How Widespread was Late 19th Century Cap Iron Use?

[D_W]

So as not to hijack the other thread, this is just a thought that I always have when I'm adjusting wears, etc. I never got really good results fitting double iron planes until I had to make them. Now it's very easy to get a fine plane from England that is about $30 and make a plane that would provide someone a lifetime of jointing and panel preparing. I've gotten two English planes now with nearly unused Ward iron and Cap iron sets that I couldn't have bought the iron and cap for the same price (average of $50).

At any rate, what's curious to me is that in order to really get these planes working well so that dimensioning is essentially an easy operation that only requires sweat, has no risk of overshooting a depth mark to remove tearout (no matter the grain orientation), and where the shaving stays together so you can almost use one mark on one side of a board to thickness a panel accurately, just taking even strokes from left to right - anyway, runon sentence - in order to get a plane working that well, you have to understand it, and I don't get too many vintage planes that look like they were put away set up properly. There is no shortage, though, of planes that have been opened up improperly with a rasp or something ugly.

I don't have an unused example from the early 19th century to examine the planemaker's work, but many of the newer planes I've gotten needed a little bit of educated tweaking for them to work properly, and only a couple have had the leading edge of the cap iron worked into shape - it does work to stop tearout to some extent, even if the front edge is a little sloppy.

Warren Mickley, who goaded me into learning to use the cap iron - whether he knew he was doing it or not - mentioned that he'd had discussions with some people (now deceased) who had worked in the early 1900s and described themselves as experts on hand planing, but they had no clue about using the cap iron and one of them told him that once an iron is set too deep, you can do nothing other than take the wedge out and start over.

All of this leads me to the following bunch of facts:
* people were paying extra for the double iron, even though catalogs were filled with single iron options - those single iron options didn't sell well
* not many of the planes come to me in shape to plane without choking - one griffiths plane and one mathieson plane have passed that test. Another 20 planes, none did unless they had already been ruined by being opened too much
* Often the wear needs to be relieved to make things work with the cap that comes with the plane. Opening the mouth a little doesn't solve the problem. Opening it a lot (and making a garish mouth) usually will.
* I've never seen any evidence on any of my planes that a user adjusted the wear instead of the mouth, including on planes where setting the cap close caused a clog (and presumably that was never fixed). Small wear adjustment is usually superior to any mouth adjustment.

Is Warren's assertion correct, that even by the late 1800s, most of the users were fairly incompetent as far as getting the true potential out of planes? As well as these planes work when the cap iron is set - it's really a night and day thing - why don't we see more that are set up properly when they are put away?

I am guessing that in the era most of my planes were made, people had already gone to relying on machine planers for most of the work, and most didn't know how to properly adjust their planes, and they probably didn't care, either, as they were no longer heavily used. I think they also didn't use the cap iron for the most part, even though they paid extra to get it. That's certainly the case in the US. On top of that in the US, Stanley pretty much wiped out the wooden plane - there are accounts in the US at least of craftsmen burning their wooden planes and cheering once they got metal planes with an adjuster. No way they'd have done that if they did a significant amount of dimensioning, as you can sense the increased effort with a metal jointer within a matter of five minutes.

 

[D_W]

I'd like to have been more clear with the above conversation start, but i'm working with the remnants of a migraine, which ruins my chances at efficient, well organized posts!

 

[AndyT]

Dave, that's a long, musing sort of post going in several directions at once, but here are a few thoughts from me.

I am a bit confused about the period(s) in question - did you mean to write "I don't have an unused example from the early 20th century" rather than "I don't have an unused example from the early 19th century"? Early C19th planes still unused would be fantastically rare; early 20th century examples not quite so hard to find but still very unusual.

You say that "catalogs were filled with single iron options" - are you sure of this?
Early C19th catalogues are very rare. Late C19th or early C20th are easier to find.

My first example to hand is a Melhuish catalogue from 1905. All the smoothing, jack, try and jointing planes are double ironed only (but with an option to pay extra for parallel irons).

Then Charles Nurse, 1902. A wider range of planes here, as they were a maker not just a merchant. For smoothers and jacks there were four options, including single irons, but for try and jointer planes it was double irons only.

