Recent content by patrickjchase

Carbide.

There are some such tools that a woodworker might use. For example this machinist square: http://www.starrett.com/metrology/produ ... res/3020-6 It's about half the price of the equivalent US-made square (#20-6) but also half the precision. They tell you which tools are which via the "Global...

I'd have gone "full Holty", and be running for the surface grinder in the shop at work by now.

Are you/Mathew making this claim about modern heat-treatment in general, or only the dreck that Stanley produced in the 70s? If the former I can buy that. Something certainly went drastically wrong in Stanley's irons, and as you say the steel itself seems an unlikely candidate because by that...

The decline of crucible furnaces and cast steels came about when it did because that's exactly when electric arc furnaces became capable of producing a superior product at competitive cost. The notion that the steels have regressed as a consequence is insane. While some may not prefer modern...

Roh Hock uses a heat treatment house in France (which is a smart move on his part - he isn't a metallurgist and doesn't gain by playing at being one). I don't think the entire iron is made there, though.

3 mm is pointlessly thick. The LV/Veritas replacement irons are 0.1" (2.54 mm). The Hocks are in that ballpark as well, or a hair thinner. The originals are somewhere around 0.08" and work perfectly well.

Also, "banggood" sounds more like the name of an...err...service provider than of a tool seller.

But are they identical height?

That's about what the basic 118 deg chisel-point 150s in black-oxide coating go for: https://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Latrobe- ... B000LDH1LC. They're good, solid M4 HSS bits. The 150ASP (split-point, 135 deg, heavy web) adds some more cost to that, and then the TiN coating adds more still, and...

Montana/Norseman make good stuff, and charge less for it than Chicago-Latrobe. The basic 29-piece set of C-L 150ASP-TNs (split-point, heavy-web HSS with TiN coating) is close to $300, and I'm not saying what I paid for my 118-piece set. I have a set of black-oxide HSS Norseman wire-gauge bits...

In my experience that's a good way to go from having a good quality jobber set to having a beater-quality jobber set :-). There's no way I'd be caught dead doing that to my Chicago 550s or 150ASPs. I'd probably file the hole in that situation.

Obviously people are simply confusing "perspective" and "parallax" :-) Here's a thought experiment for everybody who thinks that different-height winding sticks are OK: Consider a perfectly flat surface, on which rest two different height winding sticks. Imagine that they are so far out of...

The challenge with adjustable toes in general is that they add an additional machined interface in the tolerance stack from the rest of the sole to the bit directly in front of the mouth, which is arguably the part where flatness matters most. LV does a good job of controlling those tolerances...

Because if the sticks are different heights and you don't line up exactly parallel then you'll get a "false positive" reading for twist. That doesn't happen (in theory) if they're the same height.