Originally Posted by
David Weaver
Summary to round out the thread since it's wound on a long time, and gotten into all kinds of stuff other than chipbreakers (it seems to be drawing heat like a heel wrestler, too):
1) the knowledge must've existed at least since the first double iron planes were made in quantity. That's over 200 years ago.
2) Warren Mickley has beaten the drum about it for years (my favorite, and what were the most irritating comments to me when I was on the other side of it, are the comments where Warren flatly states that if you have trouble with a double iron plane, you don't know how to use it, no matter how experienced you are with other things or how much you think you know about it. I only didn't paste them here because they're property of another site). Warren has been using common double iron planes since before kato and kawai videos were made. Warren would've been beating the drum without Kato and Kawai's information. I have no idea who taught him to use a double iron plane.
3) Several of us were talking about using a double iron plane on the forums and in PMs, starting march '12, before there was any video and before we knew about it. We didn't pick up on it because of the video, but the video did offer excellent ammunition to show that it works.
4) Because of the talk on the forums, Bill contacted us and said "I have some information to show you, we have to get it out there". Bill wanted the focus to be influencing the ROS type users who wouldn't use a plane unless it worked every time (I don't think that's worked out). I wanted just to figure out what warren knew that I didn't, and second, to get the common pitch planes to perform like they must've been able to (else we would've seen more higher pitch plane versions, which almost disappeared completely once the double iron plane was popular).
5) The unearthing of the video was brought by forum members - bill and steve (not me), it should be credited that this change in general came about as a result of forum discussions and the work of curious forum members and that without forum discussion fostering it, there'd be no bloggers talking about it. In less than a year, the discussion has gone from everyone accepting that a tight mouth and steep iron was the only way to mitigate tearout to, hopefully, everyone accepting that you can do the same thing with an inexpensive common pitch plane.
6) there are better places to get advice about it than bloggers (Kees' blog notwithstanding), and anyone who tells you it's tedious...as warren pointed out half a decade ago...doesn't know what they think they know.
This came about mostly because I was talking to george offline and I mentioned that I saw a lot of static crediting the origin of all of this to the wrong place. As in it was being attributed to people who had nothing to do with it, those people didn't attribute it to themselves. I don't think anyone saw my forum post and claimed credit or accepted it, I'm not that vain. I think they probably saw the video that was unearthed by Bill and Steve's labor. And without Warren, there would've probably been no drive to find information. Mark Hennebury would've worked in obscurity, too, as far as the forums go (and mark fully understood the use of the second iron because supersurfacers use them). Without Bill Tindall and Steve Elliot, the work Kato and Kawai did would not have been shown to us. Without warren's talk about double irons all the time, and without warren torching expensive planes at WIA with a cheap plane, I wouldn't have had any interest in following up, either.
I wouldn't have said anything about it, but George was nice enough to. It did bother me that the discussion was turning toward crediting people discovering something that was actually a collective forum effort, and the advice coming from elsewhere wasn't as good as the advice that we've already put out there.
If anyone is bothered that we think knowing where things came from is important, that's OK. If anyone is bothered that George thinks we should get information that's as accurate as possible, that's OK. If anyone is bothered that I think the same thing as george thinks, that's OK, too. I'd hope what comes of it is that we collectively realize that the forums (any of them that get involved in rigorous discussion, some generally don't) where rigorous discussion occurs are likely to have the greatest breadth, depth and accuracy of information...once you know where to go on them to get it.
(perhaps we can close it out at that and not have any more back and forth not related to cap irons.....well, don't confuse me with one of those type of members who likes to tell anyone else what they can do. maybe we can dig up another whopper next year as a group. This year it was cap irons, it still excites me to use $14 of plane and replacement iron and get the same results I've gotten with planes costing 40 times that much. What warren said, we finally have the tools to "get it" more easily.)
And learning to remember to not confuse metric and inch measurements cost dearly!!(I think that is what happened).