If the trees or the squirrels ever get their act together, I’m certain that I will be one of the first people on the planet to wake up with a horse’s head in my bed – courtesy of the maple mafia.
Not only do I work for a magazine that encourages 220,000 other people to slaughter spruces, but I personally have a lot of sap on my hands. Since we moved into our house 11 years ago, I have ordered the killing of three trees (a fourth died at the hands of a wind storm, I swear). And I’ve also taught a few trees “a lesson” by having a few branches here and there snapped by arborists-for-hire.
Last week, I ordered the ash tree in our front yard be taken out. This was a hard call to make. For the tulip poplar in the back yard that I had dismembered seven years ago, I had no love. That deciduous demon chucked a branch through the windshield of my beloved Honda Civic.
But the ash tree was a loyal shade-giver that had gone bad. Recently, it started chucking loose limbs – first at dogs that soiled its trunk, later on at neighborhood kids walking up the sidewalk. So I made a call (actually, I had Lucy do it). I had them do the job while I was at work.
After the body was removed, I volunteered to clean up the piles of sawdust with a rake and shovel. It was no small task, and I scurried around the stump scratching furiously at the dirt and weeds.
After a few minutes I started laughing. Not because I was dancing around like a ground squirrel on Bugger Sugar, but because I wouldn’t (or couldn’t) step on the stump itself as I worked.
There’s a lesson in here, somewhere, really.
Here it is: Senior Editor Glen Huey and I were talking this week about all the stupid things we’d done when learning woodworking. We agreed that the single-most idiotic thing we had both done was avoiding making cabriole legs for years and years too long.
Cabriole legs – the Queen Anne equivalent of a hitchhiking cartoon fox sticking out her shapely leg to stop a car – seem hard. They are, however, quite simple to make. And once you make one, your reaction is: Huh, that’s it? That’s what I was afraid of all those years?
It’s not just cabriole legs that woodworkers fear, it almost everything new. We recoil at anything with curves, inlay or angles other than 90°. (Ever wonder why Art & Crafts and Shaker are the two most popular furniture styles in woodworking magazines?)
With this thought, I dropped the rake. I stepped up on the stump. I looked around.
The neighborhood looked different from that slightly elevated point. In fact, I almost could see the trees forming a lynch mob at the end of my street.
When I was designing (i.e. ripping off the plans from a deceased German tool merchant) my Holtzapffel Workbench, my intention was to have the screws of the face vise in perfect alignment with the holdfast hole in the bench’s right leg.
My plan was thus: I could put a huge George Nakashima-style plank in the twin-screw vise and it would come to rest on the shaft of a holdfast stuck in the right leg.
I bet Charles Holtzapffel wished he’d thought of that, I muttered as I drafted this up.
Months passed; I built the bench. And I really mucked that detail up. As built, the holdfast hole in the right leg isn’t lined up with the top edge of the vise screws. Far from it. That hole is about 2” from being in the same plane.
When I first realized the error, I beat myself up pretty badly (no bag of oranges was harmed during the self-flagellation). But before I started going all “prairie dog” on the bench and drilling holes everywhere, I decided to take my own bitter advice: Try it before you burn it.
Here is the huge surprise about twin-screw vises (you ready?). They are monsters, with almost unlimited clamping power. Several months ago, as we were preparing to film a short video about the bench, I bragged that I could clamp an 8’-long board on edge in the twin-screw vise and plane its edge and it would be rock solid.
Eyebrows were raised. Uncomfortable coughs were emitted. Senior Editor Bob Lang, I think, pantomimed that I had been drinking alcohol.
So I went to the wood rack to get me a 1 x 12 x 8’ hunk of something. We didn’t have any 8-footers. The only 1 x 12 stock we had was 10’ long. Yikes. Suddenly I wished I’d had been drinking in order to increase my courage/foolhardiness. A 10’-long board is 4’ longer than the bench itself.
But you know what? The twin-screw vise held it without complaint. So the support in the right leg isn’t really needed. But if you do want to modify your plans to match my original plans, shift all the dog holes in the right leg up 2”. That will do the trick.
Photo credit: Katy, my 6-year-old daughter, took these photos today while I was working on a cursed Chinese plywood bookcase. As you can clearly see from this photo, I still don’t have a butt.
I keep a short list in my head of what I like to call “The Woodworking Mysteries” – things that I pretend to understand but are really just outside my grasp.
One of the mysteries is how a tree can pump water and nutrients from its deepest roots to the furthest reaches of its branches. We have many clues as to how it works, but a complete picture eludes me at least. Another mystery is about how yellow glue (polyvinyl acetate) actually works. Again, I’ve never read a satisfying explanation.
