Category: Uncategorized

Would be dumb enough to make things like this? The iron on top that is.

I think this kind of stuff is interesting. It probably isn’t interesting enough to other people to do it and for some, maybe mental scorn about how it’s not “real woodworking”. Most of us aren’t doing “real woodworking”, though I’ve never been able to figure out what that is in the first place. Does it have to be real wood or can it be plywood but what you do is real? And who makes tools and calls it’s real woodworking – what is the rebuttal against? I don’t know. More on that at the end of this – but first on what I’ve devised, and it could be something different next time and so on. What I don’t want is to be bound to needing some kind of specific tooling or method to do this to a point of accuracy that’s at least as good as the iron that’s already there.

I’m thinking this is about a two hour project on top of that. A typical iron like a stanley replacement iron without machine tools is less than one.

I started with .187 bar stock. The decision to forge or shape comes up. If I had a flatter hammer and a second person who would hold it, this would’ve been faster to forge. I don’t, and my large anvil isn’t set up with space for someone to stand opposite – so there would be no time savings with that and it’s out. The subject iron here is about 0.16 or .155 and the far end of the taper is .085″. The raised area with teeth is a separate issue – you can’t see on the old iron but it’s got pins that go through to the front of the iron – they’re not flush peined, but I would assume they are affixed by being driven in and they obviously never came out.

Back to the stock. My favorite way to deal with something like this is a round contact wheel and a pair of calipers. And since it’s short, a one-time holder for the iron isn’t a bad idea, but that can come after the iron is cut out of bar stock and the ends have been beveled to set a visual stopping point.

This is what the one-off holder looks like:

What you see is a longer stick of cherry, and I took a picture after the fact, which may not be quite as helpful. the idea here is just a longer piece of throw away wood that’s a little less wide than the iron so that I can check the sides with a caliper. The screws are driven in close to the ends of the iron, but they are driven in far enough that they put lateral tension on the ends of the iron. There is no belt and suspenders thing that does more than that. The screws have to be below the level of the final article or they will get in the way of grinding.

This is then ground against the contact wheel for a variety of reasons, but among them are the fact that a belt grinder at high speed with a contact wheel is efficient, I can direct the dust and metal shavings toward a bowl with a vacuum hole at the bottom, and I can remove metal in just about any way from a point on the edge of the wheel to a line across, and rotate the iron with that line to lay it crossing prior passes. As long as you don’t grind the ends of the iron off in specific ways, you can literally use this method to make an exact replacement for an old wooden plane if you need to. In this case, it’s within a few thousandths of the original, which isn’t that accurate. The lower corners on the fat end (left) are not totally in plane, but they’re not far out and probably won’t need to be addressed, anyway.

the next step is to locate and install the toothed strip on the back of the iron for the plane’s adjuster to engage. I have the plane in another room that’s clean and dry and can test the result to make sure it will work. but you can envision a lot of difficult ways to make this strip and file it. The smartest for simplicity’s sake is not to machine the whole thing including the legs that go through the iron in one piece, but rather just take flat stock about the same thickness as the bottom to the top of the teeth – in this case .105″. That’s nearly identical to hot rolled unmachined 3/32nd stock.

What’s First?

This iron will need to be hardened and it has to be relatively flat, and then the adjuster fixture will be installed after. It would be possible to do all of this first and then just harden an inch of the iron or so. This plane belongs to Raffo – it would be a challenge to get Raffo to use an inch of the iron – that would take a long time, and there’s no guarantee the plane will be nice to use. This was Lie Nielsen’s philosophy with W1 irons long ago – challenging to harden to the slot in an industrial setting so only half of the iron’s usable length was hardened.

But I would really rather have the length up to the adjuster hardened and not just a little, and I’d like it flat. So it will get a typical routine here for irons – heat/thermally cycle, ramp up heat, quench at the top end and then plate the iron on the anvil under an aluminum plate for about 10 seconds. It’s uncommon for an iron to get away from that routine and not be pretty flat. Before adding the plating with thin irons, I would bow a few trying to both use no fixtures and also precut a little of the bevel to game the bowing of the back. if you have a bevel, the flat side will be hollow 19 times out of 20, but too much and it’s a wasted effort and getting too much hollow isn’t hard. So I shoot for flat now and cut the bevel in its entirely when the iron is hard.

I’ll make a small tool out of a board and a file to cut the rabbet on the stock next to the teeth and then pin the fixture to the iron with bronze brazing rods 1/8th in diameter and file the teeth in last. That will be done after the iron is hardened, so the hardening can go up to the point where the first pin will go in. Pictures never show taper well, but here’s an attempt, anyway:

I think it’ll turn out fine, and the sort of visual here so far aren’t the end – it’s a rough iron at this point and can be touched up after hardening both in grinding and lapping if desired, but also just for visuals. Lateral lines from sandpaper will be gone – they’re not exactly appealing.

if you’re wondering what’s wrong with the original iron – it’s not very hard. I don’t think it ever was and I attempted to reharden this iron in fast oil and it didn’t get appreciably hard. Rather than chance ruining it by quenching it in brine, it can be put aside – that can be done any time in the future if it’s desirable, but the bevel would need to be ground off and that length lost. Doesn’t seem optimal. I don’t commonly find defective irons among mainline tools, but finding auburn or ohio or below that the lower volume one offs that just don’t have very good irons is common. I tested a very pretty Ohio iron yesterday that was later make and is laminated and it’s a whopping 31 hardness (!!!). Hard to believe, and a second strike with the hardness tester showed the exact same result. Luckily, it was unused.

