laminated irons (again)

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Interesting stuff, Andy. I can add another - case hardening. That is, packing the iron in a container with carbon, heating and letting it diffuse into the surface for several hours. This forms a high-carbon steel as an outer skin that is very hard, and can be hardened further by quenching. This is still sometimes used, having the advantage that it can be done after the component is made from a softer steel. It's an old process, still used.

Also, induction hardening uses an induction coil to heat the outside surface of a component, usually medium carbon steel, which can then be quickly cooled or quenched to harden it.

Quite a few processes have been developed to make a hard outer layer or skin with a tough, ductile interior. It's pretty much an ideal tool material.

It's relatively recently that alloy steels (such as the fancy ones now used for planes) have been developed that are hard throughout but can be worked into shape without cracking. That is, for a factory with big expensive equipment, they can be relatively cheaply made as is is a one-step process and gives good marketing copy. As Custard and others have pointed out, it is not so obvious that they are useful in the workshop, since they are hard (literally) to sharpen. Hence also the multiplicity of threads on the Voldemart topic.

One could even argue that they are really aimed at well-off amateurs rather than pros. The professional might get the advantage of sharpening every hour or two rather than every 10-20 mins, but it's a harder (slower) job. The amateur will use the tool far less, and may only have to sharpen every month or two rather than every day, so will think that it's a miracle!

I'd personally go for a laminated blade rather than a super hard one, except on tools that get only occasional use such as the shooting plane. In this case the lower wear is useful as it has a heavy task, but is only used for a few strokes, once or twice per board. I've had one a few months and only needed to sharpen it once. (And yes, I know that it is not necessary, it's a treat).
 
Cheshirechappie, I think you are spot on. I've even seen this change in my career. In my younger days it was dead easy to get a modest local foundry to cast steel or aluminium in more or less any size, inexpensively even for a one off. In fact the cost was the pattern not the casting. Now these shops have largely disappeared. OTOH, one can now get laser cutting and 3D printing done in small job shops so it's not all bad!
 
Music Man's raised an important question, are the laminated irons for Bailey style planes superior to the irons that superseded them?

I've used them a lot, and on a wide range of timbers. IMO any advantage is pretty marginal, maybe they're a tiny bit easier to sharpen, a whisker better at dealing with awkward grain, last a few strokes longer. But for all practical purposes your woodwork won't suffer if you're using the later irons in your Bailey plane. If anyone's passing my workshop you're welcome to try a laminated iron and a later iron, identically sharpened, on the same timber, and in the same plane. I'd bet a pound to a penny that in real life usage you can't tell them apart.

If laminated irons were materially better wouldn't they have been retained even as a premium option? Wouldn't knowledgeable users in the 50's, 60's and 70's have snapped them up and worn them all out? Wouldn't Record or Stanley have tried to take a competitive advantage by hanging on to them? Wouldn't informed professionals have passed the secret on to generations of apprentices? Wouldn't they be celebrated and command a premium in the used tool market? The fact that none of this happened suggests the collective experience of the market agrees, laminated irons are nice tools, but they don't represent a chalk and cheese benefit over their successors. They might have been superior to their predecessors, but not to their Bailey style plane iron successors.

Furthermore, laminated irons may suffer from a serious disadvantage. One of the most frustrating issues for many new users is buying a used Bailey style plane and discovering the cap iron doesn't seat properly on the iron, so shavings get jammed in the gap. The traditional fix of flattening the two components to an accurate mating surface is perfectly possible, but it's a long, hard, dirty job. For an older hobbyist user, who doesn't have the finger strength they once had, it might be unrealistic. One quick and easy solution is a well aimed whack to the non bevelled side of the iron with a nylon hammer, it doesn't always work, but when it does it's revelatory in it's effectiveness. The problem is that I'd be hesitant to do that on a laminated iron because of the cracking issue previously discussed.
 
arghh Custard, that question is a border-line sharpening-discussion provoker! Nonetheless I'd be very interested to hear from MusicMan on whether the softer steel back might help reduce the risk of splitting the cast steel even if it was made harder than would have been wise with solid steel (although of course for the reasons mentioned earlier it is not necessarily the case the makers would have made the blades harder, just because the lamination meant they could).


very good work on sumarizing the manufacturing techniques chaps -most educational. The spirit of Rabindranath Tagore flows strongly through you all today!

