In the discussion comparing handplanes, reference is made to the extra effort required to tune an older or pooer quality hand plane. I have to confess ignorance.... Is anyone up to a step by step description as to how it is done?
Dave
I'm still a relative newbie to the world of hand planes, but the one thing I know for sure about the whole tuning situation is that it is a whole lot easier to have someone who knows how to do it help you get started. I must've worked on my old bailey plane for about 30 hours using various articles in magazines and website descriptions of the process, and got almost nowhere. Sure, it'd cut wood, but it wasn't pretty. I took the thing into a voc. ed course, and had the instructor give me a hand with it, and he had the thing shaving little curls of wood thin enough to read newsprint through in about 15 minutes. Most of the problems he spotted with my setup were not even mentioned in any of the articles I found, and I learned more in that
15 minutes than I did during countless hours of frustration. The moral of the story is not to mess with text descriptions of handplane tuning- IMO, it's much less time-consuming and more rewarding just to find someone who knows what the heck they're doing to at least take a look at your plane, and tell you how to fix it up!Aut inveniam viam aut faciam
For wooden planes, this is my favorite site:
Glen
Another tuneup site
Fine Woodworking magazine has had wonderful articles on this subject. On their webpage there is an index of all issues. Most libraries have FW. Or, you can just order a new plane from Lie Neilsen. Dave
Oh fooey. I've never had anything but. I don't think I know anyone under the age of 80 who has ever actually used a hand plane. (In three dimensions anyway. Sure, lotsa you electronic type invisible people on the other side of this piece of shiny glass.)
First you thock it with your thumbnail. Note the pitch it produces. Now look up what pitch it's supposed to produce in the table. Remove metal or add weld until it produces the correct pitch when you thock it with your thumbnail. Now it's tuned perfectly.
(Now that you have some real answers already.)
On Wed 29 Dec 2004 08:12:18p, "Dave" wrote in news:6uJAd.604404$Pl.487644@pd7tw1no:
I really liked the Frank Klausz video on tuning up your tools. Found it at Woodcraft. He does chisels, saws, and hand planes. Watching somebody do this stuff is a thousand times better than reading an article or seeing pictures. After watching him tune up and use that old fleamarket plane, I went back to the articles and websites, and got a lot more of them because I had a better frame of reference.
Incidentally, he does mention in that video that he used to use glass as part of his tuneup, like for trueing a plane sole, but then he put a straightedge to the glass pane and found it wasn't flat, so he uses a piece of melamine now. And he set the teeth on a dovetail saw with a little screwdriver.
Not necessarily. This is a fine method if you're going to be planing alone, but if you're going to be planing with someone else, you'll want to grind or weld until you've got that pitch either 1/3 above or 1/3 below.
Fifths sound much better than parallel thirds. Or, if you're into Godsmack, you could pick a nice dissonant pair.
Barry
Nothing wrong with finding old folks- they're a wealth of information about all sorts of things. Your "80" figure is a bit high, though. They were still using hand planes in the local schools 20 years ago, so there are bound to be a few around who know what they're doing. Aut inveniam viam aut faciam
Basically you lap the sole of the plane flat, then lap the sides square to the sole. Then you need to make sure the blade sits flat against the frog (?) and a few other tweaks.
Read about it here:
All right - you opened that box... what is that dissonant pair that those guys and others like them use?
"Evil" stuff is usually played in minor keys, and sometimes with a flat fifth. Some hard rock bands tune a half or whole step lower, which gives the whole thing a gruntier sound. The "E" string on a guitar would actually be tuned to an "Eb" or "D", and the rest of the instrument is tuned to match.
In rock and roll, It could go back to the Black Sabbath's "Black Sabbath". Leaving rock, who knows who invented it? Scary, dissonant sounding passages appear in all kinds of classical music.
Barry
I'm going to try some flattened 5th stuff and see what it does. The sound you hear in a lot of the dissonant stuff today is definetely more than just drop tuning and it's something other than the standard 3rd or 5th for harmony.
Also look into "passing tones".
Drop tuning dosen't create dissonance, but it can drastically change the way an amp and speaker handle the instrument. 5 string basses make a difference in the overall sound as well, if the rest of the band is using standard tuning.
Barry
Yeah - I use passing tones in lead parts a lot, but I've never played with them to see if they would create that modern dissonant sound.
One of my favorites is the Germans marching into the Soviet Union in one of Shostakovich's symphonies (the Leningrad ?)
I haven't heard that.
Off to find it...
Barry
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