I’ll return with a finished post sometime in the next couple of weeks – busy season at work and this is still a hobby.

“A Real ____ Would Be___”

Since starting, a few members on forums would always say ” a real maker would be making furniture ” or what furniture or how. Knots was full of Taig Frid acolytes, but I doubt any of them were legitimate fine makers of anything. They’re acolytes – at least self-appointed – of the people who were writing articles in magazines when they started out. Knots was pretty toxic, but it was closer to the average adult just getting on the internet and feeling like they could say or do whatever they wanted, failing to admit to other people that they were…..well, a failure.

One with a numeric name would tie you up in anything. I don’t know what his point was, but I think it was the careful craft of implying that he knew something and just enjoying the endless text referring all of the things he knew about against the things you were doing. I ran into him after making an infill plane. He instantly showed up and told me no real woodworker he knew would use an infill plane. Well, I don’t really use one much either – I made the plane. that was the point. I’m grouchier and older now – I’d instantly ask him for a portfolio of his work, the name of his woodworking business and thoughts on how much of the household share it takes on.

One of the other animals there turns out to be a tax preparer, I could never find a portfolio, and business attempts by court documents end in bankruptcy. I guess the bankruptcy filings are their portfolio. That’s what they make other than a hassle for you on the forums. Why would you look for a portfolio? Well, first, if someone loves Danish modern or CNC use, finding their portfolio would kind of tell me at least that I’m not looking to do things the way they do. You may be.

What you’ll usually find, though, is no portfolio at all and digging deeper just finds things that will make you wonder why you’d take any advice at all. Especially about what you should do with your time when you really are interested in something other than going bankrupt. Or making furniture, or whatever else.

You can probably get pretty good at deciding exactly what you want to do if you’ll allow yourself the freedom. Even if that’s doing something that involves impressing others (more power to you) by doing just what everyone else is doing. I’m not a real anything in my leisure – it’s really enjoyable.

One of my longer-term friends where I live, which is not where I grew up, is actually the person who got me into woodworking. Last year, he expressed an interest in Japanese planes, and since I had probably at least 6 at the time, I offered to sell him two of the better planes that I have for some fraction of what they’d cost new on the open market. Of course, I didn’t get them from a retailer marked up in the US, either – I got both from Japan.

When demonstrating the setup of one of the planes, which is basically a simple fitting operation that’s far overdone in terms of something a reasonably skilled planemaker would do, I mentioned to him that most planes when new, just with some shrink since new, would be a ten minute proposition to fit properly with better tools than you’d typically see on an instructional page. So, I made him an edge flat for the sides of the plane and a legitimate Bill Carter style rehardened (stanley 750 now at 66 hardness at that!!) push chisel to scrape. These are crudely done, not heirloom tools. the finish on the handle on left looks really bright, but it’s just a few very thin coats of shellac and then carnauba.

I hadn’t thought too much about it but I’ve got a bundle of LN floats. They’re not exactly fresh and new any longer, but I’m going to dump them on ebay because people seem to be nutso for them. and I’d rather make my own. there’s a freedom of working with your own tools – not an ego freedom, but I can beat it and someone else wouldn’t have to remake the tool for me and I won’t feel guilty kind of freedom. I like to work with tools I’ve made because of this – the ability to use without too much regard.

Floats need to be fileable, or should be. the float at the top is half hard, meaning it’s a steel that needs a fast quench to harden, but rather than do that and then temper back to spring, the steel itself is 3/16ths and won’t need to bed, so it’s just plate quenched, which partially hardens it. This works, but it’s not that great for something that needs to be spring because as far as I know, it’s just unconverted austenite and some martensite rather than tempered martensite. Austenite will stabilize over time, but it’s just tough chewy stuff.

After sending the tools above off, I decided that it’s my preference also at the top of beds on japanese planes to reference the center of a bed and use one of the small cheek floats or whatever Lie Nielsen calls the float below. So I resolved to make two, or at least two. I don’t have much use for the pull version of this float, so I took a first shot at making one of these and it’s to the right in the picture below. Pretty hideous. I got an idea, and maybe it’s a stupid one – or probably, that the first tooth or first couple of teeth for me clog, so I’d make the first tooth big. you can see if you look closely that it got a little out of hand. It looks fragile here, but it’s not.

This did, however, necessitate a way to spring temper brine quenched steel. Now that i’m quenching stuff in brine, I just much prefer to use it due to how efficient and fast it is at sucking the heat out of steel and transitioning it immediately. The confounding issue here is that spring on the lower side is generally 600-700F. You can slowly heat steel and temper by color, but this is kind of difficult if you have something you can’t hold on to – maybe more suitable for small springs that would be used in mechanical stuff.

