Skew irons for wooden planes

[Oskar Sedell]

Hi all,

after coming up short when searching the interwebs I'll turn to the expertise here. I'm playing with the idea of building a dedicated wooden shooting plane and a shooting board. With dedicated I mean low angle (35-38 deg bedding), bevel down and a skewed iron.

Philly planes has a skew miter which has these features. I've mailed them asking about the iron, but no answer yet. Any suggestions on where to find a iron for my project? Around 2 inches wide, preferrably tapered and pretty thick.

Best regards,

Sedell

ps. I don't have a grinder to regrind a standard iron.

[Matthew N. Masail]

Buy a grinder. I bought the Metabo 6" regular speed, it was cheap (60$) and still runs perfectly after 5 years. You should have a grinder

[Stewie Simpson]

Oskar. Have you tried sourcing your plane iron from Gerd Fritsche. Location: (Bavaria;Germany.)

http://www.traditional-handplanes.com/planeblades.php

He is only a 3hr 17min drive from your location in Heidelberg; Germany.
https://www.google.com.au/maps/dir/H...48.7904472!3e0

You could also make contact with Gerd via his email or phone no. Check his website for details.

regards Stewie;

[Oskar Sedell]

Thanks for the replies!

Matthew: Yes, you're right. At some point I will get myself a grinder. But at the moment I don't even have a proper shop, so I stick to smaller projects, like toolmaking and restoration until I have a better work area.

Stewie: Great, I missed Gerd Fritsche. I will write him immediately.

EDIT: I'm pretty new to planemaking, but my two woodies so far turned out nice. Anyone here who made a skew miter or similar plane? Anything I should think twice about when cutting the mouth and abutments? Other design features for a shooting plane?

[Steve Voigt]

Not that you asked for any advice, but just FYI, my own attempts at very low angle + skew have not been terribly happy…the low sharpening angle needed makes the edge more fragile, the skew makes it still more fragile, and end grain shooting is one place where the edge can't be fragile. If you make it 35°-38°, you will constantly be fighting to get an edge that won't chip and still provides the requisite clearance angle.

A couple months ago Richard Arnold, on his Instagram page, posted the only pic I've ever seen of a vintage wooden skewed shooting plane. He put up a drawing; the bed was 45° and the skew was only 12°. That makes sense to me; the benefits of low angle/lots of skew are outweighed by the need to fight for clearance angle. I think if you keep the bed above 40° and the skew below 15°, you'll be a lot happier. Just my (unsolicited) 2 cents…good luck with your build.

[Stewie Simpson]

http://www.phillyplanes.co.uk/skew.html

[Oskar Sedell]

Not that you asked for any advice, but just FYI, my own attempts at very low angle + skew have not been terribly happy…the low sharpening angle needed makes the edge more fragile, the skew makes it still more fragile, and end grain shooting is one place where the edge can't be fragile. If you make it 35°-38°, you will constantly be fighting to get an edge that won't chip and still provides the requisite clearance angle.

A couple months ago Richard Arnold, on his Instagram page, posted the only pic I've ever seen of a vintage wooden skewed shooting plane. He put up a drawing; the bed was 45° and the skew was only 12°. That makes sense to me; the benefits of low angle/lots of skew are outweighed by the need to fight for clearance angle. I think if you keep the bed above 40° and the skew below 15°, you'll be a lot happier. Just my (unsolicited) 2 cents…good luck with your build.

Thanks Steve, this was exactly the kind of answer I was interested in. My inspiration was the Philly Skew miter in the link above, and I assume it has been tested and found a good combination of bedding/skew angles. Its interesting to hear about your experience and I will think about this. Does the roles/influence of skew and bedding depend on wether I'm shooting hardwood or softwood?

Also, it just struck me that there are two ways of defining the bedding angle, either perpendicular to the mouth, or along the length of the plane. I was visualizing the latter.

[Derek Cohen]

Oskar, rather than grind a skew on the blade, use a straight blade on a skewed bed. For example, the Stanley/LN/Veritas shooting plane beds have a 20 degree skew. The advantage of this design is a blade without weak areas.

