Avoiding tearout when chamfering edges

[Oskar Sedell]

one more vote for a plane with cap iron. I usually use a small smoother and put the cap iron really close if the grain does not behave well.

[Brian Holcombe]

The chamfer plane makes life easy. You can mark out and plane chamfers to the marks, and for large chamfers that is not a bad plan, but for many small chamfers the chamfer plane is the easiest method (in my opinion). I like to use chamfers extensively in my work, going to certain extremes to avoid stopped chamfers.

[Gene Davis]

Well, I went ahead with a heretical solution for this project, and used a router with a chamfering bit. My RadiPlane had done some tearing out, so I made all the chamfers a little deeper with the router.

But for future, I will go and order the Lee Valley japanese plane, which they say has a cap iron. If it works I'll keep it, and if not, will send it back.

[Brian Holcombe]

A router!



They do say it has a chip breaker, so I'm curious about that plane. If you would post up your thoughts when you receive it.

[Patrick Chase]

A card scraper can break the edge and create a chamfer of course, but, it's not going to provide a consistent chamfer along the edges of the piece like a tool designed to create chamfers.

Depends on the driver. I know people (not me) who can create very consistent chamfers with just a scraper.

To be clear, what I was suggesting here was to use the scraper to clean up the problem areas after roughing in the chamfer with something else. They're pretty easy to use for that IMO.

[Patrick Chase]

Sorry about the double-reply, but...

A card scraper can break the edge and create a chamfer of course, but, it's not going to provide a consistent chamfer along the edges of the piece like a tool designed to create chamfers. That's the idea for the Radiplane. A small block plane fitted with a guide to reference off the surface and create the chamfers would work as would a tricked up spokeshave.

The Radi-Plane is simply a bevel-down chamfer/radius plane, with about a 45 deg cutting angle IIRC. In principle it should work fairly well. Not as well as something with a cap-iron, but not horribly either, except...

The reason I say "in principle" is because a lot of the Radi-Plane clones on the market these days including the Woodstock and Rockler models share a common liability: Carbide-tipped blades. Carbide offers terrific edge life, but it's extremely difficult (and more like impossible if it isn't top of the line micro-grain carbide) to bring it to a truly sharp edge. If I had to bet I'd guess that the OP is having so much trouble because he's working with a not-optimally-sharp blade.