The most infectious hand tool I own is a 3/16” beading plane that has a permanent space in my traveling tool chest. Nearly every woodworker who uses it becomes possessed by the entirely sane desire to own one (or three) for their work.
However, finding a functional antique beading plane in the wild is difficult. While they are common planes, they commonly have a lot of problems. The body (also called the stock) is warped. The iron is a mess. The mouth has been opened too far. The wedge doesn’t fit.
And those are for starters.
When I was at Hulls Cove Tool Barn this summer I inspected at least 20 beading planes. None was worth buying.
If you are interested in getting a new beading plane, I’d talk to planemaker Caleb James right quick. He has been working on batches of beading planes in 1/8”, 3/16” and 1/4” sizes – the most useful sizes for furniture-making. I have two planes on order from him myself.
I got to use his planes while at a Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event and am totally sold. Caleb is a very talented planemaker (and furniture maker). So place your order now before he gets swamped. His e-mail is calebjames@me.com.
Part 4 of a British Introduction to Japanese Planes
What we in the West do not realise is that a plane comes to a maker as a kit of parts. He would buy the blade and maybe the back iron from the blacksmith but they may have been made by two smiths. The body would come from a Kanna maker down the road. These are the three parts that have to be made to fit together and it’s YOUR job to do it.
Note that there are only three parts. There is NO WEDGE to press it all together.
What we have instead is a tapering blade and back iron that tightens as it fits down in the body of the plane.
Most plane bodies are cut at an effective pitch of 38° this works well for them as they are cutting mostly softwood. If we are to plane hardwood to a shine we need a slightly higher pitch. My advice has been to go for 41°. Higher and you tend to loose the polish and have a harder pull on the plane body; lower and you get tear-out.
Getting a body made for a specific blade is not a problem. I will give a source later.
Back irons need some explaining. We have cheap bits of low-carbon steel that flap around like mother’s washing. The Japanese have laminated steel back irons that are made to sit a HAIR’S THICKNESS behind the edge. The contact with the blade is honed smooth and there is an angle ground at the point of contact with the blade about 0.25mm wide of about 70°. See the photo. This surface is to drive the shaving immediately up after being cut by the blade.
High-tech stuff this back iron.
Earlier planes were made to function without back irons, but this was in softwood. I believe we would not get the result we want without a back iron. Maybe wrong, but that’s the gut feel at the moment.
Part 3 of a British Introduction to Japanese Planes
This is the third in a short series on Japanese planes. I am doing this to get to the bottom of an interesting, very simple but highly developed tool for creating polished surfaces.
My son plays rugby with Harry Hood. Harry’s parents have this exquisite oak drop-leaf dining table. The surface of which is highly polished but has never seen abrasive paper. As the evening sun comes in low through the window you see the plane strokes across the tabletop. Wide, smooth, with no tear-out, straight-ish. You can see someone who “knows his onions” who really knows how to do this, has made that tabletop, fast and well.
This is what we are looking for. The answer will be partly in the timber, air-dried and mild, partly in the setup of the plane and partly in the hand that wields it. I can get 90 percent there now, it’s this last bit that drives me nuts. Europeans have used metal planes for only the past 120 years; I wonder if the old sharpened steel wedge in a block of wood can do a better job?
I am typing this with lacerated thumbs gained from careless handling of Japanese plane irons. I thought that 35 years experience of sharpening would have protected me, but no. WATCH OUT. We are now onto Sharpening, a subject that has had more wordy nonsense written about it than almost anything I can recall.
Let’s begin with definition. A really sharp edge is the junction of two polished surfaces brought together in such a way that LIGHT FROM A SEARCHING RAY OF SUNSHINE WILL NOT LAND UPON THAT EDGE. The light in this situation will pass either side; the edge is just too sharp to allow light to land there. You test your edge with your eyes – looking hard, searching for that glimmer of light on the edge that betrays it. Turn the blade this way and that, find the light, examine the edge. If you see NOTHING on that edge, hooray. IT’S SHARP. A fine dusting of sparkles tells you it’s not sharp. Or not sharp enough for me.
We Europeans sharpen differently to the Japanese. We create a polished back like they do; they make this easier by hollowing out the back of plane irons and chisels so all you are flattening is the outer edges. The front bevel we grind, then hone a micro-bevel at the cutting edge. We do this to save time. The Japanese hone the whole bevel and they proudly display the laminated steel exposed by their honing.
