Stanley No. 4 – what am I doing wrong?
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- This topic has 57 replies, 16 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 6 months ago by Samuel Colchamiro.
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18 September 2018 at 3:26 pm #551749
Looking at the blade picture and looking at my planes it appears the blade is not seated quite right. It is way away from thee mouth and pointed down at quite an angle. Before throwing money at it make sure the balde is seated flat on the frog. Set it on the frog , move it around until you feel it set on the adjuster , move the lateral adjusters so it drops in , then Lock down the retainer.
I have this happen occasionally when i sharpen and do not return the cap iron to the same position on the blade. Which changes the protrusion out the mouth.18 September 2018 at 6:15 pm #551771Hi Kirsty,
Here’s a link to an eclipse honing guide on Ebay if you aren’t sure what everyone is one about!
Harry is dead right in what he says about the cap iron being vitally important to avoid chatter and he gives some very good and detailed instructions on how to set one up but since your plane was initially planing fine I would suggest the cap iron is at least passable (It wouldn’t hurt to check it anyway though). Setting the cap iron up is what you would typically need to do when you buy an old plane or blade off ebay or from a car boot sale. Tooltique, I think, would/should have set this up when they refurbished it.
I think it is likely a sharpening issue as it sounds like that is the only thing to have changed since you were last merrily planning away. Personally, I would get the honing guide as that will definitely allow you to sharpen the chisel to the correct bevel then at least you can rule that out of the equation as a cause of your problem. It doesn’t have to be an eclipse (many people swear by the Veritas Mk2) but I, like others have mentioned find the Eclipse pretty fuss free and easy to use. It’s a tool that you will find useful for the future anyway.
John
19 September 2018 at 1:31 am #551780@harryawheeler, I hate to disagree … – just kidding 🙂
What @howardinwales means is that the chip breaker doesn’t have to be sharp like a blade but must be seated flat against the iron and to ensure you get that fit you rub the chip breaker on some fine grit to ensure there are no gaps that allow wood between the chip breaker and the iron. If you get any wood between the breaker and the iron the plane will skip and tear – the chip breaker seating is critical. The position of the breaker from the end of the iron is also critical – too much distance and the iron will skip or dig in or tear or chatter – all sorts of bad stuff. You’ve both made some really good points and I reckon we’ll get to the bottom of it in the end. A few more photos will help our diagnosis I think 🙂
19 September 2018 at 6:31 am #551789The whole point of rubbing the steel on an abrasive is to get a burr. Concentrate on that. Concern about the relief angle might be a secondary issue if you have only sharpened once or twice. You may not have really done any sharpening.
If you don’t get a burr ( and then remove it) you haven’t sharpened, just worn away metal.
Try sharpening again, this ime raising the angle just enough that a couple dozen strokes raises a burr on the edge. Then remove it by stropping. Do the same through each grit. After a while, you will only have to remove the burr once at the end, but for starters, remove it at each stage so you know you are working the edge and not in the middle of the bevel.
- This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Larry Geib.
19 September 2018 at 12:08 pm #551862Hej again,
This might open up Pandora’s box, but your photos could be indicating benefits from moving the frog somewhat closer to the toe of the plane. It’s a far-off one, but potentially the blade might be resting on the back of the mouth, which I don’t think it should. Then, there are all the other vices and virtues of the frog – “ruminations over already exceedingly well chewed bones” – which I shy away from.
Doesn’t learning a skill by observing from distance always have the drawback of that there is no one by when watching doesn’t suffice. If there were, then it would be more of an apprenticeship. Lacking that, one option might be to inspect tools that are correctly set up. Retailers and manufacturers in UK all seem to be knowledgeable and helpful; and ready-to-use products will inform on desired properties and alternatives on how to set them up. Ideally, the tool is bought, and for a period any unsatisfactory results will be down to the user, who, however, will also know what to strive for in set-up.
In analogy to the above, it’s not easy to develop the correct techniques by merely watching, particularly when demonstrations of “correct” differ. Having, as part of a review, tried not that few of them, my summary became: one swings forth and back, or from side to side, aiming at a desired result by taking thin shavings, and with very frequent use of winding sticks, a straight edge (the plane’s), and a square. The swinging of Mr. P. Sellers, time, and perseverance eventually took my hand-planing from the dismal to the tolerably mediocre.
