I've been doing a lot of learning about hand planes recently, and was interested to see the differences between metal bodied and wooden planes.
Then I read about infill planes. They look really nice, but can anyone tell me if there is a functional advantage of having the wooden infil vs. a regular metal bodied plane?
Bling. And weight.
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wilbur wrote: : I've been doing a lot of learning about hand planes recently, and was : interested to see the differences between metal bodied and wooden : planes.
: Then I read about infill planes. They look really nice, but can anyone : tell me if there is a functional advantage of having the wooden infil : vs. a regular metal bodied plane?
They have (or should have) very tight mouths, and the blade is supported all the way down to the mouth. The former you can get with a metal plane by moving the frog forward, but this results in less support for the blade.
-- Andy Barss
Infills have heft,tight mouths,easy to adjust,and a pleasure to use,stanley came out with the 4 1/2 to compete with the infills more heft,all in all the
It's how it's made that's the major advantage. Infills start out as flat plates and are machined prior to assembly, as opposed to starting out as a casting. Castings shrink as they cool and it can be a fair amount of work to get the sole dead flat. Infills start out that way. The weight is another advantage. There's also more hand work involved in making an infill, so each one is closer to a custom creation.
RNewly manufactured infills are probably machined from the solid as the low volume would make it more economical. Old ones, when they were in production, were cast same as any metal body plane. If you start out with a piece of metal thick enough to make an infill and machine it to shape, it WILL warp. It can, of course be stress relieved and machined strait. Cast iron will warp, unless stress relieved and machined strait. Cast iron, when treated correctly, is extremely stable. The bedways of precision machine tools are now, and always have been, made of cast iron.
AS far as I know, both old and new infills are made from steel plate, with sides (usually of thinner plate) dovetailed to the base.
OTOH, that work should be done at the factory making it a non-issue for the buyer/user, unless--see below.
If the plate stock used to make the infill was properly annealed then it will probably be more stable than a cast sole, even if the casting was also annealed. Grey cast iron is also brittle, a cast plane can break in half if dropped, the worse that would likely happen to an infill would be a broken tote and chipped cutter.
Lee Valley makes their iron planes from ductile cast iron---it is not brittle like the old grey-cast iron. One of the woowdorking shows on PBS visitied the factory and showed the sole for a #7 being made. They flattened the sole by running it through a machine resembling a panel sander (linishing?) befor even taking it out of the mold. Very cool.
Note that a #78 broken at the mouth makes a dandy bull-nosed chisel plane.
Should be the operative word. I shouldn't know what lapping was if the work was done at the factory.
I hadn't thought about repairability, but that's a good point.
Compare the cost of even a high quality wood or cast plane to that of an infill. The infill is roughly twice the price at least. Ten or twenty bucks would cover the difference in materials, so the rest is the labor involved, which is substantially greater. As in most things, you get what you pay for.
R
infrequently.
Not true.
Which part is untrue, the part about the plate being stable or the part about the casting being unsable?
Cast iron is very stable and better wearing than steel.
Interesting. Do you know the origin of these planes? By "the couple I have", do you mean the couple you own or the couple you have seen? If the former, can you post some details and a pic or two? What metal was the casting?
I think the better known makers, such as Norris, Spiers, and Mathieson, made their planes primarily from steel, with the bodies dovetailed together.
Steel generally wears better than iron.
Not a metallurgist here, but I thought CI was softer than most steels, and more subject to wear by abrasion?
It is. Not sure that 'better wearing' is meant to imply resistance though.
Castings also are notorious for warping due to residual stresses left when the thicker parts cooled slower than the thinner parts. Cold-rolled plate will have residual stresses too, but hot-rolled and annealed should minimize them.
Infills really can be better.
First of all, they're intended to be better. They're just made for it - better fit, tighter tolerances, a design intended specifically for fine smoothing in awkward timber.
In practice, as far as my Norrises are concerned, it's the zero-backlash adjuster that makes the difference. It's the best design of adjuster I've yet found (I prefer the differential screw version) although it's notably copied onto modern Veritas planes.
As to weight, then I don;t find their extra weight to be an advantage. Weight is good, but by the time you've got to an iron plane, a lot extra isn't much extra help. The point of the rest of an infill's behaviour is that you don't have to use inertia as a hammer - it's _sharp_.
As to the blades, then mine have Sheffield laminated and tapered irons from a variety of makers. These are all good irons and chatter proof owing to the enormous thickness of both them and their cap irons. They're not as hard as Japanese laminated irons though, and they don't have anything like the eternal edge holding of A2.
I like my infills, but I wouldn't pay insane collector prices for them. You can get the same performance from Veritas, or for less weight and wedge adjustment, one of Steve Knight's.
Old cast iron is stable. New cast iron is anything but, unless it has been normalised (heat treated).
I've got cast iron, ductile iron, cast bronze, steel plate and a mixture of steel and brass plate. If you buy a new kit for one, most are cast bronze. Most of the low-volume bijou makers today are dovetailing. For thumb planes, chariots and the like, then cast bronze has always been the common method.
For narrow shoulder planes, corian makes a nice infill (but a poor wedge, as it's inelastic)
If you make your own by dovetailing, go for the steel and brass route. It's easier to dovetail, easier to file the dovetail gap flush, and you can still see the join afterwards. It must be really galing to go to the trouble of dovetailing steel into steel, working hard to get an invisble join, then having something where only a plane duffer can appreciate the quality!
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