Old plane irons..

[Michael Gibbons]

It was very interesting, I just wondered if your question was answered?

Stephen

Yeah, for the most part. Though some of the stuff is over my head since I'm not a metallurgist. Someone remind me to supply pairs of boxing gloves next time I get a question in my head that I want to ask on the Creek.

[Don C Peterson]

I've enjoyed this thread and Mikes last question got me thinking...

Market decisions are not always based on the maximization of any particular end. There are many different competing ends that drive decisions, of which quality is only one.

I agree with you Mike, that modern processes and controls make more consistent steels, but I can't help but wonder if something might not be lost in that sea of consistency? Sure the old time steel was a bit iffy, sometimes being great, other times not so much. Toolmakers naturally would have preferred consistently good steel over sporadically great steel since is only takes one bad batch to ruin a reputation.

Also, producing cast steel involved more steps and initially would have been more expensive, but those fundamental processes leant themselves to automation and larger scale production which of course, brought down costs.

The result might have been an ability to produce lots of steel that was consistently good enough, but never really great. Today's fine edge tool makers seem to be able to choose from a wide variety of steels, all of which were ultimately designed for other purposes. Are there any steel makers out there that have focused on perfecting and producing steel for edge tools?

[Mike Henderson]

I've enjoyed this thread and Mikes last question got me thinking...

Market decisions are not always based on the maximization of any particular end. There are many different competing ends that drive decisions, of which quality is only one.

I agree with you Mike, that modern processes and controls make more consistent steels, but I can't help but wonder if something might not be lost in that sea of consistency? Sure the old time steel was a bit iffy, sometimes being great, other times not so much. Toolmakers naturally would have preferred consistently good steel over sporadically great steel since is only takes one bad batch to ruin a reputation.

Also, producing cast steel involved more steps and initially would have been more expensive, but those fundamental processes leant themselves to automation and larger scale production which of course, brought down costs.

The result might have been an ability to produce lots of steel that was consistently good enough, but never really great. Today's fine edge tool makers seem to be able to choose from a wide variety of steels, all of which were ultimately designed for other purposes. Are there any steel makers out there that have focused on perfecting and producing steel for edge tools?

There are a couple of problems with the belief old steel could be "great" compared to modern steel. Old steel was simply carbon steel - nothing more. Since our ancestors could not control the other elements in the steel it's possible that some batches might contain beneficial amounts of certain elements.

But since that time, we've studied the effects of various elements added to iron and steel and can produce metal with the optimum amounts for well defined applications. To assert that old steel was "better" you have to show what might have made it better (what additions, or what processing).

One could argue heat treating but even heat treating has been studied and understood to the point that boutique tool producers can do an excellent and consistent job of heat treating, even to the point of one tool at a time, if that would be necessary. I'm sure LN's heat treating of their chisels and irons is excellent, even though it's probably farmed out. Same for Hock irons.

The production of cast steel was an artisan process to the very end. Small batches of metal were made in crucibles and pulled out by a worker. The picture of the puller-out that I posted earlier was taken in the 1930's. Good steel, however, did get much cheaper, especially in the early 20th Century, which is why tool makers quit making laminated tools.

Also note when comparing shear steel to cast steel - the input to both processes was exactly the same -> blister steel made through the cementation process. To make shear steel, the plates were assembled into a faggot and forge welded, while to make cast steel required another furnace at high temperature (read "lots of fuel"), making it more expensive than shear steel. But our ancestors converted to cast steel. They obviously thought it was better. According to the web site I posted earlier,shear steel was preferred for some knife blades because the slag and the variation in the carbon content made the blade a "naturally serrated" blade, which cut certain things better (meat?). But it certainly wouldn't have been good for a straight razor blade.

There's an ingrained belief within people that old things are "good" and all things modern are taking us to the devil. But in most cases, incuding the making of iron and steel, that's just not true. That ingrained belief means our grandchildren will probably look back on our days and think things were so wonderful.

Mike

[Wiley Horne]

Hi All,

I think there is continuing confusion in this thread. Not that any person is confused, but rather that people are talking past each other. There is the steel itself, as received from the steelmaker. And there is the forging and heat treating of the tool. These are two separate subjects. At least two.

