Help with ebony

[Ped82]

Hi . New to the forum . Was going to post an introduction but could not see a section for new members .

I have final purchased a house with a garage that allows me to final get started in woodworking . Always lived in houses with no space etc . So really happy now I have a bit of space to do some work . In my 30s now but better late than never .

I very much like working with hand tools and enjoying improving with them and learning . Which brings me on to my question ....

I am pulling my hair out with try to hand plane ebony . I have been smoothing off other woods such as ash , Zebrano , Purple Heart and rose wood , with good success .

However the ebony just tears out on me .

I have a cheap plane TBH . It's an Irwin record smoothing plane no 4 . I'm not sure if I'm just not getting it sharp enough and that the ebony needs it to be a good bit shaper than what I have it now . I have moved the chip iron as far forward as the plane allows which is about 1mm showing . I've tried planing in either direction with same results of tear out . Also tried skewing (?) as I plane too .


My sharpening stones are basic ...one rough one smooth , which I know isn't great but before I go buy a bunch of new stones I just wondered if there is anything obvious I'm doing wrong , since I'm having good success with other woods . Or is my plane just too cheapo for the job

I ended up scraping it which has gave a nice finish but I need to get it working with a plane if possible

Any help would be great

Thanks

 

[matthewwh]

Ebony can be a bit fickle, if you get a nice straight grained waxy piece it comes out like glass no trouble at all, a drier piece with curly grain can be a right pain in the chuff.

You might try honing a tiny back bevel on the cutting iron - like half a mm or so - and possibly use some sheet abrasives or a strop to squeeze a little more sharpness out of the iron.

 

[Racers]

Setting the cap iron as close as possible will help just the merest sliver of reflected light, but you say 1mm is as far as you can go, why?
If its fowling on the front of the mouth move the frog back, the close cap iron will hold the shavings down preventing tear out.

Pete

 

[Ped82]

Thanks

I can definetly try a back bevel .

I have some wet and dry papers here too . I plan on buying some new sharpening stones this week also

 

[D_W]

Ebony is one of the few woods that I would finish scrape instead of plane (scrape to finish). If it's not dead straight flat grain, it fractures somewhere on the surface and leaves you to look at. It's so hard and takes such a good finish off of a scraper that it's not like a softer wood were scraping dulls the surface.

You can get close and minimize the scraping by setting the cap iron closer (shame if the plane doesn't allow it). Something on the order of a hundredth or a little less is probably appropriate - just along the lines of making the edge disappear and then backing the cap iron off so that you can just see it.

On inexpensive planes, if the shaving has any thickness, the chips can still make their way between the iron and cap even with what looks like a good fit. At least that is my experience with cocobolo when planing the face of a flatsawn board, or the edge of quartersawn.

 

[Ped82]

Setting the cap iron as close as possible will help just the merest sliver of reflected light, but you say 1mm is as far as you can go, why?
If its fowling on the front of the mouth move the frog back, the close cap iron will hold the shavings down preventing tear out.

Pete

I set it so that I could only just see a glimmer of the blade but no matter how I adjust the frog the blade won't protrude past the sole . To get the blade to protrude past then about 1mm is as far as I can go .

Would closing the mouth have any effect on tear out ?

 

[Ped82]

Ebony is one of the few woods that I would finish scrape instead of plane (scrape to finish). If it's not dead straight flat grain, it fractures somewhere on the surface and leaves you to look at. It's so hard and takes such a good finish off of a scraper that it's not like a softer wood were scraping dulls the surface.

You can get close and minimize the scraping by setting the cap iron closer (shame if the plane doesn't allow it). Something on the order of a hundredth or a little less is probably appropriate - just along the lines of making the edge disappear and then backing the cap iron off so that you can just see it.

On inexpensive planes, if the shaving has any thickness, the chips can still make their way between the iron and cap even with what looks like a good fit. At least that is my experience with cocobolo when planing the face of a flatsawn board, or the edge of quartersawn.

Yeah the grain is not straight at all . The pieces are only 35mm wide and I scraped them with a stanley blade and the surface is glass smooth . However I had made a kind of thicknesser jig that my plane could run on to get accurate thickness which would be great if I didn't get the tear out

 

[ED65]

I set it so that I could only just see a glimmer of the blade but no matter how I adjust the frog the blade won't protrude past the sole . To get the blade to protrude past then about 1mm is as far as I can go .

That may indicate that the rectangular hole in the cap iron could do with being tweaked, but don't go ahead until someone else gives input and of course you know what you're doing As cap irons are mild steel they're really quite soft, so the work would not be difficult with even a standard needle file.

Would closing the mouth have any effect on tear out ?

Yes it can. But don't do this in concert with a very close cap iron setting, it's generally one or the other, not both. Do both and you can virtually guarantee shavings will jam.

While it's good practice to work away at a problem like this since you've gotten good results previously with purpleheart I don't think you'll gain anything here, and I wouldn't recommend using a back bevel just to solve this problem if you only have the one plane. While it can help it is at the cost of (sometimes greatly) increased resistance from the wood, and grinding past the back bevel to remove it later on if you choose to can be quite the workout.

