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There are always things to learn or understand. For me as an amateur toolmaker, one of those is the impact of alloy choices. For the most part, you and I can feel things like hardness, and on the stones, you can get a pretty good idea once hardness is known how long the potential edge life may be. Briefly put, the longer it takes to sharpen something of the same hardness -and really fully sharpen it – the longer it would last in a planing test.

How long it lasts in real use when cuts are interrupted in rough work is entirely a different matter, and is why in my work, V11 doesn’t measure up to its hypothetical test results. In my hands, actually, those tests were spectacular – it lasted twice as long as my O1 irons in long grain. In actual work, since smoothing continuous wood is really just the last step and over in a sniff, there isn’t much like the test. As confident as I was in the test results having planed something like 40,000 feet, I realized that I would need to test the irons further in rough work, but this is far less easy to test in a way that’s repeatable by someone else as you’d have to have enough rough work of similar boards, and a plane that you’d like to do it with. I didn’t.

In the end, I learned a lesson – abrasion resistance doesn’t matter if the edge gets damaged instead of abraded. Stability of the edge in actual wok is top dog and an iron with less wear resistance may be less work.

On to the Stanley

In the hardness testing results here and discussed here, I was surprised to find that a later type stanley iron tested just fine. 61.5 hardness. Without going into details, I’d regarded the later types as generally kind of soft, they don’t wear that long, and in a prior post in the blog, I showed pictures of the worn edge. It *feels* like softer steel in planing, but has no carbides in it. Edge life isn’t great, but no professional would care. It’s not that bad, and the somewhat false need for edge life comes from the idea that all shavings are thin.

I hardened another one of those irons with sharp corners at the top and it tested at 63.5. This was a shock, because it still ignores the fact that their edge life is less than O1. The two things together beg a question – is it the lack of iron carbides that create the issue? O1 steel itself isn’t really that plain – it’s got excess tungsten and a little bit of excess chromium and it does last longer in an abrasion test than “plain old carbon steel”. So some of that is involved, but there’s almost certainly some alloying in the stanley irons to make them more hardenable. There isn’t enough of it along with enough carbon to form carbides that cast visible light. Roughly speaking, details about a micron in size begin to show up as visible under my metallurgical scope.

But I still had a Wild Card – a Round Top Stanley Iron

I’ve been advised and generally advised folks that the round top irons in later planes are a little weak. Fine for coarse work, but if you do a lot of fine smoothing, you’ll be doing a lot of sharpening. If you’re planing hardwoods, even more, as the apex of these irons seems to be somewhat intolerant of impact.

I figured this would finally be the iron that proves stanley jumped the shark with hardness.

Pardon the tape or whatever is stuck to the top. These irons aren’t actually round topped, they just have rounded edges/corners at the top. I think I have two of them and I’m still going to find the other one and ensure that one also tests the same before this is all settled, but this iron tested all strikes of 61 and 61.5.

I scraped it, cleaned it off, whatever, same number.

The aldi chisels do the same fooling. I tested one – the first one was 58.5. They feel a little softer than that, but close enough. The other three that I dug up yesterday were just under 60.

This isn’t going to turn into some sellers-esque lifestyle woodworking where I claim they measure up to the better English chisels. They don’t. The differences aren’t unhardened vs. hardened, but a person working in some volume will appreciate how much better a ward chisel is, both in steel and proportion.

I’m fairly sure that what’s being observed with all of these is a combination of wear resistance with very little alloying, but also lower carbon, as well as something described as edge stability by the knife community.

We all know “toughness” and “strength” even though people often use the terms incorrectly. They are measured on a larger scale than just at the apex of a tool, at least the couple of thousandths that we use. Edge stability is a term used by the knife folks. It turns out to be somewhat similar to the whole Unicorn concept, though I knew nothing of it other than an old video of Cliff Stamp talking about managing the angles to dictate where edge failure would occur, and my own experience seeing that edge failure in tools – to the point that we are forced to sharpen, is rarely more than a couple of thousandths deep.

Larrin’s older post discusses this here:

https://knifesteelnerds.com/2018/08/27/what-is-edge-stability/

With knives, the discussion is more wide open because there isn’t such a standard use as there is with chisels, and some edge failure is tolerable in the case of a knife with a thinner bevel. Think cutting cloth or boxes or something vs. chiseling. Knives have a much more wide ranging application.

My article about the unicorn is currently not up on Woodcentral. I don’t have any idea why, but I’ll be rewriting it and hopefully in an improved way, and posting it here. Several years of use and a different format necessitates it. Something of its absence could be the redesign by a site administrator who doesn’t know anything about woodworking, or also by the less than flattering results obtained with V11 given that Lee Valley is an advertiser on the site. Who knows, I don’t.

I observed a problem, I solved it. Whoever came up with linen and leather did the same thing. A long stropped comfortable straight razor has a very acute following angle, but the edge worn slightly by the strop and then becomes very stable and probably could be used for years with nothing more than linen and leather.

I think what we’re finding in what’s really just observation of toolmaking experiments is that below about 0.8% carbon, we don’t have the edge stability that we’d like. I wouldn’t be surprised if later stanley irons are a little less than that. That’s below 1084, and typically in the matrix steels (AEB-L and matrix versions of high speed steel), the carbon content is low. For AEB-L, it can be down to about 0.6%.