Laminations are partly to make honing easier again. The hard cutting edge is forge-welded to a softer iron.They like to use pre-World War II anchor chains for this as it has a different, softer, quick-sharpening structure compared to modern steel. Look out for a steel with small black flecks in it. It’s very highly prized in Japan, but not here.
To hone these blades I went “their way” and worked the whole bevel. The bevel should be pretty flat to sit well on the stones. But some of them were not. I have now bought a small collection of planes and irons some 40 years old as well as couple of “new old stock” planes which have been in a store but unsold for up to 30 years. The old stock have some evidence of minor rust damage and light degrade, but if you choose the right one it seems to be the way to go. I have enjoyed having tools set up by skilled makers much my senior. They each tell me part of the story of how to do this, but there are a few small problems.
A “new old” blade takes me a few minutes of well-practiced work to set up, an old one may have come from a skilled and much-revered grandfather. Or, and you don’t really know what you are getting on eBay till it’s too late, from a less-than-careful sake-sodden owner whose careless workmanship leaves you with a tool needing a full half a day to get sharp.
Honing demanded a careful sensitive touch. No place here for those dreadful honing guides. You hold it in your hands and work it on the stone. First, get the stone flat, really flat. We use a granite slab with #180-grit wet/dry paper. Put some water on the paper, then rub the stone on the wet/dry paper. You know it’s flat when the surface is an even colour.
Holding the blade with the bevel flat on the stone and working back and forth without rocking and changing the angle takes care, a light touch and lots of slurry. Use the Nagura stone that comes with some high-end stones to help clean the stone and create a polishing paste.
This “going through the grits” is essentially polishing. We start with #1,000 grit to turn a burr, but go through #3,000, then #6,000 and on to #10,000. General sharpening might skip #3,000 and #10,000, but we are being careful here. We are a Japanese waterstone workshop; most of our stones are manufactured by King or Ice Bear. We have stayed with this method because it is fast efficient and relatively inexpensive.
This last qualification is changing now as we are now starting to use natural mineral stones imported from Japan. They are very, very interesting, and I will talk about these another time.
Watch your thumbs. Mine were cut quite badly not once but twice when wiping the blade clean, something I have done routinely every day but probably not with edges like this.
Japanese planes and the surface they promised to give. That is the goal. The shimmering hand-wrought surface that only a cutting iron in a handplane can give. I am hanging on for this, as it fits my need to put clear blue water between my furniture and the robot-driven, manufactured surface. That routine, intimidating perfection of industry that surrounds us. I wanted a human, imperfect surface, a surface that reminded us of the skilled hand struggling for perfection and failing. I wanted failure.
So I have bought this impressive piece of Japanese steel, but I have also in the process acquired an eBay habit that is disturbing my wife and children.
“Dad, why are you on the laptop during dinner?”
“You tell us to put the mobile phones away at the table.”
“And what is a snipe bid?”
I bought not only the old handmade plane iron and accompanying back iron, but also a couple of other planes. The more I got into this, the more I found I did not know about these planes.
When the blade arrived wit as beautifully wrapped and presented as the Japanese do with all their things. But it needed some work as rust and time had taken its toll. So I set to work on the back of the blade first.
I started with a #230-grit diamond plate. This is a coarse surface and, combined with Trend Lapping Fluid, is an effective way of removing a lot of metal fast. The other benefit is the metal plate itself is pretty flat so we are working toward a constant flat target.
Diamond plates are an expensive way of doing this. This one cost me nearly £25 and is no longer as coarse and effective. Bigger, more expensive plates are, in our experience, just as short-lived. Another way of doing this is a granite slab with #180-grit wet/dry sandpaper; we use this to keep stones flat.
I think I spent a good couple of hours getting hot, wet and dirty doing this. The black stuff that comes off the blade is an indication that the abrasive is working, and the slowness is an indication this blade is hard steel and that the blacksmith knew what he was doing.
What I am hoping is that some of the Samurai sword making history will have rubbed off on my plane iron. “Tamahagane” or “jewel steel” is the name of the steel they used to make swords. The process of hammering and folding, creating a supremely sharp edge with the contrasting quality of toughness. The kind of edge that would cut through three bodies at a time. Mmmm…
It was the hammering under heat, the forging, that makes steel better for us woodies – the time-consuming hammering that gets left out of most modern tool steel production. It makes a finer grain, sharper, edge-holding steel. I have seen and appreciated this during the past 30 years I have been using Japanese chisels.
That plane iron back was hard as blazes. The hollow that is worked into the back of all Japanese tools to save us time in getting that blade flat was being slowly removed by my flattening efforts. The pitting from the rust was pretty deep. If you can, avoid rust-pitted blades; they may be cheap on eBay, but you pay for that neglect.