In my own collection, which really only covers examples which are relatively common and cheap, the only English single iron bench planes are the sort of tool which was included in the range so that a non-professional could buy a plane for a few shillings less than a professional would pay - the DIY option of the day - and are probably from the mid C20th. So I offer a hypothesis that single iron planes stayed in some merchants' catalogues to appeal to cheapskates. (The modern marketeer's love for having something for sale across a wide range of price points is nothing new.)

But as an attempt to answer your implied question of why cap-iron setting was not always such a big thing, let's not forget that a great many of the surviving tools would have been used by joiners, not cabinet makers. In ordinary domestic work, joiners spend almost all their time working on relatively mild imported softwoods, already dimensioned by machine. (Steam planing came in in the late C19th). When you remember that almost all of this wood would be painted once it was in place, perfection of surface straight from the plane would never beat efficiency and speed of working.

 

[AndyT]

Ok, in a quest to find something earlier, here's a price list from John Moseley of London. It was preserved in the archives of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, much of which is being digitised in Bristol and made available online. The list is from a "fact book" of 1829-44 which seems to have been a compilation of material the great man used in calculating tender prices for engineering projects.

It does list single iron options for the whole range of bench planes.

http://oac.lib.bris.ac.uk/DServe/dserve ... 188a%27%29

(To browse the collection, start here http://oac.lib.bris.ac.uk/dserve/ . It's a great resource, which I learnt about on this forum.)

 

[D_W]

Thanks, Andy. Apologies for shifting around in various time periods. I mentioned early 19th century and late 19th/early 20th figuring the following:
* the late 19th early 20th century planes that I've gotten a hold of that are unused or of extremely low use often don't feed right - but maybe few cared about that by then already (and few knew how to fix it)
* I'd like to have gotten a hold of an early 19th century plane to see if they were better made in terms of feeding (but if not, maybe the average cabinetmaker would've understood the mechanics better than the average late 19th century or early 20th century woodworker).

I was surprised to hear Warren's conclusion that by late 1800s early 1900s, the huge group of comptent planers (who would've existed in droves a hundred years earlier when it was needed to make a living) was already extinct and the knowledge mostly lost.

re: the planes for sale - certainly, speaking of the late 19th and early 20th century. Those are the catalogs I have, other than perhaps some listings in books that might have been earlier. I notice even in the catalogs circa 1930 or so here, there is a full array of double and single iron wooden planes planes, but there are very few single iron planes to be found here unless they are very old. I have one from the early 1800s that somehow escaped use until I got it - it's well made. Those 1925-1930 catalogs still have those offerings even though Stanley planes had been available for almost 70 years, and by what I've seen, outsold the offered wooden planes by a gigantic margin.

 

[D_W]

Ok, in a quest to find something earlier, here's a price list from John Moseley of London. It was preserved in the archives of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, much of which is being digitised in Bristol and made available online. The list is from a "fact book" of 1829-44 which seems to have been a compilation of material the great man used in calculating tender prices for engineering projects.

It does list single iron options for the whole range of bench planes.

http://oac.lib.bris.ac.uk/DServe/dserve ... 188a%27%29

(To browse the collection, start here http://oac.lib.bris.ac.uk/dserve/ . It's a great resource, which I learnt about on this forum.)

Thanks for that link. In price terms, is the d. pence? I think the money system didn't make it to america because we couldn't understand it.

Gigantic price difference in single and double iron planes.

I was wrong about one thing, our HSB catalog here from 1925 only has one remaining single iron plane. A jack. Price at that time was $2.40 for the single iron and $2.80 for double. The rest of the planes are double iron only, and only two makers are provided in that catalog (I'm somewhat surprised that two different makers were even offered). By that point, the price of a wooden plane here was half of a similar role stanley bailey plane (and certainly that was in the sweet spot of stanley's offerings in terms of features and quality). A stanley jointer was about $10 - which would've been a princely sum at the beginning of the 1920s and not quite so princely, but still a lot at the end of the 1920s (hard to know the pattern of inflation through the decade without looking it up - still likely a lot of money).

http://www.alaskawoodworker.com/old-too ... -catalogs/ (Catalog page 79 - somewhat poor scan quality where it counts, too).

