Month: August 2024

Not much of this blog has to do with buying tools. Why? Because you eventually start buying stuff to make things rather than tools to imagine doing it. I did the latter for plenty long, but I’m out of room for practical purposes and I never wake up on a Saturday at this point wanting to go somewhere and buy tools or getting on ebay and just checking the new listings of stones or hand tools.

And the whole flea market thing was always intermittent. The buildings or booth markets get picked over by flippers, and the local flea market here that happens on a regular basis is first hit or miss at best, and a time soak, and second, usually looted by a dealer who takes advantage of the ability to set up a booth and go buy everything that’s really any good before the market opens up to the public. I think that whole “dealers can buy anything that’s actually a bargain first” is the shits, but I guess it attracts the dealers, and the dealers pay for a space at this particular local flea while the patrons don’t.

Flea Markets

It was sort of a sport online to go to flea markets in the mid 2000s when I started. You can get all kinds of stuff at fleas, but usually it’s another of something you have or something you don’t need because it’s a good deal. I bought a lot of that – another smoother, another three socket chisels, and so on. Every time I had an immediate need, it was never at a flea market with the exception of one single time – metal vise.

But I would buy other stuff and some of it I’ve used. The strike rate isn’t great, though. Most of my better tools came from online shopping, and I guess that’s an expensive way to go.

My mother is making a slow trip, it’s the end of one that starts with memory loss, and it puts burden on my dad, though she’s now in a facility. I visit home, four hours away, far more than I ever did in the past. Every three or four weeks, I drive past a building of flea market stuff thinking “i’m going to stop just to look in there”, but the feeling having crossed over to making is what will I buy and should I just save my money instead – there’s kids going to college in a few years, a cranky mrs. and hopefully funding for an early retirement. We’ll see.

I finally stopped last week. And somehow, I don’t have the urge to do it again because the results were better this time than they were when I had the bug to buy rather than the bug to look:

There’s one more thing missing from this that I forgot about – an old hand made pin gauge with a wooden screw. it works wonderfully. the only thing in this picture that I didn’t pick up is the cherry box bottom the stone shown is in.

I love a panel gauge, but have only one – the stanley pin panel gauge with a brass liner but all rosewood stem and head other than that. it’s a nice gauge, but I’d love to have one that could be fitted with a pencil. And I have to apologize for the picture here, because the opposite side of the beam is a treat here. It’s hand marked, very precisely, and the numbers written in for measurements at the measurement marks are done with charisma completely by hand. The pin sits in a round socket on the other end and needs to be replaced, but I think I can manage that. I can make a filler that goes in the round bits on the other end and use this gauge to mark with a pencil. Why not make it? This gauge was $7.

The little Arkansas finger size stone at the top , or pocket stone, is something I use to surface finish stuff that’s been ground so it doesn’t look like cheesy ceramic belt look, and the little green stone is one of the finest hand hones I’ve ever seen. I think it’s probably English slate, but it was about $3.

When I got to the counter, everything shown and the missing pin gauge was $30. The slip on the right is washita, and there’s a second one under it. I have india slips and a trans slip, and they work fine, but being a buffer of things, washita following the india would make more sense. It never was urgent enough to want to pay anything significant online, but at $5 for a pair of slips, I’m in.

My eyes were bothering me that morning, so the white ark stone, I thought maybe it was a washita. I have no idea – but it’s novaculite. it’s a little aggressive and an odd size, who knows. the green stone and the ark stone, I did think “why am I getting these?” and still kind of feel like that. they don’t address anything and it’s true that I have more stuff like them that I probably should sell rather than add to. But the two together were somewhere between $5 and $7.

When I was looking for something, I never found anything that was a deal outside of one type 1 millers falls smoother. that I didn’t need – it just stands out as one of the few things that weren’t full market or close.

The Other Option

Ebay and online sellers often have stuff far more like what I’m looking for, but at the moment, nothing that I need. I do have a turkish oilstone, but it’s light brown and i’d guess the light brown stones weren’t as highly regarded as the black stones that looked like they’re covered with fractures.

Last couple of weeks, someone on ebay posted broken parts from bigger older turkish oilstones, and most days, I’d wait a little bit with some internal argument and someone else would buy them.

But This time, I struck. this stone has enough obvious characteristics to show that it’s a legitimate turkish oilstone and not a currently-available cretan stone that you can get for $60.

it’s also the first time I’ve seen something of size that isn’t eye bleedling expensive. it was about $120 or something, which is a lot of money for a stone you don’t need, but it’s a stone I won’t probably find again with as little as I’m looking.