For lower carbon steels of this type that aren’t also alloyed, heat treatment becomes simplified. No carbides, nothing to dissolve, and nothing is keeping grains from being reset very easily – no carbides or vanadium pinning grain, no chromium of note, etc. That translates to the same hardness as earlier irons, maybe due to tempering being less, but the time the steel needs to spend hot is less, and the temperature that needs to be used is less.

This is by no means a recommendation to seek any of these irons out unless you’re looking to sharpen more often. The perception from actual use still remains – they’re not that great. They can be used, but they will not match even a good O1 iron. Too, there is no guarantee that the other one, if I can locate it, will test the same, as the shape is slightly different.

It’s definitely true that I didn’t notice the same thing with later stanley mexico planes -the iron in them isn’t exactly a thriller, but it does have some carbides in it that show up under magnification.

I’ve posted a permanent page of hardness test results here:

Hardness Test Results

These results are accessible from the home page ribbon as well as with this link, and as I test additional tools (old, new, and my own), I will add entries.

I am emboldened. Much of my thoughts about what I can feel with hardness, and how consistent I can feel it is supported by the hardness tester.

This is a boast, as George Wilson used to say, when you can do something, maybe it’s still boasting, but it’s true.

But this means ultimately, you could do it, too, as I have no real special talent other than curiosity and plenty of people on the forums will confirm that if you ask them.

I will put up a separate post about the hardness results that I’ve found in a bonanza of testing over the last several days, but they also help to confirm other thoughts of mine – that older English tools aren’t any too soft.

Thus far, of the chisels and irons that I’ve liked, and that are well received, only one tested below 60 (a parer that I’ve used little). Everything else has tested 61.5+.

A few other things have solved mysteries that I thought maybe I just wasn’t perceiving correctly, and a pair of boutique irons that I always thought were a bit of a bear compared to their specs (hock O1 france and LN spokeshave iron) tested at 64 hardness. I struck them both over and over to come up with the same thing.

I think it will be an interesting thing for us to look at as I compile test data.

The tester that I purchased is a hand held tester that can be used in a stand, but it is a full strength diamond cone tester, just like the upright stationary types. There are some nuances in handling it, but anyone who can sharpen a plane iron freehand would gather these quickly, and then the device will return a value that differs by well less than a point on the C scale every time.

Lastly, the device has confirmed that the things that I think i can do well (26c3 steel) and consistently are really close. Every single 26c3 item so far has struck at 63.5 except for one, and that remaining item struck a test result of 64. I’m so pleased to see that because I can scarcely perceive any hardness difference between any of those four, except I did perceive the 64 result as being slightly hard. But I could have also been telling myself that because it was heat treated twice and got a little overtemp on the second try. I certainly wouldn’t claim to feel 1/2 point.

At any rate, this tester will help us bust some myths, and it has already helped me clean up two steels I was coming up short on with the induction forge.

What we see in test results and now my addressing those shortcomings, and then confirming that how I get hardness where it should be doesn’t lead to a poor outcome is a good topic for a future post, because it will help you do the same if you’d like to try your hand at heat treating, but you’re reading too many internet articles that tell you that you’ll just find uncontrollable grain growth or lack of hardness.

I will give you some advice on how to get reliable sampling without having to buy $700 chinese hardness testers or induction forges. All you’ll need is a good file and willingness to make test samples with offcuts and look at them under any inexpensive magnification.

I really don’t know how much stuff I’ll ever make for sale. But entertaining the idea makes it seem like some kind of hardness tester is in order. I’d like to test everything for a while before grinding until or unless I find there’s no reason to.

Why? I can test (in use) every chisel or iron and call it good, but I think that ultimately makes the goods used and it does take a lot of extra time.

Finding a job shop with a hardness tester isn’t feasible – not for cost reasons, but nuisance/time reasons.

I’ve looked off and on at hardness testers listed on craigslist – the bench or table top type, but they never show up without something broken. I think I’ve figured out why. For a lab or shop to use a hardness tester, I guess periodic calibration is customary. I’m not that worried about getting a reading down to 0.3 points, but rather not missing something underhardened or measurably harder than expected, which would be associated with grain growth.

Domestic hardness testers are expensive, and the more capable, the more expensive ($10k isn’t unusual). I haven’t yet seen a working domestic hardness tester of any type that’s under $1000 and they’re usually offered by flippers or as “shop liquidation”.

And here’s where the rub is – if you buy one used, and find that the diamond needs replacing, the diamond cone that indents steel (the machine measures how deep the indent under standard loads) is a minimum of $600 or so, some more.

I don’t get it.

There are three other alternatives: portable american types that are slightly less accurate, but acceptable, like Ames ($3500 new (!) or about $500-$1000 used depending on condition), portable chinese ($650) or bench top chinese ($1500 with shipping in the US or a little under $1000 if ordered directly from china).

The diamond cone indenters sold in china are about $20. the Ames domestic portable versions, a replacement diamond cone if a diamond cracks or the cone gets damaged, $600-$800 (!!!).

