Lie Nielsen tools

UKworkshop.co.uk

Help Support UKworkshop.co.uk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
The collection looks amazing. Are they getting neglected in the box?

Treated myself to the No.3, 4 1/2, 5 1/2 and 7 at the time as I had intended to get into box and small cabinet making when time permitted. The 7 would have been overkill for that, maybe only needed the 4 1/2 to be fair but, well, shiny tools and all that ! :)

Have since found that I tend to favour turning and some green woodworking, and the flat work never really happened !

So the Cliftons sit in their plane socks on shelves in the workshop and come out only occasionally to be checked over, re-oiled etc, shame really they ought to be used as intended. The boxes are still around somewhere in the house I think.

Before I got them I had a range of the LN planes and they were top notch of course, but the Cliftons just spoke to me more, had more soul or magic or whatever :) The LNs went to new homes except for a low angle 5 and a couple of block planes, (one bronze small one) which I figured were useful alternatives to keep around but they never get used either !
 
The green Clinton’s do have a voice. I know as I have heard them speak. Cliftons are just hard to get in the states. And I am not sure about the new cliftons. That British green is just eye candy. I also prefer the older blade that was used.

In looking at the green Cliftons, I get the impression that the base sole plate is actually thicker than on other planes. Are they slightly heavier?

I have seen a couple of examples of Sorby bench planes. They are painted red. Another really nice looking plane but collector rare.
 
The green Clinton’s do have a voice. I know as I have heard them speak. Cliftons are just hard to get in the states. And I am not sure about the new cliftons. That British green is just eye candy. I also prefer the older blade that was used.

In looking at the green Cliftons, I get the impression that the base sole plate is actually thicker than on other planes. Are they slightly heavier?

I have seen a couple of examples of Sorby bench planes. They are painted red. Another really nice looking plane but collector rare.

Not sure if they are heavier, but it was the weight and handling of a Clifton 5 1/2 I tried out that first made an impression on me, and the aesthetics are just lovely ! :)
 
Message to the budding realists out there. You don't need these expensive tools to create beautiful furniture. Just learn how to sharpen and hone well. All you need is a few good old tools, as long as they have Sheffield steel, because it is the best in the world. Get all your advice from Grandad and not 'you tube' and away you go. All you folks that pay hundreds or thousands of pounds for one tool.... pah! you need to get over yourselves!
 
I just watched a vid on a new Clifton 5.5. My problem is that I got the idea the soles were heavier.

Not So! Here is the deal. At the front and rear of the plane sole, there is a web about 12 mm high. This gives an initial impression of a thicker sole. Nope, it a web that defines the outside edge

The I spotted two diagonal webs running in a cross cut fashion in the back near and under the tote.

What does this mean? It means the casting is webbed to enhance stability. I have never seen this before but it makes really good sense.
 
Message to the budding realists out there. You don't need these expensive tools to create beautiful furniture. Just learn how to sharpen and hone well. All you need is a few good old tools, as long as they have Sheffield steel, because it is the best in the world. Get all your advice from Grandad and not 'you tube' and away you go. All you folks that pay hundreds or thousands of pounds for one tool.... pah! you need to get over yourselves!

OUCH! Let me introduce you to a secret. I love making furniture and the like in wood. But I also enjoy making tools for both wood and metal. Yup, I am one of those closet tool makers. So the beauty of the well made tool is part of our satisfaction. What Carl Holtey does is artwork.

Bit here is the secret … as much as I love LN, I also love my coffin nose smoother. I paid one dollar for it at a garage sale. It needed lots of work. I stripped it down to the wood to get a nice, newer linseed finish on it. I don’t care about it’s value as it is a production plane to me.

The iron was knackered and rusty. Lots of work here but that’s OK. When I saw the iron set all cleaned up, I could see who made it.

SORBY/Sheffield Steel

Thay plane feels different than a LN as it’s a wooden plane. But in a nice way.

My older Sorby chisels feel better than my LN chisels.

So at the end of the day, you are absolutely right. If the tool was not the end game but rather the path to the end game, I would not have bought some of the tools have.

And I can’t say enough about the Sheffield Steel used. I would kill to know what alloy it is and the process to finish it the way they did!
 
Message to the budding realists out there. You don't need these expensive tools to create beautiful furniture. Just learn how to sharpen and hone well. All you need is a few good old tools, as long as they have Sheffield steel, because it is the best in the world. Get all your advice from Grandad and not 'you tube' and away you go. All you folks that pay hundreds or thousands of pounds for one tool.... pah! you need to get over yourselves!