The deal with a lot of these is even if they haven’t broken off, the undersides are irregular and you have to fit them into a box. if you dropped this stone, it would break into a million pieces, and at the bottom, you can see the box fit is pretty bad. it wasn’t at first, but I took a hammer and tapped the thin tail off of this stone while fitting it It didn’t serve a purpose. Since the picture, I’ve lined the fitted box with plaster as the front and the back of the stone taper and need support. tung oiling and then topping this box with varnish will keep it from getting black right away.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the stone is like. the turkish stone I already have is slightly friable, but still immune from gouging with tool tips and this one was sold as soft and fast for a Turkish stone. It doesn’t feel like it’s very coarse, still – figure something like a 6-8k waterstone type action, but with a far better feel not such a fragile face. The surface is continuous and none of the lines in the stone are actually open. In a couple of days, everything will be dry, and if it’s interesting enough, I’ll see what the edge and speed are like compared to other stones, and maybe leave a post about it.

Side comment that goes with this – thank goodness for coming across the buffer – that one discovery had really curtailed much of this stone buying. I’m sure if not for anyone reading this, that it’s saved a few other folks plenty, too – from falling into the trap of buying gimmick multi-hundred dollar synthetic stones, and “systems”, too. It couldn’t quite save me from blowing money on another Turkish oilstone, though.

A few weeks ago, someone emailed me and mentioned they had a LV shooting plane, and they couldn’t get the iron to hold up with a V11 iron. This request was after getting a replacement, which was better than the original iron but still not suitable. I haven’t bought a V11 iron in a very long time, but when I did, they were tempered a little hard. So this was kind of a surprise.

Shooting is more like chiseling than planing, and when I tested irons even with wood in the vise planing end grain, the wear life of V11 vs. O1 wasn’t nearly at the same interval. In long grain with no challenges, V11 doubles good O1 if the V11 and O1 are in the same hardness range. You can’t actually get this interval in regular work, but in a test situation where you’re just continuing to plane clean wood that’s already planed, it’s pretty spectacular. LV’s O1 isn’t really a good comparison because it’s too soft – my opinion, of course. I don’t know what woodworkers do with 59 hardness steel in dry wood, but issues where there is an edge strength need – like chiseling or shooting, will relate to accelerated wear.

But V11 was a puzzler, just from what I remembered. I remember it lasting about 15% or so longer planing end grain in a vise, which is a more gentle operation, but certainly nothing that would lead to it not holding up.

I have made XHP irons that are 61/62 – same steel, as far as I know. if the steel is below that or even at 61, it does change behavior a lot and will deflect more easily. This can be seen in knives, but a knife isn’t shooting end grain and you can tolerate more deflection.

Regardless, the request was whether or not I could make an iron that wouldn’t fail.

I accepted the challenge, but then realized all I have in 3/16″ steel is O1. Or that was the case. I figured I’d make an O1 iron pushed a little to 62/63 but with a strong temper at that to avoid chippiness. What does this compare to? I match Hock’s 64 in the one hock iron I have by tempering to 350F. it’s tempting to be impressed by that in test shavings because the iron is very crisp. I suspect the actual hock irons might be pushed less in the quench and be tempered just below that, like around 325F, but I could be wrong. It doesn’t matter that much. This test isn’t about duplicating Hock, but rather knowing that if O1 is to better V11, it will need to have edge strength that comes from hardness, but not chip easily. Tempering my hock iron would’ve improved it for day to day use, but I broke it instead to get a look at the grain. LV offers nothing similar, which gives me a lot of options.

26c3 is the apple of my eye for chisels. It hits 64 hardness with a strong light straw double temper, but upon looking it up, you can get it in .14″ or .25″, and no 3/16ths. O1 steel is, of course, an option, and so is 52100. I don’t love 52100 in irons for planing long grain, but I know I can get it to 64 after a 400F double temper as well, without brittle grain growth.

But looking around, I’m chasing comfortable hardness without having to freehand grind and then float/flatten/file a .25″ bar stock to 3/16ths or close. So 26c3 is out – unfortunately. There’s one other option, though, which is 125cr1 – a similar composition steel but not made with the high cost process (remelting, which improves uniformity at a microlevel) that 26c3 gets. I’ve fiddled with 125cr1 and you can see in snapped samples that some of the alloying isn’t as well distributed, or at least that may be the case, and if that’s not the case, something .

that’s 125cr1 at high hardness. What are the white bits? Talking with a metallurgist in the past didn’t help. the internet creates too big of a distance and a metallurgist will just assume you did something wrong and pose 10 ways you could’ve failed and insist “you don’t know”. That’s correct, I don’t know – I’m not staking a professional reputation on this, I want to know if it could be a “not worth using it” it matter, and have seen the same thing in some samples of 52100.

