Reply To: What 2 hand planes to start with.
“Well I am not positive if I have it set up correctly the shavings taper at the ends. ” Do you mean side to side? If you adjust the blade with the lateral lever, you can probably get the thickness to either be constant or taper off similarly on the two sides (and thicker in the middle) depending upon how you sharpened (shape of camber). I use shavings from a piece I keep on the bench to confirm my setup quite often, although one can often do it on the work depending upon the stage you are in….roughing work, sure set up on the piece. Final smoothing or fine adjustment of joinery, then probably I set up on my test piece. If you mean taper off at the start and stop along the length, I don’t know that that means much, usually.
As for width, it depends upon your camber. Usually, I want my camber so slight (if at all) that I can get a full width shaving almost the width of the mouth and then tapering at the edges so that I don’t get tracks. You can do plenty of good work exactly as you have things, and sometimes you need it like that, but I like the wider shavings for sake of speed and uniformity in most cases.
“What was it about the Lie-Nielsen chisels that led you to move along to something else?”
The first bit of fun was that the blades would fall out of the handles, which was always exciting. I read of many possible fixes, tried them all, some sort of worked, but ultimately I epoxied the handles into the sockets. Too bad. The bigger problem is the A2 steel. It is slower to sharpen (not such a big issue for most chisels) and it is more brittle than O1. I played with the A2 vs. my O1 chisels and found I needed something like 35 degrees for the A2 when chopping end grain in oak to avoid fracturing the edge too quickly while, for O1, I could use a bit less than 30. The steeper angle means more mallet force and means more creeping back into the knife line. If you don’t want to change bevel angles for different purposes and end up paring with your chopping chisels, paring will take more hand force. For me, there were just no up sides. With O1, everything was better and I don’t care about sharpening less often because it takes me two blinks to sharpen a chisel free hand (except on those days when nothing will sharpen because the sharpening Gods have been angered and you just need to go for a bike ride or walk and stay away from not-so-sharp things).
Ill take a picture of it tomorrow I am not even sure if you can see it. All I did was did the 5 points of contact method did 20 on the both the left and right 10 on the inner left and right and then 5 in the center. I only did that on the5K, 8K and12K, stones. I could see streaks on the stone’s but enough to actually do any thing I am not sure.