A third mystery relates to handplanes and basic geometry. One common strategy for reducing tear-out in a board is to skew the plane as you make the cut. This strategy was beaten into my head by all my teachers dead and living. It’s repeated on the Internet by people I deeply respect and trust. And I do it myself in my work.
But if you do the math, you will quickly see how this strategy doesn’t make much sense on its face.
Let’s start with a fact that we do know: The higher the angle of attack when you plane a board, the less likely you are to experience tear-out. This is an almost immutable truth. It’s why we have high-pitch planes and scrapers in our arsenals.
Now for another fact: Skewing a plane in use reduces your angle of attack. Mike Dunbar, the founder of The Windsor Institute and a personal hero, explained this to me in the clearest way possible. When a shaving encounters a plane iron, the angle of attack is like a hill that the shaving has to walk up. If you walk straight up that 45° hill, that’s a lot of work. When you skew the tool, it’s like the shaving is walking up the hill at a lower angle. Or put another way, it’s a bit like building a road up a steep mountain. You don’t make the road go straight up the mountain, you build switchbacks so the vehicles can actually make it up the incline. Skewing reduces the amount of work required – both to plane a board and to climb a hill.
How much does skewing reduce your angle of attack? John Economaki, the founder of Bridge City Tools, published a brilliant chart that explains this on his web site page that promotes his variable-pitch plane. You can see the chart in full here (scroll down to the section titled “Skewing the Plane.”) You can look at this chart and see immediately that skewing a 45°-pitch handplane by 30° will reduce your effective angle of attack to 40.9°.
So here’s the problem: If high planing angles reduce tear-out, and skewing a plane reduces your angle of attack, then how can skewing the plane reduce tear-out?
Here’s a hint: The answer is in the branches.
Planing with no skew resulted in no tear-out on this ash board.
To explore this seeming contradiction, I did a little experiment in the shop on Saturday. I took a short piece of ash with pronounced grain direction – that is, there was no question about which way the grain was traveling in the board.
I cleaned up one face with a smoothing plane and then turned the board around so that I planed against the grain, which is when you are more likely to encounter tear-out. Then I planed the board with a bevel-up block plane, the Lie-Nielsen 102. This plane is bedded at 12° and the iron is sharpened with a 35° micro-bevel, so its angle of attack is 47°. The mouth on the plane is wide open, so it’s not much of a factor. The tool is set to take a shaving that is about .002” thick.
Planing with a 30° skew created this ugly patch of torn grain.
First I planed the board against the grain without skewing the tool. This cleaned up the board just fine with no tear-out. Then I skewed the tool by 30° (which lowered my effective planing angle to about 43°) and did the same operation. I tried skewing both to the left and to the right. Two areas of the board tore out grotesquely.
Then I cleaned up the board again and tried skewing the plane at 20°. Tear-out occurred at the same two places but not as badly. So I tried skewing the plane at a variety of angles. And without fail, the more I skewed the plane, the more tear-out occurred.
So how can skewing reduce tear-out?
You have to remember that trees are not manufactured items. They are giant cones made of fibers that grow in different directions as the tree responds to its environment: a hill, a disease, a wind storm. Then we slice them up into shapes suitable for building things, regardless of how the fibers are traveling through the tree.
In some boards, grain can change directions on you a couple times. And the grain can be at odd angles – you cannot assume that all your boards will have grain running from one end to the other – the grain may be traveling at a 20° direction along the face of the board and 10° along the edge. And the grain might be in the shape of a shallow wave.
So there are times when skewing the plane puts the edge in the right position at the right time to deal with that patch of grain.
Planing at a 20° skew created a little tear-out.
In my example board above, the two places where the tear-out occurred were at places where the grain rose quickly. So how did I deal with this board? As I encountered the areas that tore out, I straightened out the tool – no skew. When I worked the areas that didn’t tear out, I skewed the tool to reduce the effort required for planing.
So the trick with skewing takes us back to the No. 1 way to reduce tear-out: The best strategy is to select the best woods possible and learn how to read the grain so you can begin to predict how your tools will behave. Sometimes, the best strategy is to not skew the tool.
Or put another way: Because grain is irregular, sometimes skewing the plane allows the blade to encounter the grain at a non-skewed angle – and to therefore plane it without tear-out.
This is the end of my series on planing. I hope that some part of it was helpful. Next week, we’ll probably return to the topic of (surprise!) workbenches.
If you follow the conventional wisdom for setting your chipbreaker, you will hate your handplane.
