Month: March 2025

It seems like a good time to make one more plane. I have some chisels I told people I would make, so at some point, being more responsible and doing it would be polite. But I’ll finish this plane first:

It’s the shell of what will become a coffin smoother in gombeira. Kind of an ugly wood – it’s sort of a combo stacked straw and fish scale look, but it will become dark brown soon enough. It doesn’t ever fully lose the fish scaly texture on the surface, though, even once it’s past rosewood brown.

What is in the back of my mind though is out of laziness, I’ve never made an abutment saw. I don’t really have any interest in making one right now, either, but the idea of using the zero clearance or flush cut saw that I’ve used for a very long time (not the right tool for the job – and slow), really didn’t appeal for gombeira. Cross cutting gombeira or katalox gives the same feel with a sharp saw that normal wood gives with a dull saw.

I found something that I could convert quickly.

What is it? Remember those plastic handled tool box saws that came with three blades and each blade could be affixed with a single wingnut? This is from one of those. If it’s not 30 years old, it’s really close to it. And I bought it new or my dad did.

I have a lot of things in the shop that could be converted to make a saw like this – from raw 1095 spring stock to something salvaged off of a spring steel machine guard. But recalled this tool box saw blade laying on top of the tool box that I’d looked in for a soldering gun. The blade was covered with plastic including between all of the teeth. Why? I have no clue if it was used to mix plaster or to cut through wet plaster, but that combination of statements tells you why it’s good to be wasted on something else.

Let me describe the custom handle. CA glue, activator, yard stick that was already ripped to half width with the cut away piece used for something else the kids were doing. Perfect combination of spontaneous junk. Blue tape for comfort and also to keep one scale from coming off completely at once.

I try to make nice things. Try is a word that has a lot of range. But there is also particular delight in making something that would terrify or offend someone obsessed with only making and using “proper” things.

It was a little slow through the gombeira, but if anything, the teeth and the blade are a touch hard for regular files. It’s not differentially or impulse hardened, but the future for it was the garbage can, anyway.

When I compare pictures of grain in my tools to older tools, I often see larger grain in the older tools. The Ohio Tool was over the top, though – beyond that.

I lost my manners with old irons this past year and started nicking the edges, or in some case for irons I wouldn’t use, just breaking them to look at the grain.

So, when I compare pictures of my grain, there’s something going on in the older irons where the composition of the steel tolerates some grain enlargement, probably because the steel itself would be ultra tough at lower hardness.

The first ward iron I chipped the edge off of is probably 210 years old at this point, and I have to apologize, I don’t have a picture of the steel but to say that it’s almost identical in look to the much later iron I have a picture of below.

This is that Ward and Payne Iron (for the record, taper plane iron 61 hardness):

There’s something unfamiliar enough to me about this steel that I can’t say visual comparisons to mine are that relevant. And to some extent, Ohio Tool’s irons may be missing something a little if trying to compare them straight up. As in, it may be unfair.

In contrast to the ohio tool iron, partially due to hardness, but at least some due to grain, this 61 hardness W&P iron first deflected a lot and then in another section, I managed to strike it very hard and get a section to come out. it’s a very good iron under the punch test sensing how hard it is to get it to let go of some of its edge in the first place.

If I made an iron out of the steels that I use and the picture was as coarse as above, they would break too easily and have somewhat chippy behavior.

I thought knowing that the Ward and Payne grain doesn’t look as small as mine, it would be not totally fair to compare the Ohio Tool iron grain in the prior post to a modern steel that may not even be made from the same type of iron ore. It’s out of my area of expertise.

But just for reference again, here is a picture of that Ohio Tool steel iron:

It’s possible that those aren’t grains but rather agglomerations, but the force needed to nick the edge out of this was a tiny fraction of what was needed for the Ward. I don’t know if I’m going to venture into wasting my time with the Ohio Tool iron to temper it and see what the resulting hardness is. One thing is true on plain steel -if you push steel with a higher temperature prior to quench, even for a little, it’s easier to hit a high hardness target as the time interval to get to 900F or so widens, and when that interval at heat just above critical is 2 seconds, to get it to 3 or 4 is a lot of forgiveness.

The only way I know of to get actual grain boundaries and eliminate the guessing on these two steels would be Nital (nitric acid and ethanol mix) and polished samples. I’m just not looking to go that far. Nital can be dangerous (explosive) if some of the ethanol evaporates and I don’t have a separate lab building or something where that wouldn’t risk burning something down).