/Sven-Olof
19 September 2018 at 12:50 pm #551865Hi all,
As usual I am so grateful to you all for taking the time to help me with this. Thank you.
I have attached some photos (not great but it’s the best I could get with my phone camera!) of the blade and chip breaker/cap iron. On close inspection it did look like I might have been sharpening the blade more on one side – probably pressing harder on the left side resulted in a slight angle. I wonder if this could be causing the issue? I haven’t sharpened the back of the blade at all as yet. Thank you for the video Howard, I haven’t watched it yet but certainly will. Hopefully it will give me some insight.
Keith, it worked fine when I got it, so must be something I’ve done/am doing.
Of course I’m a total novice but I’m fairly sure the blade is sharp – it’s sounding more and more like it’s the sharpening angle that’s wrong. The wood is just PAR redwood. I’ve noticed the burr being referred to a few times in the replies, and to be honest it’s one thing I was aware of when I was trying to sharpen – at no point did I get a burr. I know Paul talked about this in his sharpening video so I know what to expect, but I just assumed it’s because I’m using wet/dry sandpaper (with a bit of water) rather than a stone. Should that not make a difference? If not, I honestly don’t know what I’m doing wrong, I carried on for maybe 5 minutes on each grade of paper but still didn’t get this elusive burr. Maybe I need to do a video of how I’m sharpening so that somebody can enlighten me on what I’m getting so wrong!
Harry, I don’t totally understand what you mean – if it doesn’t matter too much if the angle is a bit steeper than it should be – as long as it’s less than 45 degrees which of course it is – then what else could be causing this problem? Sorry if I’m missing something totally obvious – I’m very confused :/
It’s definitely seated properly on the frog – I place it on and wiggle the lever around so it moves side to side, then clamp it down.
Out of interest – would this honing guide from Screwfix do the job for now (it’s £4.99 and I can get one today!) https://www.screwfix.com/p/magnusson-honing-guide/6342v?_requestid=230780
John, thanks for the link. You’re right, this has happened since I started sharpening so my thought was it’s either the sharpening or something I’ve inadvertently done to the setup of the plane when disassembling or putting back together. But I haven’t adjusted the frog or anything so…
Sven-Olaf, I agree the blade does seem far away from the opening (although it’s not resting on the back) – I did wonder if I should adjust it to be closer, but then I decided it might be best not to start messing and risk making the problem worse than it already is! I haven’t adjusted this since I got the plane so the position didn’t seem to be an issue before. You’re totally right – learning online has so many advantages but when something like this happens, it’s hard to explain and resolve the issue from a distance. My winding sticks have also been used regularly and I’m not sure I’m at the tolerably mediocre level yet!
Thanks again, everyone.
Kirsty- This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Kirsty Sanderson.
Attachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.Well, Kirsty, eleven out of ten for perseverance.
I think that you may now have identified your problem.
You are not raising a burr. Seriously, this is crucially important. No burr, no cutting edge, you just have a very minutely rounded-over piece of pointed metal!I’ll explain. The action of sharpening, usually on hard stones or diamond-dust impregnated plates, involves a reciprocating movement, back and forth, that abrades the extreme edge of the bevel gradually wearing it down to a very thin wire.
This is the burr and can always be felt with the fingers. Once you have the burr extending the full width of the blade, job done, move on to the next grit.
Moving up the grits means that this burr gets thinner each time and it is this burr that is the meeting point of the two edges – the bevel and the back – that ideally meets at infinity but in reality, as there’ no such thing as infinity, needs to be as thin as you can practically get it. Usually the final action is to hone this burr down on a leather strop impregnated with a fine abrasive paste, though usually the first couple of cutting strokes will remove the remnants of the burr.From this, it is important to look at the back of the blade because it is one half of your cutting edge. Please look at it carefully. It needs to be flat and shiny. Unused Stanley / Record blades such as you have generally had minute milling marks from the manufacturing process. It was customary to hone this surface down to a shiny surface before use, though you only ever use the last 6 to 8 mm at the end. It is one of these jobs that you do once and then just maintain. But it is essential to do it well. The cap iron or chip-breaker (your choice of terminology for the same thing) sits here on this cleaned bit of metal and it is this surface that has to be a clean tight contact to avoid minute shreds of wood getting stuck: this will jam the plane, so it’s important to get a clean fit right across. Again, do it once and do it right.