While you were hard at work on this I was sat in The Spotted Dog browsing an ancient old-tools thread on this topic. For those of you unwilling to navigate the bizzare threading system on swingley.com (still no idea how it works!) the gist is that someone was convinced that as well as the laminated type blades we have been discussing, Stanley also made a solid tipped version (a bit like the HSS shown earlier but cast rather than soldered on).

This had to be explained and the theory suggested was that a melted low carbon steel was poured into a donut shaped mould after which high carbon steel was melted and poured into the middle. The resulting circular ingot was rolled and the blades cut out as if you were quarter-sawing a tree trunk.

It was thus slightly disapointing to come back from my revels only to learn about 'casting-on' which I suspect makes it likely that the above excellent process never happened.


Rabindranath_Tagore.jpg
 
custard":13jxgjwp said:
......The traditional fix of flattening the two components to an accurate mating surface is perfectly possible, but it's a long, hard, dirty job. ......
I doubt that was 'traditional' when there's a very simple fix available - you have to flatten the face in the area of contact with the cap iron (2 or 3mm only) and then bend and/or file the cap iron edge to get a tighter fit. It helps to back it off a bit so that the cap front edge closes tight against the plane iron face.
When you hear "flattening ... long hard dirty job" etc you know someone has been infected with the modern sharpening virus! :lol:
 
on a more serious (non-sharpening) note , I suspect the first part of Custard's question is going to very hard to answer without some more info.

I think it would be instructive to know the dates that the laminated Bailey irons were in production, as it might give us a clue to why Stanley introduced them (and subsequently abandoned the idea)

There seems to be a general consensus on the US forums that the initial stanley irons were solid steel, but the dates for the laminated versions suggested vary from 1909-WWII to 1920s/30s and I have not found any conclusive evidence one way or the other.

We made a bit of progress in this thread and can move the earliest end-date out to >1951 for record (Custard's broad arrow Iron) and > WWII for Stanley (1946 popular science ad linked above). But when did they start? (and, while you are at it when did they stop!?)
 
I'll have to look in my bin. I have a double iron set from a pre 1892 transitional. The iron set is almost unused and certainly worth more than the plane was with the iron in it, but i haven't used it.

I'm pretty sure that it's laminated. It's also thinner than later irons. We'll see, I'm in the office today working on something deadline related so can't look right now.
 
that would be a very interesting data-point DW.


Just4Fun":3ihlw0ku said:
Is it always possible to identify a laminated iron visibly?
I bought my first wooden plane at a flea market recently. The blade is thick, much thicker than in my Stanleys, but it is a treat to sharpen and use. The blade & chip iron were made by Erik Anton Berg and writing on them mentions gold medals won at fairs in Paris in 1900 and Stockholm in 1897. Would this be a laminated iron?
there is a bit of discussion on identifying laminated irons below, but for the old thick irons in wooden planes it is often very visible since the two metals generally corrode differently and have been around long enough for the differences to be obvious
record-stanley-laminated-plane-irons-t106851.html
 
nabs":2y6t6pwb said:
that would be a very interesting data-point DW.


Just4Fun":2y6t6pwb said:
Is it always possible to identify a laminated iron visibly?
I bought my first wooden plane at a flea market recently. The blade is thick, much thicker than in my Stanleys, but it is a treat to sharpen and use. The blade & chip iron were made by Erik Anton Berg and writing on them mentions gold medals won at fairs in Paris in 1900 and Stockholm in 1897. Would this be a laminated iron?
there is a bit of discussion on identifying laminated irons below, but for the old thick irons in wooden planes it is often very visible since the two metals generally corrode differently and have been around long enough for the differences to be obvious
record-stanley-laminated-plane-irons-t106851.html

the other thing I've noticed about wooden planes, being an amateur maker and purchaser of the old irons is that there was a time when single iron planes had thin irons (probably pre 1800?) in a lot of cases. Then we went through a phase where laminated irons were about 3/16ths on the business end with some makers in the US offering 1/4" thick "premium" laminated irons in some planes (which is a step backwards because they take much longer to grind - especially by hand).