But I am genuinely curious. One, why ohio tool irons were never made better than they are, and two, why the Ward and Payne irons can look coarser than my irons but still be just as tough and very stable at the edge.

Mine again, for comparison, in case you don’t want to go backward chronologically (actually, this is another 125cr1 picture and I think I may have considered the grain a little questionable and given the iron away to a friend):

I don’t know what Ward and Payne used – but the 1.25% steel in this last picture, and even 1084, won’t tolerate too much in terms of enlarged grain. toughness can be reduced to a fifth or a tenth very quickly, and my first attempts at 1084 irons with somewhat enlarged grain were intolerable to use. It’s really high toughness, though, so making a 60.5 hardness iron out of it tempered at 400F and tiny grain is also annoying. It’s too tough and deflection damage will hang on – something you don’t want with plane irons and chisels. if damage occurs, you want it to remove itself so you’re not pushing an edge or deflection that’s really wide through wood.

If you’re curious about a modern commercial iron, the hock france iron that I broke and tested previously – in O1 – had grain similar in size to the 125cr1 picture above. I can shrink grain to a little smaller than O1, but can’t make the claim that it makes a difference. The Hock iron was a little chippy, but not due to grain. It was a little chippy because O1 is a low toughness steel and undertempering it just exposes that very quickly. I suspect Hock’s French irons were or are tempered around 325-350F. O1 comes into its own at 375F in my opinion, and if you can get a good hardness out of the quench, is noticeably better at 400F temper. That’ll knock down hardness from Hock’s iron by 2 points or so – I measured 64.5 on the one I had. O1 is ideally suited to 62/63..

So, anyway, I can’t totally solve the mystery here with the different looking grain pictures. Modern alloys look different under the scope. Iron carbides of size will start to show up and steels like O1 with tiny carbides (which still doesn’t result in good toughness) will look very fine.

All of these trivial things, even with the modern steels, will seem confusing until you’re working with the different steels. 1084, 1095 and O1 can just look supremely fine under magnification. the 1.25% carbon steels start to get some volume of iron carbide, which isn’t much of a threat to toughness like harder carbides are, and you can’t conclude much from each unless you’re comparing pictures of the same alloy.

Very likely that the four pictures here are all substantially different compositions. An XRF of the Ward and Ohio Tool irons would be interesting, to find out what’s different about them vs. something plain like 1084. 1084 is often suggested as being “like old steel” but if you make an iron from it and then use a Mathieson or Ward iron, they’re not the same, I’d say by feel, really not similar.

When I started making planes – which I don’t do much of now – I bought a lot of wooden planes. I don’t remember the number as some were junk, and most were sold off, or cut up and thrown away, whatever was appropriate -but it was perhaps 20 planes. One thing that stood out to me was Ohio Tools planes could sometimes have good wood, but I’ve never had a single Ohio Tool iron I liked. Including one of their metal planes with a tapered iron. They’ve all been chippy, though it seems to vary from one to the next.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve made two rosewood planes in the last month – a jack and a coffin smoother – and I’m in the middle of making a coffin smoother out of gombeira, or “brazilian ebony” or Swartzia Panacoco. Whatever. Typical density at 12% MC is 1.2 for the wood and it’s unique in how it works. It does have a little bit of directional preference like oak does, and that has no effect on handles, but it may not be appropriate for a plane. We’ll see if it splits the abutments. The dry sample that I have has a specific gravity of 1.32%.

What better way to size it than to use the just-made smoother. That smoother in this case has a 125cr1 iron that came out of a 390F double temper at 66. It actually performed fine, and was still at 66 here, but I bumped the temper up 25 degrees and it’s at 65 where it will remain. Nothing you ever make won’t chip or roll on something, but it’s still annoying if you’re a maker and using your own tools if they chip at all. is the chip because it’s not good, or because you did something that will chip anything. You never really know.

So, the shape of this coffin smoother isn’t that interesting – it’s one that I copied from an Ohio Tool coffin smoother that I have that I like and even the iron looked decent. Like well enough made that it should have been difficult to heat treat it improperly given the rest of the effort. Heat treatment isn’t difficult to do on plain steels. I haven’t, however, had any experience with Ohio irons that has been in a class with any decent English iron, and it’s a head scratcher. I don’t mean just mediocre, I mean it always falls short of even that.

I didn’t buy the plane in question to use it, though. I bought it because it’s a decent layout that still leaves some tubby plane rear in your hand and I like that – it’s less hand stress to use it even though it’s not very pretty.