I tested my diamond-stoned surface on a series of Japanese waterstones: #330-grit green to take out the lines of the diamond plate, #800 to take out the lines of the #330, then #3000 natural waterstone (not synthetic), then #6000-grit gold polishing stone, finishing with a #10,000 natural waterstone. I will why the natural waterstones soon. All of these stones are kept flat religiously with our system of using #180-grit wet/dry sandpaper on a granite slab after every use.
This flat business is pretty dull, but you only do it once. Your shiny, mirror-like blade back then only ever touches your finest stone. All this as it is necessary to get your blade in REALLY close contact with that #10,000 grit polishing stone right at the cutting edge.
Editor’s note: Craftsman David Savage has kindly agreed to post here a series of articles on setting up and using Japanese planes, all told from the perspective of a skilled (very skilled, actually) Western woodworker who demands a high level of performance from his tools.
A sharpened steel wedge in a block of wood that will, when set up right, pull off gossamer shavings leaving a polished finish straight off the tool. That is where we are going.
I am to take you on a journey. A journey into a way of working with wood that may change the way I shine pieces of furniture. It may work, it may not; artists are used to taking this kind of risk, accepting that more than half of our daft ideas are just that, daft ideas. But this time you will come with me. I will report periodically on what I have learned, and share it with you; if it’s a failure, that too I will share.
Way back in the 1970s, Japanese tools came, along with James Krenov, into the lives of many British woodworkers. I picked up, used and reviewed Japanese chisels. What I learned about Japanese tools in 1980 I learned from an American monthly newsletter called “Mahogany Masterpieces.” I learned about the forging process involved in creating a high-quality blade. This was a development from the Japanese Samurai sword-making history – super-sharp edges that could chop through three bodies at one blow….
What they created for us was a supremely sharp and hard-wearing edge. Made of two steels, a hard steel at the cutting edge, with a backing of softer steel. The hard steel itself had been forged. That is, it had been put into a hot forge, made a red and then beaten with a hammer. This forging process not only changes the shape of the steel, but it changes its structure. Steel has a structure a little like long-grain rice. When it is beaten and hammered, those long grains align and form a narrower, tighter structure. This is why these edges are capable of becoming sharper.
This forged cutting-edge is then laminated to a softer backing steel to make sharpening easier and to make the blade accept shock. The laminating is done in the hot forge and results in the best cutting edges a woodworker can get hold of.
I have known this for years and benefited from using great “Ouchi” chisels for the last 30 years. But I never messed about with planes until now.
Japanese planes were tricky. There was a mystery to setting them up that was not so easily unraveled in the days before World Wide Web. And, after all, we were having enough of a problem setting up our Western planes. Japanese planes needed very careful setting up; the blade never fitted the body, and the bodies needed to have convex bases to function and you pulled the damn things not pushed them. So why bother?
But these hand planes are sublimely simple and very sophisticated. A sharpened steel wedge in a block of wood that will, when set up right, pull off gossamer shavings leaving a polished finish straight off the tool. That polished surface, that handmade shine, THAT is what I want! Something elemental that cannot be put there with plastic polishes. That, combined with CAD development, a three-dimensional printer and a CNC machine will, I hope, take my furniture to places I have yet to see.
So why are you always on that laptop Carol asks? The truth is that eBay to a newcomer can become quite a distraction. I have, after hours of research, bought an antique Japanese plane iron. I was quite startled when my bid was accepted at £23.30. My bid was £11 and my reserve £30 and it all happened in the last 20 seconds! I admit to being no eBay Warrior, but I enjoyed the tussle so much that another Kanna, for that is the proper term for a Japanese plane and blade, will be arriving soon. Just don’t tell Carol.
When it arrived, I was like a child at Christmas tearing open the package; I can’t remember getting this excited by tools for more than 30 years. I was stunned by how heavy and elemental these two bits of metal were. Clearly a skilled person had invested hours into their existence and other skilled hands had used them perhaps for 30 or 40 years. Half the life of the blade was still there, and I plan to use what remains of it.
Next I will tell about flattening and restoring this blade to sharpness and finding a body to fit it to. Apparently for each blade there will be 10 bodies, all of them dead.
However, finding a functional antique beading plane in the wild is difficult. While they are common planes, they commonly have a lot of problems. The body (also called the stock) is warped. The iron is a mess. The mouth has been opened too far. The wedge doesn’t fit.
