Shooting Plane....Not LV or LN

[Matthew N. Masail]

If you have time you could make a laminated plane with a sqaure body and a skew iron. Turn or buy a round knob to thread Into the side to act as a pushing point between your thumb and forefinger. Use a 2 3/8 inch blade from a metal plane you have or better yet buy a wooden plane blade from LV for like 36$. Bed the iron no more than 40 bevel down and you'll have a true low angle plane while retaining a 30 degree bevel. You could make a track for this plane too.

[Robert G Brown]

A ramped shooting board might help if not using one already.

[Chris Hachet]

Let me be a contrarian. Invest in stones and refine your sharpening technique. I shoot quarter sawn white oak, hard maple and beech with oittle trouble with a really sharp vintage number 5 Stanley. I did finally break down and drop a Hock blade into it though. Was going to get a PMV 11 blade from Lee Valley but am very happy with the Hock. YMMV.

[Brian Holcombe]

I don't find a low angle to be really necessary for shooting, I use a #7 plane....which has eclipsed my use of a low angle jack.

[Patrick Chase]

A ramped shooting board might help if not using one already.

Ramped shooting boards are typically about 2.5 deg (3/4" of rise along a nominal 16" board). When you use a straight blade on such a board to cut, say, a 3/4 thick workpiece the effective displacement from leading to trailing edge about is 1/32", which doesn't make any meaningful difference to start-of-cut smoothness. There's a good reason why all real shooting planes have ~10X that much blade skew.

Ramps help wear, not cutting performance.

[Derek Cohen]

lI have used a wide range of cutting angles for shooting, ranging from a 60 degree bed of a HNT Gordon Trying Plane to the 37 degrees of a LV LA Jack, and the low cutting angle wins every time. A sharp blade helps enormously on higher beds, but the low cutting angle leaves a smoother finish and cuts more easily.

A very good alternative to a metal LA plane is a wooden strike block plane, which has a 37 degree bed and is used bevel down. There is a pictorial for building one on my website.

http://www.inthewoodshop.com/ShopMad...lockPlane.html




A ramped board, such as above, certainly does aid in shooting. The principal factor is its reduction in impact, which also reduces blade wear. There is some spread of blade wear in addition.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Patrick Chase]

A ramped board, such as above, certainly does aid in shooting. The principal factor is its reduction in impact, which also reduces blade wear. There is some spread of blade wear in addition.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Hmm, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on that count. From an analytical perspective the amount of skew you get from a ramped board strikes me as "homeopathic", and my own experience is consistent with that. I don't see much difference in ease-of-cut between unramped and ramped boards with straight blades, while I do see a very significant improvement with 20+ deg of blade skew as on the dedicated shooting planes.

Out of curiosity why do your configure your board so that you shoot top->bottom? The lateral component of the cutting force will tend to lever the workpiece up and away from the bed in that configuration. It probably doesn't matter at such negligible skew angles (see above) but there's a reason why the blades on the shooting planes are oriented the way they are.

EDIT - Never mind, you do it so that you have the option of working tall-but-narrow workpieces that wouldn't be feasible if the fence were at the high end. Given my own conviction that such small skew angles are irrelevant, that's logically the "right" configuration :-).

I agree that a lower cutting angle helps. No debate there.

[Graham Haydon]

I'd echo Brian, George and others in regards to using a normal bench plane. On the basis you use mainly power tools a #6, #7 or wooden jack will work great and offer the ability to shoot long grain edges as well.

[Patrick Chase]

I'd echo Brian, George and others in regards to using a normal bench plane. On the basis you use mainly power tools a #6, #7 or wooden jack will work great and offer the ability to shoot long grain edges as well.

As has been previously stated, the key thing to note here is that the OP is already shooting with a bench plane (a 4-1/2) and is looking for something with a lower angle, presumably to help with end-grain shooting. Given that context I don't see how recommending more of the same in the form of a bigger bench plane is responsive to the OP's requirements (though ideally he should clarify why he thinks he needs a lower cutting angle - I suspect that skew might actually be more helpful...)

EDIT: Given the OP's apparent constraints, Derek's suggestion of a low angle Jack is probably the most reasonable one so far.

[Derek Cohen]

Hi Patrick

With a ramped board, I am not suggesting that the "skew" action creates a slicing cut. I am stating that the skew action causes the blade to enter the wood in a progressive manner, rather than all at once/ straight on. This has a noticeable effect on the the way the plane strikes the work piece, reducing the impact. This is not a theoretical issue. This is factual. I have used and compared different shooting boards over some years, as well as eliciting the opinions of others. Try it for yourself.

