Author: D.W.

So – the results for everything but the shop made varnish were pretty abysmal. the varnish is an odd choice, and you may be thinking “what about polyurethane” and so on, I’d imagine thinned, that would also work fine. You don’t want a heavy coat on anything and finsihes with adhesion problems will just come off and that’ll be ugly as it’s going to occur over a period of time and be about as attractive as a peeling car hood.

I used varnish because it’s tolerant of a lot of things and will still have good adhesion and toughness. In short, it could actually be practical in this case, even as a base for under wax.

To see how deep the damage is, I put the varnished sample aside – in reality if I were using it, I’d scuff it with steel wool and wipe on again to get rid of the deglossed spots. But for the others, I spent about 15 seconds on each spot with #00 steel wool. Here is how the Ceramic Finish sample fared:

It’s not that bad in the center, but there is dimension and depth to the rust at the edges and steel wool will not remove it. If you have a prized cast iron surface, this is disaster that you won’t just sand out. Fail, all the way around where plain standing water is concerned.

Shellac – expect disaster, and that’s what we find:

The remaining rust with depth is more vivid and the larger damage more uniform. Fail all around.

And the carnauba wax after steel wool:

Apologies on this -the test was a bit of an afterthought and only the darkened areas on the bottom of the right side plate are from the carnauba – I didn’t clean all of the rust off of it around the edges that was there before starting. But surprisingly, most of what is left is discoloration and there is nothing with a three dimensional feel.

Fail chasing perfection, but success – surprisingly – a very practical solution for moderate rust control.

I did nothing further with the varnished sample.

The results of this are fairly important to me, but because I have water in the shop for tool grinding purposes. Once in a while, i run around and dribble a few drops where I didn’t want to and find the result later. I’ll be using Carnauba where oil isn’t durable enough, and varnish where Carnauba may not wear long enough or provide needed protection for a non-work surface.

I do have a problem with vapor/humidity rust on bar stock and am lazy about doing anything because metalwork results in the loss of the mill surface. However, i have once in a while found that the rust missed on stored bar stock goes deep enough that I have to do further grinding or lapping to get that out, and that’s avoidable. I’ll think about maybe coating three pieces of metal to test if seasonal rust is stopped by all three – I’d imagine it may be, and the results might not be interesting in a daily use sense vs. storage or calamity, but still in my mind sticks the whole thought of “the ceramic coatings are sold as a plus step on finishes”, what good are they if you already have a good finish. Nothing that i can tell.

If you like to see water bead, you can actually buy 20-nanometer silica from china and mix it in whatever you’re using. This is probably not how the refractory resin in the ceramic finsihes exists, but the feel and the dazzling water beading effect is the same.

And the Nanosilica there also does not make anything waterproof if it wasn’t already. I just assumed from the top that the actual finish used beyond the whiz bang water beading effect would be much more like a legitimate finish than it is.

When rust is mentioned in comments or on forums or reddit or wherever, or even locally by friends of mine, there’s always disbelief that some basic product that isn’t value added and massaged into a sow’s-ear silk purse is suitable. Boeshield may work, some other urethane finish in a little bottle might work, but I doubt any of these things work as well as the basic components you already have around. if you have your own oil, but think it needs rust inhibitor – test that first. If you still think it does, find out what the rust inhibitor is. Chances are whatever is being marketed at you is 1 unit of value sold for you at 10, 20 or 100 units of cost. No thanks.

This post will provide you with results based on water sitting on bare high carbon steel until it has evaporated. It is plain tapwater from appalachia, treated with the chemical industry’s finest, and includes some minerals (it’s a little hard). it has also sat for a while, so maybe much of the sterilizing bits are gone.

At any rate, this is a “test of things that shouldn’t” happen in your shop, but could if you’re ever exposed to storing tools where a leak occurs or condensation on ducting drips on tools. Been there done that in my humid shop.

