One of my longer-term friends where I live, which is not where I grew up, is actually the person who got me into woodworking. Last year, he expressed an interest in Japanese planes, and since I had probably at least 6 at the time, I offered to sell him two of the better planes that I have for some fraction of what they’d cost new on the open market. Of course, I didn’t get them from a retailer marked up in the US, either – I got both from Japan.
When demonstrating the setup of one of the planes, which is basically a simple fitting operation that’s far overdone in terms of something a reasonably skilled planemaker would do, I mentioned to him that most planes when new, just with some shrink since new, would be a ten minute proposition to fit properly with better tools than you’d typically see on an instructional page. So, I made him an edge flat for the sides of the plane and a legitimate Bill Carter style rehardened (stanley 750 now at 66 hardness at that!!) push chisel to scrape. These are crudely done, not heirloom tools. the finish on the handle on left looks really bright, but it’s just a few very thin coats of shellac and then carnauba.
I hadn’t thought too much about it but I’ve got a bundle of LN floats. They’re not exactly fresh and new any longer, but I’m going to dump them on ebay because people seem to be nutso for them. and I’d rather make my own. there’s a freedom of working with your own tools – not an ego freedom, but I can beat it and someone else wouldn’t have to remake the tool for me and I won’t feel guilty kind of freedom. I like to work with tools I’ve made because of this – the ability to use without too much regard.
Floats need to be fileable, or should be. the float at the top is half hard, meaning it’s a steel that needs a fast quench to harden, but rather than do that and then temper back to spring, the steel itself is 3/16ths and won’t need to bed, so it’s just plate quenched, which partially hardens it. This works, but it’s not that great for something that needs to be spring because as far as I know, it’s just unconverted austenite and some martensite rather than tempered martensite. Austenite will stabilize over time, but it’s just tough chewy stuff.
After sending the tools above off, I decided that it’s my preference also at the top of beds on japanese planes to reference the center of a bed and use one of the small cheek floats or whatever Lie Nielsen calls the float below. So I resolved to make two, or at least two. I don’t have much use for the pull version of this float, so I took a first shot at making one of these and it’s to the right in the picture below. Pretty hideous. I got an idea, and maybe it’s a stupid one – or probably, that the first tooth or first couple of teeth for me clog, so I’d make the first tooth big. you can see if you look closely that it got a little out of hand. It looks fragile here, but it’s not.
This did, however, necessitate a way to spring temper brine quenched steel. Now that i’m quenching stuff in brine, I just much prefer to use it due to how efficient and fast it is at sucking the heat out of steel and transitioning it immediately. The confounding issue here is that spring on the lower side is generally 600-700F. You can slowly heat steel and temper by color, but this is kind of difficult if you have something you can’t hold on to – maybe more suitable for small springs that would be used in mechanical stuff.
I saw a penknife blade forger on one of the Hawley videos heat a piece of steel in the forge and then temper a blade over it by color, so I decided to do that. I got lucky, and the first attempt ended up 45-48 hardness all over. Seemed like problem solved right away. To heat a piece of steel in my forge to high heat, even a pretty substantial piece of 1/4 bar about 8-10 inches long and fairly wide is only about 90 seconds, and I can lay that bar stock on refractory brick next to the forge and not have to grab or hold or drop or touch (!!!!) something that’s orange or red. however, it didn’t work well again, and after rehardening the second piece of stock twice, the third time I decided to instead use some aluminum quench plates that I use for tempering, and instead heat them with the orangey bar stock, get a thermocouple reading from them as they have holes in them for the toaster oven just so that I can see the plate temperature while items are tempering, and then use those hot aluminum plates for direct contact and prolonged. that worked great. Aluminum with significant mass is so good at moving heat, that a bright orange billet of steel under the aluminum block doesn’t melt anything.
But there are still a few kinks to work out. The steel is 1095 that I found that has a little vanadium in it as well as chromium. I was more thorough with the heat this time around, and the piece laying loose on top of a wooden blank below is the result. this one is 52 hardness on one end and 54 on the other. Probably could be drawn back a little further but it’s spring and it still filed neatly – very neatly. What caused the tempering to be hard beyond just more heat and a better quench to start has something to do with which side of the aluminum plate/bar I’m heating and then other little details. Safe to say, not big enough to go on discussing here other than to say the refractory brick that I have is low mass, so it doesn’t take much out of the aluminum, and I can cover the whole setup with a piece of kawool and greatly slow the heat loss. 675F is what the thermocouple said on the second one, but that’s just for a bit before it descends.
The first one is always a trial, and since the second one will be given to the friend mentioned above, it needs to be a little nicer and more neatly made. But I don’t necessarily want the float teeth to be identically sized, so they’re eyeballed in the same float below and very slightly to try to prevent resonance or chatter on surfaces. I picked lacewood for the float handle, and some glue remains in the picture, but I removed that. I picked lacewood because the reality is it’s not that great of a choice and I have two pieces of it that I’ll never do anything with. Also, this friend and I prefer to make fun of each other, and this will give me a chance to say “this is a shitty wood for a float handle, it won’t be very durable, but I’m sure it will last ten times longer than you’ll need it to, anyway”.