I saw a penknife blade forger on one of the Hawley videos heat a piece of steel in the forge and then temper a blade over it by color, so I decided to do that. I got lucky, and the first attempt ended up 45-48 hardness all over. Seemed like problem solved right away. To heat a piece of steel in my forge to high heat, even a pretty substantial piece of 1/4 bar about 8-10 inches long and fairly wide is only about 90 seconds, and I can lay that bar stock on refractory brick next to the forge and not have to grab or hold or drop or touch (!!!!) something that’s orange or red. however, it didn’t work well again, and after rehardening the second piece of stock twice, the third time I decided to instead use some aluminum quench plates that I use for tempering, and instead heat them with the orangey bar stock, get a thermocouple reading from them as they have holes in them for the toaster oven just so that I can see the plate temperature while items are tempering, and then use those hot aluminum plates for direct contact and prolonged. that worked great. Aluminum with significant mass is so good at moving heat, that a bright orange billet of steel under the aluminum block doesn’t melt anything.

But there are still a few kinks to work out. The steel is 1095 that I found that has a little vanadium in it as well as chromium. I was more thorough with the heat this time around, and the piece laying loose on top of a wooden blank below is the result. this one is 52 hardness on one end and 54 on the other. Probably could be drawn back a little further but it’s spring and it still filed neatly – very neatly. What caused the tempering to be hard beyond just more heat and a better quench to start has something to do with which side of the aluminum plate/bar I’m heating and then other little details. Safe to say, not big enough to go on discussing here other than to say the refractory brick that I have is low mass, so it doesn’t take much out of the aluminum, and I can cover the whole setup with a piece of kawool and greatly slow the heat loss. 675F is what the thermocouple said on the second one, but that’s just for a bit before it descends.

The first one is always a trial, and since the second one will be given to the friend mentioned above, it needs to be a little nicer and more neatly made. But I don’t necessarily want the float teeth to be identically sized, so they’re eyeballed in the same float below and very slightly to try to prevent resonance or chatter on surfaces. I picked lacewood for the float handle, and some glue remains in the picture, but I removed that. I picked lacewood because the reality is it’s not that great of a choice and I have two pieces of it that I’ll never do anything with. Also, this friend and I prefer to make fun of each other, and this will give me a chance to say “this is a shitty wood for a float handle, it won’t be very durable, but I’m sure it will last ten times longer than you’ll need it to, anyway”.

I zapped this handle after this with carnauba, too, but wish I’d have had the patience to varnish it. Which I’m going to go and do with some of the remaining billet after this, just to see how it looks. It should look dazzling with depth – the sort of oil and carnauba finish it received just kills it.

I have another idea for spring tempering in the future. Steve may nod to this one – I think I’d be closer to 50 hardness here with a much longer 600F immersion. This could be done in a melting salt, but I don’t have a pot, or it could be done in a pot with rosin in it – something I think I will try. Rosin’s not expensive. It doesn’t love a long time at 600F, but …well, it’s not expensive and it’s pretty easy to handle if you don’t do something stupid.

Dealing with the plates isn’t too bad, but the “cold one” is 700F and the orange one, who knows. Sooner or later I’m going to grab one of them while they’re still hot and remove my fingerprints at the very least. BTDT.

A little more for the older guys, like me, and older yet. Astroturf is a great word – fake grass. Or in this case, a fake grass roots effort. Plenty of definitions online, but they generally refer back to a marketing campaign that presents a fake grass roots effort.

A simple example that we can all gather being obnoxious would be company W2 employees and 1099 contractors going out to social media like Reddit and posing as the general public. I suspect this stuff will get much better with AI, but on Reddit, it wasn’t difficult to tell if someone was a shill. Their post history would usually show one or a few things that they commented on all the time, but the comments weren’t differentiating or very deep, and they managed to show up when a company name or product was mentioned responding to a query, for example. Mechanically, that’s pretty easy. You want X, Y or Z’s two part “hard wax oil”? Shills as part of their day job monitor sites or do open searches by date to see if something is mentioned, and probably beyond that, have a bot that does it.

There’s also some buddy buddy boutique tool astroturfing. E.g., if a planemaker or sawmaker is getting critical comments for something not done well or not delivered at all, then another will show up and attest to their products being great just kind of like a drive by. And then do it several times, perhaps giving a quasi logical explanation as to why the original poster is wrong or claiming nothing else is available and the trouble is just the cost of getting the best.

But the direct astroturfing – employees posing as customers faking a grass roots effort by the public, it’s obviously disgusting if you have any ethics at all. And at this point, illegal to my understanding.

Commissioned Turf Weaving

Somehow, we all have some holes in our logic. Cognitive deficits and biases. They can be relatively more innocent, like believing that Chris Schwarz only recommends things that he thinks make sense in a trade situation or professional situation. Maybe he does, but I doubt it. However, he’s not Stumpy Numbs on my kind of scorecard of people stitching the turf for someone else. But what Chris says he uses creates a pretty big barrier because Chris isn’t selling the stuff that he recommends.

