Angles on tools.....

[Corneel]

Lowering the angle is a pain. It calls for a lot of steel removal. So I don't really see the point of tuning the edge to the lowest possible angle. In my (limited) world almost everything is about 30 degrees. Things like paring chisels, block plane or shoulder plane blades are lower. Some other things like mortice chisels, the irons from the Record 044 and the like are higher.

See this is what I mean with the communication thing. It's much easier to discuss this, when you can give a number.

 

[LENPAM]

The fact that everyone started to figure ways of achieving a certain angle tells me my assumption was true we've fallen into some kind of trap where we believe a certain angle is paramount to tool usage.

I think the reality is we need a sharp edge,might be a shallow angle on a miter plane for end grain and might be a rather steep angle for hard wood with squirrley grain and I just have a hard time beleiving 35 degrees is all that different from 33 or 36 or whatever my eye ends up at when I sharpen and hone an edge. I looked again at my planes and chisels especially the older ones and the infills and they're not the same even by just looking one can see the differences in angles. I even plained some faces of a few boards using different planes to test my theory and I tried to stick with the same type planes jsut different irons sharpened by Tormek for an initail bevel that matched the existing on them freehanded to hone an edge on waterstones.They were different but all worked very well,so in general I goota say angles are somewhat less important then made out to be especially if they're all in same ballpark say plus or minus 4 or 5 degrees. Len

 

[Jacob]

Yebbut you can buy a popular device which does "three gross bevel-angle range configurations: a high-angle range (25° to 54° in seven increments), a standard-angle range (15° to 40° in six increments), and a third range for back bevels, blade stop has discrete positions for preset angles".
How can you resist? :lol: :lol:

Basically just stick to 30º and try not to increase it unless you really want to. That's all there is to it.

 

[Corneel]

I think you fall in another kind of trap Len, taking numbers too litterary. When somebody writes 35 degrees on an internet forum, he doesn't mean 35 exactly, he means to give a ballpark figure. And I suppose everybody agrees that there isn't any difference between 33 and 36.

In a plane there are just some physical limits. In a standard Stanley you run into clearance problems when you go much beyond 35 degrees and the stability of the edge is going to suffer when you go much below 25. So that's where the standard ballpark figure of 30 degrees comes from.

 

[Jacob]

.....
In a plane there are just some physical limits. In a standard Stanley you run into clearance problems when you go much beyond 35 degrees and the stability of the edge is going to suffer when you go much below 25. So that's where the standard ballpark figure of 30 degrees comes from.

Could be the other way around?
30º is an easy angle to hit when freehand honing, and is suitable for most woodworking purposes.
So Stanley/Bailey designed the plane to fit the angle?

 

[bugbear]

.....
In a plane there are just some physical limits. In a standard Stanley you run into clearance problems when you go much beyond 35 degrees and the stability of the edge is going to suffer when you go much below 25. So that's where the standard ballpark figure of 30 degrees comes from.

Could be the other way around?
30º is an easy angle to hit when freehand honing, and is suitable for most woodworking purposes.
So Stanley/Bailey designed the plane to fit the angle?

No, that's obviously rubbish and silly.

Unless it's provocative, of course. Who can tell?

Was this a serious point?

BugBear

 

[Jacob]

.....
In a plane there are just some physical limits. In a standard Stanley you run into clearance problems when you go much beyond 35 degrees and the stability of the edge is going to suffer when you go much below 25. So that's where the standard ballpark figure of 30 degrees comes from.

Could be the other way around?
30º is an easy angle to hit when freehand honing, and is suitable for most woodworking purposes.
So Stanley/Bailey designed the plane to fit the angle?

No, that's obviously rubbish and silly.....

Why?
(Take your time :lol: :lol: )

 

[bugbear]

30º is an easy angle to hit when freehand honing, and is suitable for most woodworking purposes.
So Stanley/Bailey designed the plane to fit the angle?

No, that's obviously rubbish and silly.....

Why?

Bailey got his frog design half-right - he just used a bedding angle that been common for a few centuries in wooden planes.

Intelligent use of tradition. Obvious.

BugBear

 

[Jacob]

No, that's obviously rubbish and silly.....

Why?

Bailey got his frog design half-right - he just used a bedding angle that been common for a few centuries in wooden planes.

Intelligent use of tradition. Obvious.

BugBear

What was the half wrong aspect?
Seems to me that Bailey (and everybody else for centuries) chose the frog angle which best fitted the universally preferred 30º honing angle (preferred for general purpose planes and chisels at least, and easiest to hone freehand).

 

[bugbear]

Seems to me that Bailey (and everybody else for centuries) chose the frog angle which best fitted the universally preferred 30º honing angle (preferred for general purpose planes and chisels at least, and easiest to hone freehand).

I've pointed out your mistake. I don't expect you to change your mind. So we're back where we started. I'll stop. (Hi Noel! )

BugBear

 

[Jacob]

BB strikes again! :roll: :lol:

The thing about the Bailey design is that there is nothing there which would not have been carefully considered from the beginning, carefully designed, and then developed over the coming years. Nothing much left to chance or tradition.