I zapped this handle after this with carnauba, too, but wish I’d have had the patience to varnish it. Which I’m going to go and do with some of the remaining billet after this, just to see how it looks. It should look dazzling with depth – the sort of oil and carnauba finish it received just kills it.
I have another idea for spring tempering in the future. Steve may nod to this one – I think I’d be closer to 50 hardness here with a much longer 600F immersion. This could be done in a melting salt, but I don’t have a pot, or it could be done in a pot with rosin in it – something I think I will try. Rosin’s not expensive. It doesn’t love a long time at 600F, but …well, it’s not expensive and it’s pretty easy to handle if you don’t do something stupid.
Dealing with the plates isn’t too bad, but the “cold one” is 700F and the orange one, who knows. Sooner or later I’m going to grab one of them while they’re still hot and remove my fingerprints at the very least. BTDT.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
That scraper! I forgot about these…
I’m ready to bed the iron on the jack plane I’m making and if memory serves correct this would be a good way to remove the high spots in place of a bed float right? Would there be any use in making this style of scraper (by modifying a chisel) without rehardening?
Thinking on it now, I seem to remember in your double iron plane making video, you had a trick for getting the bed near finished dimension without using a bed float. Not sure now exactly what that process was…
The floats look great, I’ve always wondered about a slight variation in tooth shape for these as resonance and chatter always seems to happen at the worst of times. Also I find when I’ve sharpened a float (LN as pictured) it cuts fine – but only briefly, then really drops off and remains workable but not nearly as pleasant to use. I end up working with them feeling dull 90% of the time as a result.
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Yes on the scraper – a bed float is instantly dull working a plane bed. Larry kind of popularized that, but I don’t think it’s practical. there’s so much tooth real estate on a bed that as soon as the edge of a float deflects or dulls a little, you can’t get anywhere, and then the front tooth as a scraper on the bed float is a non starter because it’s dull quickly.
The last part of your comment – that kind of sums up floats. They work better across the grain, and then too if you put finger pressure over where you want the cut to be and use the other hand to push the float – if on open space, and then move the float a little askew. Experiment with that if you haven’t already, it will create little tiny pigtails like a draw filed shaving off of a file.
For the scraping chisel, any reasonably hard chisel would be fine. Rehardening the chisel improves the crispness and life of the leading edge, and reduces its desire to form much of a burr. I think I tempered the one here around 300-325, which is why it’s bonkers hard for a 750 – typically not a hard chisel, that and a brine quench. It works nicely right off of the grinder without anything else, so it’s ultra easy to kind of use and refresh when needed.
As far as the bed, I used the edge float and cut three parallel lines in the bed with it that were right at or very close to finished depth and then chiseled off the waste between them very close to those lines and scraped. As long as those three edge float cuts are reasonably accurate relative to each other, it leaves you with not too much work to do other than using the actual iron and bedding the plane to the iron you have on hand.
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A sharp float is a formidable weapon, I actually prefer them blunt or rather not sharp ‘cos it’s too easy for me to scrape a deep “valley”. Mine are about half from old files — unhardened, — and other half is Ariou and 4 from PhillyPlanes. Ariou are hardened, Philly planes aren’t (gotta confirm it though, never checked).
They too cut quickly for a bit and then everything slows down. I always assumed it’s like filinglapping: once a “hill” has been filedlapped away, the progress slow down considerably because area become several time bigger and more metal is removed, so the spot grows way slower. ‘Cos how exactly does a tooth get dull? It can’t roll over since the angle is huge, it shouldn’t chip because it isn’t that hard (I’m talking about mine), right? Is it abrasive wear from beech? Doesn’t seem to have this effect on bench chisels and their gentle edges though. Or maybe it’s just some sap that collects on the other side of a tooth, like polishing compound on a wheel? I have a cheap x10 microscope, would be interesting to look at it.
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those teeth are close to a scraping cut, and on top of that, they do definitely have a fat angle behind the edge, so it doesn’t take much before they don’t have any bite. If they were more slight, they’d have more bite at a given kind of shape of the leading edge, or amount of wear, but you’d end up having to file them more, I guess – not to mention what’s behind them for an angle is really more of a matter of the shape of a taper file than it is ideal, I guess.
Sometimes sharp is good with them, you’re right, and sometimes slower is fine – they excel plowing fibers off rather than severing them.
if you took a chisel and put it vertical and then used it by scraping, it’d be close to what you get with a float, I guess – and that definitely dulls a chisel or plane edge quickly – much faster than planing.