Let’s look at this through a different lens, because I experienced a financial advisor taking advantage of both my parents and a huge group of their friends. They all have more money than they’ll need in their lifetimes, though not because they’re rich, but because they have moderate incomes, pensions and social security and don’t care for stuff that costs much. Let’s frame this accurately – consider a group of people who are spending X% of their annuity income where that figure is probably about 50%. Inevitably, they have a surplus and end up at a financial advisor. The advisor is lacking honesty, but is classified as being independent, but not fee for service. I’m not apprised of anything while this is going on because of another cognitive bias as well as other types of bias – parents often do not like their kids to know what they’re doing and after a lifetime of being the one teaching the other, they certainly don’t want to learn from their kids. And my parents were good parents, but this dynamic still exists.

So, an independent investment advisor invites one of them to a learning session. This is not really a learning session, it’s a sales lead session, to give information that seems to be separated from the products being sold and tout the independence of the advisor, and also boast about their accomplishments and book of business, which implies credibility. I think it implies something else, but we’ll leave that out. One person goes to this advisor, and the next is brought to them or one of their sessions by word of mouth. They tout that they are not captive to a specific company and say they would like to see your complete financial picture so they can give good advice. That part is potentially partially true – they need to know what your means and needs are, but collection of information about your entire financial picture also affords the advisor the ability to try to get those assets under their management, too.

Suddenly, the entire group of folks who are over 65 with no savvy are buying income annuities, and they believe these annuities are earning 8% because the advisor told them verbally they are. The advisors also make pitches that they are screening the companies they broker products for and can change every time, and that makes them on the clients side. Legally, this is what’s supposed to happen. However, this is a shield and you’re left guessing first whether the advisor is actually operating on your behalf when selecting a type of product and then second when they’re selecting the company offering the product.

The advisor in this case failed the first test, but the group didn’t know it. Had they met with something like a captive insurance agent, or someone who had a shingle that said “commissioned salesperson who gets X%”, they would’ve refused to buy an annuity. My dad’s reasoning was a critical friend of his (critical in opinions) trusted the advisor. I asked him to have the advisor call me. At my dad’s age, an annuity that pays 8% of the purchase price at the time was earning about 2-2.5% interest per year. Taxable. The group of marks in this case were loaded up with the claims – the market may average 9% but they’re getting 8% guaranteed, and they have no clue what the whole profile is or that the actual price of the annuity builds an expense-adjusted return of 2-2.5%.

I can guarantee my parents would’ve been distrustful of a captive insurance agent who sold them something, and probably a lower expense load. What they experienced was something that elder law protects people from, but it’s too seldom enforced.

In that case, I requested my dad have the investment advisor called me. My intention was to refer him to the state attorney general’s office, because what he was doing as someone who should’ve been acting in the interest of my parents was acting in his own interest. Another relative of mine who works as a consultant to larger entities (not individuals) has had a lot of success getting similar folks prosecuted, and I guess you could say he went on a tirade at the end of his career cleaning things up voluntarily.

The Situation Isn’t as Dire

In woodworking, this situation isn’t as dire, but disclosure is also weak. My dad’s advisor never called because my dad’s poker skills in terms of withholding information involved “my son says what you sold me earns 2% and not 8% and that I shouldn’t have been sold an annuity”. Of course, the advisor told him he’d gladly call me, that I was wrong about the return (zero chance of that) and he had nothing to hide. A couple of months later, he sold his practice to a large national chain. My dad referred to this as issue solved, because the dishonest advisor retired. I guess you could look at it that way. That also gives the impression that this is a one-off thing, and other than really high fees for the follow-up advisor, things are better. My dad, as you would expect, also expressed dissatisfaction with this situation in the end because what I pointed out “made him feel stupid”. He’s an upstanding 100% honest guy, and has nothing to hide, but people feel embarrassed if they look stupid rather than wanting to settle the score. That’s too bad.

But the dynamics underlying here are the same. Influencers create a situation where they are paid like a salesperson in the companies they are referring would be paid, but can present a front as if everything they show is what they picked and whatever else happens is just circumstance. I can practically guarantee you that the larger influencers have employees who seek affiliate agreements and find products that offer affiliate agreements, buy those products so they can say they did and the arrange affiliate terms later. If someone is pitching nano-silica “ceramic” finish to you and saying they bought the finish, do you think they just ran into what they bought and it’s just happy ending they could get paid? It’s possible they’re telling you they bought the product with their own money because they did even after an affiliate agreement was in place. if someone buys $100 worth of a product and collects $10K in affiliate commissions, would you consider them to be the same as someone you know who bought a product once, liked it, and never said much? Of course not, but your eye is not on the ball as a consumer of information.

The $10k or whatever it may be of affiliate commissions and “discount if you use my link” is really only telling you the price of the product has a big enough margin as it’s claimed at retail to pay both affiliate commissions, probably an investor group who is paying to set up the product along with other similar items on different sites, and still make a margin. How much is nanosilica finish directly from China? It’s a few dollars, and maybe ten for 60ml for nanosilica and a small graphene addition. that’s not to say there’s any reason to buy it – I bought some, haven’t used it yet, but the gimmick is the silica is hydrophobic. I can tell you for sure adding nanosilica to tung oil and wax makes the water bead well, but guess what – the effect is superficial. It gets even more puzzling when an influencer announces the durability of the product and then tells you that the maker recommends you apply another finish over the “ceramic” finish so that it will hold up better and be protected.