The tested rust protections are:

• Ceramic finish “with Graphene”
• Dewaxed Blonde Shellac
• Carnauba Wax
• Tung/Rosin Varnish that’s shop made

For anything you’re actually using on a regular basis, mineral oil and wax will never not be enough. However, what triggered this was really aiming to test the hardness of these “ceramic finishes” that cause water to bead. They are quoted in pencil hardnesses, like 9h. I have 9h pencils, but must admit I don’t have a good way of seeing if they are harder than varnish – or maybe I do. It’s not important because based on the results of this test, I never got there. I can’t stand influencers, though, nor can I stand – and it’s just a personal irk – the idea that influencers are providing woodworkers with something so valuable that they can market claims that don’t hold water (or prevent it from touching metal!). It’s my supposition that in nearly all cases, the information provided in non-marketing videos is there to funnel people toward the money making bits and claim that the arrangement arises out of the opposite circumstances. Or in this case, the “technique” videos are the mirrors on a solar oven. The reviews themselves are already veiled advertising – it’s the most convenient way to propose something to you that’s really just directing to purchasing avenues without saying “i’d like to introduce this product that i’ll make money from if you buy it”.

So, the test of these things was simple and the failure of the “ceramic coating” triggered me to try a few others. All that’s done is a glue bottle full of water is squirted onto the steel and allowed to stand without any interference until the water dries. The result for the “ceramic coating” is this:

The coating was applied thinly, but uniformly and then allowed to stand for a day. The result was shocking -this occurs in one day.

Well, then, what about shellac, as I assumed that shellac might be a better barrier than wax, and maybe it is to vapor or humidity, but here’s how shellac did with standing water.

That’s even worse, but what’s curious about it is the water seemed to lay out and perhaps hydrated the finish layer to give such a uniform rusty result. The “nano” finishes do feel like nanosilica additive to the touch and they do cause the water to bead and not lay out like shellac did.

We already know shellac isn’t waterproof – it takes very little time to make something wet and have it soak in.

As bad as shellac fared, I figured maybe “nano ceramic” wasn’t too bad, but it sure wouldn’t help you if you had a drop or condensation that stood on a tablesaw top, and we are well aware that even without that, the wood whisperer’s magic affiliate deal didn’t lead to a stored table saw top that didn’t rust. So regardless, it’s not that great, either.

Carnauba would be the next option – it’s cheap to make a carnauba wax (25% carnauba, 75% aromatic solvent, heat outside, pour in a jar, apply thinly and buff lightly with something like kraft paper).

Still not a good result – but the water beaded and then never seemed to lay out to cover a wide area like it did with shellac. This result does look similar in severity to the Ceramic Finish.

And lastly, since these all worked about as well as a bucket of steam in a bull ring, I applied a very thin “by finger” layer of 1/1 limed tung rosin. This varnish has 2% beeswax in it, though that has settled some. I don’t think the wax will improve it, but may test the same without wax. one to one just means the solids are half varnish and half tung oil. 1% japan dryer exists and I allowed this thin film less than a day to dry in an area that’s 62 degrees F. It’s cured “enough” even though it may fare a little better if it could stand for a week or cure in the sun and so on.

What’s left behind is a little bit of mineral that you can actually see, but it did also degloss the varnish a little. No rust. Post two will go a step further into not just showing the rust in the failures, but how much or how little is removed with a quick scrub of #00 steel wool.

I do have to ask a question at this point that is important, though. The nanosilica finish does cause impressive initial beading. I don’t know about durability but suspect it will stay on a car finish longer than wax, perhaps by a good bit, but there’s practically no chance that one application will last half the life of a car. However, its job on a car is not necessarily to protect the finish from water as the clear coat under it is not harmed by water. In my estimation, it’s more of a way to cover surface scratches and wear with a finish that beads. I have no clue of the beading does anything more than create a result that draws in people who know what a freshly waxed car does with water.

But, as this stuff is being marketed to woodworkers in droves to protect surfaces from water ingress, why in the world would you use it for that? I suspect it’s being sold at you because it’s good for affiliate programs, meaning there’s a huge margin and influencers can extract some of that. It is, in my opinion, antisocial unethical behavior. That makes me Mr. Negative, as there’s no upshot to this post – I’m not selling you anything other than the idea you can take this problem on yourself and not be a lemming. There isn’t enough critical questioning and you’ll find throngs of fanboys if you do it, so if you want to be liked or you’re also thinking of selling things to people, it’s not a good idea to be Mr. Negative. I’m good with it if the motive is something positive, though.