And then, as you get back to Sheffield going all steel again, the irons are thinner with less taper. You can quite often identify all-steel wooden plane irons from England (no chance for this in the US, production was pretty gone too early to switch) just by looking at the thickness and confirming that a thin iron is a newer make.

Bit harder with stanley, though.
 
nabs":1p6ry6gm said:
on a more serious (non-sharpening) note , I suspect the first part of Custard's question is going to very hard to answer without some more info.

I think it would be instructive to know the dates that the laminated Bailey irons were in production, as it might give us a clue to why Stanley introduced them (and subsequently abandoned the idea)

There seems to be a general consensus on the US forums that the initial stanley irons were solid steel, but the dates for the laminated versions suggested vary from 1909-WWII to 1920s/30s and I have not found any conclusive evidence one way or the other.

We made a bit of progress in this thread and can move the earliest end-date out to >1951 for record (Custard's broad arrow Iron) and > WWII for Stanley (1946 popular science ad linked above). But when did they start? (and, while you are at it when did they stop!?)

Re the end date for production:

It's getting a bit confusing with these two closely related threads becoming a collective statement of everything we know about laminated plane irons, but over in the Record/Stanley thread, on page 1,iNewbie posted a link to a Paul Sellers blog on the topic.

Scroll down this page a Graeme Cook made this comment:

Confirming Andrew’s comments; when I did a school excursion through the Stanley Titan facory at New Town, a suburb of Hobart, Tasmania I saw laminated plane blades still being made in the mid-1960’s. They had a bunch of five or six women who had been doing it since the war years. Alas, that works has now gone to China

- so Stanley were still making laminated irons into the 60s, though possibly not in UK or USA.

And I'm not sure which page of which thread they were on, but I'm pretty sure Axminster were still selling Samurai brand irons into the 90s, so someone was still making them quite recently.
 
yes you are right Andy, this thread took a slightly different turn than I expected and now overlaps a lot. I also noticed that you made another relevant observation on dates too in the last post on the other thread regarding the subtle change in later editions of Planecraft in the description of the status of laminated blade production (implication being it was stopped late 50s for Record at least)


records-laminated-how-many-t100944-45.html
 
D_W":2mxowkuy said:
the other thing I've noticed about wooden planes, being an amateur maker and purchaser of the old irons is that there was a time when single iron planes had thin irons (probably pre 1800?) in a lot of cases. Then we went through a phase where laminated irons were about 3/16ths on the business end with some makers in the US offering 1/4" thick "premium" laminated irons in some planes (which is a step backwards because they take much longer to grind - especially by hand).

And then, as you get back to Sheffield going all steel again, the irons are thinner with less taper. You can quite often identify all-steel wooden plane irons from England (no chance for this in the US, production was pretty gone too early to switch) just by looking at the thickness and confirming that a thin iron is a newer make.

Bit harder with stanley, though.

there was an interesting comment on the old-tools thread that I mentioned earlier where it was suggested that the mechanism of hand-forge welding a cast steel bit on to an iron backing lent itself to creating a tapered iron (presumably it is easier to exaggerate an already started taper by adding some more metal to the fat bit than trying to get the whole iron back into parallel). I also read somewhere else that there was some discovery around 1830 that made welding cast steel to wrought iron reliable where it had been difficult earlier.

is that a possible explanation from the move from (all steel?) thin 18C irons to the 19C fatter tapered laminated ones?
also when do you think the all steel tapered irons became prevalent in the UK? End of the 19C?
 
AndyT":1i5h7m0j said:
Scroll down this page a Graeme Cook made this comment:

Confirming Andrew’s comments; when I did a school excursion through the Stanley Titan facory at New Town, a suburb of Hobart, Tasmania I saw laminated plane blades still being made in the mid-1960’s. They had a bunch of five or six women who had been doing it since the war years. Alas, that works has now gone to China

- so Stanley were still making laminated irons into the 60s, though possibly not in UK or USA.