A bench top chinese type from china seems suddenly reasonable, but they’re about 200 pounds and I don’t know that I believe freight shipping options will get the machine here without breaking something. And what do you do with a broken hardness tester? it looks like people try to sell them on ebay, but I doubt they have much luck.

Amazon and Grisly sell the same machines – the chinese price is $530 for the machine and about $375 for shipping. Grisly’s cost with shipping and tax is approaching 1600-1700, which again leads you to think “Ok, same tester with a big logo on it, and plenty of accounts of customer service that’s not that great when something is damaged”.

And I ended up at the item that I thought for sure I wouldn’t buy. A new Chinese portable hardness tester, which I still don’t see why is as expensive as it is, but it’s coming from amazon.

Sometimes things turn out to be a not very great feeling purchase, but as a matter of need, I also don’t want to buy something that makes no sense (an Ames tester and then have to turn around and either try to sell it broken or missing parts or get stuck buying a $700 indenter that’s about the size of a pinkie tip).

There are parts of moving on to making more metal tools that I’ve really liked, but navigating around various belt grinding machines (went cheap, glad I did) that are really sold for industry, and dealing with stuff like the hardness tester. I guess it’s just a symptom of slipping off into a hobby where there isn’t a bunch of harvey industries hand tool stuff made on the cheap.

There just aren’t that many places to shop, and industrial supply is out of the question. The chinese hardness tester that I’m waiting on to arrive is private labeled and market at $2800 by grainger (!!). And even at that, with the promise that you could get it in two months because it drop ships from a supplier. Awesome. $2000 mark up to drop ship something that weighs about 5 pounds.

Ultimately, a necessary thing to get but not very pleasant. I’ll know in a couple of days if the cheap one works. There are other things I’d like to know, and this will help (how hard are my stainless knives, how hard is a chisel in the first half inch vs. three inches from the bevel and at the shoulder).

It’s never great to shop for things that aren’t used by hobbyists and have a small market.

I can show you tools that I’ve made. I’ll show you the second saw handle that I ever made (I’d made a few plane handles before this, so there’s some cross over).

This saw handle isn’t the inspiration. This is the second saw handle that I made, as mentioned, but why it’s important is because the first one that I made was “good” by first standards, but it was not similar to this. I can see now why that was the case. The horns are better on this saw, curves are natural, the transition lines are stark, the pip is sharp, and I managed to find buttery quartersawn apple (never have been able to since) to make the handle. Notice the curves on the inside of the handle at the front, how the handle isn’t just flat, and the dynamics of the curves aren’t just a round over or routered look.

I learned about this stuff right away when I made this handle. This is the first anything I made after George Wilson saw my first handle online and said “give me your phone number”. I really didn’t want the obligation, but have to admit running around in a jelly diaper (figuratively, as a woodworker) seemed lacking and I knew the first handle would be fine for sawing, but direction after that wasn’t clear. “I’ll get better a little at a time” was comforting, but I didn’t know what combination of execution vs. just not knowing what it should look like existed. it turns out that even though I’m by no means great at anything, it was 10% execution and 90% just not knowing what the outcome should look like and why.

George laid that all on me at once. I feared failure. the handle isn’t perfect – the lamb’s tongue is miles better than the first (which was the same thickness for its entire length – no animal that looks like a lamb has a milled steel parallel thickness tongue from end to end). George also didn’t give me quite the step by step that I mentioned above, but he talked about aspects and what would look better, and I took a risk and did it. The risk was posting saw number two and not knowing george well, having him tell me that it wasn’t very good. I was already 10 years into a white collar career and to find out you’re “not worth a shit” at something else is a big threat.

Except it seemed almost like magic at the time when I was done. Looks like the wood has shrunk a little since then and the screws are proud. Oh well. I needed the saw at the time and it performs that function well.

But this isn’t furniture and only furniture counts

That’s often said. I think it’s limiting, as mentioned, if you want to find something where you’ll go broke – try making a business making fine high skill solid wood furniture.

Someone sent me this picture yesterday – this isn’t my work.

I don’t even know the person who did this work, I just know who sent it to me because they were inspired by it. Look at the fronts, look at the base moulding and the beads and the carving. The carving is crisp and clean and has excellent symmetry and depth.

And though it’s a different skill…look at the side. that looks to me like it’s one board. i asked if it is, and it is indeed a single board of mahogany (!!!).

the drawer fronts will be carved and the piece will get hardware and finish and who knows what else.

I requested a grapevine message be sent to be returned about whether or not I could post this here. Why?

The sender told me that the maker of this desk has only been woodworking for several years.

Think about that.

It reminded me of Wyatt McQueen, who came out of Thaddeus Stevens college east of me able to make furniture like this probably at age 20, and maybe since Wyatt was and is a pro, it’s even beyond this.

I saw Wyatt’s furniture on display with Wyatt presenting them, much younger than me at the time, and it was a real lesson. What I am doing, because I want to build nicer things, and why am I not pushing to do it.

What’s in this piece isn’t some kind of pondering that Paul Sellers could also do it, or how Rob Cosman would tell someone to do the dovetails or whether or not it’s hand planed. What’s in it is a shot of high voltage calibration that should enter the thoughts for all of us – if this is something someone can do within a few years, are we sure we’re leaning from the right places?

