Originally Posted by
ian maybury
I'm a bit short of in depth practical experience in this space, and have just been working through a thought experiment to figure out some possibilities.
Combining the above and another discussion though. (a) It's likely that a chip breaker equipped plane will as above reach a depth of cut limit beyond which the chips will start to fail, and problems set in. i.e. chip breakers probably are at their best on lighter cuts close to smoothing. (b) The angle of the nose of the chipbreaker has to matter. If it was e.g. 90 deg then it'd just stop the chip dead. If the same as the pitch of the plane then it'd likely just continue bending the chip in a constant radius.
On (a), it is definitely not correct that "chip breakers are at their best on lighter cuts close to smoothing." Really, the whole point of using a chipbreaker over other methods of tearout prevention is that you can take comparatively heavier cuts. With a high angle plane on really nasty grain, you are going to be reduced to taking sub-thou or 1 thou shavings to finish, while the chipbreaker will let you finish in the 2-4 thou range, meaning you're done in a half to a quarter of the time.
You are right that any method of tearout reduction will have a depth limit. But practically speaking, with a chipbreaker on an iron that has the very small amount of camber appropriate for smoothing or trying, you will reach a physical limit (the plane becomes unpleasant to push) before you reach the point at which tearout is no longer eliminated. You can take cuts up to about 10 thou with such a setup, which is about as much as anyone would want to push for any length of time, and then back it off to finish.
On (b), there is a wealth of information on this subject. See the Kato/Kawai video, Dave Weaver's article "setting a cap iron" on Wood Central, or some of the studies Kees has posted on his blog. In short, steep angles up to 80°, which is what Kato/Kawai used, can work, but they reduce the usable range of chipbreaker setting rather drastically; in other words, you go from "no chipbreaker effect" to "plane's too hard to push" in the space of a few thou.
Probably the best advice for the angle of the chipbreaker was given 180 years ago by Holtzapffel, who wrote that the chipbreaker should present a "nearly perpendicular wall for the ascent of the shavings." Since he was speaking of a plane bedded around 45°, he's just telling you to bevel the nose of your chipbreaker at around 45°. It's that simple, and the angle is not very critical.
I read your comments about the cube rule in the other post. It's interesting, but really doesn't have much bearing on actual work. I don't know why; probably because the actual range of shaving thickness is too small when we are trying or smoothing.
Probably "thought experiments," though interesting, are not very useful unless they are tested at the workbench. We can come up with models all day long, but if they don't work in practice, it's time to get a new model. That not to say that there's anything wrong with theorizing though. I'd encourage you to test some of your hypotheses with a plane and some wood, and see what you come up with.
Last edited by Steve Voigt; 03-03-2015 at 11:05 PM.
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