Those wooden planes were half the price of a stanley, but they are undesirable (Bartlett) and very undesirable (Ogontz) in terms of the two makers offered. The trade was dead as a doornail here by then. This is past the era that I'm thinking of, though. You could still get well made planes in England, but the United States was factory-based everything by then and probably around then, people became obsessed with modernity. I know my grandparents, who would've been 10 about then, had no regard for old things. They remembered using them and were glad to discard them in favor of convenience.

 

[AndyT]

Yes, prices are in shillings and pence. 12 pence to the shilling.

Stanley planes took a bit longer to kill off the old patterns here. Marples were the last commercial maker of wooden planes until their last bench hand retired in 1965. (Fortunately Ken Hawley had filmed him at work and collected his bench and tools.) He was probably working on special orders - Marples had introduced a line of cheaper bench planes in the 30s, made as much as possible by machine.

When I was at school in the early 70s we used wooden jack planes. Stanley smoothers were in the cupboard, for supervised use only. That may just prove that my school was old fashioned and saw no need to re-equip. I wonder where that had any influence? :wink:

 

[D_W]

I think I'll summarize thus far, I'm inclined to think that Warren was probably right. All of these planes were being made with double irons, but the number of people who knew how to fit them properly after the late 19th century was pretty limited in the states. Maybe it was a bit greater in the UK since the intense drive for modernity didn't exist as much.

All of this is curious to me because I have such a fascination with the cap iron, and I wasn't happy with any wooden plane that I made until I learned to use the cap iron. The others were just novelties, and so is my early 1800s JT brown jointer - when the rubber hits the road, it relies on wood being fairly agreeable to work, as well as other shortcomings vs. a double iron plane (sharpness is much more important for good results and to stay in a continuous cut - it has to come apart three times as often to be sharpened despite having the same iron make as some of my double iron planes).

In regard to the maker you're talking about, it's too bad that video isn't public. I have had the chance to see a snippet of it, at least. Maybe nobody else other than makers would be interested in it, anyway.

I've got no clue why I have such a fascination with the cap iron and whether or not it was used gainfully in the middle part of its history, but the fascination is there and I can't stop it!

 

[AndyT]

Did you notice that the Moseley list included an option for "hardened top irons" at fourpence extra? Another topic for cap iron research!

 

[JohnPW]

Turning and Mechanical Manipulation, Vol. 2, by Charles Holtzapffel, 1856
Page 480
https://archive.org/stream/turningmecha ... 0/mode/2up

...the top (cap) iron is placed from 1/16th inch (1.6mm) to 1/50th inch (0.5mm) from the edge of the cutter...

The constant employment of the top iron in all available cases, shows the value of the improvement; and the circumstances of the plane working the smoother, but harder, when it is added, and the more so when it is down, demonstrates the its action is to break or bend the fibres.

I think I read somewhere that as soon as the double iron was introduced, people realised it helped greatly with tearout and it became the standard, at least for bevel down bench planes. And that is despite double iron planes being more complicated and more expensive than single iron planes.

 

[JohnPW]

Out of all the wooden bench planes I bought or seen in person, my impression is planes with single irons are much much less common, off hand I can only remember a small no-name coffin smoother with a single iron.

 

[D_W]

I think I read somewhere that as soon as the double iron was introduced, people realised it helped greatly with tearout and it became the standard, at least for bevel down bench planes. And that is despite double iron planes being more complicated and more expensive than single iron planes.

That would seem to be supported by how quickly they disappeared in the United States, too. It's hard to find single iron anything that isn't a budget plane unless it was made well before the 1800s. I did have a budget single iron jack, and it was terrible to use - large mouth and fairly low angle single iron is just not a good combination. And the aforementioned single iron jointer, but that was probably made somewhere around 1830.

 

[D_W]

Did you notice that the Moseley list included an option for "hardened top irons" at fourpence extra? Another topic for cap iron research!

Yes, I saw that. If you had a cast steel double iron with a hardened steel cap, you'd have had the top shelf stuff.

I haven't used any plane for a lifetime, but at the same time, I haven't noticed any wear at all on my favorite smoother (stanley) and that cap iron is completely unhardened as far as I can tell.

I do know Warren Mickley to be the only person I'm aware of still dimensioning by hand, and IIRC, he's on his second or third iron in his try plane and said he's noticed no wear on his cap, either (could be hardened, I guess, I don't know).

FWIW, I think hardening on the cap iron probably isn't much of an issue, and I'd be curious as to whether or not someone preferred that.