There is no noticeable tendency for a workpiece to lift when shooting on a ramped board. In the same way that a straight-bladed plane does not impart a slicing cut, a ramped board does not impart an upward angle to the plane. In both the situations, only the initial impact is skewed, and thereafter the workpiece remains .. just a workpiece without angle.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Patrick Chase]

Hi Patrick

With a ramped board, I am not suggesting that the "skew" action creates a slicing cut. I am stating that the skew action causes the blade to enter the wood in a progressive manner, rather than all at once/ straight on.

Yes, everybody agrees on that point. The key question is: How much does does the impact have to be spread out to create a noticeable effect?

Let's try reducto ad absurdum: Several of my planes (the Veritas customs, the L-N and WR Bed Rock clones) have frogs that can be skewed by a fraction of a degree. By doing that I can cause the blade to "not enter all at once". Do you think that doing so would have a meaningful impact on shooting? For that matter no plane has a perfectly straight blade, even with modern CNC tolerances. Do you think they really vary in shooting performance? The answer to both is clearly "no", and so we must accept that there is some threshold below which the impacts are so negligible as to not be meaningful.

Now let's consider a ramped shooting board: The effective skew amounts to a couple/few degrees. When shooting a 3/4 workpiece this will cause the blade to enter the bottom of the workpiece about 1/32" before it enters the top (using the way your board is laid out as a benchmark). Most people seem to shoot at ~2 feet/second or a bit faster, so the net impact is that the impulse at workpiece entry is spread out over just over one millisecond (1/1000 sec) instead of being instantaneous. If you look at the mechanics of cutting (not all of the work is done at the exact moment of impact), the mass and momentum of the plane and the amount of compliance in your arm/body, spreading the impact out by that amount simply cannot possibly make a perceptible difference, just as homeopathic remedies cannot possibly have a medical impact (hence my choice of words in my previous post).

In each case the math is what it is, and its conclusions are inescapable. With that said, plenty of people have convinced themselves that homeopathy works, just as many people have convinced themselves that a tilted shooting board makes a difference. At that point it's a matter of faith and not really open to debate (except to say that I've tried it, and it didn't make a difference. Then again I'd already done the math before that and had a clear idea of what "should" happen - expectation is a powerful thing :-)

[Derek Cohen]

As I said Patrick, this is not for armchair reasoning or speculation - the effect can be demonstrated easily on a practical level.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Patrick Chase]

As I said Patrick, this is not for armchair reasoning or speculation - the effect can be demonstrated easily on a practical level.

Oddly enough, so can homeopathy - there was a recent study demonstrating positive medical impacts. The key thing in that case was that the patients *knew* they were getting homeopathic treatments and *expected* that they would work, leading to a classic case of a placebo effect.

Same thing here. Unless of course you've rigged up a plane with a representative (similar compliance to human) robotic arm and a force gauge and collected data?

EDIT: Actually there's a simpler way to test this: Mill some stock at a complementary angle to the skew, and have people shoot it in a blind trial (the latter part would take some doing since most experienced woodworkers can spot 2 deg of cant on the edge of a workpiece. you'd have to prevent them from seeing at least that part of the workpiece, or maybe paint a pattern on it that obscures geometry). See if the perceived benefit stays or goes away.

[Graham Haydon]

Hi Patrick

As the OP mentioned his inexperience with hand tools I thought a larger standard bench plane would prove more versatile. That's the thing with opinions and experiences, they all vary. My 47.5deg pitch wooden jack works great on a flat shooting board and I like the fact I can then bring it to long grain work with confidence.

Wooden-Jack-Shooting.jpg

[Derek Cohen]

...
EDIT: Actually there's a simpler way to test this: Mill some stock at a complementary angle to the skew, and have people shoot it in a blind trial (the latter part would take some doing since most experienced woodworkers can spot 2 deg of cant on the edge of a workpiece. you'd have to prevent them from seeing at least that part of the workpiece, or maybe paint a pattern on it that obscures geometry). See if the perceived benefit stays or goes away.

Hi Patrick

I have attempted to do so ..

http://www.inthewoodshop.com/Furnitu...sCompared.html

Still subjective, but a collective viewpoint that is more objective than a single vote.

Regards from Perth

Derek