Such a lot of nonsense. To the new woodworker, identifying the correct old tool to buy on Ebay can be daunting and how do you know if you have a good one? Plus some people are not interested in restoring tools, they just want to get on and use tools.

Also, some rarer, old tools (e.g. router planes, LA planes) cost as much as the new ones so why not buy new?

Not everyone has a Grandad they can learn from? 3 of mine had died before I was born, and my Grandad died when I was 14. He also wasn't very good at woodworking as he was an electrician. My Dad is actually the better woodworker but he hasn't made any furniture in a long time. I'm sure if I showed him a few videos of someone like Matt Estlea on YouTube, he'd probably agree that Matt is a good teacher and his experience of working at Rycotewood school means he knows more about furniture making and using tools than my Dad does.

Lastly, buying new tools is no bad thing - it helps the economy and provides / create jobs. New tools are expensive because demand for woodworking tools is low.

It would be sad if LN can't recover... a few companies able to sustain themselves and employ people and allowing others to purchase well made tools to make their living in woodworking or enjoy their hobby is a wonderful thing
 
More for devmeister - sorry I forgot to mention this since you bring up the topic of dies. There's a lot of literature talking about edge life improvement due to cryo and it's not to be. I would imagine unless you had an issue with dies where an extra point of hardness would prevent deformation, you'll see no real difference in the life of a die.

I vaguely recall LV saying something along these lines years ago - paraphrasing, they found that they end up in the same place either way.

For the edge of a chisel or plane iron, though, finer grain and additional hardness (one can temper back and still have a better quality edge than lower terminal hardness and less tempering) if there's no real cost difference, great there.

Clifton got raves for the forged irons (and in my opinion, a deep stamp speaks to quality far more than an etch, decal, etc.), though it appears that a well done iron from bar stock with careful temp control actually results in a finer grain. I think as good as rolled material comes now, if you do minimal things to it aside from careful temperature control prior to hardening and tempering and then during, it's really difficult to improve grain size. I had to do a lot of tinkering to improve anything more complicated than a quick high heat, quench and accurate double temper. Even then, the visual difference is minimal with a hand scope - what little difference I can get with 1095 and O1 with thermal cycles is a tiny fraction of how much bigger the grain will be with anything else. Even the surplus carbon in a file will make for a much more coarse visual grain (and that's not terribly reliable as an only indicator as I sent O1 and 26c3 to a metallurgist and expected because of the visible coarseness of the iron carbides in the latter, it would test worse than O1. It turned out to be 2 full points harder at the same temper and almost twice as tough.

it'll be interesting to see if the niobium carbide steels catch on - I'd have to go read more about them to even remember what the virtue is.
 
Wow! You do have a point. As a woodworker and metal worker, learning never ends. Years ago I bought a lot of stuff. Not sure where I was going. Sold a lot of stuff as my personal direction evolved. Today I call it vintage woodworking and I have never been happier. But it’s been a journey. Lots of wins but some loses. My metal work evolved from my background in engineering to support my woodworking. I am a pretty good machinist but my experience has been in steam engines and wood working tools. I got involved with LN over thirty years ago. I do love my LN tools. I just saw s video on Thomas Flynn making their new block plane. Wow! The body is vacuum cast bronze. The body pattern is awsome with rib structures to give rigidity and stability. The adjuster is a modified Norris adjuster and I love the two part cap with its bronze and walnut. As a toolmaker I am impressed. I love using tools like this and I love making tools like this. Even if all I make this month is a bird house. At least it’s a happy bird house.
 
Message to the budding realists out there. You don't need these expensive tools to create beautiful furniture. Just learn how to sharpen and hone well. All you need is a few good old tools, as long as they have Sheffield steel, because it is the best in the world. Get all your advice from Grandad and not 'you tube' and away you go. All you folks that pay hundreds or thousands of pounds for one tool.... pah! you need to get over yourselves!
I started with some tools from eBay and enjoyed hours of flattening and sharpening. That said I bought a plane (brand new) and spent days trying to flatten it. Rewarding myself with some beautifully made tools is a treat and almost the only remaining one.
 
Last edited:
I just found a reference to Sorby using EN45. I need to check this stuff out. You know anything about it?

I've not looked up modern sorby stuff before, but it appears to be a steel with about 0.65% carbon and some additives for hardenability and toughness. That explains why the modern sorby chisels are soft if that's what's in them - it's more of an alloy that you'd expect to see in a tool box site chisel, and when optimally hardened, it'll end up in the high 50s hardness (which creates an edge that will have trouble in hardwoods).