There is one thing that I remember now that I'm thinking of it, and that is a stanley 8 I bought when I first started woodworking. The cap iron was worn through right in the middle (all the way through - looks like that was the thing that caused the plane to be set aside), and it had a trough worn into the sole on the diagonal. I don't know who was using it or how, but they must've been planing something with a lot of dirt or something in it. And a lot of it. Maybe it was fixtured in in something to get wear that consistent - don't know. I was the first person who told LN that their custom cap irons didn't fit my 8, though, and I sent that cap iron to LN and it got lost there for months. Not that that's important, just an early lesson learned.

 

[Corneel]

It's not easy to conclude anything from surviving planes. About all of the ones I have had were totally worn out. The only almost new one I had was a later 20th century smoother which came with a large mouth, and still clogged in the corners. It needed a lot of work.

But at the other hand, almost all literature form the 19th/early 20th century descibes how to use the capiron to prevent tearout. Usually in just one or two sentences, but it was still there! But like mentioned above, most planes were used by carpenters/joiners on deal or something easy and most objects would have been painted anyway. So why didn't they buy cheaper single iron planes? Maybe they just learned during their apprentenceship that the double iron plane was the right choice and noone really thought much about it anymore.Or maybe they indeed found the double iron giving better results even on simple stuff, or because the planes adjusted easier, or less trouble with chatter?

 

[swagman]

The attraction may have been, you no longer needed to own a wide range of single iron bench planes (at different pitch) to deal with tear-out.

The argument that whilst double iron bench planes proved popular, very few could use them effectively does sounds like a furphy.

 

[AndyT]

I just hope someone's printing out all our discussions on here for the benefit of future generations. They'll be really grateful to have a comprehensive and completely accurate picture of what all early C21 woodworkers did and thought!

 

[swagman]

I just hope someone's printing out all our discussions on here for the benefit of future generations. They'll be really grateful to have a comprehensive and completely accurate picture of what all early C21 woodworkers did and thought!

Your not far from the truth Andy. Why would a trained Craftsman of that circa, successfully using the single iron high angle approach to control tear-out, adopt the double iron plane at common pitch, if he had no knowledge on how to use it to control tear-out.

 

[D_W]

You're missing it, stewie. I'm supposing that the ones who made that switch knew how to use the cap iron well, but maybe not the later users a century removed.

 

[D_W]

I just hope someone's printing out all our discussions on here for the benefit of future generations. They'll be really grateful to have a comprehensive and completely accurate picture of what all early C21 woodworkers did and thought!

They'll not get an accurate picture here. Nobody is talking about the kreg jig.

 

[nabs]

I share your fascination with the cap-iron DW, and I would have replied sooner but I was waylaid by the epic chisel/shoe-saga thread!

One of the frustrations is that the evidence that can be got from the surviving planes is not reliable - they are either worn-out or hardly used, and the hardly used ones surely over represent the planes that ended up with people (like me!) who lacked the skills to set them up.

Even the literature is open to interpretation and does not necessarily represent a common view. Having said that, as Corneel has noted, practically everything you read about planes from the 1st half of the 20th century and earlier mentions using the cap-iron to control tear-out so it is hard to believe that apprentices of that era were not also taught the same, even if they went on to a trade where it was of marginal benefit.

The fact that dobule-irons planes are more flexible than single irons, and that this seems to have been generally understood, would no doubt made them the 'standard' option for anyone buying a new plane.

I was looking at articles about wooden planes from the Woodworker (from the excellent https://lostartpress.com/products/the-woodworker-the-charles-h-hayward-years-vols-i-iv) and it was interesting to note the emphasis on the work you need to do to get them to work effectively.

These articles were published after 1939, later than your era of interest , but Hayward seems to have at least one woodie fan on the staff (several of the articles on wooden planes seem to have been written by the same author).

One of the articles is in the form of a good natured argument about which are better, metal or wooden planes, and our woodie fan points out that some of their respective preferences reflect differences in how they were trained, perhaps indicating he was trained in an earlier era..

Also interesting to note a couple of references to adjusting the wear, as you have suggested, as a remedy for choking (in fact in the previously mentioned 'wood or metal' discussion, it is is recommended to open the escapement and remouth smoothers from new to avoid clogging altogether).
nick
PS I have finally got my smoother working properly!