Bench plane to scraper plane?

[Karl]

Has anybody else tried this?

I got a new acquisition yesterday - a nice little Clifton No3

The guy had described it as "hardly used" - and he wasn't wrong! Looks pristine (still has the green hue on the brass fittings, for those familiar with Clifton planes).

Anyway, i'd seen that Lie Nielsen sell a "90 degree scraper blade" for their LN 62. Bit more digging about reveals that this is just a blade with a 90 degree "bevel" - ie no bevel.

So why not try increasing the effective pitch of a bench plane to 90 degrees (or beyond) to give a scraping action?

Taking the fresh Clifton blade (i'm about to order a replacement for normal planing, so worry not) I mounted it at 45 degrees the wrong way round in the eclipse guide

And then proceeded to sharpen - as this was the initial hone on the back (or face if you prefer) of the blade, just a few wipes on the fine stone, with a bit of stropping with some fine honing compound. The wire was removed from the bevel side freehand.

Once the plane was put back together, tested it out on some scrap beech - just to get the feeling and test the depth of cut

And then onto the serious stuff - a piece of Cocobolo. This stuff had been prone to tearout at the drop of a hat, and needed a high EP to give a clean finish.

As you can see, proper shavings were the result, leaving behind a nice glassy tearout-free finish.

Hope this little experiment is of interest to some others out there.

Cheers

Karl

 

[Cheshirechappie]

That's the way to do it! Nice one!

I have read that HNT Gordon suggest that you can reverse the iron in some of their wooden smoothing planes to give the same effect.

Any signs of chatter or vibration in the blade?

 

[Karl]

Any signs of chatter or vibration in the blade?

Absolutely none, which I suspect was the right depth of cut and the quality of the tool/bedding/blade.

Cheers

Karl

 

[Cheshirechappie]

Nice, thick blade would help.

That's food for thought. Why invest in wildly expensive infill planes to tackle wild-grained timber when just slipping a second (suitably modified) blade into the basic smoother will do the job?

The performance of a Holtey for the price of an iron!

 

[Tony Spear]

GLOAT ALARM! :mrgreen:

 

[Gerard Scanlan]

That looks great! How far did you hone to produce the 90 degree bevel? Did you just take off the sharp edge of the existing bevel or did you take it down to the full thickness of the blade?

 

[woodbloke]

Nice idea, but having just got my LN scraper planes to work and got a decent blade sorted out for my V.No80, those are what I prefer to use, but I dare say it would be interesting to try the idea out - Rob

 

[Karl]

That looks great! How far did you hone to produce the 90 degree bevel? Did you just take off the sharp edge of the existing bevel or did you take it down to the full thickness of the blade?

Hi Gerard

I just did a normal hone - because this was a fresh bevel being created it was a few strokes on the fine stone to raise the wire edge and onto the honing compound.

If you were to remove the original bevel and then hone the new back bevel, this would be the same as just flipping the blade over. Clearly the cap iron wouldn't fit.

The idea is to hone the back bevel at 45/50 degrees for the scraping action, and remove the wire edge from the normal bevel side, thereby maintaining the original bevel and the fit of the blade/cap iron.

Hope that makes sense :-k

Nice idea, but having just got my LN scraper planes to work and got a decent blade sorted out for my V.No80, those are what I prefer to use, but I dare say it would be interesting to try the idea out - Rob

I've got a Veritas No80 lookey-likey too, and it's fine for dealing with localised tearout. But the idea here was to test the theory out on a bench plane. I've got a large table top to make next week out of some lovely Euro oak, but I know there will be grain direction issues. Hopefully this trick will let me surface the top easily but if not it's out with the belt sander (followed by the Ceros - great ROS!)

Cheers

Karl