Mike keeps saying that modern steel is best--I think it'd be hard to argue him down on this point, especially if you include the Hitachi unalloyed high carbon in the mix (white steel No. 1 for example). But I am reading Larry and Stephen to be addressing forging and heat treating. Small batch hammer forging, heat-treating over a charcoal fire, and individual item tempering has been economically bypassed. However, a skilled smith doing work this way has control of the grain size, carbide distribution, and hardness parameters, and for my money can exceed the performance of similar steel stock (meaning high carbon) that has undergone the standard heat treat/tempering to, say, Crucible Service Center's schedules.

I think that the steel quality and consistency needs to be considered separately from forging, heat treating, and tempering--for light to be shed on the issues raised.

Incidentally, Johnny, I have some CPM 3V plane blades, and Bill Tindall & Phil Smith have written on these pages about their chisels made from this steel. It is indeed great stuff, provided one is willing to change over to diamond media for sharpening. It won't get truly sharp on oil or water stones. At least not on manmade water stones; one might be able to find a natural stone by hit or miss that will cut it.

Wiley

[Dave Anderson NH]

Don raises some interesting points about the economic issues involved in how and why toolmakers adopted new technologies. Bessemer Process and the electric furnace both made the production of steels by the shear and crucible process uneconomical. Shear and crucible/cast were labor intensive small batch processes suited to relatively small businesses or job shops. Bessemer and electric furnace are industrial sized processes and have been since they were commercialized. It would have been almost impossible for the small makers with the older processes to compete against the newer processes with equal or less labor and their huge batch sizes. Quality of product issues are a different matter entirely though the argument can be made that industrial process steel is probably more consistent.

This has been a great discussion., thanks to all for taking part.

[Johnny Kleso]

Search Engine dosent seem to work well here as it cant find any posts with CPM 3V in them

I find it hard to gauge old steel as no one has owned these cutters for the cradle.. Meaning was the steel over heated sharpening or as someone tried to reharden chisels which I have read a few times on the net...

Myself I have not found any old steel better that 0-1 that I heat treat my self in my back yard...
https://home.comcast.net/~rexmill/he...t_treating.htm

I dont seem to get what the discussion is about, its steel not a violin hehehe

No one is going to start making old carbon steel tools when you can by 0-1, A-2 or D-2 for a dollar a pound..

Can old steel cut wood??? You Bet!

I guess I had to many years breathing the smoke after quenching tools steel hehehehe

[Larry Williams]

Hi All,

I think there is continuing confusion in this thread. Not that any person is confused, but rather that people are talking past each other. ...

Wiley,

You're right, there's a lot of talking past each other going on but it's not limited to this thread. I suspect the rep at Crucible was thinking more in terms of power tools with the "best woodworking steel" comment. For things like power jointer and planer knives? Well, maybe it's worth looking at for that use where a straight knife or even saw blade is removed, replaced and sent out for machine sharpening. I copied this from Crucible's spec sheet on CPM V10:

"Crucible engineers optimized the vanadium content to provide
superior wear resistance while maintaining toughness and
fabrication characteristics comparable to D2 and M2...
Its exceptional wear resistance and good toughness make
it an excellent candidate to replace carbide and other highly
wear resistant materials...."

I was given a D-2 chisel a while ago. Because D-2 is so difficult to machine the manufacturer makes these through an abrasive process. I'm sure the abrasives are belts from the way the chisel was dubbed from side to side on all four faces. Even with abrasives D-2 doesn't work well. I have no idea how long it would have taken to turn that chisel into a functional properly shaped chisel. A few minutes on the grinder with the only noticeable change was a dull wheel that needed to be dressed again, I knew it would take longer to fix that chisel than it would ever be worth. I can't imagine bothering to try to sharpen D-2 and we have an osculating diamond grinder in our metal shop.

One of the biggest problems we face as plane makers is that many of our customers can't or don't know how to sharpen. This is a problem with our easy to sharpen tools like bench planes. With planes like the 3/16" side beads I have on my bench right now, sharpening gets a lot more complicated and difficult. In this run of planes there are six of these and I doubt any of the irons are interchangeable. By necessity, the mortise and escapement have to be shaped by hand and they're not within a thousandth of an inch or two of each other. No machine is automatically going to shape or sharpen these. They have to be done by hand. Complicating sharpening with a difficult to sharpen steel would probably doom me to failure. I know the majority of my customers couldn't sharpen such an iron even if I managed to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

I find it difficult to imagine anyone espousing technological Darwinism, like I've seen here, would consider working wood by hand. There are machines and then there's CNC. A couple years ago we were looking into CNC and found a machine that could reproduce virtually any part on any museum piece out there and it could make them faster than all three of us here could rough out the stock to keep the machine supplied. But where is the furniture or cabinets these machines could be turning out? I don't see it on the market. Come to think of it the sales rep who came to talk to us was on his way back to Texas after working on machine at Boeing in Wichita. Boeing uses the machine to produce fitted shipping crates for aircraft wings and such.