 

[Corneel]

Looking back into the murky depths of time, I can only conclude that they choose 45 degrees bedding angle because it works so nicely on domestic woods, especially pine which was used by the boatload. Lower would be good too, but then you start to run into clearance troubles. When neccessary (more difficult wood in cabinetry) higher bedded planes were available, but that was more rare.

In The Netherlands a 50 degree beeding angle was quite common for bench planes until the industrialisation of plane making. But I don't know where that is going to lead us....

 

[Jacob]

Looking back into the murky depths of time, I can only conclude that they choose 45 degrees bedding angle because it works so nicely on domestic woods, especially pine which was used by the boatload. Lower would be good too, but then you start to run into clearance troubles.

Unless you hone to a shallower angle,which results in a weak edge. In other words 30º is the limiting factor, which is the point I was trying to make earlier!

In The Netherlands a 50 degree bedding angle was quite common for bench planes until the industrialisation of plane making. But I don't know where that is going to lead us....

My woodies seem to be 50º ish too. I can only guess that it proved to be best for a woody, over time.

 

[LENPAM]

I actually checked some infills which would be the classic plane type before Stanley or Bailey invented their frog and plane design and none were 45 degrees.The bed angle was between 47 and 48 degrees judging from the infills I own with the exception being mitre and shoulder type infills which are far more in the range of 22 to 25 degrees. I have to think the 45 degree frog came from manufacturing considerations such as easier to make a 45 degree angle and less maching after it's made to make it close enough to pass muster. Why did Old Tom and Stewart Spiers make theirs steaper at 47/48 degrees unless it was because they found thats where they work best,so why did Bailey decide to just knock off a couple three degrees? Len

 

[Corneel]

Yes, I think the bedding angle is about how the plane performs on the wood type it was used for. Not about how easy it is to grind a 30 degree angle. When I look at continental wooden planes from the past 100-200 years or so, they were mostly at 45 degrees, unless you got a very specific smoother, they were 49. So 45 for hogging of lots of material, higer pitch when the wood demands it.

The Infills are also typical high class furniture planes. You wouldn't find these on a construction site or at the local village carpentry shop.

These very old Dutch planes from the guild period were probably used a lot with oak, where a higher angle can be nice.

For a wooden plane 45 degrees is kind of the lowest possibilty, otherwise the wood under the iron gets too weak for hard working planes. And you start to run into the problem like Jacob describes, clearance angle versus weak edge.

All in all, back when people really knew about planes, you found all kind of angles depending on the task they had to do and the woods they had to work with.

 

[János]

Hello,

in the real world everything is a compromise. 90, 45 and 30 degs are easy to mark out. Freehand honing results in useable edges, and the "optimal" blade angle depends on the properties of the blade's steel. But there is not too much to loose: a little more frequent sharpening does not really matter...

By the way, the use of tapered plane irons resulted in lower cutting angles in bevel down planes :shock: :wink:

Hand-made wooden planes were manufactured in a not too exacting manner, I suspect. The printed catalogues of handplane manufecturers of the XIXth and early XXth century told really few words about actual bedding and cutting angles of their tools.

Have a nice day,

János

 

[bridger]

Corneel said:
"About just following what you find on an iron, that's not always helpfull. I've found plane irons sharpened so steeply that there was almost no clearance angle left."

I once had a guy who was really a very good carpenter hand me his plane in disgust commenting that the thing just didn't work. it was sharp, but the bevel angle exceeded the frog angle- it was riding the heel, and indeed wouldn't cut at all. when I pointed this out to him, he was quite embarrassed....

 

[LENPAM]

I've found it not that difficult following an existing angle,those who end up with the shallower and shallower angle have a technique problem where they keep pressure on the front and not on the entire bevel,this will surely end up as a shallow bevel eventually. What I see even more then shallow bevel are multiple bevels where some one spends a lot of time rubbing the middle or just behind the front edge in an attempt to fix the shape of the bevel eventually leading to a rounded shape or multi-faceted bevel.Surprizingly many of these work very well if they get the very edge sharp. These usually get set on the Tormek and left alone for quite a while till all is bevel again[I've made a spring loaded holder to hold the iron against the stone where I can walk away] Len

 

[Jacob]

.... What I see even more then shallow bevel are multiple bevels where some one spends a lot of time rubbing the middle or just behind the front edge in an attempt to fix the shape of the bevel eventually leading to a rounded shape or multi-faceted bevel.Surprizingly many of these work very well if they get the very edge sharp. ......

And why not? As long the edge is OK at around 30º it makes no difference at all what is going on with the rest of the bevel (within reason) - it can even be rounded all the way back. Not surprising at all!

 

[Jacob]

Length of bevel at 25 degrees is roughly twice the blade thickness.
xy

Length of bevel at 30 degrees is exactly twice the blade thickness.
Which is all anybody needs to know about bevels.
Once you have that in your head you can easily go a little higher or a little lower but I'm not sure about "three gross bevel-angle range configurations: a high-angle range (25° to 54° in seven increments), a standard-angle range (15° to 40° in six increments), and a third range for back bevels". :lol: :lol:

Sorry - been reading this thread again and forgot to say the obvious!