And it does, of course, make me wonder if I’m doing the right thing putting off furniture making until retirement in favor of knife, tool and instrument making in most cases for now.

if I could do work to this level, it would be entirely by hand, and I would end up making tools to do it. How would you get to this point?

At the very start of this, you would need to study why it looks good, why it’s executed well so far and understand that. Because if you can’t understand or visualize that, you haven’t got much chance making it. And if you’re looking at your tenth honing guide that Lee Valley or LN is releasing and always letting yourself off the hook – think about whether or not you really want to be there, or if you’d like to do as much as you can, even if that’s getting a tenth of the way to a piece like this.

I guarantee there are people reading this who aren’t close to making something like this piece, but what’s missing is information, not talent. And it goes all the way down to solving the little problems with the big ones and telling yourself you can. You can.

This picture was a nice shot in the arm for me – always think about doing better, figuring out what doing better is, how to do better more accurately and more efficiently at the same time. I can’t help you with the bits and bobs in this furniture. I just really don’t feel like talking about saw handles, but if someone had style questions, i could assist what’s generally good and what’s generally not, and you’ll find yourself 80% of the way to good right away rather than 10% of the way there.

And if you have questions about things like setting up or honing an incannel patternmaker’s gouge so that it has a fine sharp edge that doesn’t just chip off, of course I can help with that. We can probably all be better at something for our own investment in ourselves.

But maybe this kind of self reflection and problem solving, and believing we can solve the little problems of making progressively is never going to survive a forum discussion or cycle of magazine articles that goes round and round and round forever below the level of this. it’s all too superficial. We have more within us.

I mention the frustrated furniture makers who aren’t furniture makers all the time. One of them has a last name of a university he could never hope to sniff the doors of. I doubt there’s much furniture making.

What I often say is something like those folks are filing out tax forms for a living, perhaps living off of a spouses income, or maybe doing site work.

There’s no point to this post other than making it clear that when someone does site work, especially well, or interior custom joinery, that’s not to deride those trades. It’s to deride people who dabble in them and then talk as if they are some furniture tycoon.

I work with a lot of good auditors (maybe not tax preparers) and the neighbor over the fence is a contractor who does the work soup to nuts on projects that aren’t more than $50k or so. I had him fit out a room on my house and make it permanent, and all I heard from the neighbors was “did you check around? he’s not the cheapest. I heard they do good work, but their prices are high”.

Yeah, I know what the price is. I paid the guy – cash – so that I would feel the pain of paying for the work and not get suckered into scope creep that comes along when you ask if you can afford the loan vs. afford the project.

My neighbor is a master not just of basic soup to nuts site work, but he fits all of the trimwork air tight, and while I wouldn’t pay anyone to make furniture, I would gladly pay my neighbor to do trimwork at a level that I’d have to do five times to get as tight.

Good work is good work, whether it’s audit, legal, food prep, joiners work or trim or whatever else. It just would get really weird if you hired some guy to do some legal work and found out the guy practiced law one day a week, but had a hobby of going to the internet to criticize bird carvers or something. There seems to be a lot of that. It doesn’t lift the standard of anything for anyone.

We all live outcomes. People who do what they say and are honest about it and do a good job without misleading others generally raise the standard of living for everyone, whether they’re drafting a will or installing a bathroom sink.

When I was younger, like all of us in our teenage years, I thought someone wearing wrap arounds was the sign of them giving up.

It usually coincided with not combing hair, maybe walking around with mouth open sometimes, and those jackets that had sort of the sock texture lining and the nylon outside that looked almost like it was waterproof, but wasn’t. That was before fleece was everywhere and in everything.

Wrap Around Infrared Sun Glasses on Top of an Induction Forge

A couple of days ago, I got my first wrap arounds. I’ll be 50 in a few years. Here in the burbs, a lot of people age 50 these days try to dress and act like they’re 20. 40 years ago, people who were 40 tended to be fine with looking like they were older than they actually work. I wonder what’s caused this difference, but maybe that’s something for another time.

I got my wrap arounds and i’m on my way to walking around with my mouth open catching the unexpected gnat. I have excellent distance eyesight but the close up stuff is going what seems quickly. It’s not really quick, but if you have better than 20/20 eyesight as I did for about 40 years and still do distance, any loss or eye strain is a foreign concept.

The point of the wrap arounds is infrared light. The induction forge has been a godsend for chisel making operations that involve a lot of heat. If you wanted to do so intentionally, you could put a chisel with a bolster blank in the forge and just melt it off. All of it in a shower of bright yellow sparks. But that bright yellow is eye damaging. I never read that it was until after noticing the strain.

I have another pair of IR glasses, and envisioned something much cooler, like those side shield glasses that you see people wearing in the old Hawley videos – the ones that glassworkers and steelworkers wear. However, they have some big mineral sounding name to the glass and all are expensive, and some indications are that they’re more suitable for glass blowing than metalwork. Who knows if that’s true. I eschewed the safety glass style glasses both so I can use my regular glasses, but more because a couple of times, I’ve walked away in a rush with hot metal with regular glasses fallen on the floor and nearly stepped on them.