Maybe that's true, maybe it's a mis-recollection. How realistic is that "a bunch of five or six women who had been doing it since the war" were manufacturing laminated irons? Reading this thread I'm struck by the technical challenges involved in laminating steel, it just doesn't sound like a cottage industry type task that's being done in the corner of a factory. Then there's the matter of the design of the iron's top. Every single laminated iron I've seen has a severely angular top, and I've never seen a laminated iron with a curved top. This applies to Record, Stanley, Sorby, and Marples (which is why I suspect the irons were manufactured by a third party and stamped with different brand names), by the mid 60's were Australian Stanley irons angular or rounded? And if rounded can anyone produce one that's laminated? Anything's possible I guess, but without evidence to the contrary I'm sticking with the hypothesis that some anonymous subbing contractor made all the laminated irons, and they packed up around about the time war broke out.
 
nabs":zf9b5lii said:
D_W":zf9b5lii said:
the other thing I've noticed about wooden planes, being an amateur maker and purchaser of the old irons is that there was a time when single iron planes had thin irons (probably pre 1800?) in a lot of cases. Then we went through a phase where laminated irons were about 3/16ths on the business end with some makers in the US offering 1/4" thick "premium" laminated irons in some planes (which is a step backwards because they take much longer to grind - especially by hand).

And then, as you get back to Sheffield going all steel again, the irons are thinner with less taper. You can quite often identify all-steel wooden plane irons from England (no chance for this in the US, production was pretty gone too early to switch) just by looking at the thickness and confirming that a thin iron is a newer make.

Bit harder with stanley, though.

there was an interesting comment on the old-tools thread that I mentioned earlier where it was suggested that the mechanism of hand-forge welding a cast steel bit on to an iron backing lent itself to creating a tapered iron (presumably it is easier to exaggerate an already started taper by adding some more metal to the fat bit than trying to get the whole iron back into parallel). I also read somewhere else that there was some discovery around 1830 that made welding cast steel to wrought iron reliable where it had been difficult earlier.

is that a possible explanation from the move from (all steel?) thin 18C irons to the 19C fatter tapered laminated ones?
also when do you think the all steel tapered irons became prevalent in the UK? End of the 19C?

not sure what caused the change, but the biases you talk about (taper from end to end), as well as there being taper of width from end to end along with the thickness taper, and the often not-mentioned fact that the back side of the iron is hollow - all of those things allow you to make an iron fairly inaccurately, but still have it work well.

The hollow along the back is one that I'd still like to see in wooden plane irons, but that is probably not that easy to make by machine without someone just applying it by hand. At any rate, I'd suspect that when making things by hand, you always have to bias them in the direction that the bias doesn't hurt so that you give yourself a nice wide margin for error without affecting performance too much.

The double iron also works much better on an iron that has a little more taper in it when the plane is wedged. Otherwise, it tends to need fettling to keep it from moving (waxing the top of the cap, sanding the area where the cap screw grabs on the iron, etc). But the taper existed before the cap iron, so it's not as if that's controlling as far as i know.
 
custard":s6siq6yz said:
maybe it's a mis-recollection.
actually, now you say it Custard that is surely right - particularly since we now know that until 1946 (at least) the laminated steel was pre-prepared in a mill based in Sheffield.

I wonder if the Tasmanian outfit were experimenting with the 'gobbed on' HSS steel blades mentioned before?

One more tantalizing clue on dates from this google search which shows a preview from a copy of an journal called 'Education' apparently from 1959. The snippet contains the following:

"The new Stanley cutter is made of Nickel Chrome Alloy Steel throughout (the old-fashioned ..."

unfortunately I can't find the original doc and therefore can't tell who wrote these words (or what came after 'old fashioned'!). Could this be the date that Stanley stopped buying their irons from GB and started doing it all wrong in the US :)

https://www.google.co.uk/search?rlz=1C5 ... BzN6zEBYrE
 
top tip!

Also I may have been a bit hasty about our Tasmanian friends - for the sake of argument let's assume the cast-on/pre-welded ingots were sent to Australia to be rolled out, stamped, ground and heat treated. Is it conceivable the women were doing one of the last two activities by hand even in the 60s? What say you MusicMan?

it is certainly believable that these traditionally male vocations moved to women during the war and that they subsequently stuck at it, and plausible that Stanley Oz requested to keep up with the laminated option longer than Stanley US since they would be able to specify a harder steel bit to deal with their weird hardwoods.


PS yet another titbit from old-tools - someone quoted a Stanley publication from 1937 (Tool Tips #6m? Sorry forgot to note the link) in which a Stanley Temperer is interviewed and he describes tempering each iron by hand.
 
custard":tlpu7cso said:
Music Man's raised an important question, are the laminated irons for Bailey style planes superior to the irons that superseded them?

