Bad Advice

Life is better mostly not participating on forums. I think I believed 10 years ago that we could advance the discussion, but forum vehicles are meant to hold people in discussion as a captive pool for advertisers and the point isn’t really getting members to the point they own their own outcomes.

I stopped posting on the UK forum a few months ago – it’s as far as I can tell part of a for-profit network, but very secretive about who the owners are and the “please donate” gimmick is all over it without describing how the board is funded. I think that’s dippy. Too, there’s a member and perhaps one or two others who either don’t do what they constantly post about or intentionally don’t want discussion to advance. I refer to one as Facob, but the others are just disciples of Sellers or other folks who really are power tool users but claim to be old timey hand tool users. This idea that people who learned in the 60s are “old chippies” is dumb. Even publication of reputable material sort of lost its way around 1900 when hand tools became garnishing tools rather than the chef’s main ingredients, so to speak.

This whole concept in general with forums is sort of a plague. If you have a retiree who gets notifications and a few other people who are disciples, the whole thing is lost. I left in that case and asked to have my ID ghosted when the moderators suggested I was too hard on Facob for offering bad advice, and they would prefer if everyone ignored him. They have a job to do, I guess, but I don’t need to be part of it or create content for them. The other folks remaining do a fine job of that – the forum needs content. It doesn’t need good content or accurate content.

Surprisingly, I’ve never actually been permanently banned from any forum. While I’ve been harsh on people who seem fraudulent to me, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that would deserve a permanent ban, it’s still a surprise as keeping the environment artificially “agreeable” is important to advertisers. Advertisers hate conflict, and moderators, too, hate complaints even from soft-minded folks who view discussions as always neutral where nobody is right and anyone is wrong. Trust me, if you challenge someone to prove something, you’ll hear about the complaints through whining moderators (“oh, you’re making my job difficult when you disagree or question posts made by others!”).

Planing isn’t Hard – But Sellers and Krenov and Others Will Lead You Nowhere If you Want to Do it Well

An example of this is a two-fold thing. First, you have to understand when it matters what the sole condition is and when it doesn’t. There are some things on a plane that will prevent you from doing simple operations like match planing to a light-tight joint. You cannot have a plane with any concavity, not even a couple of thousandths. As much as you can prove you can flex the casting of the plane in some kind of contrived test, you can’t control the toe and heel of the plane going concave when they are off the ends of boards. It has to be removed, or you need to find a plane without concavity.

I’ve measured this over the years making planes and refurbishing a whole bunch. You can remove a few thousandths of concavity pretty easily, but it may take 20 minutes in a smoother and perhaps an hour on a long plane. It seems to be a bias in stanley type planes, that the toe and heel are low, and I’m guessing this has to do with rushed final grinding passes flexing the casting. Too bad. I’ve seen the same on 2 out of 7 LN bench planes that I had, and neither was capable of closing the ends of a matched plane joint. Period. No amount of dismissing it because it’s “only a couple of thousandths” will change it, but you have no hope if you migrate to a forum and find the Facobs and others who say all things can be overcome with technique.

Too, I’m not saying you have to flatten your planes, but if you’re going to do true hand tool work, you need at least a couple of planes that don’t have this flaw, and that don’t have twist. When this work was done in quantity, most of it was probably done with two wooden planes and maybe a metal plane at the end of the process. It’s very easy to true a wooden plane’s sole, and there is nothing a user would do truing a wooden plane that would leave the toe and heel low.

The interesting thing about these types of discussions is they bring up relatively recent elderly woodworkers who never did this, but don’t kid yourself, someone working in the 1960s would’ve been using power tools. The comment about technique rather than understanding the issue will leave you guessing at some mystery ghost that doesn’t exist. If you can’t plane through a matched set of boards and get the ends to close without pressure, you have something to address. It may be technique along with the sole of the plane you’re using. Try different planes. If one works and the others don’t, you have problems more than technique. Too, if one works, then you really don’t have an obligation to address the others, but you need one that works.

You get to observe your outcomes. Design and things like elaborate carving are hard and demanding. Basic planing of flat surfaces is just exercise once you have some experience, and you should expect flatness as a routine outcome that’s better than you’ll get out of a lunchbox planer. Same with thickness- if you mark accurately, you’ll probably find variances in thickness of about .005″ just as a matter of exercise -not a matter of tedium.

Too, one number doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere. If you have a sole where the mouth is .002″ lower than the toe and the heel and no twist, you’ll never have an issue using the plane in question. It’s interesting how the same effect in the opposite direction is toxic, but this is the nature of reality – you have to heed what actually happens and not get wrapped up in doofus ideas like not being able to do something because someone else who isn’t doing it says you can’t.

As a close to this, after reading an entry about flatness not being that important and that one could use a straight edge and a block plane with skill to work edges, the response from the same person in another post was that match planing is bad advice because the error is doubled on the ends of the work.

This is almost comedy. Facob’s response was that match planing is a myth. Good lord. Two people advising on flatness who apparently can’t do a bread and butter operation that you’ll need to do on rough boards with rough edges if you’re going to work by hand. Match planing an edge and jointing the edge both happen at the same time, and when you have a plane that physically can do it and you have some experience, it will take little time or effort to do it.

Credibility by Numerous Non-Credible Responses

You can get consensus of a whole bunch of varying false opinions on a forum as long as they say you can’t do something. It creates an illusion of consensus and credibility because if you’re a beginner, you don’t know any better. You can hear all kinds of things, like not being able to match plane a joint, to not being able to flatten planes to be more usable, to never using shellac because polyurethane is better.

Consider the situation where you migrate to a forum as a newbie – you ask a question and there are 10 responses. Two suggest that you can do something advised, and one actually demonstrates it. 8 suggest that you can’t through any number of reasons – the poster can’t do it, they have never tried, or they know of a guru like Sellers or Schwarz who says it’s meaningless. I peed upstream against the Schwarz consensus when figuring out the cap iron and went from hearing that it didn’t have any effect because Chris said so to later getting suggestions from folks (after Chris found out he was wrong) that “I should go read Schwarz’s blog posts because he could teach me how to use the cap iron”. Barf. In the 2 to 8 scenario above, one or two of the folks will claim the confirmatory demonstration of something was false, a one time lucky shot or dishonest. A beginner just finds that 8-2 is the score and thus they should go buy a high angle plane, a router jig or an expensive sander when they probably already have tools that will do the job better.

The best way to get away from this false nonsense isn’t to listen to me, but it’s to read older more credible sources and prove you can do something rather than proving to yourself you can’t. Own it. From sawing to chiseling to marking to planing, all of these things are simple and you should assume you can do all of them well and expect to get there – they are sort of first order operations that are simple enough that you can do them with good habits and experience and observe and consider other things while you’re working.