Forge Welded Blanks on the Anvil

Now, i can just leave my glasses on and leave the wrap arounds at the forge. They only need to be worn when heating steel to the level that it will actually stick to itself. Even without hammering. Though the bolster in this case gets hammered to the tang to form it. One could make this kind of thing a science project, but in short, the blanks are square steel with a round hole drilled in them, and the rest of the shaping is just done by the actual chisel tang.

The chisel on the left, aside from dirt, is just to show what the tang will look like after it’s ground and filed.

This was one of the trickier parts to get down being self taught – getting the bolster and the tang hot enough to stick together and then hammer forming them without distorting the tang itself and making a chisel with a mushroom shaped bolster blank and a tang that looks like a railroad switch route.

The induction forge is the right tool for this job, but it’s not like stepping on a pedal and it’s on – there are still things to screw up. If there weren’t, it wouldn’t be that interesting.

Still, a device that’s ready to go all the time and that can have a chisel hot in 20 seconds, with hot basically being an unlimited term – excellent and I’m sure less detrimental to the health of the forger who sucks in a lot less particulate/smokey stuff than one does with a forge.

Years ago, I was a hunter. I no longer am and at the risk of having my house raided, I turned my guns into plowshares….er rather tools a while ago. This is the burbs, it wasn’t convenient to use them without driving far enough away to waste half a day to shoot groups and come back. So off they went to someone who will use them.

I remember the magazines back then. They’re probably worse now as the magazines go down the ladder to younger and younger writers who have evne more trouble hiding that the point of the articles is just to show off whatever is new and provide a link to where to buy it. I bought a 300WSM rifle back then, and it’s not that important, but it was an oversold not that revolutionary cartridge that may have been a rip off of the only writer that I actually liked in the magazines and still do looking back. A guy who wrote technical bits for reloaders and not just stories about shooting a rock sheep 582 yards away with a steady stick.

There was an upstart publication at the time that did nothing but advertise that they’d tell you when something was actually terrible. I got out of the hobby and don’t know how that worked out, or if they ever sold their souls, but I’d bet they had some difficulty finding traction in the gun world where manufacturers spent their time trying to get someone with a 300 winchester rifle to believe they needed a 300 something else that would make far less difference than just being a better hunter. Either way, everyone was selling something.

I’m not that test magazine – they were trying to make a name for themselves by blasting someone else. I will probably sell tools professionally, but my negative opinions about what’s really rooted in wanting advancement for hobbyists….those opinions aren’t linked as some kind of strategy. I can guarantee fake nice and false compliments is the way to sell more. My attitude will limit business potential. I don’t care, even if I’m making stuff and selling it, I’ll still be a hobbyist. I have a hobbyist mentality. You make what you like and try to learn first if you’re trying to get somewhere, not just go with the flow and see if you can find another quarter under a rock.

The Fallacy of The Pros

There is some sense that my negative attitude comes from asserting some sort of standing. No thanks, I have no standing, I’m not an authority on much and it’s really the hobbyist mentality that makes me crabby. I use Paul Sellers as an example, but it’s not just Paul Sellers. It’s Paul, the folks who will attach a parachute to you as you run, and the resentful furniture builders who claim to be professionals but usually are just trying to make furniture on the side.

With few exceptions, this is a Fallacy. Most of the folks who give me the most grief are self-appointed pros who would starve if they had to make furniture for a living. The false argument comes about that in hand tool talk, there’s a need to include power tools because “you can’t make any money working by hand”. Well, take away installing kitchens, repairing stuff someone else made, or building things in houses as a “furniture builder” and most furniture builders wouldn’t have much to do. They’re not furniture builders. They’re idealists, and often dishonest.

I don’t know if any of them has the potential to build something like Lonnie Bird would’ve taught, or the NBSS type projects. Maybe they do. I don’t think Paul, or Chris or Rob will ever get anyone there, but I have seen with my own eyes, people building fine period furniture as a hobby within a few years.

You just won’t find it on the forums, in the magazines, or anything like that.

I witnessed my mother work in the craft circuit, where people actually do make a decent income. My mother would’ve liked making higher end stuff, but she couldn’t find customers for it. I can’t imagine her going out to forums somewhere assailing hobbyists who were wanting to do fine pencil drawings or oil painting as “not doing it the way pros do”.

The Truth is that Fine work is for Hobbyists

One of the fine professional makers I saw trying to sell superb period furniture was 20 years at the time and just out of a two year program. He already made better furniture than he could sell and gave it a shot for a few years, but the last time I saw what he was making built ins. Except it’s important to note he doesn’t peruse forums and I don’t have any reason to believe he’d be frustrated to find out that an amateur would want to do something by hand that he couldn’t make profitably with half power tools.

I guess SAPFM gives out awards, and relaying what I recall from about a decade ago, the winners would often be physicians or some other hobbyist who was unbound by this nonsense argument that things need to be kept accessible or done “the real way pros do it”. Nothing is done now any better than it was done in 1790 and we don’t need to be stuck adhering to the idea that nothing can really progress further sprinkled with resentful attitudes from self appointed pros who never have really made a living making furniture in the first place.