This thread started with Michael Gibbons asking:

What type of steel or iron was used in early ( 18th century) planes? Seems that if the material wasn't as high tech as our new stuff, they'd be sharpening alot more often.

My experience with the shear steel tells me they were using pretty good stuff. It's as good as any tool steel I've used for hand tool woodworking and better than what much of that I've found in contemporary hand tools. In the beginning, I disagreed strongly with what Steven Shepherd was saying about it being better. I still disagree with his reasoning but I think the laminating process my well be involved in producing a good fine-grained steel. The shear steel I played around with is the finest grained tool steel I've ever worked with. The laminating process may be, at least partly, responsible for hammer refining the steel. I'm left thinking hammer refining steel is a very real and valuable process.

The argument has been made that modern steel is more uniform. I think uniformity can be achieved through hammer refining. However, I believe it'd be a losing proposition to start trying to hammer bars of modern steel together to overcome the variance in allowable tolerances. The critical element in the steel I buy is carbon and the specs allow a variance of 15% in carbon content. To me that's not very uniform and it's why I can heat treat steel by eye more accurately than with our computer controlled furnace. Checking an iron/carbon phase diagram I can see that this allowance translates to a difference of about 100ºF in critical temperature. Over heating steel or even holding it at critical temperature too long both burns off carbon and results in larger grain.

After reading in a 1938 text about the visible changes in steel at critical temperature, I used it for a couple years and came to trust it. I wanted to get some information out about it and wanted to explain what was happening. I asked everyone I could think of about it. Only Philip Marcou had heard about it when a long time ago he took a tool to an old blacksmith for hardening. One metallurgist I had met on the Internet was very well connected in the academic community. He was able to get the information run past some of the recognized World authorities on iron/carbon phases. Not one had heard of it before. I've since found it mentioned in a couple of the other old texts. It was mentioned but glossed over--everyone already knew about it. It's the kind of information that's lost when people start depending on averages and instruments rather than the more direct and accurate method of watching what happens.

[Johnny Kleso]

Larry,
Did you ever get the Favicon (Favorites Icon) I made you for your website working????

Last time we emailed you said you had not figuered it out yet...

[Don C Peterson]

Hi All,

I think there is continuing confusion in this thread. Not that any person is confused, but rather that people are talking past each other. There is the steel itself, as received from the steelmaker. And there is the forging and heat treating of the tool. These are two separate subjects. At least two.

Wiley, you are probably right. I know that my knowledge of steel composition and the subsequent treating processes involved is scant enough that it all seems like black magic to me...

As a user, I know I tend to attribute a tool's edge holding and working qualities more to the steel than the treatment it recieved, which is probably a mistake. But it's much easier to grasp that a tool is made from x as opposed to understanding the complexities and interplay between the material and the process it undergoes.

[Larry Williams]

Larry,
Did you ever get the Favicon (Favorites Icon) I made you for your website working????

Last time we emailed you said you had not figuered it out yet...

Well, we updated the web site. I now have someone else doing it, because I don't have time to keep up with it. When I was giving him everything for the web site I completely forgot about the favicon. I think you sent it to Don. I just checked the all my e-mail from July and I don't have it. I would if you sent it to me, I'll check with Don tomorrow.

Thanks for the reminder.

[Johnny Kleso]

I'll make a new one tomorrow if I cant find the old one..

[Wilbur Pan]

There are a couple of problems with the belief old steel could be "great" compared to modern steel. Old steel was simply carbon steel - nothing more. Since our ancestors could not control the other elements in the steel it's possible that some batches might contain beneficial amounts of certain elements.

But since that time, we've studied the effects of various elements added to iron and steel and can produce metal with the optimum amounts for well defined applications. To assert that old steel was "better" you have to show what might have made it better (what additions, or what processing).

I can think of an example that addresses this issue. Consider the traditional way of making steel for Japanese tools. (This is a vast oversimplification, and I'm sure I'll get some details wrong, but bear with me.)