It’s not dire – you buy stuff you don’t need or at a price you didn’t need to pay. Ultimately, my dad isn’t going broke, either – though fiduciary rules would make it difficult for his advisor to argue what he was doing was legal. As far as I know, there’s nothing at all illegal for an influencer to choose what they talk about based on the biggest affiliate commission and then tell you whatever they fell like saying as long as the video they’re saying it in wasn’t directly sponsored by the vendor of the product.

The illusion of objectivity that could exist is there. It’s even better than astroturfing – not for you, but for the influencer, because if you are in the majority of long-time viewers, you already trust them vs. just seeing someone you don’t know and adding that to a list of random comments.

The influencer further is going to make the effort to manipulate the algorithm, and almost certainly, the social media platforms are going to place a value on the audience based on their data. That means, in less polite terms, the more gullible you are, the more valuable and targeted the audience is. I think people don’t believe that youtube would actually be interested in what an influencer gets for affiliate commissions or their pattern of videos and how they’re composed outside of views, but that’s very naive. if you are creating videos like Wandel, for example, who demonstrates a bunch of interesting stuff that doesn’t involve buying, you’re more likely to be deprioritized in search. It’s been a long time since I watched Wandel’s videos, but I recall that he was fighting a rash of the system making it hard for subscribers to get updates. My last remnants of youtube as a viewer involved the same thing. I had difficulty getting notifications from a few people publishing videos. they were all “bugs”, of course, where the notifications didn’t work just by chance. That “bug” that occurred at random just always pointed me toward someone else providing lower level content, like the influencers mentioned here.

Around four years ago, when it was clear this would never change, I came up with a pretty simple system – if anyone has an affiliate link in their videos, I would tell Youtube not to recommend them to me. Youtube completely ceased recommending any woodworking videos. I guess they didn’t like my choices.

Just like you will see financial advisors giving “free advice” where they don’t directly sell anything, or sponsoring something local and showing up, I’m sure you will see youtube influencers at woodworking events or presenting media about a manufacturer or a seller or a flea market or whatever else. It’s part of making sure that the important part remains – the trust level that allows you to be easier to get to for an affiliate link than you would be if the company itself sent you advertisements. You’re still playing on astroturf as a customer, but maybe you think it’s grass because of everything else around it.

That creates a completely different interesting question for another day – is it better to just be intentionally ignorant and do what feels good or makes you happy? It might be, but I can’t really offer any useful commentary.

I can offer a list of considerations, but I’ll spare you – just the first simple one, as a consumer if social media if you consume it, do you believe that the information you’re getting is there for its own sake, and if something appears in a video or is even touted or referred to that it is chosen by merit and the chips fall where they may? If the influencer you’re watching primarily gets their income from another source, it’s possible. The more their channel is the primary means, the less chance I think that’s the case, and just because an influencer has several streams of income doesn’t mean that one is where they farm marks and the others are objective.

And lastly, the nice person thing. I have known a few people who I consider to have serious ethical problems and issues with respect for other people during the day. Off hours, they are really nice, at least they are attested to be very generous and nice by other folks they have nothing to gain from. My view of influencers is dim. I think they see most people as someone to get something out of, especially if they are on the gimmick, so to speak. Which is more than just when the camera is running. They may be very nice when there is something completely outside of the area where they’re looking at people and just considering what they can get out of them. Probably, the folks who operate that way and are otherwise nice will be the most successful, even when they are also the most exclusory in terms of what they are getting out of you.

At least the mark farming is just for woodworking, though. You can get the equivalent of turf toe on woodworking stuff and it won’t change your life a whole lot.

I stopped reading reddit – it was interesting for a while, like shopping at a different buyer’s club store for a while, and learning some new words.

Astroturfing – creating artificial impression of public genuine feedback on items and I guess there probably already is a definition of what follows after that. A snowball where marks (as in of mark and con) begin to add to the astroturf with glowing comments. If this kind of effort goes through influencers, in my opinion here- because you’ll never get an influencer to reveal how much they’re getting or in how many other ways – you get people like James Wright pushing Zen Wu tools.

Behind astroturfing and the snow ball, you first have a product that appears to have some positive differentiation. I’ll leave that to other peoples’ opinions, but what I see is tools that are either cheaply made, or they’re made in an expensive way that’s pointless. Cheap in chisels is slab bar stock stuck in a handle (check, that’s there), and pointless is titanium, for example, with expensive milling for a bottom layer of steel. The draw for the mark is not naming the steel and making people think it’s exclusive. It’s never going to be with the rare exception of an alloy exclusive to a very few inclined folks. Magnacut is the development of Larrin Thomas. It’s a genuine effort, and what it does is novel, but there is no hiding what it is – Larrin wants to celebrate what it is and pretty much tells you everything about it from the composition, to micrographs, etc. Larrin is legit. The world of woodworking astroturf isn’t. I don’t really see the point of Magnacut in woodworking tools, but I can guarantee if I emailed Larrin (I think Larrin doesn’t care too much for my way of doing things, but he’s too quality of a guy to just tell me that, and he still will answer any question I ask – I respect him for that, too. I would answer legitimate questions of people I don’t care too much for – buddies and information are kind of separate to a point).

