Skip to content
Woodworking Masterclasses
Facebook Instagram
  • Register Now
  • Video Library
  • GalleryExpand
    • Bedside Cabinet GalleryExpand
      • Assembly Table Gallery
      • Bathroom Cabinet Gallery
      • Bench Stool Gallery
      • Blanket Chest Gallery
      • Bookends Gallery
      • Book Shelves Gallery
      • Breadboard-end Cutting Board Gallery
      • Carrying Tote Gallery
      • Chess Board Gallery
      • Chest of Drawers Gallery
      • Christmas Gallery
      • Coasters Gallery
      • Coat Rack Gallery
      • Coffee Table Gallery
      • Corner Shelf Gallery
      • Craftsman-style Lamp Gallery
      • Dining Chair Gallery
      • Dovetail Boxes Gallery
      • Fly Swat Gallery
      • Frame Saw Gallery
    • Foot Stool GalleryExpand
      • How to Make a Table
      • Joiner’s Mallet Gallery
      • Joiners’ Toolbox Gallery
      • Keepsake Box Gallery
      • Laptop Desk Gallery
      • Leaning Wall Shelf Gallery
      • Mitre Box Gallery
      • Occasional Table Gallery
      • Picture Frames Gallery
      • Rocking Chair
      • Sawhorse Gallery
      • Shaker-Style Bench Seat Gallery
      • Shaker Stool Gallery
      • Sofa Table Gallery
      • Stepladder Gallery
    • Trestle TableExpand
      • Tool Cabinet
      • Tool Chest Gallery
      • Walking Cane Gallery
      • Wall Brackets Gallery
      • Wallclock Gallery
      • Wall Shelf Gallery
      • Winding Sticks Gallery
      • Wooden Plane Gallery
      • Wooden Spokeshave
      • Wooden Tray Gallery
      • Workbench Gallery
      • Other user projects vol. I
      • Other user projects vol. II
      • Submit Photos to Gallery
  • About Us
  • News
  • FAQsExpand
    • General FAQs
    • Workbench FAQs
  • Contact
Account Login
Woodworking Masterclasses

Chisel and plaine iron width variance

Search
Previous Back to: Tools and Tool Maintenance/Restoration5 Replies

Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Tools and Tool Maintenance/Restoration / Chisel and plaine iron width variance

Tagged: chisel iron

  • This topic has 5 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 2 years, 5 months ago by Sven-Olof Jansson.
  • Author
    Posts
  • Jukka Huuskonen
    28 August 2020 at 1:13 pm #675886

    Hi,

    I just got a 6mm Veritas router blade. After I started to use it, I noticed it seemed a bit narrow and comapred it with my Narex 6mm chisel. It was noticeably narrower. I took out my vernier caliper and measured both blades and results are these:

    Veritas 6mm plane iron: 5.80 mm (+/- 0.02mm)
    Narex 6mm chisel: 6.1mm (+/- 0.02mm)

    Especially that Veritas blade 0,2 mm variance seems quite big.

    Is this variance normal or should those widths be much closer to their nominal widths?

    In this pic you can see the difference in width with these 2 blades, just zoom in.
    Veritas iron on top of Narex chisel

    -Jukka

    Settings
    Selva
    28 August 2020 at 3:15 pm #675908

    Their 3mm blade is the same as 1/8″ so sizes are not really precise.
    In fact their online description says sizes a nominal .
    Have you asked Veritas (lee valley)? They are generally very good at responding to such questions.

    Selva

    Settings
    Jukka Huuskonen
    28 August 2020 at 7:31 pm #675939

    Hi,
    just got a reply from Veritas. They have 0.25mm tolerance. So that iron is near lower tolerance limit.

    -Jukka

    Settings
    Larry Geib
    29 August 2020 at 7:26 am #675989

    Do you woodwork with a micrometer?

    Settings
    Jukka Huuskonen
    30 August 2020 at 6:41 am #676029
    Larry Geib wrote:

    Do you woodwork with a micrometer?

    No I don’t, the difference can clearly be seen by your eye, if you check the pic I posted. And I was talking about a caliper, not a micrometer. The caliper is a very useful tool in woodworking, even though it’s accuracy is usually much greater than is needed, but you you can eg. transfer measurements and check mortices/tenon sizes easily.

    In any case, I’ve seen eg. Paul Sellers use chisels width to measure widths of mortices and tenons and thought those tolerances would tighter. Of course, he was just using the same chisel for both. Then they are the same width and it doesn’t matter if those tolerances are greater.

    In my case I was starting a long dado with 6mm chisel and finishing the depth with router plane and just noticed how much thinner the router iron was. Had those tolerances been other way around, it would have been impossible to finish the dado of that width with the router plane.