What’s the conventional wisdom? According to Charles Holtzapffel’s seminal work on the cutting action of tools, you should set your smooting plane’s chipbreaker .02” from the cutting edge of your iron (other respected sources say to set it even closer than that) and to have an extremely tight mouth. The illustration shown on page 478 of Vol. II of Holtzapffel’s “Construction, Action & Application of Cutting Tools” shows a plane with a mouth as tight as one could imagine.
This, Holtzapffel says, prevents tear-out.
This, says your neighborhood blogger, makes your plane choke like a starving man at the Chicken Bone Buffeteria.
Chipbreakers do more harm than good in a handplane. Whenever I’m having trouble with a plane (especially if the plane is choking or refuses to cut), the first place I look is the chipbreaker. Whenever I fettle a new or vintage handplane and the bugger won’t behave, the first thing I’ll do is swap out its chipbreaker with another plane that has a working chipbreaker. In almost all cases, this solves my problem.
So what is the purpose of the chipbreaker? My cynical view of the gizmo is that it became widely used so toolmakers could use a cheap, thin steel cutter and reinforce it with an inexpensive iron or soft-steel plate. This is supported by the odd names given to chipbreakers. Some early sources call them cap irons, double irons, break irons or top irons. In other words, not everyone agrees that they were designed to break chips.
Early planes had thick irons and didn’t have chipbreakers, even during the age of mahogany, which has irregular grain that tends to tear-out.
In my view, the chipbreaker’s only real purpose in a modern plane is to mate with the tool’s blade-adjustment mechanism and to aid in chip ejection. Oh, and it exists to frustrate you.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Professor Chutaro Kato at Yamagata University did an interesting study of chipbreakers and how their shape and their position on the iron reduces tear-out.
You can read the entire study here. But here’s the quick summary: The chipbreaker actually did its job when it was located .004” from the cutting edge. I have tried to set a chipbreaker on a smoothing plane to this position (using a feeler gauge as a guide), and it doesn’t work well if you have a tight mouth on the tool. My planes just clogged because there wasn’t enough room for the shaving to escape.
If you read Professor Kato’s study carefully, you’ll note that he had better luck with a chipbreaker that had a radical forward-leaning angle – 80°! This 80° breaker worked better even when positioned back a little on the cutting iron. I have yet to try this setup on a plane because the numbers don’t add up. Professor Kato is working with a bevel-down plane bedded at 40°. Do the math: Putting an 80° chipbreaker on an iron bedded at 45° with a tight mouthseems madness. (If anyone has tried this, let me know. I also used to think that $8 for a six pack of beer was madness.)
So in what position should you place your chipbreaker? I set mine back about 3/32” in a smoothing plane in most cases — sometimes even a little further back if the mouth is really tight. All I’m really trying to do is to prevent clogging.
Which begs the question: Why did I list a chipbreaker as one of the ways to reduce tear-out? Well, I did mention one use for the chipbreaker in a modern Bailey-style plane – it mates with the tool’s depth-adjustment mechanism. This mechanism allows you to easily set your tool to take the finest cut possible, which really will reduce tear-out.
I want to thank all our customers, all those persons that tried to place orders and all those that needed patience as we started this endeavor. We are just two months into Lost Art Press, a concept that has been years in the working.
The idea of Lost Art Press is to make the equivalent of the Lie-Nielsen $150 block plane. We wanted to bring back to public knowledge, the “Lost Art” of woodworking. As Chris recently explained this concept to my sister in law, when compact discs came into existence who wanted to know about LP albums? When machinery came to the woodworking trade and mass production became not only possible but common, the secrets of the old timers went to the grave with them. Remember the first time you tried a premium hand plane? After using a number of low cost planes, the first time I used a Lie-Nielsen plane I was convinced it was worth every penny it cost. The thing worked! We are trying to make the $150 block plane equivalent in the publishing business. Our goal is to produce books and DVDs that will outlast us, that will inform challenge and provide that story of the past.
That said, we have a number of projects underway that will follow this theme. We will update our site as they come online.
To introduce myself, I am Chris’s apprentice. I have been woodworking for a number of years and thought this company would be a great fit with my woodworking passion. Well, thanks to all of you, I have not been in the shop for months! I have learned all about internet e-commerce, gateways, merchant accounts, accounting software, web sites and shipping! Shipping is a real issue. We are trying our best to keep our shipping costs as low as possible and get products to you asap!
We will be on the road to a number of shows this year. If anyone wants to know about the business end of things, please grab hold of me through if you are at one of these shows. I will be glad to share. We will be updating our site on show dates.
Lastly, I would like to introduce my wife Sharon. She is the one handling the telephone and most of the customer service issues. She continues to remark how nice our customers are. It is no surprise to Chris and me. The woodworking community is a great bunch of people.