At any rate, here’s the key elements to the mark formula:

• An influencer who has never really done significant work and really doesn’t have a qualified opinion about anything other than influencing. Once in a while, you’ll see a professional go off the rails which looks like they’ve given up on being legitimate, but the world of social media has generally brought us people who started with no skill and haven’t gotten far. Stumpy, Animal Trades, Wright, etc.
• Information that comes through the influencer that seems to be novel. It may actually be new and not related to you being a better maker or really benefiting you at all in any way, or it may be copied (“the last finish you’ll ever need” – with every mark farmer offering to let you know a secret – that you can mix an oil, a thinner and a varnish and rub it on things. “psst…don’t tell anyone!!”)
• The implication that the influencer isn’t really in on a gig. The selling is just ancillary, or hidden in token links and not discussed.
• Offering something and getting an uneducated base to make a comparison. Years ago, for example, someone offered 3V chisels. They were all the rage. 3V at the upper end of its heat treatment range would make a decent chisel. It wouldn’t make a great one, but if you compare it to a chisel that isn’t very good, it will look good. The blueprint for a superb chisel is probably 200 years old and but for affordability of the materials improving, has not been bettered.
• A huge group of individuals who really don’t know much then praising both the item being sewn into the field of fake’s playing surface as well as the influencer.
• A group then reading who just is really itching to buy and has lost sight of the hand on the keyboard and the other on the bench – it’s a dopamine trip at this point, I’ve been there – that group is looking for confirmation that they can get in on the excitement. And maybe buy some competence.

There’s another odd byproduct in the woodworking world. The people who actually make stuff and sell it are viewed as shills. The influencers, who are just grifting a gullible audience are seen as saviors. If you don’t believe that, just go ask about Rob Cosman on Reddit and then James Wright.

You and I don’t really need either of those guys, but the former is a guy who really sells his stuff hard. It should be more respectable than the latter, but the latter is the model for finding marks in greater volume and not being called out. Does that mean I think you should purchase stuff from Cosman? That’s up to you – I think you don’t need anything Cosman sells and just like any other guru, you’ll be on rails if you start believing everything has to be done his way.

The pleasant David Charlesworth got me on rails when I first started. I like David, he certainly isn’t a salesy pusher nor is he a grifter, but if you’re going to work entirely by hand, a little bit from him is enough and move on or you will be stuck. That’s life. None of us needs each other. Nobody needs anything I type about, either, I’m not delusional.

Blue Forum Post

A blue forum post that came up this morning reminds me of astroturfing, but I think the poster is a Mark. That’s what brings up the Zen Wu topic. Someone asked almost exactly a year ago, the post died quickly but then was probably brought back by someone who probably searched the maker and then found a negative opinion about influencers. As i understand it, even Reddit is far behind the wave of stupidity that is flowing in the woodworking world now, but I won’t patronize any real social media sites to find out otherwise. They are a world just as artificial when there is “knowledge sharing”. They’re advertising sites, and when the advertising at the local level goes beyond the junk guy hauling stuff away from your elderly parents’ house and doing you a favor, it’s nonsense.

At any rate, the poster responded “I don’t think youtube influencers are paid”. Maybe in another 30 years, people won’t be quite so dumb. Another follow up as the plastic grass began to grow, though, described that Wright announced that his “go to” smoothing plane is now better than a boutique plane and it has the Zen Wu iron. Of course, that sentence should end with “and if you buy it, I get paid X% of your order amount if you click on this link”. The grass grew a little bit further then with a discussion of $1,500 5-piece chisel sets that were impressive at a wood show.

If I Unicorned a $50 chisel, and put it on a bench, it would snag the beginners at any show because it would be sharper than anything most of them have used. If I made a paring chisel and demonstrated malleting it into hardwood, that’d be pretty interesting, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t to me, it’s something the chisels can handle, and so can an older Marples paring chisel and a Ward or Nurse marked chisel or anything else. But we’ve gotten to the point that a lot of stuff is marketed at, well, marks, and some of it says you can only push half length paring chisels, leaving one of the tenets above covered – compare the results to another product that isn’t very good.

I couldn’t resist seeing what chisels are $300 each, and that resulted in finding a titanium bodied chisel with a dovetailed lower layer. that combination makes no sense. The fake steel name is added to the equation. What is the actual steel? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t outperform 26c3 chiseling wood, and 26c3 is affordable. *you* can thermally cycle 26c3 heat it a step past nonmagnetic for 15 seconds and then quench in brine. You’ll also need to learn to tackle some things like warping, but there isn’t that much there in the way other than desire. A laminated chisel of that type will bend before a solid 26c3 chisel would. Will we see breakage on some of these tools like we have seen with Iles D2 mortise chisels from time to time (those wouldn’t break if they were something else but ingot D2, but luckily the market of users doesn’t really do much using).

All of this stuff – the astroturfing, the self-fertilizing marks and the whole formula makes for a good adventure, I guess. But it has staying power. What is it? I used to think, and probably a lot of folks did, that the whole commission and as in the case with SMC (blue forum) “non-competitive advertising environment” arrangement was good for sort of connecting people to each other and if you’re in the pool so to speak, you kind of deserve what you get.