Not the plane, not the float, but the file handle screwdriver.

Have you ever used a narrower screwdriver to find that it’s marking and chewing up a fairly soft chipbreaker screw? What about the case where you buy one of those boutiquey things like LN or LV make (I either have or have had both – still have at least one of them), only to find that some older screw isn’t wide enough or in the case of the LV version, is too large around? Plus, you feel the obligation to keep those things nice…

I like a long handled screwdriver with a wide blade – and you can find them sort of easily, but I will generally have one and then lose it, and do nothing for five years but wonder where it went. In the middle of making the iron and cap iron set for the pictured plane, I thought maybe if I make a dump screwdriver, I’ll have incentive to not lose it. Plus, I can make the handle wooden and just use an offcut of the high carbon steel and hammer out the tip and then grind it after heat treatment. The whole thing should take about 10 minutes as long as lazy fitting of the shaft into the handle is done. In that case, it’s drilling the center out of the file handle and just flooding it with epoxy. If it breaks later, who cares, I’ll make another one. That did all take about 10 minutes and I did it spur of the moment because the pan of sand that I use to stabilize temps in the tempering oven was hot from tempering the iron.

Same steel, same tempering, whatever. The other quirk here is to accommodate the largest number of screws possible, and not break easily, the blade of the screwdriver is very slightly convex, and the tip is fine. If the whole thing was hollow ground, the tip couldn’t be that fine, so the compromise here is even though a convex face screwdriver isn’t what you want in general, when you’re working with a bunch of wide screws and sometimes they are old and the slot appears to have been swaged or chiseled in, convex isn’t so bad.

And, oh yeah, what’s a dump tool?

It doesn’t mean the tool is dumpy, it means it’s made of stuff that was headed for the dump. I made the mistake of referring to a knife I made for someone as a dump knife at one point when they showed a picture of it. The peanut gallery missed the fact that I made it and thought I was insulting the poster and it was more a matter of the poster extolling the virtues of just how much better it sharpened and worked than a two cherries chip carving knife, puzzling over why the steel was so much more friendly and crisp for the user….than it was talking about the wonderfulness of the knife. The result of not thinking about that? “you’re an asshole – just because someone else doesn’t make something perfect, you don’t have to be such an asshole about it”. Yeah, we’ll I made it – it’s a dump knife. It was heat treated with a quick heat and quench, then tempered and the materials were headed to the dump. This is a dump screwdriver. I’d have parted with the handle a little less easy, but in a per-handle purchase of a bunch of file handles off of Ebay, it’s a dollar. The offcut is hard to find a use for.

Back to the Dump Screwdriver

This will perhaps expose my laziness, but I had no intention to do anything but use this as a screwdriver. In a pinch, I’d knocked the corners off and filed the shaft of the screwdriver ahead of time. That means everything on it was slightly convex in general, and then the corners are eased just enough to not make them uncomfortable.

This turns out to be a gold mine for card scrapers. It’s not a matter of whether or not this will dominate the other scraper burnishes that I have, it’s just how much rounding of the corner is needed. I ended up polishing the almost flat faces and then stoning the corners now and buffing them. you can flatten an already-there burr with the width or thickness and then roll the handle ever so slightly to introduce the corner and a burr is had effortlessly.

I am so lazy, existing within a hobby that does have a lot of physical exertion, that something little like this is the nugget of gold that I always look for. you don’t even have to squeeze the scraper tightly on the bevel side, you just rotate the screwdriver shaft a little and introduce the back corner to the edge that’s being turned to a burr (or drawn out) and finding just the right amount of edge aggression to cater to laziness is easy. The screwdriver itself is around 64 hardness, so it’s indifferent about scraper edges, and it’s tough enough that it’s not going to break easily as a screwdriver.

I’m happy to have not made it any nicer than it is, and am now somewhat curious about perhaps making some nice screwdrivers out of round or square stock and maybe making them octagonal and much more carefully filed on the metal parts. They won’t be 125cr1 or 26c3 as long shafted screwdrivers- they’ll be something a little lower carbon for toughness. And if I lose this one, I’ll feel no guilt – the ultimate time spent on this was closer to 20 minutes due to honing the screwdriver shaft and hastily slathering varnish on the handle. I can do that again faster than getting too and from home depot in a busy retail corridor and then doing stupid things like “come on, now the stub screwdriver is $10 instead of $6, and it’s made in China?”.

