Plane Iron Corners
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Paul, or anyone else who can answer this, I’ve watched the video on sharpening planer irons and I have a question about the corners. I’ve tried rounding the edges slightly as the video shows but I still get some small ridges when I plane anything wider than my plane. They are very small and I can smooth them out with a scrapper but that’s extra work that I probably should not have to do. Can you post a close up picture of the corners of your cutting edge so I can compare what I am getting?
10 January 2014 at 3:56 pm #25683hi Sandy have you watched the video that Paul blogged about on the 8th febuary 2012 that shows all the techniques on plane iron sharpening
10 January 2014 at 4:18 pm #25685I have rounded my plane irons and still have this same issue. Very slight lines but it would be nice to have a smooth surface. Any light on the subject would be well received here too.
Mick
10 January 2014 at 7:04 pm #25688Try using less downward pressure on the plane and maybe a shallower cut. Try a few strokes with almost no downward pressure. Just steady the plane and push forward. You should see a difference.
I’ll try that Greg. I just started the presentation case I told you about and I can’t get my surfaces smooth without going to the scraper. I have tried backing the iron off to get those whisper thin shavings but I haven’t tried less pressure. i’ll let you know how that works. Thank you!
10 January 2014 at 7:42 pm #25690I think a dead smooth surface will be hard to get with a plane. When working a surface that is wider than your plane iron you are literally plowing a groove the width of you iron. The goal is to make the groove as shallow as possible and to feather the edges. Hopefully a light sanding will be all that is needed. Most hand made pieces that I have seen will show evidence of plane tracks. The scraper comes into play for difficult grain and when you require a glass flat and smooth surface.
If you have Paul’s DVDs he goes into this in some detail. It took me a while to figure this out but when you are honing the irons you need to lift the corners up and round them, it took me several sharpenings to get the irons to a point where there were no tracks even at the finest settings. I only do this to my smoothing plane. I tried to take a pic of what the corners look like but I’m not sure if you can see it in the photo. Also when setting the cap iron, I can visually see the plane blade rounding out from behind the cap iron.
Attachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.Maybe I’m not putting enough radious on the corners. I can barely see any change in the edge of mine as I was trying not to have a noticable radious. On Paul’s video he says raise the blade only slightly. Well slightley can be very subjective. I’ve got a couple of extra irons so I may give one of the a hefty radious and see if that works… Tomorrow… My part time job get’s may attention tonight :-(.
Like most people I also had this plane tracks problem. I rounded the corners off as is typical but it really wasn’t making a difference. Not even a thinner cut setting worked fully. Then I thought about it for a few days and came up with something to try. I imagined that I was the cutting edge of the iron 🙂 and what it looked like from the point of view of the cutting edge while slicing out a shaving. I saw that rounding the corners wasn’t entirely working because rounded corners were simply creating rounded track edges. I theorized that what was really needed was for the cutting edge itself to ever so slightly taper out of its 30 degree angle. Simply breaking the corners wasn’t doing this for me.
So the actual technique I thought of was to sharpen as usual, then hold the iron at the normal sharpening angle (i.e. 30 deg) and then tilt the iron forward slightly a few degrees, then tilt to a side slightly (such that maybe the outer 1/4 or 1/8 or so of the edge is still touching the stone, and then slowly pull back while slowly continuing to tilt the iron to the side and just slightly more forward. I only do this like 3 to 5 times on each side. The result looks like a curved microbevel which tapers the cutting edge out of the 30 degree plane close to its ends. That’s the key, I think.
This did it for me. Kinda unorthodox I know, but it worked and I just kept doing it.
Hi sandy,
Here is how I look at it. On the video, paul already has rounded corners when he resharpens the blade, so the few strokes he makes with the coarse stone establishes the rounded corners to the points where the do not leave any tracks
You have to grind the blade the first time tothe point where the corners do not grab, this can be several strokes 10 to 20 on the coarse stone, where you will see a definite camber and the corner out of the same plane than the rest of the blades edge. then it will be only a few strokes everytime you resharpen as paul does it in its videos.
Sometimes the strokes you make to
Sharpen the edge are more than the ones used to maintain the corners at the proper camber as not to leave marks.Then the only way for you to know how much is enough is everytime you resharpen the blade. You will just know.
Hope this helps and I will uploafd a picture of my blade later
Mario
11 January 2014 at 4:49 pm #25753To expand on my earlier post… Make sure that you are overlapping you strokes. For instance; let’s say you are working the face of a board from left to right. The first stroke, on the far left of the board, the plane should be hanging off the left edge. After the stroke there should be only one plane track from the right edge of the plane blade. Each stroke moving over to the right should overlap the previous stroke. So the one single plane track should be moving to the right with each successive stroke. You should make you last stroke, on the right side of the board, with the plane hanging off of the right edge of the board.
If you do this method and are still getting two plane tracks with each stroke then either your blade is not square to the sole of the plane or you are slightly tilting your plane to the left based on the example above.
The shallower you set you blade, the less noticeable the single track will be. Even if you can’t see, you will be able to feel it.
The main advantage of rounding off the corners of the plane blade is to mitigate the damage that can be done when a sharp 90deg corner catches in the wood. Try this, take a 1/2″ chisel and run it across a board, bevel down, that is wider than the chisel. You will get a shaving but the edges of the resulting groove will be pretty ugly. Now try it with a gouge. Big difference. That is the same idea with the plane blade. You are creating a large flat bottom gouge.
Hope I helped and didn’t make it more confusing.Greg, not at all. I’ve been playing around with it in my shop this morning and the lighter cuts and less pressure along with a slightly more aggressive radius is working pretty well. I played with it and tried different suggestions and planed a 3/4 x 6 board down to about a 1/4 inch thick. But it’s smooth! I also tuned up my #4 Stanley. I think that might have helped a bit as well. So now I am back to my project at hand. Thank you all for the time to reply. your suggestions were great. I guess this just goes back to something I have heard Paul say a few times. What ever works best for you. So I try all the suggestions and settle in to what works best for me. 🙂
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