have a plane that has feeding problems at the corners (these are gone with Leonard's masterpiece, but they can be an issue in a poorly fitted plane and they are the last part of a plane wear and escapement to get right)
* If you had a reason to roll the iron laterally (as in use the right side of a smoother only and adjust it as such), then there would be some potential reason
* It could, perhaps, be a minimization of labor in planing (from a day when people would've done a lot of planing instead of just a little). Meaning, the center of the chip is the thickest, and that is where you need the cap iron to prevent the chip from lifting. Maybe it matters less at the edge

Custard, I hope you don't mind if I've quoted you elsewhere for mentioning that using the cap is just a faster and better way to get the same thing done as the rest of the "tricks" when you're dealing with a large slab of less than agreeable wood.

 

[richarddownunder]

I worked the cap iron in the last video here at about 13:30, though it's not ideal to see it. the other end of the cap iron is below the level of the stone to get the undercut I mentioned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InbpoRcQyI0

This cap iron required considerable work, more than most vintage ones. It was pretty coarsely made and I had to grind the leading edge to get the stanley curved profile correct (and get the mill marks out of it).

I don't think I have anything better for the cap iron, but there must be dozens of tutorials about these types of cap irons that describe the same thing, as the requirement for the knife edge fit is there regardless of whether or not someone instructing the setup knows how to use the cap iron.

Grinding without safety glasses! :shock:

Just thought I'd mention it

Cheers
Richard

 

[richarddownunder]

Hi Folks. A number of years ago, having read discussions like this one about capirons and thick irons I thought I'd test it out by making extra thick capirons for a couple of Records - a 4 and a 5 - out of stainless which was darn hard to work and I'd not recommend it!! Both were OK planes as far as i could tell to begin with. Anyway, long story short, I felt that the thick capirons improved the feel of both planes and I haven't been tempted to replace the home-made ones with the originals. I haven’t experienced 'chatter' and 'feel' is subjective and the experiment isn’t really statistically valid, so its just opinion, perhaps biased by the fact that I made them so they had darn well be better than those thin bits of pressed steel. They feel more like my favourite Record SS to use and, I think, different to my ~1930 US Stanley, which is again and OK plane but not one I'd reach for to finish the back of a guitar or something similar. In the end, I really don’t need duplicate planes so I use my SS Record and Cliftons for everything and the stainless-fitted ones sit on the shelf gathering dust (but not rust). Just noticed the fit of each cap iron is a bit different but they both work well enough (cant remember whether the blue one is the final photo or whether I fitted it a bit better. Anyhow, my 5 cents as a beginner.

Cheers
Richard

 

[D_W]

Those look quite nice. And stainless, too!