What happens when it looks like this rather than uniform gray? Well, in 52100 and in the 1.25% carbon 125cr1 above, the steel needs to be pushed a little further to get full hardness vs. very clean looking samples. Speaking of, clean is a word being used here for how these look – the 125cr1 melt sheet shows that the actual composition is really high quality and aside from a tiny 0.25% addition of chromium, the other stuff is pretty close to being in line with hitachi white 1 spec.

I decided to buy 3/16 125cr1 and give it a try. I’ve seen defective 1095 first hand – when there is a defect for real, it shows up in the edge. This stuff might not, and there should be a potential to get edge strength.

I asked the person making the request to send the V11 iron so that I could hardness test it and so that i could use it as a template. I don’t care for the aesthetics, especially in the slot, but I don’t have the shooting plane – did at one point, but don’t now.

My first attempt at making one from 125c1 is this:

This iron came out a point softer than I’d hoped, so I tempered it at 375F or so instead. that left it at 64.5 hardness in the middle. It’s not hard to hone because there’s little in it for abrasion resistance, but you can feel it’s hard. the black is 95% scale from the forge, and to make it uniform, anywhere I dinged or marked the surface, I just put cold blue on to make it uniform. I can’t see a reason to remove it. But I’d sure like the slot to be rounded and not to a point. it would look better and be easier for a hand maker to make vs filing this in.

I sent this iron off, and the first reports of it are solid – it’s better.

I decided also that maybe I’d send one to Bill T – who some of you may remember from forums. Bill does a lot of woodworking and I can count on him to say “i don’t see the point” if I make something I think is better but he doesn’t see that it matters. that kind of feedback is valuable.

I pushed heat treatment harder on Bill’s, fiddling around to try to get as even of heat as possible visually. The thickness is really reactive with the induction forge (of course i’m not sending these out or using a furnace), so it’s a challenge to get the sides and center to the same color for the same amount of time. When you push heat for a short time, it has to go well above the furnace schedule protocol, but you’re playing with fire doing that despite using magnetics (har). A little too much for 10 seconds too long and you can have grain growth. The second iron looks like this:

I don’t sell stuff to Bill, and admittedly, the geometry on the sides of this second one isn’t so accurate – they’re not straight on the edges but rather a little bell shaped – oops! But this one came out of the quench after that kind of fiddling at 70 hardness, and it tempers back with a double 400F temper to 64.5. It makes no sense to send something with a little grain growth to someone, so I was pondering making it over again and realized that it’s not a sold product, so I can just set up the edge, and then strike it with a punch and break it out:

This broken out section show is about half of the width of a BB – looks fine. what you’re looking for in a snapped sample is something that looks like coarse silicon carbide with shiny facets all over the place. That’s large grain. none of it shows up here. Also, where did the blotches go? No clue. I haven’t noticed extra heat to fix the issue in the past, but maybe it does.

I’ll see what Bill says. As far as I know, he has no issues with his.

Does this experiment to beat Goliath offer some kind of eureka if these are notably better? Not really – nobody is going to make these on a commercial basis because the steel is water hardening, and on top of that, the furnace samples of 26c3, which are sort of a ceiling for this, don’t have as much toughness as the forge samples I had tested. that’s rarely going to occur, but I think surplus steel simple carbon steels probably have the potential to be better out of a forge.

So, How did the V11 Test?

First, I looked over the iron when I got it, and I didn’t see anything unusual in the edge in terms of how it was set up. I did see some artifacts of deflection that still existed behind the honed edge from prior damage. That’s unusual. I tested the iron a little hastily and got 62 hardness as a result. But going back later with four more strikes, it’s a half point less hard than that. I don’t know if that matters, but using a plane for shooting in a steel that’s not that great with edge stability, not much hardness can be sacrificed.

To make sure the edge itself wasn’t at all overheated, I filed it. Nope, damages a file – fine there, and no color anywhere on the top or bottom side of the bevel.

