Re: Getting A Little Neander - Got A Question Or Two...

[Frank McVey]

the mouth so that just the leading edge is showing. Sighting down the

> length of the plane sole and using light to reflect off the edge you > can easily tell if one edge is lower or higher than the other in > relation to the mouth.

Concur that. You soon get the hang of it. If you have problems at first, you can confirm your sightings by holding the plane upside down and simply running the lengthwise corner of a small wooden block (say 1" x 1" x 6") over each extremity of the blade, taking off a small shaving. Keep backing the blade off, until the cutter has completely withdrawn, trying the block all the time. If you get to a stage where one side of the blade is still cutting and the other isn't, make the necessary lateral adjustment.

Setting the distance of the cap iron back from the edge is also very important. 1/16" will give a very coarse shaving and a rough finish, good for hogging off lots of stock. 1/32" is pretty good for a general purpose jack, and 1/64" or even less for a smoother.

Cheers,

Frank

[Layne]

Yep. There's a definite satisfaction in seeing the results of *your* work rather than the machine's work. :-)

Layne

[Conan The Librarian]

That's the conventional wisdom, but I've found that for supertuning a smoother, you want to actually back off the cap iron up to 1/4" from the edge. (I learned the technique from Larry Williams of Clark & Williams wooden planemaking fame, and Jeff G. mentions a similar thing as well.) To set a smoother up like this, you may need to take a file

*ever-so-gently* to the leading edge of the mouth. Even high-end planes sometimes have tiny irregularities on the leading edge that interfere with you closing up the mouth so that light barely passes through.

Advance the frog forward so that when you set the plane for an extremely light shaving, you can see just a sliver of light in the mouth when viewed from above. Obviously, this may also involve playing around the lateral lever. When the iron is set like this, a cap iron becomes superfluous and may even interfere with performance by clogging the mouth. (Jeff talks about this on his page. He suggests that the leading edge of the mouth/sole functions as a "chipbreaker" in this case.)

Anyhow, I don't really mean to disagree with you, Frank. I'm sure you get fine results using the standard setup; I just had to toss out that other option to muddy the waters a bit. :-)

Chuck Vance

[Frank McVey]

Thanks for that, Chuck. One of these days, I'll give it a try. The main thing is to break, or curl, the shaving. I can see how you could achieve that by having a very close mouth. After all, I suppose, block planes do it all the time!

Cheers

Frank

[Conan The Librarian]

IIRC, in his sharpening bible, Leonard Lee talks about the type of shaving produced in a bevel-up plane and the "ramp" of the bevel is responsible for chipbreaking on those planes. (I could be wrong; it's been a while since I read his discussions about the different types of "chips" produced.)

But I have definitely seen the effect on a plane with a tight mouth. For example, the Clark & Williams wooden planes don't even have a cap-iron, and they certainly work well.

Anyhow, you might find it fun to play around with some time. The idea of lightly filing the leading edge of the mouth is probably not a bad thing for any "super smoother", so it's a short step from there to backing off the cap iron. Then if you get the nerve, you can play around with putting a back bevel on the iron to raise the effective angle. I did that on my L-N #4-1/2 and it works nicely that way.

Chuck Vance