I've used them a lot, and on a wide range of timbers. IMO any advantage is pretty marginal, maybe they're a tiny bit easier to sharpen, a whisker better at dealing with awkward grain, last a few strokes longer. But for all practical purposes your woodwork won't suffer if you're using the later irons in your Bailey plane. If anyone's passing my workshop you're welcome to try a laminated iron and a later iron, identically sharpened, on the same timber, and in the same plane. I'd bet a pound to a penny that in real life usage you can't tell them apart.

I'm sure you're right, Custard. I didn't mean to say that later types were inferior in use; rather that amateurs may perceive greater advantages (in frequency of sharpening) than professionals. Sorry if I gave the wrong impression.

custard":tlpu7cso said:
If laminated irons were materially better wouldn't they have been retained even as a premium option? Wouldn't knowledgeable users in the 50's, 60's and 70's have snapped them up and worn them all out? Wouldn't Record or Stanley have tried to take a competitive advantage by hanging on to them? Wouldn't informed professionals have passed the secret on to generations of apprentices? Wouldn't they be celebrated and command a premium in the used tool market? The fact that none of this happened suggests the collective experience of the market agrees, laminated irons are nice tools, but they don't represent a chalk and cheese benefit over their successors. They might have been superior to their predecessors, but not to their Bailey style plane iron successors.

I generally agree, though enough people on this forum do in fact swear by the old tools of any sort, and Japanese blades do seem to be prized. But I think the issue changed with the modern steels and concentration of manufacture into a few large companies with massive equipment. It rather became "we can now make plane irons that are at least as good if not better than the laminated ones, by a cheaper process". There is an surprising rule in manufacturing: if (and only if) you have mass production and a large market, the manufacturing equipment to make a large number of items costs you almost nothing per item; whereas items made essentially by hand cost you the same significant amount per item, i.e. the hourly rate of the worker. With good enough manufacturing processes and a large enough market, the cost per item is eventually limited only by material costs. Startup is of course limited by the capital costs of the equipment, which is why small manufacturing firms struggle to compete.

custard":tlpu7cso said:
Furthermore, laminated irons may suffer from a serious disadvantage. One of the most frustrating issues for many new users is buying a used Bailey style plane and discovering the cap iron doesn't seat properly on the iron, so shavings get jammed in the gap. The traditional fix of flattening the two components to an accurate mating surface is perfectly possible, but it's a long, hard, dirty job. For an older hobbyist user, who doesn't have the finger strength they once had, it might be unrealistic. One quick and easy solution is a well aimed whack to the non bevelled side of the iron with a nylon hammer, it doesn't always work, but when it does it's revelatory in it's effectiveness. The problem is that I'd be hesitant to do that on a laminated iron because of the cracking issue previously discussed.

And you'd be quite right to be hesitant! Still, I'm glad to know this trick.
 
nabs":24jyzuok said:
arghh Custard, that question is a border-line sharpening-discussion provoker! Nonetheless I'd be very interested to hear from MusicMan on whether the softer steel back might help reduce the risk of splitting the cast steel even if it was made harder than would have been wise with solid steel (although of course for the reasons mentioned earlier it is not necessarily the case the makers would have made the blades harder, just because the lamination meant they could).

It's possible, as the softer stuff would blunt cracks that tried to get through. I have no idea whether this was a big effect, whether it happened in practice, or was even a consideration.

Keith
 
nabs":1xngx5qd said:
that would be a very interesting data-point DW.


Just4Fun":1xngx5qd said:
Is it always possible to identify a laminated iron visibly?
I bought my first wooden plane at a flea market recently. The blade is thick, much thicker than in my Stanleys, but it is a treat to sharpen and use. The blade & chip iron were made by Erik Anton Berg and writing on them mentions gold medals won at fairs in Paris in 1900 and Stockholm in 1897. Would this be a laminated iron?
there is a bit of discussion on identifying laminated irons below, but for the old thick irons in wooden planes it is often very visible since the two metals generally corrode differently and have been around long enough for the differences to be obvious
record-stanley-laminated-plane-irons-t106851.html

One 1867 patent date on the iron, and no lamination. So nothing new As I thought it might be.
 

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