I really don’t know, and I don’t have any real suggestion about what might be better aside from 64 hardness M2 as an offering. That wouldn’t be that expensive, and it’s a steel that comfortably hits that hardness, and on top of that, it would be hard to overheat an edge. It’s not hard to overheat V11, which isn’t high speed and grinds at half the speed of O1, retaining a lot of heat. I think it’s just an odd choice to offer a soft O1 iron that would probably be good at 62/63, and then offer a steel that is highly abrasion resistant but may land in the hand of the user at 61 hardness and also grind a bit warm threatening loss of even that.

Who knows.

If anyone is concerned about the tracing of the center slot including the characteristic V, don’t worry – neither of these irons is being sold. Is that a trade dress thing? I don’t know. I could make more of these, but they will not look the same if I do, they’ll look a little more human did in elements.

Also, there’s a little Easter Egg in the second iron – look below the slot. I pushed the limits on temperature, but heated only a little past the slot and then quenched the entire length of the iron chasing hardness. The result is a tiny hairline crack, but one that doesn’t go far, and fortunately it isn’t on the bevel end.

Isn’t that just filthy garish grand? it’ a type 20 formerly blue “was rusty” stanley 5 that I picked off of ebay.

I’ll type more later about making japanning and what I’ve learned, and by saying making japanning, it’s a little misleading. It’s just varnish with pigment in it, and the pigment is ground into linseed oil before mixing it into the varnish.

Because the pigmented varnish after baking will still degloss very easily, I brushed a short oil tung and limed rosin varnish, but that’s also something in the presence of metal dust hands and wood dust and such, it will degloss, too.

if you want to see a closer picture of this, here’s a link.

What’s wonderful to me is it’s kind of ugly. I forgot that there are some second line planes that are red, and when conversing with a few folks online the other day, remarked that chrome ox green might be nice, but then was reminded that’s Kunz. So, we’ll have to do a little thinking.

While I was at it, i brine quenched the iron – it was 61.5 hardness before quenching, as in from the factory at stanley, and I really was only able to get it just north of 62. It’s plain steel with alloying that feels like chromium and something else when you put it to the stones – probably a little excess manganese, and it’s short carbon. As in, I think it’s probably somewhere between 0.6% and 0.75% carbon as no carbides appear in a worn section of the blade.

That translates to if you can get it to 62.5 hardness or something after temper, there’s nothing else there to gain. What’s surprising is that I’ve now tested a whole bunch of type 20 and later irons – they’re all short carbon like this, probably because that became the modern way. Short carbon means little to normalize and the heat treatment process can be something more akin to a bottling line than a furnace.

But every single bench plane iron I’ve tested has been 61-61.5 from Stanley during that era. The short carbon doesn’t impress because it affects fine edge feel a little and also makes the irons really tough, so they hold a burr and give the impression they’re softer than they are. Carbon 0.8-1.25% gives a range of kind of bite to an edge that shorter carbon doesn’t maintain. But it’s not hardness that’s lacking, and given all of the comments from gurus over the years about inconsistent heat treatment and softness and things of the like.

It’s bullshit. Stanley may not provide exactly what we like, but even in their cost cut era, they are fabulously consistent.

Modern block plane irons with “lots of slots”, not the three slot super modern type, but what you find on 9 1/2s – I’ve tested three made at different times, bought at random. 62.5, 62.5 and slightly above 62.5 in hardness (but not 63).

Again. not exactly a 50,000 iron sample, but there are 7 irons in two types here – in the small sample not differing by more than half a point.

They’re better than I thought. I learned long ago that the derided type 20s are better than i thought they would be, too – they’re lovely. If the short carbon iron is undesirable, it’s $10 and an hour of time for me to make another one in something else, but i could not make a case that any of these irons couldn’t work on any wood that’s come through the shop and be adjusted to deal with anything (including silica), because they don’t have the fatal sub-60 hardness that a lot of low and mid grade tools do out on the market at present from other sources. I’ve had LV’s O1 irons – they are just not up to the task of end grain or dedicated smoothing work. While the Stanley irons here aren’t better than a Hock iron, they’re better than LV’s version of O1 in metal planes.

OK, a dose of reality before you look on amazon -these irons are short carbon, they’re blanked, and probably cost a dollar each to make. They’re practical. Amazon says $20 each. I’d still go find a vintage iron instead – they’re not short carbon if they are from the era before this and are just a little better. But if you have one of these laying around, at the very least, the bench plane irons could be made into two stellar marking knives.

I just wonder what our perception of some of the pedestrian things available would be if we spent as much time figuring them out as we are willing to spend if we waste a bunch of money on something we don’t need.