As far as the old sheffield steels go, I have probably a 150 or so irons and have made about 30 or 40 bench planes with different irons (I rarely buy american irons from that time period - I think the auburn/ohio steel stock was not good quality and thus it's difficult to make the irons come close to sheffield or current stuff like Starrett O1). The really old irons are water hardening steel of some sort - I would guess the very early irons are chosen by ore (as in, use the ore that has the right alloying to make a good steel - without necessarily knowing why it does, but once you find it, keep using it). I'm not a reader of steel history, so I can only go by what I feel and what the microscope shows for wear pattern (which is both how evenly an edge wears and also whether or not carbides show up due to surplus carbon or other additives above a percent or so).

Late 1800s, things may have changed and the steel in laminated tools may have been more controlled or alloying adjusted without relying on the ore to have a certain property.

Once irons became solid in sheffield, they feel on the stones to me like they're oil hardening. As time goes on, they got a little softer (the solid steel end to end tapered wooden plane irons all seem to be a bit softer - someone working at the factory would've know why for that decision).

Some of stanley's irons in the early 1900s that are solid feel more like a water hardening steel and they have high hardness potential. I have some block plane irons that don't quite feel like 1095 or sheffield steel, but they're not as slick on the stones as O1 - they're probably one of the W-series of water hardening steels or something similar. I don't see much for carbides other than one here and there in the matrix (which is something that happens with tungsten).

I've never had the chance to play with W-1 steel - the spec is very wide and if you got some that didn't give the carbon content, it can literally vary and still meet spec within a range of something like 0.6 to 1.5. 0.6 and 0.8 are vastly different, let alone the range they give. I looked some up this morning and realized that if we want plane irons made of 1095 (I can send you one sometime - they're cheap and easy for me to make), one of the W series of steels would be a better option - they have only a little bit of alloying but much better toughness than 1095 - more like what you'd get in something like 1084 steel or A2 at high hardness (but without the coarsened grain and without the chromium).

I know there are natural ores with nickel, and natural ores with chromium. Either would've improved the outcome in the 1700s and 1800s by making steel a little tougher and more hardenable. There may have been manganese in them, too (which is in 1095 and others to make them more hardenable). It would've been an interesting time to make things - not knowing what made for a better outcome, but judging based only on the outcome itself. We now push specs which from an engineering standpoint can lead to improvement, but choosing spec first and then accepting outcome leads to stuff like A2 when you compare to something like an older ward or even older yet, a very old butcher laminated iron with extremely fine steel. The latter doesn't plane as long (maybe only 70% as many feet) ,but the edge is pleasant the entire time and sharpens easier at same hardness.

So, summary of sheffield steel:

early - weldable and water hardening - probably success in terms of fineness and toughness determined by ore source

later, like late 1800s - not sure, but still a lot of laminated tools - could still have been done the old way. There's little quality difference between something made around 1800 in sheffield and a 1900 ward iron. The difference I see is in average hardness (sharpening options would've been more starting mid 1800s with introduction of the washita allowing a harder iron, and then of course, synthetics by the late 1800s - starting to appear around that time. I don't know exactly when, and you could get corundum(alumina) before then as it had a lapidary use. When they started making vitrified stones like india stones, though, I'm not sure.

Later yet (before 1950 or so and after the early 1900s) - lots of solid steel irons that feel like water hardening and are often a click or two softer (not sure why - could be sharpenability, etc). As time went on toward the 1950s and marples, etc, were still marketing laminated irons, they were soft. That could've been lack of care, a nod to site workers, or to make grinding after heat treat faster.

After 1950, no-man's land. Lots of use of steels with lower carbon amounts (like EN45) that don't have the potential to have high strength, and thus won't hold a hard fine edge.

(Lie Nielsen's early irons were apparently W1 - the whole W series of steels is interesting as there are some versions that have carbon over 1% but a tighter spec and tungsten to improve toughness. Add a little tungsten, things get better. Add a little chromium, things get better. Add manganese, hardening is vastly more forgiving. Add silicon, and steel gets tougher. Add small amounts of vandium and peak hardness increases slightly and grain grows in heat less easily).

Add them all at one time, though and maybe the fancy sauce might not be that good. I think 1095 with just a bit of chromium added would be much better. 26c3 is basically a drastically cleaner spec of 1095 with a small addition of chromium and carbon at 1.25% instead of 0.9-1%. It's super dandy stuff, but requires quench oil to get full hardness and doesn't wear very long.
 
