Lost Art Press

Somehow, during the course of about five years, I became a math dolt. When I left high school, my SAT scores for math were near perfect – far higher than my verbal score.

But after four years of studying intransitive verbs, subjunctive mood and zeugmas, my math skills withered to the point where – no lie – I couldn’t figure out the formula for the perimeter of a pentagon during a college class we all called “Math for Trees.” My wife still mocks me for this.

So I’ve always been at a loss to explain to readers the different curve required on the blade of a bevel-up smoothing plane vs. the curve required for a bevel-down smoothing plane.

The brain-dolt answer was always: The bevel-up planes require more curve to take the same shaving as a bevel-down smoothing plane. But that was about as good as my explanation got.

A couple weekends ago, David Powell explained the math to me during a presentation at the Northeastern Woodworkers Association’s Woodworkers Showcase. I retained the explanation and formula only until the next morning. (Honest: I had only one beer that night. Perhaps is was the lamb korma.)

In any case, I took notes during the presentation that are useful for the shop. If anyone wants the formulas, you can probably ask Powell himself. Powell was the founder of Diamond Machining Technology (DMT) and is now the maker of the Odate Crowning Plates. The plates are diamond stones with a curve built into them so you don’t have to use finger pressure to create the curve on the blade.

Powell’s numbers assume that the iron has a curve created by one of his diamond crowning plates. The plates are dished to mimic a 37-1/2’-radius circle. Powell’s numbers also assume you are using 90 percent of the iron of the tool during the cut.

So here goes: A bevel-down No. 4 handplane with a 2”-wide iron that is bedded at 45° will take a .002”-thick shaving if it has an iron that is sharpened with the Odate crowning plate.

Now let’s take a bevel-up low-angle block plane with its 1-3/8”-wide iron bedded at 12° and the iron sharpened at 25° (the angle of attack is therefore 37°). Powell says this plane will take a .0005”-thick shaving if you use 90 percent of the iron in the cut.

How about the very popular bevel-up jack plane? It has a 2-1/8”-wide iron and also is bedded bevel-up at 12°. If you have a 25° bevel sharpened on the iron, it will take a .0008”-thick cut. If you have a 38° bevel sharpened on the iron, the plane will take a .0006”-thick cut. And if you have a 50° bevel sharpened on the iron, the plane will take a .0004”-thick cut.

While these numbers don’t tell you how much extra pressure to put at the corners of your iron to make that extra curve, there is a good piece of data here. And here it is: Use the same curve for all your smoothing planes.

A plane bedded at 45° is best suited for mild woods. So its .002”-thick shaving is about right.

Planes bedded at higher angles are used for curly, exotic or just grumpy woods. So the best strategy is to take a thinner shaving (thinner shavings help reduce tear-out in my experience). So a shaving thinner than .001” is an excellent choice. And that’s exactly what you’ll get with a high pitch.

So all that math boiled down to this: Don’t bother with the math. Just stick with the same curve for bevel-up or bevel-down and you’ll be OK.

— Christopher Schwarz

Aside from eBay descriptions, photographs might be the biggest fibbers in the world of tools.

I’ve just finished judging a toolmaking contest sponsored by WoodCentral and Lee Valley Tools. During two days, I and two other judges examined, used and quarreled about more than 70 amateur-made tools. Our task was to award three prizes: the best-looking tool, the one that displayed the highest craftsmanship and the tool that worked the best.

As the entries came in, Ellis Wallentine of Wood Central posted pictures of the tools that were snapped by the makers (you can see those pictures here). I checked back every week or so to take a look at the entries and get a head start on judging.

Judging this contest, I thought, was going to be a cakewalk. We’d wrap it up in a couple hours and hit the Irish pub near the Lee Valley headquarters and spend the afternoon yucking it up.

It didn’t work out that way. In fact, the Lee Valley folks had to gently push us out the door after the first day of judging.

Here’s what happened: Photos are sometimes deceiving. Though some tools looked as good as they worked, other tools that looked like a million bucks in photos couldn’t cut a soggy toothpick in half. Tools that looked like they came over on the Mary Rose were so sweet they would almost do the job themselves when you went for a bathroom break.

And then there were the “ugly” tools. The tools that looked like they were made in a style that you had to wear either a black beret or Big Smith overalls (and no shirt) to truly appreciate. These tools managed to bore their way into your heart like a tapeworm in an Arkansas rice paddy.

So we argued about the tools. We almost abandoned any hope of awarding a prize for aesthetics. We were just too far apart. The craftsmanship award, however, was a little easier. There were lots of well-made tools, but some required more varied skills to make than others.