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For whatever reason people think that a scraper for a bed must be some special scraper, preferably with a name, preferably something looking very confusing. Just FYI, the “a legitimate Bill Carter style rehardened push chisel to scrape” is really “an engineer’s scraper”. They’re often sold with a variety of hardened interchangeable inserts of various lengths and profiles, e.g. there’s a curved bit, a triangular bit and other shapes that would call for a whole set of individual scrapers. I know you don’t like naming stuff after people, but in this case it should be “Cecil Pierse’s blunt chisel” together with “Cecil Pierce’s blunt scissors” or maybe “Cecil Pierce’s scraper from anything metal”. The only issue with this scraper is that a bit is held by two little plates screwed together, so it’s kinda thick and might not fit into, say, an abutment. For bedding it works perfect, these scrapers can scrape hardened steel, I haven’t had to sharpen mine yet. Before that I used a 7$ set of fixed blade scrapers, one of which looked exactly like a chisel. They would have been better if they would have a longer handle. Have you seen this “Make a jointer plane” video by Bill Anderson? He used a turning scraper together with the floats. I had a chance to ask him about it, he replied that he needed something quickly so he just grabbed 1/2″ round nose scraper
These days there’s a couple of new (to me?) tools from Japanese toolmakers. The most advanced looks like a very thin wide chisel that looks like a letter T. A description says it’s only 3mm thick, has ura(!), doesn’t say anything about its edge profile, but photos looked like there’s maybe 80º ground angle. It’s a general purpose because a manufacturer suggests using it for sole conditioning too. Another is a kote-nomi (crank neck) with a very short bit, about 3/8 long and about 1/4″ wide, but a very long neck – it’s for scraping that little ledge tsutsumi (or whatever it’s called). Other products are just basic scrapers. There’s this one Japanese planemaker who recently put out his own scraper for setting up a dai. It looks like 2$ worth of HSS and a peened wooden handle. Of course it comes in a washi wrap, a postcard and and a handwritten haiku on the box, so perhaps it’s worth what he’s asking for it.
LN used to make good floats, I think I’ve test driven every float they made. Very nice tools at 65$, too bad I didn’t buy a set while could. Idk what are people that pay 250$ a piece doing with these. It’s not like we have a new crop of planemakes all of a sudden.
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Yeah, I mention carter because almost everyone who is blunting the front of a chisel is doing so because Carter put together a DVD before youtube was really that popular and it just had pictures on it and I think they may have had some descriptions. Could’ve been a CD. Carter shared that tip for surface refinement of all types and every wright, kruger and anne now – whoever it is who may show that tip, slow to ever share where the tip came from. They may not know because they’re too busy copying each other.
it’s a lot like an engineer’s scraper, you’re right -but much cheaper. I have an anderson scraper and another one that escapes me name wise, but they are sprung a little and kind of gadgety. Love it for scraping metal, though – it’s great. I wish they were cheaper used, though.
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I’m guessing the people buying the floats are collectors, by the way. My floats aren’t in great shape across the board, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens with them on a penny start auction. They’re excellent quality, but other than the one shown and the edge float, most are kind of in proportions that aren’t very useful to me – too dedicated to making side escapement moulding planes.
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pretty sure they’re collectors, who else is going to pay 250$ PER FLOAT when there’s still options available? My boss told a story about his boss from one of his previous jobs — the guy had full set of Veritas tools, including all those little gimmicks. And a pretty large set of LN tools: all the planes, all the chisels, floats (whether this was a complete set wasn’t mentioned, probably it wasn’t given the history of the brand). He had them neatly arranged in a special display cupboard under a glass panel. Never used any. Reminded me a story about some guy hoarding metalworking machines (Mechanic’s bedside reader, vol II)
oh by the way, perhaps you know this website: both of the tools mentioned are there (I was sure “daiku dougu” was a brand, but this looks like a personal website — although it means literally “carpenter tools”)
Dulling of a float makes sense, I forgot that force applied at a different angle and indeed that front will degrade.
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The way he canoodles the cigarette that long without smoking it reminds me of my grandfather’s generation. They were all physical workers, none rich and all *really really cheap*. they smoked little cigars, and usually cheap ones and would walk around for a long time working with a cigar in their mouth unlit before they would finally decide to light it. I think it was something to keep them from getting bored, but also allowed having the cigar in their mouth for much less than the cost of having one in their mouth lit all the time.
One of the men would keep some of the cigars in his mouth so long that they’d get shredded up from gumming them and he’d never smoke the “suckers”. We didn’t know too many men who smoked cigarettes – probably because “they disappear like burning money” too quickly.
They were all sparing with everything other than completely blowing themselves out for the day working and then eating like famine was coming. Dad used to tell me that sometimes in the larger farm families (9 kids in his) the food was put on the table and how fast you ate had something to do with how much you got to eat. My grandfather had farm hands and kids and there was no way he was going to tolerate anyone spending time fixing individual plates or waiting for a slow eater to finish some equal allocation of food.
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Interesting approach to tempering. I’ve made most of my floats out of O1 and tempered them in the stove at top temperature (around 525 F). These are harder than LN floats but still can be filed.
Cool idea with the rosin…but have fun cleaning it off!
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