I'll look a little harder for W-bar. After rehardening an older stanley 18 plane blade (all steel, but definitely not O1 and not 1095 either), I'd love to make some irons out of the same thing. W is common in narrow bar stock and drill rod here (since you're in the states with me), but in rolled material less so. The same is true for 52100, but enough knife guys use it for the specialty retailers to heat and roll drill rod into bar stock themselves (it's just OK for tools - great for knives because it can be bent almost onto itself at full hardness, but for some reason, the edge doesn't wear nearly as uniformly as O1 and it doesn't pick up a shaving as well when it's dulling even though it will plane about the same distance as O1).

I thought when I started making chisels, 52100 was going to be what I used - which leads back to the outcome statement above. 52100 has high hardness potential and very high toughness. it just turns out that at the very edge, it's not quite as good and then the toughness isn't the asset that I thought it would be.
 
Wow! And all this in seeking the ultimate edge steel for a wood working tool. It’s complex requiring one read the posts several times. I know by the Flinn website that they use 01. It seems we always tend to gravitate back to 01.
 
It's like anything else - it's complex to read about but pretty trivial to feel or see the difference.

If you have an older plane, one good way to get an idea of what it is is to sharpen it identically to a known source (like a hock O1 iron for example) and plane the same wood alternating back and forth with the test iron and the known iron, measuring the shaving thickness once in a while and weighing the volume of shavings on a postal scale. The water hardening irons will always end up a little behind the O1 iron due to lower alloy content (unless they have extra chromium like 52100 - that's the one example I can think if that will match O1).

A ward iron will last about 75% as long as an O1 iron at same hardness, but that's with smoother shavings around 2-3 thousandth.

That lets you know what's in an iron, though. There's not much in older irons that is even as alloyed as O1. O1 seems to be the standard for sheffield makers who are still making solid steel tools because it through hardens pretty easily, sharpens easily attains good hardness and tempers relatively simply. In europe, the tool steels seem to be more of the chrome vanadium variety, but the name is a bit misleading as they don't feel like they have surplus chromium or vanadium - they're just additives to improve toughness and keep grain small.

The boutique makers with CNC machines don't seem to like anything that's not very dimensionally stable, though (thus, less O1 or O1 is done overseas with the exception of LV who makes a too-soft-tempered version of O1, maybe due to the preference of someone there who like soft irons). Hock's O1 stuff is almost entirely done in france where labor costs are lower than the US.

After all of the above and experimenting with a little of everything, I've settled on O1 for plane irons and 26c3 for chisels. O1 makes a slightly better plane iron than 26c3 and 26c3 makes a slightly better chisel than O1 (two points harder, twice as tough, but not so tough that it won't release edge damage).

It would be nice if the BS and DIN steel melts were available over here - I'd like to compare some of the CV steels to O1 and 26c3, but they're tariffed and don't seem to show up at retail here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_steel
1095CV used by knife makers isn't easy to find, either, and when it's found, it's usually overpriced (I'm sure in large melts, it's cheap, or it wouldn't be in knives that are literally sold at walmart and sams club).

All of these would be fun to experiment with, but they probably warp more than O1, which LN and LV already think is warpy. LN is the only company I can think of that used W series steels, but they couldn't do it well and the whole line of W steels seems to have fallen out of stock favor deferring to O1, D2 and A2 for lower wear range die making.
 
I just sold an LN 4-1/2 that had a W1 blade. Got it in a trade years ago, and did not care for the plane. The blade sharpened OK.

I think LN will be around a long time and will retain the growth rate desired by the owner. I believe he fully understands the hand tool market, and the past decade's whims of the internet barkers. Watch the content of the YouTube content producers and what they promote. Next check their bio! So many have just a couple of years under their belt, with their experience predicated on what some other content producer yelped about last week. In the US, we have too many "fan boys" of woodworkers that have marketed themselves as experts, with many selling goods to the fan boys, while true craftsmen go unnoticed.
 

longer answer follows, but short answer is:
* it can be made plenty hard
* it doesn't have any wear resistant anything in it so it only wears - in my only head to head test - 81% of the footage and volume planed that O1 and 52100 does

******************
It can get terminal hardness around the same level as O1 (I sent samples to be tested - I missed on its toughness for some reason - the only one I missed on, but I don't use it so I can't claim that it should've turned out well as I haven't snapped samples like I have 1095 and O1. So my routine may result in it being less fine...)

At any rate, it should be about as hard as O1 with regular process, very fine grained, but less edge life than O1. I think it'd make a nice chisel, but it won't have the brash keenness that 1%+ carbon steel chisels get (which is why razors are made with steel that's generally above 1% - to get edge strength in a fine edge and initial edge taking).

1084 is *really* cheap and sharpens really nicely due to the lack of wear-resistant carbides - I'll show some pictures following below.