First, before I show any pictures, I bought a random “graphene” so called ceramic finish off of aliexpress. The bottle that I got is labeled “Adam’s”, which is suspiciously similar to other bottles of the same thing with nothing on the label. So you have to decide reading this if you think I got the real thing and it’s just a private branded version of a $15-$20 finish that you can just order yourself, or if you think this is fake. if you believe that, and you’ve been stained by influencers to tooting your horn about “ceramic coatings”, then all you need is unfinished steel that will rust and you can do the same test.

I suspect this is the same, but have no proof and don’t know who “Adam” is. If “Adam” purchases products from China and resells them, then you get what you get. If “Adam” actually developed something and they are selling it on the side directly, then that’s kind of rude, but not the point here.

What’s in these finishes based on the SDS is a refractory resin, which I read some about. These are resins that are set to cure at normal temperatures, vs those that might need to be baked, and they will handle relatively high temperatures, but relative is doing a lot of work. What I gather is they will tolerate several hundred degrees, but if you’re thinking of refractory bricks or refractory linings in kilns, nothing close to that.

I have gone off several times on forums about people like the Wood Whisperer posting affiliate links to products, coming out and talking about how they didn’t stop rust on a cast iron table in storage (not in the rain, in storage) and that you should buy them anyway. I suspect the second video is just a shot at harvesting more affiliate commissions and that the woodworking hobby has come to this “you should buy this” instead of you should be inspired to make things….that bugs me. George Wilson kind of laid the burden on me that I could make things that look a little nicer. I thought he was wrong, but his view of that accelerated me and really turned what is a burden to a joy – feeling like you could figure things out or make them well, or at least challenge trying to do it. This is missing from the hobby as the algorithms and influencers go – it’s a chance to stay a beginner for 20 years and go to a lot of classes and marketing.

If you love that, fine, but it’s not the message for a maker. The message for a maker is generally you want to make something, you can figure it out, but the core of being a maker (and it’s OK not to be a great one relative to greats! but you can be better vs. you yesterday), is you have to find something you really want to make badly enough to make it well, and then find out what well means. Well usually means function, look and feel of some sort. But looks are important, and feel is important if it can be discerned and function if function is important. These are the joys of making, not trying to buy something that’s sold because the margin is large.

So, I am delighted…

…to show you how well a fairly healthy rubbed in coat of ceramic finish does to protect metal from standing water.

OK, so tell me again why you want to put this on other finishes? You can see the dullness here around the finish, and you can tell I scratched off prior rust. This is 26c3 flat stock. How does a “ceramic” finish allow water right through to the metal? And to be frank, this is spectacular rust, but this is a difficult test to pass as it turns out.

Both Carnauba and Shellac tests are now running and the water has not yet evaporated -and they’re already rusty. I’ve had pretty good luck with oils, waxes and shellac from vapor or humidity related rust. So this piece of bar once done here will get stowed near the door where temp and humidity change quickly, and we’ll see if any one of the three Carnauba, Shellac or “Ceramic” areas fares better.

What do I see when putting water on these areas in general? Initially, the “Ceramic” finish does feel like nanosilica (yes, I got a bag of nanosilica to put in other finishes to see if it can do anything alone – short answer, nothing useful), even though it may not be a finish with nanosilica in it the same as I have it loose here. The water beads impressively, but eventually, it breaches that.

We already know that shellac and carnauba are not waterproof. How badly the “ceramic” finish did here is a surprise and it begs the question – why would you use this as a “protective” layer? There are plenty of finishes that are actually waterproof that if you really needed to protect a finish, you could thin them and apply them very thinly and abrade them off – or just wax them later if you don’t want to.

I’ll test one of my varnishes with this, too – but in a really really thin layer. I don’t personally feel like this (varnish) is a great idea for a metal protecting moisture barrier because it isn’t going to be removed easily, but what is “ceramic finish” going to do for your furniture – allow the water through under a sweating glass and then hold it in?