Trust me on the tool side – I’ve been informed more than once about how I should really make tools, that I should not mess around with forge welding bolsters, but hire this or that thing out and really “do it like pros would do it”. I’m a hobbyist toolmaker. Even if selling something, I’m a hobbyist toolmaker. I’m curious and want to see what’s next, not how can I get into the game of marketing stuff and pushing rah rah.

When I see someone who is only a couple of years into woodworking making fine furniture or fine tools, I want to know what they’re doing. They won’t have to hide any facts.

The internet provides us a unique opportunity to share information at little cost. It’s gone backwards in 23 years as far as I can remember, in terms of woodworking info that’s shared. The folks who made inroads early on, like Lonnie Bird, where you could probably learn basics and get to building fine furniture pretty quickly, they seem to be gone for Numb Stumps, Fakobs and Pall Cellars. The art of reaching beginners and then putting them in a heavy suit to slow them down is here.

The supposed pros failing in what is a hobby now don’t help, either.

But I have no interest in creating a false aura about my accomplishments – you can see some of them on the things made. I’m not claiming to be Leonard Bailey or Cesar Chelor – i’m just a guy trying to punch the bottom of the knowledge flower to see if we can get it to bloom.

If I have to brand my tools “Cranky Brand”, that’s fine. I’m not going to pat Krenov Copy Planeworks on the back just to sell Cranky Brand tools. it’s not nearly as important as the hobby.

For somewhere around 11 or 12 years now, we’ve been hearing about Paul Sellers’ sharpening method and the description of it being traditional.

I would liken Paul to being the Robert Kiyosaki of Woodworking. We have plenty of proof that Paul makes a living teaching students, or at least a large part of his living. I can tell you from the things that I know well, he isn’t accomplished when it comes to understanding tools or making definitive comments about them, but his audience isn’t the discerning type. An example of this is commentary about how someone hardening an iron in the old days would’ve been doing the work willy nilly. I’ve never seen any example of main line high quality tools where hardening is inconsistent.

I have seen cut price tools, like Ohio or Auburn irons that just don’t seem to get their shit together even when you reharden them. If I can’t reharden something fine, thermally cycle it as part of the process to reestablish grain and then get a good result, the stock is no good.

What we don’t know is anything of Paul doing any fine work to make a living. I vaguely recall him talking about moving to the US and scraping by on the craft scene. This is make trinkets during the week and sell them on the weekend. It can be quite profitable – my mother did this for 30 years. This isn’t the same as fine work – it’s kitsch most of the time.

I use Robert Kiyosaki because everything the guy says (he’s far worse than Paul) strikes me as not being credible, and not surprisingly, you will have trouble finding anything about Robert Kiyosaki making money other than selling things to beginners claiming stories that don’t seem to have any real proof. Another example of this is Frank Abagnale. Tells a story that seems less and less likely as it goes on, and if you look into his actual past, you’ll find that his real con is selling the story. Most of it didn’t happen and his criminal record isn’t flattering. He claims to have not ripped off individuals or small businesses, but his actual criminal record shows a history of doing that but none of his taller tale feats. If you ask 50 people about “catch me if you can” do you think a majority of them would say “i don’t know how that guy managed to seed a movie about himself when the real con is that he was able to get people to believe he was an accomplished con artist”.

You have to use your sniff sense with things, and Paul’s schtick in my opinion is a lot more subtle. Look at the “piece in the white house”. Does it look like paul made it or does it look like it was made by someone who does a lot of veneering? Does it look similar to work that Frank Strazza shows on his website? I don’t really know whose fingers did the work, but it looks more Strazza and Sellers to me.

OK – What’s the Rub and Where does it Meet Traditional Sharpening?

The big myth that surrounds Paul is the idea that somehow his sharpening habits are trade tested. I think they are tested by the paint-can opening truck unloading at the jobsites trades.

I think this because I have a lot of hands on experience trying different sharpening methods and what he teaches doesn’t last long if you do more than just beginner level woodworking. You will eventually learn in bench work to separate grinding and honing so that both can be done more quickly, and you will find that if you leave a bevel convex on a plane iron, the sharpening interval shortens *a lot* and you deal with much more trouble due to limited clearance early in the wear cycle. You do more work, get less out of it, and end up sharpening longer.

The Fakobs in the world will advise beginners that this is the traditional method, and that anyone saying otherwise is trying to sell you stones or gadgets or whatever.

This is talk of stupidity. I fought it on the forums for a while, but where proof occurs is actually trying “Paul’s Traditional Way” to what was actually prescribed in literature several hundred years ago. The difference in sharpening accuracy (without as much effort) and interval of use is stark. Paul’s method sucks. I suppose if you get a tool sharpened the first time, and it’s a thrill, that’s OK – look to move on quickly, and look to move on from gurus unless you’re in it because you like the yarn.

I can’t tell you how to avoid the Fakobs, who talk at length without showing anything related to the subject, and mention their age and that they were trained in the 50s. This stuff was dead for at least 50 years by then, and I hear often about the training – especially in the UK – with hand tools, but it migrates into things like drilling a hole in all mortises and using mortise chisels with the flat side toward the wood yet to be removed. These things make no real sense, but they could be pondered either in barn mortising or imitating a machine.