Take a bunch of iron containing sand, charcoal, and some other stuff, throw it into a furnace, and burn it for three days. After the process is over, you'll have various chunks of steel. The steelmaker was able to sort through the chunks and figure out which chunks were hard/brittle, and which were soft/tough. Some chunks might be good enough to be called tamahagane, which was considered to be the hardest and rarest, and usually reserved for samurai swords. He priced and sold the chunks accordingly to tool makers. Some tool makers bought the more expensive steel to make high end (and expensive) tools using the tamehagane for extremely talented woodworkers, and others would buy the less expensive steel for user quality tools for people like me, who are not so talented.

Now, I don't think that the steel makers back then could quantitate the amount of carbon in those chunks of steel, but they could identify which ones were "better". These days we can identify which additives will adjust the properties of steel to our liking. But not having this knowledge does not preclude someone from being able to identify which steel is "better". The old Japanese steelmakers may not have known the actual percentage carbon content of tamahagane, but they could sure tell when they had a chunk of it.

I think it's examples like this one that lead one to the conclusion that the old steel is better. If your thoughts about steel continuously improving were true across the board, Hitachi would be making tamahagane steel today for the production of samurai swords and high end Japanese tools, just like they make their blue and white steels. But as far as I know, they don't, and neither is anyone else. I'm sure that the composition of this steel is known, or could be known, so there's no technical reason why it can't be made.

[Mike Henderson]

What you describe was apparently common in the west, also. Our western ancestors had a great deal of trouble controlling their processes but could recognize good and bad iron and steel after it was made.

Like you, I'm sure that the tamahagane has already been analyzed and could be reproduced - and perhaps it is being reproduced. The steel that came out of those furnaces was just ordinary carbon steel. The Japanese steelmaker might select the pieces with the "best" level of carbon but it's unlikely that other elements played any significant part.

Perhaps the "secret" to the best Japanese swords lies in (1) the selection of steel with the proper amount of carbon (and perhaps layering of pieces of different levels of carbon), and (2) the forging and heat treating of that steel. From what I've read, the actual making of the Japanese sword was a very involved process requiring great skill. It may be that a skilled Japanese sword maker could start with modern commercial carbon steel and make a blade as good as (or even better than) a traditional blade. In other words, perhaps the best blades lie within the maker and not within the steel.

Mike

[An example of a "product" which required both special steel and great skill is the Damascus blade. Only wootz steel from India could make a true Damascus blade (true is as opposed to a laminated "Damascus" blade). Recently Verhoeven has claimed to have discovered the "secret" to true Damascus steel.]

[Another comment: While Japanese swords and Damascus blades were made for royalty (or samurai) by the greatest smiths without any regard to cost, chisels and irons for planes were made by smiths of lesser skill for a price sensitive market. It was simply not possible for the smith making a plane blade to spend the time that went into a Japanese sword. And in the 19th Century, most of the cast steel laminated forging was done by much less skilled labor working at machines. Some workers were quite skilled, but many were like the repair people of today who do shoddy work. People back then were the same as people of today.]

[Marcus Ward]

It may be that a skilled Japanese sword maker could start with modern commercial carbon steel and make a blade as good as (or even better than) a traditional blade.

This is true. I have a blade made from 9260 that is amazing in its durability. It's a strong tamishigiri blade and very forgiving of beginner mistakes. People think the old Katana were unable to be duplicated with modern methods but this isn't so. Modern steel can easily duplicate the durability and edge holding properties of a samurai sword if it is correctly produced. The layering process of a katana was 'invented' to make 2 lesser quality steels into one superior quality weapon, not because it was superior itself.

[Wilbur Pan]

Another comment: While Japanese swords and Damascus blades were made for royalty (or samurai) by the greatest smiths without any regard to cost, chisels and irons for planes were made by smiths of lesser skill for a price sensitive market. It was simply not possible for the smith making a plane blade to spend the time that went into a Japanese sword. And in the 19th Century, most of the cast steel laminated forging was done by much less skilled labor working at machines. Some workers were quite skilled, but many were like the repair people of today who do shoddy work. People back then were the same as people of today.

Of course, at the end of the 19th century (1876 to be exact, at the end of the Meiji era), the samurai class was outlawed, and the swordmakers were instantly out of work. For the most part, they turned to toolmaking, making plane blades and chisels instead.

I completely agree that the skill of the toolmaker plays a huge role in how good the tool is. Jacques Pepin and I can start with the same chicken and assortment of vegetables and herbs, but I can guarantee that his roast chicken will be a heck of a lot better than mine.