Finally, as you are using abrasive paper, there may be another issue: the material itself is minutely compressible, however hard it feels and unless it is secured all over its surface, typically with double sided tape it can ruck up, especially on the forward stroke. This may, and I emphasise the word ‘may’, lead to a tiny piece of the paper dubbing over the cutting edge as you push forward and in so doing preventing the formation of the bevel. It’s a little like pushing a piece of tablecloth forwards with your fingers – it rucks up, draw back and you loose the ruck. So, if this is the case, abandon pushing, try just drawing the blade backwards – this will put the abrasive paper under tension.
Finally, I must have used every bevel guide known to humanity over the years – ultimately I have returned to hand sharpening which is something that is improved by practice….. practice and more practice.
Good luck. Let us know how you get on.
19 September 2018 at 1:57 pm #551876Hi Kirsty. I didn’t mean to confuse you. My point is simply that any bevel angle in the 25 to 30 degree range works fine. If you get a honing guide, I would set it at 25 degrees like Stanley recommended and sharpen the bevel at that angle (the heel may already be less than that if it was sharpened at 25 degrees to begin with and you’ve been honing mainly the heel). The edge doesn’t look sharp at all to me, and you’ve been putting a little more pressure on one side as you mentioned. That’s easy to do but it’s also something a honing guide will help you with. The guide you’re looking at looks like it should work. From what I can see, it looks like you’ve been honing the back side of the bevel (ie, not raising the blade up enough) without ever getting to the cutting edge and if you haven’t been feeling a burr, that’s why. If you place the blade on your wet paper and start raising it up, you’ll reach a point where the fluid moves out from under the front edge of the blade and that’s the point where the cutting edge is actually in contact with the paper. You have to go at least that high with the cutting iron at the back of your sharpening stroke to hone the actual cutting edge. If you use a guide, you just hone until you form a burr all the way across the cutting edge. Watch Paul’s video’s again, start by flattening the back of the iron (in the last picture the back looks like it’s messed up right at the cutting edge and that area has to be dead flat) and get the guide if you want something to help you get started. Good Luck!
BTW, what @howardinwales is saying about the sandpaper is absolutely true. Sandpaper loves to bunch up in front of the blade on the push stroke so go easy in that direction. Sandpaper is fine when you’re starting out, but eventually you’ll want some diamond stones. They’re just so much easier to deal with and cheaper than sandpaper in the long run.
- This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by harry wheeler.
- This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by harry wheeler.
- This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by harry wheeler.
- This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by harry wheeler.
The guide you showed is the same style as the Eclipse. Even once you master freehand sharpening, there will be times when you want to have a guide. Do yourself a favor and just get the guide. It will remove one variable from the equation by ensuring you get a usable angle and, by being constant, it will help you get all the way to the cutting edge. I disagree with the others in two regards. First, I believe that when you start using the guide, you are going to discover that you have a broad sweeping camber that is steep at the tip (even if it doesn’t reach the tip) and shallow at the heel. There may be a substantial amount of material to remove by hand because of the steep tip. Quite doable, but for that reason I’d set the guide at 30 degrees rather than 25. You’ll get an edge faster. Second, I believe it is possible to be too steep after a single sharpening when learning to sharpen freehand. I’ve done it. You can accidentally put something like a microbevel at the tip by lifting the blade too much at the end of the draw stroke and it doesn’t take many strokes to do it.
Just get the guide and gain confidence with it. It will give you an “it always works” approach that you can go back to when you are teaching yourself to sharpen freehand. It will help you square up blades now and then. It will be useful for narrow chisels and for joinery blades like rebate planes.
Sandpaper is fine but, as others mentioned, it can round over the edge. Get some spray adhesive and something flat like a piece of glass or tile. The lightest spritz of adhesive on the back of the paper will be good enough. You won’t need to do both it and the tile/glass. The paper can still cause problems even with glue, but you should be fine.
The final area where my opinion differs is with regard to the back. The back of your blade definitely needs work to get to really fine work, but I’d say don’t worry about that just now. Although there are scratches, the previous owner has already taken out the grinding marks. It is flat enough for you to get the burr off. Just let it be for now until you gain more experience. Raise a burr working the bevel, then flip over and draw the back of the blade on fine paper glued to something flat to remove the burr. You may need to go back and forth between bevel and back on the fine paper to get the burr off. The degree of scratching that I see will not keep you from cutting. You can tune further in the future when you need to. The gross skipping you are having now is from being nowhere near sharp.
