One Begets Another and Forge Welding

There’s only one game in town at this point for plane blanks as big as I want them, and I have half a dozen or so on hand, but I will likely build planes off and on for the rest of my life when I get the jones. And it may be possible in retirement to actually beg, borrow or steal a main stem from an american beech tree somewhere, but that’s not now.

The recently finished plane is sitting on a billet here because the first long plane I ever made was a jointer. I rarely use it, but I’d maybe like to refresh my planes and maybe cut up the older ones for handle stock. The old jointer is a serviceable plane, but the iron I put in it is just OK and it the style hurts my eyes. We are not talking about priceless goods here – there’s about $60 worth of wood in the old plane and I hate to say it, but it has my mark on it and I will not sell it to anyone else to use or even give it away. I’d rather clean up an old plane for someone else than do that.

So, the blank on the bottom here will get my regular treatment – which is it’ll be a normal plane, but if I think about what I really want in a jointer, I want one with a 2.75″ iron instead of 2 1/2. it’s uncommon to find furniture work that the trying plane here will be deficient in. It works great. The iron will still nick, though, if something causes it to. it’s disappointing that I can’t metallurgically bend reality, but we’ll see over time. It should be usable and it’s a lot easier to be critical when you make the iron and you want it to be perfect vs. a vintage iron where you really want to learn what it needs rather than pick at what the iron needs for set up to be critical. One has you moving volumes of wood and the other, at best, would lead to accurate criticism online. To do the latter when you could be doing the former is stupid.

I just checked the cost to get 11 blanks from horizon and it’s a grand. that’s a lot. Baked in there is what causes me to tap the brakes – freight from 2 hours away is more than 1/3rd of the price. Just like the second to last sentence above, that’s stupid. I can drive to get it at some point and I haven’t bought any in a while. It’s effectively $25 a board foot, which dear, and I haven’t seen it – and these blanks are not all actually straight. They’re quartered but you can’t buy one and assume that it’ll be dead nuts straight with no wander in it. That’s life. I did like the original american beech stock they dried better, but it’s half heart and the euro is all sap. Old planes are all sap. so who knows, the american beech of yesteryear isn’t available and it’s unlikely it ever will be again in the quality horizon provided. i still have a little of it, but it’s stuffed off to the side until or unless I get the urge to make something legit unique, like a cooper’s jointer, perhaps.

On to the forge welding thing:

I don’t forge weld much. Just bolsters usually at this point when I can’t get round stock. I haven’t thought about it much because wrought or mild steel forge welded to high carbon steel isn’t something I want. I don’t want it because at this point, the solid steel chisels I’ve been making are better. They can have the same strength and stiffness in a thinner cross section and 26c3 and 52100 both allow hitting high hardness without making something fragile like D2 steel would be.

So it’s been out of mind. Except I got an email from someone earlier today and looked further. Another issue that I deal with is the limited availability of steels I want to use. I want to make chisels that are not bettered by something. It’s just a thing. When you start to make things, you want to make something usable. In the back of your mind is fantasy that you want it to magically be special, but it isn’t. You’re struggling when you start to make something that will match basic commodity goods and again, if you don’t do the comparison and just regard your mediocre stuff as superb, that’s stupid.

Not wanting to do stupid things does limit you to certain experiments. For example, there are steels that would benefit from a higher pre-quench heat than a mid carbon backing steel would tolerate to get full hardness. So what do you do? If the bit hardness (the cutting edge) is going to be fully hard, the grain will bloat in the backing metal and then what’s the advantage? It may not be able to even match a single solid steel chisel. Too, I’ve learned by experiment unintentionally that even moderate amounts of alloying will make it a lot harder to get a forge weld done. you can often still do it when you can get really high heat and the work area is small, like bolsters on 80crv2 or something, but it’s not something you’d want to do in great big volume hand hammering.

But discussing this with someone who is having someone else make tools still allows pondering and strikes up the chance of perhaps using a mid carbon steel with a plain really high carbon steel. Like 1045 carbon steel rod (0.45% carbon) laminated to 26c3 or hitachi white 1. The latter should be an even better match. Both of these steels need contamination free composition, and a lot of the mid carbon stock has been replaced in the US by steels like 4140 that are much more highly alloyed but through harden in long cross sections. They also have yield strength values twice as high or near vs. 1045 steel, so it’s easy to see why they have become a preference for industrial use. I doubt they would weld easily to a high carbon bit.

There are specialty 1045 products that are nitrided and high sulfur, presumably the sulfur makes machinability easy, but it’s a toxic thing to have forge welded and maybe diffusing into an old file or hitachi white 1. How long does it take for sulfides to form, making steel brittle junk? I don’t know and I don’t really want to learn. Fortunately, digging deep in mcmaster carr’s listing finds 1045 rod made from the US with a sulfur content limit that’s not much higher than white steel, and the same with phosphorus.

I think this is worth trying partly because it’s worth trying for fun, but also because if it’s workable, It may make white 1 chisels viable vs. being a $200 of steel per set novelty. Figure when you are shopping for unobtanium japanese chisels made of white 1 and sold for $2k, you’re probably looking at about $30 of white steel bit the most – maybe less. But when you make solid chisels end to end, the strangely high price of hitachi white starts to bite. I still have to make one solid set of them to squash the nonsense that “it’s laminated to wrought iron because it’s too brittle to use as monosteel”.

And I think I didn’t make it more clear, as I should’ve – 1045 moves much faster under hammer than does 52100 or anything else that I’ve been using in the round. W1 is pretty amenable, but 52100 will definitely build more shoulder and forearm muscle, or in a small power hammer, require more heats. neither of those are quite what I’m looking for in a chisel steel.

If this works, the only drawback is the 1045 steel may end up at 55 hardness while the cutting edge is 65. I don’t think there will be much there to see in terms of lamination line, but at least the chisel body itself will not flex as much and chance breaking at the butt end of the forge weld – exactly how I’ve broken two different laminated chisels in the past. I’ve never broken a solid steel chisel that I can recall.