But participation goes farther than that. My last paragraph implies to you and me and everyone else, “well, no big deal – if you don’t get caught up in that, you won’t ever be exposed to it”. Lee Valley at one point said only about 10% of their customer base perused forums, so when there is conflict, I’m sure they don’t like it, but what they were letting us know is most of their customers aren’t buying from there. I’m sure that’s changing.

As I learned at a sharpening class that I gave (only one I ever did!), one of the attendees floated to the front of the room with a Benchmade pocket knife. It wasn’t hard enough to survive dressing a deer. I can only guess that if you search for a Benchmade knife, you’ll get a lot of hits from social media. The days of getting a catalogue and using that and calling someone to order are pretty much over. Cross contamination here from Stew Mac – the prior post – a good friend of mine remembering Stew Mac the family owned company now long gone was frustrated that there was no phone number to call to ask questions. He ordered something anyway, and was disappointed with the quality compared to what he remembered.

Here’s the point – the efforts to spend in social media and create enough marks to taint the punch everywhere flows back out into searches for information about products. And we see now that forums that die or that haven’t yet get bought by conglomerates like Group Builder – those forums have been indexed by search engines and the users can be solicited for donations and the unregistered folks who are referred to from google will see – last I counted – 8 advertisements including a full screen or mostly full screen ad. Everyone wins all the way around except the folks looking for legitimate information.

The unicorn will save the guy I mentioned by preventing the knife he has from rolling while he dresses a deer. But it would do the same thing for a Chinese-made Buck knife (or a USA made one!) that’s $12.

So, this makes me angry and motivated, right?

Not really, you just watch and observe and shake your head once in a while. I think for anyone who will get serious in the hobby, as soon as you start making things, you quickly find out what it takes and if you never start going backwards in time to more permanent knowledge, you wouldn’t have, anyway.

I think it’s unethical – the whole influencer system, but that’s for other people to really determine for themselves. I’m sure the FTC’s intent is blown up a little bit in terms of disclosure of sponsorship by weasel wording, but again, since the beginning of time, creativity has allowed pushing the limits on the legal or regulatory side of things. There’s no reason to get too excited by that.

I will admit that if I’m talking to someone in a DM or email and they are extracting information out of me and then spring up with “James and Rex do this and this, though”, I’d like to know if you’re going to do what James and Rex advise, when all is said and done so I can reply “I think they’ll be good sources of information from you and you don’t need anything from me”.

I do think the Public Deserves Information

If you’re buying chisels, you may be indifferent about what the steel is, or you may be curious. XRF analysis will out what any of these “secret proprietary” steels are, and there is nothing that prevents you from getting that information. There is no legitimate consideration for “courtesy” here and it’s not illegal or even unethical to spend $35 for XRF analysis and publish what you find.

If I ever make something professionally in the future and don’t disclose the alloy (it’ll never happen), there is only one reason I would do it – for lack of want to use the same alloy every time. For a company like Pfeil, who probably uses 80crv2, not disclosing the alloy may have some to do with marketing, but it also will insulate them from getting bound up in discussions from armchair experts reading knife forums who want to lobby them to use something else. Same for ECE. ECE doesn’t specify the alloy – their metalwork isn’t good enough at this point for it to matter, anyway, but there’s nothing for them to gain.

I would encourage anyone to have anything I make XRFed and hardness tested even if it’s a matter of seeing if I’m honest.

When Lee Valley picked a steel that would be V11, much of the public believed they developed it and it was proprietary. The woodworking boards were abloom with discussion about how it would be illegal to have the steel tested and disclose what the alloy components are because that’s IP. It isn’t, and if LV did something other than choose CTS-XHP (as in, adjust the alloy at all outside of its spec), it would be very ill advised unless they lucked out and had Larrin give them a tip. Several people XRFed the steel, including a sawmill creek member, and described it as CTS-XHP. I think disclosing that would’ve been a boast – it’s expensive, but to the average person who is getting into the hobby with white-collar pockets and no collar knowledge, maybe thinking it’s exclusive is more valuable. To have something that’s not easy to get. Well, CTS-XHP itself isn’t easy to get – Carpenter just never really found a market for it that wasn’t better served by something else.

I guess we all pay our entry fee into this. I did. I bought enormous amounts of stupid stuff, and other than once in a while feeling a little guilty about spending money that was of no consequence to me to spend at the time.

You shouldn’t feel guilty if you mention to other people that the world of influencers really doesn’t have anything to do with making, but you’re not obligated either. I don’t think any of the influencers deserve deference – the persona of providing information doesn’t hold water and you’re not being rude by asking influencers to disclose what they’re paid for and how much. Ask them what the affiliate commission is for everything they sell. It might create a little bit of real grass growing in the world of astroturf if enough people start asking and the volume of requests gets to be too large to just moderate out every comment.

You’re never going to do anything that will change the course of real makers, so you can ignore anyone who thinks you’re “damaging the community”.