Get some shavings. Enjoy the success. You can tune further in the future when you need to. The gross skipping you are having now is from being nowhere near sharp.
If you can get a decent sized strop (leather on wood) and some compound, that would be a good thing. The softness of the leather helps you to remove the burr from an imperfect back and imperfect bevel.
21 September 2018 at 9:15 am #552045Thanks all for your valuable advice. I picked up the honing guide from Screwfix yesterday and gave it a go on the 240 grit sandpaper, which is taped to a flat tile with Gorilla tape. Well, I am amazed at the difference. The blade looks and feels totally different, and clearly what I thought was sharp was actually not remotely close to being sharp. I had a very quick 1 minute attempt at planing my wood again, just to see if it had made a difference to the ‘skipping’ problem, and I’d say it was 90% better. So, tonight I’ll continue with the sharpening using the honing guide on all 3 grits and hopefully I’ll be back to my workbench project!
The sandpaper does ruck up as you say on the push stroke even with the strong tape on all edges, so the diamond stones are most definitely on my Christmas list. I’m wary of investing too much before I’ve really been doing woodworking for long enough to know that it’s a hobby I’m going to stick with – I’ve already spent a considerable amount on various tools. One of which is an old Record plough plane, which I’ve had varying results with, so I’m now going to sharpen the blades with this honing guide and see if it makes any difference to my work! Having said that, trying to use a plough plane with no workbench or vice to clamp the wood in is not the best starting point for accuracy.
Anyway, I’ve gone off topic, but thank you all very much for taking the time to help me, you’ve got to the bottom of the problem for me and I’m looking forward to continuing my workbench project – which hopefully will be the first of many! I’m sure there will be lots of other problems I encounter along the way and it’s good to know there is a helpful supportive forum I can come to and get great advice. Lots of forums for various hobbies are full of criticism for newbies and I haven’t experienced any of that here. So thank you all.
Kirsty
21 September 2018 at 11:40 am #552047Excellent Kirsty! I think we went around in a big circle with some of the discussion only to come back to sharpening where this all started, but at least you got there. One thing you’re going to notice about a honing guide and especially with the type you have is that when you remove the blade from the guide, it’s hard to get the blade back in the guide in exactly the same position the next time you use it. You may see that after a few strokes on your abrasive, the scratch pattern that is forming is starting at the back (heel) of the bevel and not going all the way out to the cutting edge. That’s telling you that the blade is sticking out of the guide a little further than is was the last time you sharpened it. Don’t worry about that and don’t try to adjust anything – just continue and very quickly the scratch pattern will move all the way to the cutting edge.
The opposite can happen too if the blade isn’t sticking out of the guide quite as far as it was on the previous sharpening. You’ll see a scratch pattern starting at the cutting edge but it isn’t going all the way back to the heel of the bevel. Now I know at least one of my fellow woodworkers is going to take issue with what I’m about to say, but I’ll say it anyway. As long as the scratch pattern is starting at the tip, there is absolutely no reason to continue grinding away to get the scratches all the way back to the heel. You’re just wasting time and metal. Fifteen or twenty strokes in this position will form a perfectly sharp cutting edge. It’s actually what’s called a secondary bevel and it works perfectly. The key test when sharpening is whether you have formed a burr or not and as soon as you have a burr that is continuous all the way across the cutting edge you can stop. Further honing will make no difference. Move on to the next grit until you’re finished.
To help with positioning the blade in the guide, some people make a little jig out of a small scrap of plywood with a small stop block glued on to it at the distance your guide requires for the angle you want to use You simply butt the sharpening guide against the edge of the plywood and push the blade out of the honing guide until it touches the stop block. That helps guarantee the blade position from one sharpening to the next. Notice too that a plane blade goes in the upper grooves of the honing guide, but if you use it for your chisels, you’ll be using the bottom grooves and the distance the blade has to project from the guide is less for the bottom grooves. If you use a larger piece of plywood for the base, you can glue multiple stop blocks on it for various angles and have one set of stops for the top grooves in the honing guide and another set for the bottom grooves. I hope that wasn’t too confusing – maybe you get the picture.