My test samples of 1084 ended up (400F temper but fast quench and low terminal temperature) at 61.6 average hardness, which is nearly identical to 3 of the 4 O1 samples I sent for a prior test. I had one flyer (60.9) but the other three were all 61.6 or 61.7 C scale hardness, which kind of dispells the myth that you can't get accurate hardness by hand - even the flyer, which was a little overheated but I sent it to see what it would be - was within 1 point of the narrower group).

Long story short, 1084 is perfectly usable and can get hard but it needs a special quench oil to get hardness numbers like above, and accurate tempering. The quench oil sold here is called parks 50, and it's kind of pricey (about $80 a gallon with tax and any place that carries it cheaper has exorbitant shipping charges).

O1 will get to or very close to the numbers above with cooking oil due to the addition of a lot of manganese. Doubling the manganese further makes something like mushet steel (which will harden in air - the earliest high speed steel).

For some reason, 1084 is described as an ideal starting point for knife makers because it doesn't have much surplus anything, but O1 is easier to heat treat and doesn't require anything special, as long as you're just heating and quenching samples and not forging. O1 is more expensive, but the domestic O1 is intended for industrial customers and very very good quality. No clue where most 1084 is coming from - probably india.

..I'll just post the pictures in a separate post.
 
(1084 will usually be tempered softer in knives because people like to stick the tips of knives in cracks of trees and then bend the knife tip to see how far it will go before it breaks. We don't do soft/tough temper for tools - edges deforming is a bad thing and we have high priced screwdrivers to abuse prying rather than chisels).

Edge profiles at 150x to see grain uniformity - fully worn and needing resharpening at this point. If an edge is uniform at the start and the finish, it will be pleasant even if it doesn't wear as long (you can just do pre-finish shavings at a higher thickness and still plane more, anyway. The fascination with extreme edge life is a beginner's folly) .

The little grove appearing here is where the shaving stops rubbing due to a cap set about 2-3 times as far from the edge. The cap turns the shaving, holds it down, it wears the tip slightly hollow, thus the very defined edge and no long scratches going past the divot.

O1

01-284.jpg


1095 (this iron had trouble with chipping early on and then had to break in - this is before I had parks 50 oil, so I would not likely have the early chipping, but it does chip and nick easier than 1084 or O1)

I would guess the more pronounced grooving is due to carbides leaving at the edge and then wear being less even.
1095-193.jpg


1084-230.jpg


Sorry about the stuff at the edges on the last two pictures the banding is just oil - even the tiniest amount of oil shows up like this. You have to wipe an iron with a dry cloth section five or six times to get rid of it. The jello looing stuff on 1095 is either skin or oil or wood, don't know which, but something very thin that light passes through.

I only have an A2 sample from an older scope in smaller picture size. You can scale the image up to match the wear band size.

Compare the uniformity of the edges and you can see why I mentioned that the A2 starts to go south with edge uniformity and the surface and the effort to use the plane follows it.

LN A-2.jpg
 
01, 1084 and 1095 all have supremely nice even wear as long as there's nothing defective about an iron. LN's A2 is the most uniform I've seen, so A2 doesn't get better than the picture above. The only higher wear steels that maintain a fine edge wear (still not as nice) are matrix type steels (lower carbon versions of high speed steels, etc - there's not enough carbon for them to form carbides with their alloying elements - there aren't many of those. AEB-L is one of them for anyone wanting to search.).

I proposed this as a potential steel for LN, but I don't think they take suggestions. Plus, it takes careful heat treat to get it to high hardness.

I don't know why the wear profile doesn't look the same (apologies for the oil again). Durability was 1.7 times O1 and 52100, but I can't get it to high hardness so the initial edge was fragile.

aeb-484.jpg


Which leads to an interesting comment - if you have subpar steel that can't hold a fine edge that well, put it in a plane where the edge doesn't need to be as fine (soft irons are great for jack planes if they're not defective soft, or jointers- they'll break people of the habit of trying to take tissue shavings with a jointer, which is a dippy practice in the first place).

Hock's O1 showed the same behavior (hard tempered). Very minor initial damage, but once the edge had some wear and the initial edge wasn't so thin (it becomes rounded and a little more blunt/thick) it didn't get any more defects.

(AEB-L is really cheap. Half the price of O1. It's stainless, but it also warps when fast quenched to get high hardness - someone with a dewar of LN would probably be able to get the hardness that I can't in the open atmosphere).

Notice the uniformity vs the worn LN edge, though, especially given there's far more chromium in AEB-L - there just isn't enough carbon for it to make big chromium carbides.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top