    I do have experience in machine design and in there tolerances of machined parts (like that chisel) of that size (chisels width, 6mm) would easily have tolerance of a few hundreds of a millimeter. As that chisel and router iron are comparable to machined parts, I just assumed the tolerances would be tighter. Of course, now that I thought about how that router iron is manufactured with its narrowing blade, it’s quite understandable that achieving tighter tolerances would harder than with the chisels.

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Jukka Huuskonen.
    Settings
    Sven-Olof Jansson
    30 August 2020 at 10:12 pm #676043

    Veritas offers some tools, e.g. plough planes, in pairs of left hand and right versions, with the supposed benefit of one of the planes to be used with the grain. It’s of course not uncommon for grain direction to change, which would call for first using one of the planes and then the other. If tolerances are ±0.01″, then it’s perfectly feasible to have quite the discrepancy in width of a groove where the planes meet. Running a 6.2 mm left replacement blade into a more narrow part of a nominally 6 mm wide groove, resulted for me in bad spelching. Being by myself fairly good at generating imperfections, there is no need for the tools to add any.

    Thinking that the 6.2 mm one was just bad luck, and not completely without merits for fitting 6 mm plywood (seldom 6 mm), I ordered a new one, and was apparently in luck, as it actually is 6 mm. Then, after having read this exchange, I measured the widths of all my 26 plough plane blades. The ones coming with the planes were, perhaps not very surprising, ¼”. The 10 mm ones were 10 mm; all the other blades were off, with one deviating by 0.23 mm. Thankfully the discrepancies were consistent within the pairs. The metric blades were all above their nominal widths, with opposite for the imperial ones. The wide blades 10, 12, 16, and 18 mm were all very close to nominal values. Finally, all left hand metric blades came in small plastic bags, while all imperial and some right hand metric were neatly wrapped in little paper envelopes – acknowledging the company’s awareness of its bread being mainly buttered on the transatlantic side.

    Those who, like me, have multiple chisels of the same widths, to be able to change when one loses sharpness, might wonder if a tolerance range of 0.02″ really leaves sufficiently accurate mortice holes.

    In a rather hagiographic blog post of some years, Mr. P. Sellers describes the detail into which Veritas go in order to achieve accuracy and precision (plane soles for instance), which begs the question: why not plane blades? Particularly since there’s a company not that far west of Toronto, capable of the most laudable accuracy and precision.

    Finally, and please forgive me Larry, but isn’t the comment on a micrometer just the teeniest tad of rich, coming from someone who allegedly milled his own set-up blocks.

    Cheers
    Sven-Olof

    Sven-Olof Jansson
    London, UK; Boston, MA

    Settings
  • Author
    Posts
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
Log In

Security and Payments

Payments on this site are processed using stripe.com and gocardless.com. Customer's credit card details or bank details are stored on the secure servers of stripe.com or gocardless.com This entire site is secured by SSL.

About Our Company

Woodworking Masterclasses is a trading name of Rokesmith Ltd

Rokesmith Ltd



About Rokesmith Ltd | Privacy Policy | Terms and Conditions | About Us


Useful Links

© 2023 - Rokesmith Ltd

  • Register Now
  • Video Library
  • Gallery
    • Bedside Cabinet Gallery
      • Assembly Table Gallery
      • Bathroom Cabinet Gallery
      • Bench Stool Gallery
      • Blanket Chest Gallery
      • Bookends Gallery
      • Book Shelves Gallery
      • Breadboard-end Cutting Board Gallery
      • Carrying Tote Gallery
      • Chess Board Gallery
      • Chest of Drawers Gallery
      • Christmas Gallery
      • Coasters Gallery
      • Coat Rack Gallery
      • Coffee Table Gallery
      • Corner Shelf Gallery
      • Craftsman-style Lamp Gallery
      • Dining Chair Gallery
      • Dovetail Boxes Gallery
      • Fly Swat Gallery
      • Frame Saw Gallery
    • Foot Stool Gallery
      • How to Make a Table
      • Joiner’s Mallet Gallery
      • Joiners’ Toolbox Gallery
      • Keepsake Box Gallery
      • Laptop Desk Gallery
      • Leaning Wall Shelf Gallery
      • Mitre Box Gallery
      • Occasional Table Gallery
      • Picture Frames Gallery
      • Rocking Chair
      • Sawhorse Gallery
      • Shaker-Style Bench Seat Gallery
      • Shaker Stool Gallery
      • Sofa Table Gallery
      • Stepladder Gallery
    • Trestle Table
      • Tool Cabinet
      • Tool Chest Gallery
      • Walking Cane Gallery
      • Wall Brackets Gallery
      • Wallclock Gallery
      • Wall Shelf Gallery
      • Winding Sticks Gallery
      • Wooden Plane Gallery
      • Wooden Spokeshave
      • Wooden Tray Gallery
      • Workbench Gallery
      • Other user projects vol. I
      • Other user projects vol. II
      • Submit Photos to Gallery
  • About Us
  • News
  • FAQs
    • General FAQs
    • Workbench FAQs
  • Contact
Login Account
Search