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Thread: My new favorite mortising chisel for planes...and the start of a panel plane

  1. #1
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    My new favorite mortising chisel for planes...and the start of a panel plane

    A cheapie. Warren came to mind when I was using this, but not for the steel (it's high speed steel). It's a mujingfang chisel that is not beveled or tapered on along its thickness (at least not enough to matter), but along its length. It has almost no resistance when cutting mortises, and maybe it doesn't clean the sides of the moritse, but that doesn't much matter for planes.

    P1040461.jpg

    (warren comes to mind because he has often pointed out that vintage mortise chisels were tapered along their length, too, something that appears to have gone the way of the dodo bird once chisels were mass produced)

    These muji chisels would be cheap if they were offered individually - they're about $8 each, but they come in a set of medium, medium wide, wider than you'd use, wider than that and wider than that yet, and the shipping on a set of 5 of them from china is expensive (about $30). So they end up not being that cheap, and their tang isn't real long which will necessitate an eventual fix.

    I won't be making a second of this plane, I've got no tools for skewed planes (no floats cut to fit in a corner) and have done all of the work with chisels, except for the bed.

    I had a salvage double iron, well not salvage - sacrifice. Sacrificed an english badger plane because skewed double irons are not easy to find, but a double iron will be a necessity to making this plane cut against the grain in all woods. Badger planes have some lean (the iron at the bottom is at the edge, but not at the top), which messes up skewing if you don't do them that way. I chose to not have lean on this plane, and since it's raised panel only will let up the plane at the side of the mouth a millimeter or so such that the cut bottoms out.

    Anyway, eliminating the lean changes the skew angle from 20 to 28 which could be problematic (and definitely would if the cut used the entire iron, but this one only uses about 80% of it, so I'm hoping that will save me). Double iron planes don't love extreme skew angles, but it's no issue on a normal bench plane because you never have to skew it to eliminate tearout.

    Guessing at all of the angles has been a complete pain, and working up low effort ways to find out where they'll need to be (for example, the 28 degree skew required to get the iron to bed such that at a 45 degree bed, the cap iron will be lined up with the edge so that it actually works to prevent tearout). And then making and fitting the wedge, which results in a lot of dragging a wedge with no square sides over a plane stuck upside down in a vise. Fortunately, such things set up with the cap iron set close don't actually cut the skin on your hands. The angle on the wedge is dependent on the skew and the bed of the angle in combination, so if you blindly cut it at 28 degrees, it won't fit, it's somewhere around 20 or 21 (I guessed at the angle divided by the square root of 2, which was close).

    P1040465.jpg

    P1040464.jpg

    The reason I'm letting up the edge instead of leaning the iron out (so that it cuts at the edge of the plane) is that letting up the edge and keeping the iron tucked in gives me the option to add a wedged nicker later if it seems like it will be helpful (if the finish isn't good cross grain).

    Random thought, the front of the mouth, front corner at the edge, is always an erosion point for skewed planes. That edge wears in 3d, and then these planes have a problem feeding. I've left the mouth a little wider than you'd leave with a single iron plane, because double irons like a mouth tight or loose, but not between. I'll eventually put a brass wear strip there.

    The work could be a lot neater, adding the skew makes everything you normally look for (a coplanar bed, etc) a challenge. The eyes are gigantic because I tried cutting them a little differently this time and had to redo them twice. Lost cause, mostly due to picking the worst blank from my new pile of beech - intentionally, so as to leave the good ones for planes that I know will turn out good.

    Here's the donor plane. My shop has become a dangerous place for a plane that has a good iron.

    P1040466.jpg

    "modern" steel is a bit of a departure from normal for me, but this chisel, which is super tough, even at sub 30 degrees, sharpens nicely on a dry diamond hone and then believe it on not, on an okudo suita (japanese natural), which raises black swarf fairly quickly and doesn't allow an organized wire edge to form on the finished edge. This is a chisel that is a bit much for a king stone, and that gums up a shapton. This is the first time I've ever seen a natural stone outdo most of my synthetics for finish work, but it's a very strong cutting stone that most will not come across buying low priced natural stones.
    Last edited by David Weaver; 11-23-2014 at 11:33 AM.

  2. #2
    To be honest, I have no idea what you are writing about! But describing in words all the subtleties of a skewed plane is very difficult, I guess.

    Anyway, I am looking forward again to the result.