If chisels got rounded over on job sites, it may have been Ok because there was no demand for better.

What the Literature Actually Says

Nicholson carefully describes sharpening for fine work to include grinding a chisel or plane iron on a round wheel and doing it carefully so as not to have a lumpy bevel (that would be convexity or threatening it), and grinding the angle at such acuteness that if the edge were used, it would not hold up. That is, grind at a shallow angle. And then hone with a fine stone or pair of fine stones at a somewhat steeper angle.

We now hear often that this is “modern”.

Maybe it’s a fluke? Except it isn’t.

Holtzapffel has careful instructions for grinding and provides angles. I suspect the angles are somewhat important, but deviating a couple of degrees will make no difference. the concept is very important and it is directly addressed to planes and chisles, there’s no escaping it by suggesting maybe it’s for turning tools. That’s addressed elsewhere.

What does Holtappfel say?

Grind on a wheel at 25 degrees and hone at 30 for softwoods and 35 for hardwoods. This sounds simplistic, but remember, when you’re reading this from my context, I have a whole bunch of microscope pictures. Typical chisels stop taking damage with a flat secondary bevel in hardwoods around 33 degrees. They will not do it at 30 degrees, even with skilled use, unless the apex of a chisel is modified with some stropping or edge conditioning routine (like buffing!). At 30 degrees, agreeable softwoods pose no threats. This advice from Holtzapffel is so good that a modern microscope can’t put a dent in it.

Holtzapffel goes on further to describe the two step routine in their case being a turkish oilstone or something similar. This is the fineness of an 8k waterstone, but slightly different characteristics – and the speed of a 4-6k oilstone but different because you can lean on the stone and do the initial honing and then lighten up, with this sort of idea taking all of about 15 seconds on a bevel, refining the edge and then lightening up a little bit to make sure the fine burr is very weak and won’t pose damage when it’s stropped off.

And then further – Hasluck, maybe Hasluck will describe the “traditional” rounded bevel that can open paint cans, cut straps off of lumber bundles and then chisel wood.

No, it doesn’t. Instead, in a guide discussing sharpening of straight edges, Hasluck goes off on a tirade of the preference for a hollow wheel grind and how detrimental any convexity will be because it steals the craftsman’s time. In Hasluck’s word, it’s similar to a craftsman showing up to the job site for the week with a poorly set and sharpened saw – that sharpening this way (with convexity) is akin to losing several hours of time before even starting the week.

And that Hasluck talks about this agrees with what I see when people send me tools, and my own inability to not grind shallow enough with any convexity to make up for the poor performance of the method. People send me tools that look innocent, but the plane irons will have clearance problems immediately after sharpening. Hasluck talks about how the convexity is fat behind the edge and if the honing angle is appropriate, the amount of metal to be honed is too fat too quickly, leading to too many trips to grind when they shouldn’t be needed, and the habit of workmen to try to evade it by steepening the angle and then costing themselves time a different way.

By my understanding, these excellent editors put together volumes based on things that were relayed to them from experienced workmen.

So, perhaps there were rounded bevels, but the credible information sources feeding the writers would have put them to the side of being crude workers or people who didn’t have the discernment to know better.

Just like the present.

These publications from Nicholson to Hasluck encompass a 100 year period ending around 1910. The first two are laden with discussion about how cap irons work. I didn’t see discussion of the cap iron in Hasluck, which was the latest of these. Maybe it existed in another book – I tend to figure something out and then find later where it was described because when I do something and find out it doesn’t work well and it’s undeniably inferior, it’s suddenly a lot easier to see what the writers are trying to convey.

If you ask someone with little experience, they will attempt to write off these texts as being dilettantes just going on at length. Based on my experience, you can find the things that were novel at the time as they are presented as new. the other stuff, you ignore at your own peril if you want to progress.

We don’t all want to be beginners forever. I learned to sharpen first from David Charlesworth’s DVD. it took 45 minutes to set up my first plane iron. Today, it would take me about 3 minutes or less to do the same thing because I am making tools and have learned to be more nuanced. What I do isn’t for beginners when flattening – some parts of it may be, but the method overall is too nuanced.

Where I see the demonstration of Hasluck’s railing is simple, though. When I cut the initial bevel on an iron, it typically has a little bit of convexity. I try to cut it more like 20 degrees and flat, but even at that, the convexity on the iron will considerably shorten planing intervals within a couple of sharpenings and I will give in and hollow grind the bevel instead and restore planetary alignment.

If you are enjoying convex bevels, by all means, continue to do it. But don’t get sucked into these false scenarios where somehow you can’t do better as you move on. If you don’t feel like moving on and woodworking is just a transient thing, then that’s OK, too. If you want to move up because you’re developing discernment and you think there must be a better way, you’ll eventually back into things like using cap irons and sharpening and you’ll start to find historical concurrence. I am walking proof that you don’t need to read about things things to figure them out – you will figure them out and then you’ll be able to read about them. Having the experience with the way that works less good isn’t entirely a waste – it will keep you from wondering once you level up if you should try ten other things.