I get what this does for car finishes – you don’t need something waterproof on a car finish and you might really delight in the beading and uniformity of the surface, even though it’s actually slightly dull. Compared to worn and abused car paint, it probably looks very glossy in sunlight.

I didn’t start to coat metal here to set out to embarrass this nonsense about “ceramic” finishes that are supposedly super hard but expressed in pencil lead hardness scale, I wanted to apply it to other finished wood like with shellac on and see just how protective it was and how scratch resistant it was. The first attempt at this deglossed which immediately triggered the desire to see if the degloss was superficial on wood or if it was a significant breach like this.

You can make varnish, and if you don’t want to, the entire coatings industry for furniture and housewares is full of durable finishes that are actually waterproof. if you don’t want them on the surface, you can thin them to death and allow them to soak into wood so they are resident in it rather than on it.

Ask your “friendly” influencers to run this same test, and if they show no rust, then do it yourself, because if they show no rust, they’re probably cheating the test perhaps by putting it on top of a waterproof finish. I’m fairly sure at this point if I apply my own varnish, and put this on top of it, there would be no rust. Except we now know, it’s the varnish doing the work, not the “ceramic finish”.

I think the last time I posted, I was making a coffin smoother. I made it, it looks a little funny because I haven’t built one in a while, so I made another. Planes 1 and 3 are here – the second indian rosewood smoother I still have and will use, but this smoother is Gombeira. About 30% more dense than water in the case of this sample.

All three recent planes have the same kind of iron – a tapered iron made of 1.25% steel referred to as 125cr1. it’s a very clean steel and easy to work with, but not bumped into a class of the remelted steels as far as I know. My limited use of remelted steels suggests they are just a little better for the maker.

I went on a tear pulling old beech sticks out that I have left from when I was making more planes and to my shock, the four from horizon that were euro beech all twisted moderately or bowed a *lot*. I’m glad that they sat here for a while and I didn’t make planes out of them, but I suspect that they were under tension because the wood wasn’t straight and without tension in a tree and they’re moving toward that.

Backing up a second, I’m convinced coffin smoothers were used differently than you’d use a stanley smoother. And it might be more efficient in some ways, but torturous in others. I think the platform allows easier removal of big shavings, but obviously adjustment to a small degree is less convenient and the fact that there is less friction means the plane has to be more in the cut and will not enter a cut as easily or stay in an iffy cut.

Some version of this is the nature of using the double iron – it lets you bolster the shaving thickness, get a lot more done and work a lot more cubic footage of wood with each sharpening cycle. And if you have a marginal iron, you have to focus on this even more and end up learning something useful in all work. This ability is what eliminated the single iron plane. You can’t do it with a single iron and for all but the thinnest smoothing and using perfect wood, a double iron plane will pretty easily outwork a single iron plane at least two to one and without the user feeling like they are having to rush or slash around.

So, back to the wood:

This piece has two issues – one the grain isn’t straight cut center down the length of the billet, and this was expensive wood – something like $15 a board foot, but when it’s good or even just pretty good, I’ll gladly pay it. You can’t make good planes with common wood unless you laminate. No thanks on that.

er…forgot the second issue – the second issue is the billet itself bowed at least 3/8″ through the center. we don’t really like planes that bow a few thousandths, so hopefully it’s over that.

I’ll make myself a plane with it. I much appreciate the look of american beech – it has more of a beeswing look and can be dazzling like quatered sycamore, and euro beech looks nice but it has these little brown egg shaped dots all over it that make it recognizable in ikea laminations, etc. the camera is confused by the lightness and bright white overhead LEDs and the picture is not true color, but that’s the way it goes.

After hand sawing off these wedge shaped bits, the wood ends up like this:

The end of this stick is within only single digit degrees of being perfectly orthogonal – I’ll plane one face of this that would be a sole perfectly flat to a straight edge and then see what it does over the next couple of months as the weather changes. Kind of like you’d do with wood for a guitar neck, except I’d never use this for a guitar neck given its history.

it does have some nice curl along the top, which should look brilliant with a varnish finish.

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.