Regards from London

Derek

[Stewie Simpson]

My own experience with making skew mitre planes suitable for shooting is rather limited.

1 dedicated for left hand use; and the other for right hand use.

Shown below is the RH plane.

Stewie;

[Stewie Simpson]

I have a deep respect for the work being done by Bill Carter from the U.K.

http://www.billcarterwoodworkingplanemaker.co.uk/8.html

[Patrick Chase]

Oskar, rather than grind a skew on the blade, use a straight blade on a skewed bed. For example, the Stanley/LN/Veritas shooting plane beds have a 20 degree skew. The advantage of this design is a blade without weak areas.

Regards from London

Derek

That may not be a practical solution on a (relatively high-sided) woody.

The reason the planes you list could be designed that way is because their thin iron soles don't impose any constraints on how far the blade can extend laterally (upward when the plane is oriented as on a shooting board).

EDIT: I'm glad I said "may not". Obviously shooting in general doesn't impose any constraint on how far the entire plane can extend upward (again when the plane is oriented as on a shooting board), so I suppose if you didn't care about weight/bulk you could just make the plane wide/tall enough to accommodate a rotated blade. It seems to me that might complicate construction, though, as you'd then have tapered cheeks...

[Patrick Chase]

Oskar. Have you tried sourcing your plane iron from Gerd Fritsche. Location: (Bavaria;Germany.)

http://www.traditional-handplanes.com/planeblades.php

Conventionally processed (non-PM) D2 is an interesting choice for plane blades. At ~12% Cr D2 is much of the way to stainless, which leads to large carbide particles and limited edge keenness. IMO it's a good choice for mortising chisels though.

Of course if you form a steel of broadly similar composition by sintering (PM) then that's a whole different ball game.

[Oskar Sedell]

You are all fantastic, lots of good input here.

Stewie: Nice plane, pretty close to what I made up in my head. What are the dimensions? Comments on the design, anything you would change if you had the chance?

Derek: Thanks for chiming in, and good point. I thought the same as Patrick did, about how to get the plane blank to accomodate this. But of course, there are no rules saying you cant have more wood on the upward side (when in use). Do you have an example picture ?

Patrick: I asked specifically about this in my mail to Gerd Fritsche. I really like the O1 steel in my Hock irons. I don't know anything about D2. But I care a lot about that final sharpness (especially on endgrain), and I'm using synthetic and natural water stones. Do you think I should avoid D2?

Best regards,

Oskar

[Kees Heiden]

D2 is kind of a weird choice, also for a chisel. It is actually less tough then O1 or A2. The large carbides tend to break out of the steel matrix. It does have very good wear charactaristics but might indeed not get as keen as O1. It is more work to sharpen too.

I don't understand why they choose D2 for those mortise chisels. Maybe in practice it is all half as bad as I imagine.

[Patrick Chase]

Patrick: I asked specifically about this in my mail to Gerd Fritsche. I really like the O1 steel in my Hock irons. I don't know anything about D2. But I care a lot about that final sharpness (especially on endgrain), and I'm using synthetic and natural water stones. Do you think I should avoid D2?

It depends how obsessive you are about sharpness, but D2 raises at least a yellow flag from my perspective. I would want to either see positive references from trusted sources, or design in a fallback path to some other steel.

For reference, here's the composition of A2:

C=1.00%, Si=0.30%, Mn=1.0%, Cr=5.20%, Mo=1.1%, V=0.2%

And here's the composition of D2:

C=1.50%, Si=0.30%, Mn=0.35%, Cr=12.00%, Mo=0.80%, V=0.60%

D2 is worrisome from a sharpening perspective because it combines a lot of excess carbon (beyond the 0.8% eutectoid threshold) and a lot of Chromium. Those will combine to form chromium carbides, and with conventional (non-PM) processing those carbides will be large. Hock's book has micrographs of O1, A2, and D2 on p. 20. The capsule summary is that the grain structure of conventional D2 is many times more coarse than A2, which is in turn many times more coarse than O1.

With all of that said, I have no experience with Fritsche's blades, and for all I know he's using PM D2 and just forgot to advertise that on his website. As I said, it's a yellow flag...