A friend of mine likes to say that the Rockefellers and Smiths differ by the fact that the Rockefellers will watch people do something that doesn’t work and they won’t do it. The smart Smiths (or Millers or Bakers, or there has to be a common name that isn’t a trade so it doesn’t seem like I’m talking about tradesmen) will abandon what doesn’t work well, but has to make the mistake on their own to understand it. The less inclined will fail to learn even from their own experience. I’m one of the Smiths and am first, not smart or wise enough to ever be one of the Rockefellers, and too curious, anyway.

I used the Robert Kiyosaki example because I have a morbid curiosity with folks who think they’ll get rich taking on debt and buying properties and becoming “independent”. There’s a “this is the real way, the secret that people have been keeping from me!” hysteria, and somehow, Kiyosaki gets held up even on financial sites with vague predictions. I find this appalling, but following him are probably people with their wallet open and maybe not much discretion – as in, loyal purchasers who advertisers find lucrative. But when you look at the real world of real estate investment (which I have no interest in), the credible stories come from guys like Ben Mallah. And Ben Mallah doesn’t have a get rich advice – I think he says something like “find someone in your area who is able to find deals and start small and learn from them”. The folks criticizing him for not making a business of teaching more directly and promising the quick wealth seem to fail to realize that he’s retiring and moving his real estate business to his kids, but he likes to do real estate and talk about it. Not farm peoples’ wallets.

And his honest showing of what he does day to day makes me realize something I already knew – I have no interest in real estate, but find what Ben shows interesting and entertaining. He provides excellent advice when people ask him questions – it’s just maybe not what they want to hear because it puts the burden on them to learn and own what they’re doing.

You owe it to yourself to become your credible source of experience and information within pretty short time after you just get started. it’s less inclusive than flowery advocation of paint by number listings, but you will be better off in the end. Even if that teaches you that what you want to be good at isn’t woodworking.

Just by chance, I ordered a Stanley 9 1/2 last week off of Ebay. I had premium block planes in the past. They’re long gone. I like to say that I have only one block plane (Stanley 18), but that’s not strictly the truth because I have some junkers for my son to drop.

The reason I have a Stanley 18 instead of a 9 1/2 is because when I ordered my “one” block plane, there was some kind of trend for hobby fly rod makers to buy a 9 1/2. And they were very expensive for what they are.

While smoothers and jointers seem to have near doubled, I looked the other day for a pre-Mexico 9 1/2 and was able to find one easily for less than the fly-rod-craze prices.

I wouldn’t have known for sure, but the #18 and a later pack of replacement irons for a #18 are just butter soft. One of my group for that plane is laminated and the others were solid steel. In a previous post very early in this blog, I rehardened one of the solid steel irons to find that they have a whole lot of potential to be much harder than they are as delivered. Every one of them is butter, which would vex honing guide users, as they just will not hold the apex.

On a whim while testing a low angle jack to see if the unicorn method was viable on bevel up planes, I decided it might be a lot faster to use the #18 and it’s small soft irons. To my surprise, once they were buffed, they would plane cocobolo with silica in it with no issue, and they would last longer than my hands could tolerate pushing the plane. That sort of put the nail in the coffin – though already known – that you could solve much just keeping honing the same and buying an expensive supersteel iron. You can’t get hardness and toughness in combination in any super steel such that you can plane minerals or silica or even just a lot of the hard woods with varying grain direction.

But you can hone a very very soft block plane iron and then buff the tip off of it and it will outrun just about anything. The rehoning process is should-be-illegal easy.

The next two pictures show a piece of *was rough sawn* louro preto. This is a dusty wood that’s a little hard on irons, but the billet had ambient dust from the shop on it.

See any defects or lines? I don’t. Louro Preto isn’t the hardest wood, but it’s far harder than oak or maple or anything we’d work with in great volume. The dust on the plane is just the nature of the wood. You plane nice clean shavings and the dust comes out of the wood at the same time coating your hands with light brown filth. The aroma isn’t unpleasant, but it reminds of aromas in wood that would be associated with sneezing. It’s like a floral version of the rosewood and cocobolo pepper scent.

This picture shows the shavings more closely – these were some of the last to come off of the block plane. No resharpening, no anything like that. The seam down the center of the closest shaving is some kind of artifact from the large grain cathedrals.

I don’t use a block plane for much. I don’t care for low angle block planes because a block plane in my hands is a walking around plane for edges or planing small items. Older texts don’t prescribe low angle planes for this work for a reason – tearout – and I don’t see any virtue in it either. the effective angle on this plane is probably about 60, so the consequence of the high bed is nothing – it’s actually nicer to work with.

And one last thing – I have the metallurgical microscope. When you view a 12 degree bedded low angle block plane iron, the wear on the back of the iron is substantial and long. For some reason, once the iron is bedded at 20 degrees, almost no wear appears on the back at all. It’s bizarre.

Was the rash of low angle block planes and bench planes an improvement over anything? Definitely not. Stanley’s bench planes already do everything better than those planes – all you have to know is how they need to be set up.

The fact that these can easily be hardened to ice hard lets me know that stanley tempered them soft on purpose – probably for ease with site sharpening (carpentry) and chose a higher carbon steel than they would’ve needed to prevent the steel from having gummy edges that would fight your ability to tease off their wire edges while finish honing.