And function? That was the easy prize. When the steel hit the wood, it was quick to see which tools cut the mustard and which should be used only for resawing the mustard. In the end, using these tools radically changed my view of them. I didn’t care if the photos looked like junk or they had been professionally shot. When I looked at the pictures I saw only a tool that worked or didn’t work. As a result of all this, I was really pleased that we judged this contest in person and not via the photos. I think we got it right.

I cannot say yet which tools I personally liked or which tools I didn’t, but I’m including a few photos I snapped during the judging to break up the awful grey page generated by my typing prowess. When you take a gander, just make sure that you remember that pixels can be a crock of poo.

— Christopher Schwarz

I almost never get a phone call from the public relations people at the Stanley Works. Perhaps they are too busy selling garage door openers or thinking up double-entendre and obesity jokes to accompany the company’s line of Fat Max tools.

But in 2002, the phone rang, and it was Stanley.

The friendly public relations person had heard that I’d just reviewed jack planes in Popular Woodworking magazine and that Stanley had won the “Best Value” award. Could he get a copy of the review right away? And could they use it in their marketing materials?

At that moment I knew this was going to have a storyline that ended me with telling him that the tooth fairy didn’t exist.

Yes, I reply, Stanley won the award. Yes, I’d be happy to send him a copy of the review. Yes, they could use the test in their marketing materials.

“However,” I say, pausing for a moment, “I don’t think you’re going to want to use the review.”

And so I explained: When I set up our review of metal-bodied jack planes, I included all the major brands on the market at the time: Lie-Nielsen, Clifton, Record, Shop Fox, Anant and Stanley. And then, as a lark, I put a few vintage Stanley Type 11s into the test.

The vintage Stanleys in the test were about 100 years old and were bought at flea markets and on eBay for anywhere between $12 and $35. As you can probably guess, the vintage Stanley planes blew the doors off most of the new planes (except the Lie-Nielsen and, to some degree, the Clifton).

It was a fair fight. These vintage planes needed work. The soles were a bit wonky. The irons and chipbreakers needed work. The frogs weren’t perfectly tuned. But even though these vintage Stanleys should be retired to the old-folks home for cast iron, they were easier to set up than the new planes. The controls were finer. Heck the 100-year-old fit and finish was better than those on the Record, Shop Fox and Anant.

The guy from Stanley Works was perplexed by my explanation. But he still wanted the review for his files, so I sent it to him that very afternoon.

And now bear with me for a second story that begins with my phone ringing.

It is from a reader who wants help choosing a tool – the kind of call I get about five times a week. This guy wants some help buying a bit brace. No problem. I rattle off my standard favorites: The North Bros. 2101A brace and a couple from Peck, Stow & Wilcox. And I throw in a plug for Sanford Moss’s web site as a great place to research and buy the brace of his dreams.

“Um, thanks,” the guy says, “but I wanted to buy a new brace.”

Huh? Why would anyone want to buy a new brace? The best braces ever made are still littering the planet and can be had for less than the price of a tab of Oxycontin (not that I know anything about the price of illegal prescriptives).

“I don’t like used equipment,” he explains. “I want to be the first person who uses it. When I take it out of the box, I want it to be perfect.”

The reader then asked me about three brands of new braces he’d seen in catalogs. We went over the details of each one: junk, tremendous junk and crap-tacular junk. He settled on purchasing the brace that I had the fewest bad things to say. We both hung up the phone bewildered.

Sometimes I forget that there is a certain consumer that won’t buy anything that has been used. With all of the sturdy old houses on the market, they would prefer to buy something new in the suburbs that doesn’t have the same level of craftsmanship or detailing.

I used to get fairly worked up about this fact, but in the last few years, I’ve come to embrace it as a good thing. Here’s why: These people are helping expand the marketplace for high-quality new tools. They are the consumers who help ensure that Veritas, Clifton, Lie-Nielsen and other manufacturers will have a customer base.

Their buying habits have encouraged competition among makers and have exposed more of their fellow woodworkers to the wonders of high-quality modern tool manufacturing. I myself started into the craft with vintage planes and balked at the price of Lie-Nielsen (and later Clifton and Veritas) planes when I first encountered them about 12 years ago. But after using the tools, I think they’re a tremendously good value.

The whole thing is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Does the availability of quality new tools grow the interest in traditional tools? Or does an interest in traditional tools fuel the availability of new quality tools?

I’m not smart enough to answer a chicken-and-egg paradox. But I am smart enough to recognize that the world works in cycles. You see, last week I got an e-mail from a public relations person at Stanley Works….

— Christopher Schwarz