So I tested the iron (which I haven’t pictured here).

66 hardness. WTF. Maybe I’ve always been wrong – maybe it’s just undertempered, but before I waste time doing that, I knocked some of the edge off with a punch. It looks like these two pictures:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Given my recent iron at 66 and this one coming through at the same, I had to bust out the calibration block that came with the hardness tester to make sure the diamond hasn’t cracked off at the tip. Nope, it’s fine.

I doubt all Ohio Tool irons look this bad, but I have never seen anything like this before. it’s at 75x magnification, but those big flat facets probably are grain boundary defined. We shouldn’t be able to see much of anything.

Too, I used a tiny cross pein hammer (6 ounces?) and a punch to knock the edge off. That shouldn’t really be possible – the punch should just bounce off, but each strike of the hammer knocked a chunk out no problem. This iron has no chance. I have no idea what would’ve been going on when this was made – this is not difficult to avoid if it is just a heat issue. No clue what else it could be.

For a refresher, this is what my 125cr1 steel looks like punched.

Sometimes, it’s not quite as tight as this, but it’s always close. And always better than the grain in the Narex Richter was. That was also unacceptable but not remotely close to the scale of the Ohio Tool irons.

I would not buy anything made by Ohio Tools, especially trying to save a few pennies buying an iron to make a wooden plane. Spend the money on something from England. Mathieson, Ward, Early Marples, I. Sorby, or even consider eventually making your own.

A couple of years ago, I wanted to make some seaton-like chisels. Not copies for the first ones as what if they weren’t very good to use? They are the apple handled chisels that are on the front page.

I made those out of 26c3 and at the time, a little too chicken to grind them that thin, I left them around .08″ at the tips. One of them was a touch soft and I later found that one to be 60/61. For 26c3, to have a chisel that soft is pointless -it evades the usefulness of the steel, which is to have good (not great, but good) toughness or resistance to breakage at relatively high hardness. something like 64/65.

I thought they were all soft because of that, though i can’t recall why. But you can tell when a chisel isn’t where it should be based on how the burr responds, at least if you have some familiarity with what it should be like. I put these chisels in a drawer and gave one to Warren, and he used it for a week or two and said “I wouldn’t want it to be any harder” and brought back the one he was using. Warren doesn’t like really high hardness tools and i thought all of these were soft, and later tested a couple and they are 64/65 or maybe half a point harder than that yet.

The soft one, I probably got impatient while thicknessing and that’s that, or I may have had a snafu tempering by leaving something not fully protected by a mass sandwich (a mass of aluminum that is) in the toaster oven.

I pondered throwing these away and almost did, just because it does get aggravating sometimes to have stuff around that you think is only half good. Fortunately I was wrong, and fortunately i didn’t throw them away before getting a hardness tester. And I also learned that I spoofed Warren unintentionally by giving him a 64.5 hardness chisel that he had no trouble sharpening, so that made for a nice bit of proof that alloying means a lot when it comes to sharpenability.

I’ve made some other closer to Seaton chest reproduction chisels and am slowly getting around to making a set for another friend who I have no business making tools for in the first place. But with all of the sharpening stone box making and now a couple of planes, I’ve come to appreciate a thin chisel.

The apple handled chisel here that’s in the middle did all of the excavation in this plane as well as the rosewood jack that I last posted. rosewood is a nice working wood, but it’s still a lot more punishing than beech and I don’t baby the chisel. I’m sure I could break it by trying to pry great amounts, but that’s stupid, anyway. chisels sever and the real usefulness for prying is getting little bits out of corners or thinner bits split off by rotating. This is borderline abuse, but nothing was suffered here.

The Difference

The big difference using this chisel and going a little slower – something I need to do with rosewood anyway so as not to waste it or leave garish chunk outs on side grain, is that this chisel can be sharpened indefinitely with two stones and never see a grinder, and never cost the user any time.

In wider work like dovetails/half blinds, etc, it wouldn’t be any slower and if the corners need to be gone, the edge is so thin at the front that it could be done easily by honing a slight bevel on the sides. Not a big wide flat one, just one that’s subtle. That is, after all, on some of the chisels in the seaton chest pictures – a user-added very small side bevel, but one that’s functional.

The amount of time to sharpen this chisel sans grinder is not more than a minute and a half total including stropping or buffing and to do each of these planes, I sharpened twice. For cherry dovetails or something like that, the edge would last an eternity.