I would take D_W's advice and shift to smoothing by scraping, or *gasp*, sanding.

 

[Ped82]

Just out of interest , when I was scraping the wood ....more material was moved while scraping in one direction than the other . Is this an indication of grain direction ?

 

[D_W]

Just out of interest , when I was scraping the wood ....more material was moved while scraping in one direction than the other . Is this an indication of grain direction ?

Probably. You can confirm it by planing a thin smoother shaving.Scraping "into the straws" yields less satisfying cuttings on a scraper unless the wood is something interlocked.

 

[ED65]

Possibly? But I've never scraped anything that hard (synthetic materials yes, but not wood) so I'll be interested in the answer to that too.

On the harder woods I have scraped, nothing even approaching the hardness of ebony, I don't think I've noticed any difference in how much is removed one way or the other, but there certainly can be a difference in the surface left behind which is generally what I'm paying attention to. Remember the scrapings are waste, they're not necessarily the thing to pay attention to.

 

[Muswell]

Here's someone doing both. The ebony will be straight grained, and his plane will be very very sharp. The scraper will be very sharp too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s4tU4fgMwY

 

[custard]

As a beginning woodworker is Ebony (or indeed most other exotics) the best material for you to be working with?

I don't want to sound prescriptive, after all it's your time so you do as you please, but the fact remains that a craftsman's tools and techniques are substantially influenced by the materials they work. It's difficult enough acquiring mastery over the key tools and developing a useful suite of skills, if you add into that a wide range of timbers with radically different characteristics then it makes a difficult challenge harder still. If your tools are optimised for temperate zone hardwoods then they're not optimal for ultra hard exotics or softwoods, and chopping and changing between different tool settings too early in your woodworking career is both an exercise in frustration and will actually delay you getting to the position where you can reliably produce good results.

When I trained as a cabinet maker new timbers were introduced sparingly into the syllabus, and even then only after you had built up a thorough understanding of your tools and techniques.

Just my 2p's worth.

Good luck.

 

[Ped82]

Thanks for the help and advice .

Ebony probably wasn't one of the best choices of a wood to use this early on as custard has said . I will try and complete what I have started here though and most likely go back to some easier materials for my next project .

I will invest some time and £s into sharpening the blade tomorrow and let you know how I get on

Thanks

 

[AJB Temple]

I have worked with ebony quite a lot, mainly making guitar fingerboards and a few for violins. Planing it can be very tricky and I gave up early on as those days were in my "pre Clifton, LN and Veritas" era). Still tricky even with a very fine plane as it can be hard to see grain changes and ebony has hard spots. My approach was to bandsaw it close to thickness and then run a belt sander over it (in my case with a jig as the fingerboard top is radiused, if I needed to remove a lot of material. I also have a spokeshave that cuts very fine and that works well too along with a radiused metal scraper. Scrapers are capable of delivering a very fine finish. Fret slots hand cut in a jig Ebony is expensive and I could not afford the tear out that planes might create at times.

 

[Corset]

I have worked a bit with ebony recently and draw filing with a metal file is very very effective. If somewhat close to cheating, it seems to be a bit like aluminium
Owen

 

[David C]

A back bevel of 0.5 mm at 25 degrees will plane virtually anything, as long as the shavings are kept very fine. About 1 to 1.5 thou.

In my opinion this is by far the best method. (As Matthew said!)

best wishes,
David

 

[Racers]

Setting the cap iron as close as possible will help just the merest sliver of reflected light, but you say 1mm is as far as you can go, why?
If its fowling on the front of the mouth move the frog back, the close cap iron will hold the shavings down preventing tear out.

Pete

I set it so that I could only just see a glimmer of the blade but no matter how I adjust the frog the blade won't protrude past the sole . To get the blade to protrude past then about 1mm is as far as I can go .

Would closing the mouth have any effect on tear out ?

Sounds like you need a replacement cap iron, your slot that the adjuster fits into is too far down the cap iron, that's why you can't set it close.

You might as well get a new iron as well it should transform your plane Workshop Heaven have Quangsheng plane irons and cap irons which seen to have good revues.
Or look at getting a better plane keep the old one for rough work and the new one and a smoother, you can't just have one plane!

Pete

 

[ED65]

I will invest some time and £s into sharpening the blade tomorrow and let you know how I get on

If your current sharpening gear isn't quite doing it that could certainly be part of the problem. Before you buy anything further though what are you currently using?

Just a quick thing for future reference, there's a lot to be said for buying a cheap (and much more easily worked) hardwood and staining it black instead of using ebony. Assuming you're using a film finish it's quite possible that even a wood enthusiast wouldn't be able to tell that you hadn't used real ebony.

 

[ED65]

Sounds like you need a replacement cap iron, your slot that the adjuster fits into is too far down the cap iron, that's why you can't set it close.

Cap irons are easy to modify, nobody needs to buy a new one if just a few minutes of filing would resolve the issue.

You might as well get a new iron as well it should transform your plane

I don't think that's good advice to giving starter woodworkers Pete. Or TBH that it's sage advice anyway given all the counter info building up on what swap-in irons don't do (that they're supposed to, like reduce chatter).