  3. #3
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    Hi David. I am struggling to understand the logic behind why you marked out the skewed bed the way you did on this plane. Its all ended up looking rather messy. The upside; you would have learnt a lot from this experience.

    Stewie;

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    Kees hit it on the head, it's a bit difficult to describe the problems you encounter making a double iron skew plane when your cap iron and iron are a set angle and it's not ideal for your plane.

    I guess it was more of a brain dump than anything else, most is esoteric.

    Safe to say that when you're given a fixed parameters, it makes everything else a lot more difficult.

    The chisel, however, is top shelf due to the taper in width (and the fat handle). It's too bad nobody retails them over here. Mujingfang has the has tooling down pat, though I don't know what their steel is. I have seen a couple of casual mentions that the steel may be T1 HSS, which would explain why they're a little nicer to use than M2 or something similar (tungsten steel being better for edge taking at high hardness because it's finer grained than M2). At any rate, not a heavy chisel, just a slab of steel with a small tang on it, and muji calls it a cabinetmaker's chisel. It took less time for me to chop this mortise out than it would've for me to drill it (especially given what I have available in the shop to do accurate drilling).

    But who knows...
    Last edited by David Weaver; 11-24-2014 at 9:12 AM.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by Stewie Simpson View Post
    Hi David. I am struggling to understand the logic behind why you marked out the skewed bed the way you did on this plane. Its all ended up looking rather messy. The upside; you would have learnt a lot from this experience.

    Stewie;
    Pretty much because I have a double iron that has a vintage cap iron on it that must be bedded at a certain angle for the cap iron to be a constant distance from the cut. I don't know if I remember enough trigonometry and geometry to figure out the angles on a sheet of paper, so fitting and drawing lines manually proves to be a better way to go. That literally involved leaning the iron on a 45 degree angle and turning it askew until the iron was:
    * bedded at 45 degrees
    * otherwise vertical so that the iron once bedded isn't leaning to the left or the right in a plane (as in lean that a badger plane has where the iron is 3/8" to the left of the edge of the plane at the top of the mortise, but comes out the side of the plane at the top.

    That was an operation that I could've used a third hand for, but it worked.

    I'll admit I cut the angles on the wedge (where they fit the side of the plane) at 28 degrees to match the skew before I realized that they are at a shallower angle because the bed angle compounds the situation. I guessed at 21 IIRC on a subsequent attempt and it turned out to be pretty close.

    Had I used a single iron, I'd have had none of these issues (just decide what bed and skew you want and then just grind the end of the iron to work with the bed). A single iron plane, however, even at 55 degrees, would be much more sensitive to wood choice than this plane - to avoid tearout, and wouldn't hold a candle to this plane in a heavy cut. Nor would it stay bedded as well in a heavy cut, which allows you to use the plane longer before having to resharpen it and reset it. Thus the desire to trudge through it (and throw away a badger plane body that really doesn't need much to be put back in good working shape).

    I'll clean up the aesthetics some on this plane before it's done (trimming the wedge fingers, etc - actually that's done, just not for the pictures) and the housed area in the fence of the plane below the mouth. To some extent, it doesn't matter that much because the plane is for me, and I'm not sure that I care what this one looks like (I'd like the bench planes I make to be a little neater each time, though the aesthetics of the three bench planes in my avatar are fine. This one will end up looking decent when all is said and done. I'm overstating the disappointment with the eyes to some extent they're just big but there are no other aesthetic issues after cleaning up the wedge except for the small split at the left side of the wedge.

    Simply put, this plane is to cut a bevel 1 1/2" long and field a raised panel that has a bevel slope of roughly 10 degrees. After putting fitting the wedge better last night and setting up the iron and cap iron, it will feed left and right, but I don't have enough grip without a handle to see if it will handle a full width cut.
    Last edited by David Weaver; 11-24-2014 at 8:47 AM.

  6. #6
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    FWIW, the Narex mortise chisels I have from LV are tapered in width a bit. Not as dramatic as the chisel you snapped a photo of, but after using non-tapered chisels, I really agree how much it helps when making deep mortises, keeping from getting stuck.

    I remember reading the skewed plane construction in Whelan's book, and man, it can make your brain hurt.

    Joshua Clark has set up a second page selling some bits and pieces, last I looked he had some older irons there.

  7. #7
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    I need to go track down Josh's page. To the extent I can secure enough irons and cap irons to satisfy anything I'll make for myself for the next several decades, that would be good.