I’d have been worried about breaking a chisel like this – this particular one is at least 65, and also wooed by the discussions of Japanese steels and that steel is always fragile at high hardness. It isn’t. these very chisels are going to make for an interesting comparison against hitachi white 1, as I suspect that the 0.25% of chromium in 26c3 is probably a benefit and not a detriment, but we’ll see when I finally get a set of solid steel chisels made out of hitachi white 1. It may not be until later this year unless I get laid off or who knows what else.

If I do, there will be a toolmaking bonanza for a little bit. I’d prefer not to get laid off, of course! But there’s definitely not enough hours in the day to make just the things I want to make let alone make a few more things for other people.

As with many things, the experience here using this chisel has really made me think some things just from function and feel that I would not have guessed. Yet another thing where informed or experienced opinion is just far better than supposing.

I know the answer for mortising in general is that a chisel should be thicker than this one. This one wouldn’t tolerate that much hard forces because it just isn’t thick enough for that, and it wouldn’t rotate in a mortise. but I’m starting to get a sense as to why cabinetmaking didn’t require or prescribe any “firmer” chisels in the sense that people errantly think of them now. It required firmer chisels as Nicholson described them – chisels strong enough to form wood.

What I really don’t have any need for is chisels that were designed to survive uninformed hands on a construction site. When I first started woodworking, I would’ve called stanley 750 chisels “delicate”. Things change over time.

That would be part fore, part Jack, and part try. The reality is, I don’t need the plane, but I need what it offers to build the plane, which is just the same kind of three dimensional satisfaction that you can’t get by reading about things or having to sort out real problems. That’s the draw of the shop for me.

There are some ulterior motives. I wanted to make the iron and cap iron and see if I can make them to a standard that ward would. Jury is out on that. And also, i’ve always just loved running a jack and try plane through wood, but once in a while, a full sized try plane can be a little much. So this tweener plane really has the most potential use as a smaller try plane. if it fails at that, it’ll just be set less aggressive than my usual jack and used in its place.

The reality is this role is also undertaken well by a stanley 6. But it would take a long time for me to figure out how to make a Stanley 6 and it probably wouldn’t be that great.

This is what it looked like originally. I like what walnut does as a wedge – it’s protective of the abutments but also far better at confirming to little differences in the abutments themselves or the top of the cap iron. I really don’t have any interest in putting the iron and cap iron together and then belt grinding the top so that the spring in the cap is straight along the top. It’s not needed, but with a rosewood wedge – as I found out – there isn’t enough give in the wedge and fingers and along with fiddling with grip, I was afraid I’d get stiff at some point and split an abutment.

The look of the wedge is a bad match, though, and it’s not aesthetically very good, either. It’s just OK.

So, keeping track, this is the original wedge. I needed to make another one no matter what to address a few feed issues, and then I made another one out of rosewood but never managed to get to profiling the top due to its behavior, so I don’t have a picture.

At the very least, making a new wedge, staining the walnut a little darker with earth pigments. I don’t like coloring wood, but I’m willing to do a cheesy job here for a specific reason. Walnut gets lighter with age and sun exposure.

Notice the iron. somewhere I lost track of how close it was to the handle due to either a layout error or something logical in terms of what I was marking off of. that leads to jumping to conclusions, but now that I’ve had the chance to refit, refine the feeding so it doesn’t clog for any reason or even hold the shavings in the mortise temporarily, I realize that the iron is clear if the handle front (just barely) and it has no impact here, so there’s nothing to fix.

I’ll sludge up the pores in the wedge with french polish and it’ll stand out even less.

Making something is a process of making little mistakes and avoiding big ones, and then even if you make big ones, seeing if you can live with them or learn from them.

The handle position and gouge cut at the end of the chamfer stick out to me. I used a gouge that wasn’t what I normally use and had to correct it and widen and flatten the cut. I made the others kind of bland and boring just so they’d match. I’d rather see it or someone else see it and say “i don’t prefer that look – a smaller gouge cut and steeper with a bigger step looks better” than why don’t they look relatively similar?

This is a rare case where that’s all I have to say. It was really nice to conquer making a tapered iron and a hardened cap iron and the tapered iron also has the very classic back curvature in it, so there’s nearly nothing to bedding. It was over in a couple of minutes and the bias points are stark – there’s no contact with the bed other than at the bottom at the top.

The whole thing is already getting cruddy from handling and touching things up, and that’s a point where I like tools to be. Near perfect starting shape and trying to preserve that is a huge burden. Not a fan.

The billets are in the background, because I think it might be nice to make a matching style coffin plane.