The objective right now is to get you back to work on that bench so there’s no need to make this complicated. Put the blade back in the guide, make sure it’s cinched down well and work your way up through the grits. 1200 grit is plenty good enough for the work bench and polishing with a strop like others have talked about won’t make much difference so you can ignore that for a while. When you’re done at 1200 grit, remove the blade from the guide and place the back flat down on the paper and hone that surface. That will remove the burr and give you a good indication of how flat the blade really is. It’s probably OK but this is a quick way to check. You should see a uniform scratch pattern across the back that extends all the way to and across the cutting edge. If it doesn’t, the back needs to be flattened and that’s important. No plane will ever work right if the back of the blade isn’t flat.
A couple of final thoughts. When you reassemble the blade cap iron, you don’t need to position the cap iron any closer to the cutting edge than about 3mm. Just don’t set it too far back. At some point you also may want to hone the edge of the cap iron as we’ve talked about. Yours looks pretty rough but I think it should work OK for the time being. While you don’t need to do this right now, you’re going to eventually want to take your cutting iron to a higher level of polish than you can get with sandpaper. A lot of us use the leather strop and honing compound approach but there are 16,000 grit (and higher) stones out there as well if you’ve got lots of money to spend. Sorry for all the rambling. I hope some of this is useful for you.
@kirsty I’m glad you are having some success. Is the gorilla tape double sided? If not, and maybe even if so, I’m concerned that tape will get you in trouble when you work the back and will dub the edges. On a bench plane, that’s not a horrible thing, but for chisels, plow blades, rebates, etc., it’s better to avoid this. I find that the paper squishes more with tape and moves around more.
Around here, you can find small cans of aerosol spray adhesive like Scotch 77 at art stores. “Woodwork-y” or construction stores will have the large cans and you only need a small one. I think it will be very much worth a couple dollars / pounds / euros for you. The spray does drift, so put down some paper or use an old box to spray in. The stuff is unbelievably sticky. You just need the smallest waft of spray on the back of the paper, give it few moments, then plop it down on your tile, glass, or metal surface.
Did your guide come with instructions that say that the little notches in the guide are for chisels and smaller blades? Mine didn’t and I didn’t realize it at first. They let you hold narrower, shorter blades.
I like the eclipse guide because it is stable, but not dominating. So, you can grind the blade square and straight, but then at the end put extra pressure on the right corner for a few strokes, extra pressure on the left corner for a few strokes, then a few strokes sort of screwing to the right and a few strokes screwing to the left. The result is a very subtle camber that lets you use the blade for smoothing work and for adjusting edge squareness. This is an alternative to Paul’s lifting of the blade to round just the corners, although honestly I think this is what he ends up with, really, for blade shape. You have to explore what “few strokes” is for your hands and blade. 5 is a good place to start. If you plane surfaces and find that the plane leaves long straight lines, it is often from the corners of the blade and this camber solves that problem. Keep it in the back of your head for the future, but you don’t have to get hung up on it now.
22 September 2018 at 12:15 am #552072Third Hej,
Happy to read “topic resolved”!
Ed’s suggestion on photo-mount glue to keep sanding paper flat has worked nicely for me. An alternative, though perhaps more expensive, is sandpaper with an adhesive back. 3M offers it in several grades from 80 and upwards.
And now to “Something entirely different”: the best reason for staying with woodworking is that one can create for others. The net of Mr Harry Wheeler’s furniture for his daughter is well beyond the exquisite joinery; and personally, despite less than perfect joinery, I’m very happy with my bonus-boy’s bespoke writing desk – particularly when he’s doing his homework at it.
/Sven-Olof
Re: 3M adhesive back paper. It’s a wet or dry use paper. Following Paul’s lead, I spray with glass cleaner while sharpening to keep it from clogging. And I periodically rinse it in a bucket of clear water, to clean the grit, just as when wet sanding automobiles. No need for tape as the wet back sticks to my block.
The 3M paper seems to cut longer than some of the less expensive brands I have tried. More tedious to use than diamond plates, but it does give results using different grits.if you want to use glasspaper, there are alternatives like microlapping film that are far superior, the stuff is amazing for flattening blades and chisels and it lasts for months on end. They sell kits at workshopheaven.
- This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by btyreman.
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