    As far as reading about doing something like these planes, I've not yet read whelan's book (and probably won't) and I generally don't read anything about what anyone else does because I know I'm probably not going to do it the same.

    Getting a double iron plane to feed properly was the thing that we went over here (in terms of the design of the abutments and where they terminate and how they're shaped, etc..... on a good plane) was the only thing on planes that we've all made on this board that really required thinking so as not to make plane shaped objects that you put down.

    I know there is an article or two out there about making skewed planes in PWW, I even have that magazine, but haven't read the article - it doesn't mean anything to me until you sit at the bench and do it, and at that point I want to do it, not read about it.

    My cosmetic wants from this point are pretty well defined. I could make a bench plane in less than 10 hours, and nobody is writing about making double iron planes with vintage irons so it's just easier for me to sit and do it and figure it out than it is to try to learn from someone else. I own the knowledge then, so to speak, and never get to a point that I have followed instructions but don't understand why. I don't really have a plane to copy for this one, so there is some flying blind (though it's really a matter of just fitting things). But for all of the other planes (the bench planes, etc) learning locations of mouths, etc, and seeing the executed work is something I couldn't get just from reading - having a good plane in hand and using your brain to figure out why it is the way it is is far more valuable.

  8. #8
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    A chisel found at Novaya Zemlya, From the 16th. C. shipwreck there, looked quite like a much later chisel. It had beveled edges,but was also tapered in width. The blade was 3 or 4" long as judged from a picture.
    Last edited by george wilson; 11-24-2014 at 9:43 AM.

  9. #9
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    I can see the virtue of the chisel being tapered in width, even for something other than mortising. It would give a craftsman just another small dimension that they could control.

    the subject chisel above is probably about 4 1/2" to the tang, it's not a tiny chisel and the handles are shaped like barrels (which is nice if you hold a chisel by the handle and not by the blade). The bevels on the top of it look like they're more than they really are, as if they were put on because someone requested bevels, but that they didn't want to do a really good job of making them useful. They only go about a third of the way down the side of the chisel and are kind of pointless.

  10. #10
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    Old Mr. Simms used firmer chisels. He made them useful for dovetails by just grinding angles on their corners starting about 1/2" from the cutting edges. They quickly tapered out to nothing. They enabled the workman to get the corner of his chisel into the inside corners of dovetails. That seems to have been the standard way of prepping chisels among many workmen,ugly as it was. I noticed a few such prepped chisels for sales by Lee Richmond this last tool list.

    I tried to get an image of the 16th. C. chisel I mentioned just above,but was not successful. I saw an image of it a long time ago. Surprising it survived in as good a shape as it did. I meant the length of the blade up to where the tang started.
    Last edited by george wilson; 11-24-2014 at 10:10 AM.

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by Joshua Pierce View Post
    Joshua Clark has set up a second page selling some bits and pieces, last I looked he had some older irons there.
    Josh, can you send me a link to that page?

  12. #12
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    Never mind. I found it! I think sometimes that I am the only person buying tapered vintage double irons. I'm sure that's not the case, but it seems relatively close to it some days.

    I would like to find more 2 1/2" full length irons with matching chipbreakers, though. 2 to 2 1/4" irons are relatively easy to find, but the 2 1/2" irons are what I like to have to make jointer and try planes. Even the 2 1/2" slotted irons are easy to find, but finding them with a good condition cap iron is a little tougher.

  13. #13
    Here's the nova zembla chisel. A lot of Central European chisels up till the 20th century were shaped like that. I have a couple too.


    NG-NM-7667.jpg

  14. #14
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    We'll try again another day. Next time, I'll just build a badger style plane and go with 20 degrees and just let the iron lean. 28 is just too much leverage on the abutment - the wedge is just pushing out splitting it. For anyone new to planes, that is the end for this plane. The split is toxic.

    P1040484.jpg

    This is what it looked like just before it split. Fortunately I hadn't built the handle yet, and only buried about 6 hours into it before it split:

    P1040482.jpg
    Last edited by David Weaver; 11-24-2014 at 9:00 PM.

  15. #15
    Dave, bummer man. I've lost planes too and it's no fun.
    I've not had great luck with skews either, so far. I think if I were going to make a panel raiser, I'd try modifying a regular double iron set, as Lars did in that post I mentioned before, and keep the skew conservative, maybe around 15°.

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