Of course in all of this, i could be all wet about all of it. Could I be all wrong? Sure, I could be wrong about Wright, I could be wrong about Animal Trades – we’re left to suppose things because there’s no disclosure. Sometimes. There can be misleading disclosure. In my opinion this would be something like Stumpy Numbs talking about a product, claiming the video isn’t sponsored by it, collecting affiliate token revenue for the item and then having a different sponsor at the end. Sometimes this switcheroo is done so that the affiliate commission is generated by someone that the influencer might like as a sponsor or that has sponsored something else, just not that video. What would clear it up? Disclosure by influencers – but that does require diligence from all of us. If you ask Wright about something used as filler to fit around the affiliate stuff, make sure the answer is for everything, not for the filler.

Wright is interchangeable with a gaggle of anyone here, just used as the example because people quoted his opinion on chisels and blades doing something material for a maker. My experience? They don’t, but peddling that narrative wouldn’t provide much financial incentive, and leads back into something the marks in the farm will tell you “if they didn’t get paid, we wouldn’t have the videos”. If they didn’t get paid, there would probably be fewer, they wouldn’t be high production quality, and you might learn something much better from them. When I quit youtube, it was for an array of reasons – but one of them was that the volume of content goes up and up, and the chance of learning something useful from it vs. learning at the bench went down. And Youtube got too aggressive believing you should either watch enormous ad numbers or pay for content that is generally just a carrier for advertising, or is veiled advertising itself.

I have personally left a lot of comments in videos about what the total take is or disclosure of revenue sources. You can guess what the response to them is. I’ve never received any answer to intent but for coming from one person. Rob Cosman, who politely answered the questions I asked. That’s far from making me consider patronizing his business or carrying water, just as rare as that kind of matter of fact response, and nicer than it really needed to be is unheard of.

https://www.lmii.com/

Barf.

When I got into making guitars a few years ago, I landed like many of us do in a crowd of people who were making basic guitars or getting into it, as well as a few older folks who learned a long time ago.

What came up as “oh you have to” was patronize LMII and Stew Mac. I did a little, but quickly realized that through the lens of someone with woodworking experience, what people described to me in the past about “Stewart MacDonald” and calling over the phone and talking to someone with questions, etc, was long gone.

I also began to notice two things:

1. Stew Mac seemed to be phasing in more and more Chinese and lower market cost tools, but not at a low cost, and the versions of some tools like fret nippers, etc, that were Japanese were being replaced. With that, anything that was Japanese and listed could be found elsewhere for much less. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes with suppliers, though.
2. The site seem to have a fix that made no economic sense in my view, especially for someone building one or two or ten guitars, but in a lot of cases, not for a repair person with a little creativity.

I joined their “buyer’s club” to get free shipping for the year anyway and in a fairly short period of time, there wasn’t much more than fretwire that I could justify getting. The little tools and jigs aren’t needed for anyone with some hand work ability let alone someone who does hand work and makes tools. And when I would get things like jack plates, they would have free shipping and still be more expensive than similar quality elsewhere.

I then located some of their humbucker type pickups on reverb for about 2/3rds of stew mac price and sent them a message and asked if the gray market pickups were the same as theirs. They said yes. I asked where they were made, and they said USA (still have the email).

Turns out, they’re not. The price of them showing up gray market didn’t make sense for USA made pickups in terms of someone making humbuckers wound in the US.

LMII also quickly ran out of things that I could buy, but it seemed like an alternative.

Stew Mac at some point went from being family owned to being owned by someone else. I am going to guess there was a sale of a business involved, of course. It’s my opinion that when something like this happens, everyone loses except the prior owner and the buyer. The customer loses and the suppliers to the retailer probably don’t do that well.

Seeing LMII shut down and turn into an advertising jump off point for Stew Mac – not really a great sign – at least that’s my opinion. But when it had already kind of become a place that was hard for an able bodied consumer to patronize, especially if the hobby of making things isn’t just about acquiring a lot of stuff to make a little, I guess it doesn’t make much of a difference.

There are other options now (Philadelphia luthier supply, etc), more fractious carrying a short line of things, and I use them. So all is not lost, but it’s still a reminder of where the hobbies of making things go and part of the wider picture of who -knows-what ownership that’s taken over. So much of what was out there when I first started each hobby is toast. McFeely’s was kind of one of those small line one-off places to get decent screws, only made in the US at the time. That changed and then so did the ownership and who knows what else. I don’t remember having some kind of fit and refusing to patronize them, but the loss of the original mission just sort of made it happen over time, anyway.

Not much of this blog has to do with buying tools. Why? Because you eventually start buying stuff to make things rather than tools to imagine doing it. I did the latter for plenty long, but I’m out of room for practical purposes and I never wake up on a Saturday at this point wanting to go somewhere and buy tools or getting on ebay and just checking the new listings of stones or hand tools.

And the whole flea market thing was always intermittent. The buildings or booth markets get picked over by flippers, and the local flea market here that happens on a regular basis is first hit or miss at best, and a time soak, and second, usually looted by a dealer who takes advantage of the ability to set up a booth and go buy everything that’s really any good before the market opens up to the public. I think that whole “dealers can buy anything that’s actually a bargain first” is the shits, but I guess it attracts the dealers, and the dealers pay for a space at this particular local flea while the patrons don’t.

Flea Markets

It was sort of a sport online to go to flea markets in the mid 2000s when I started. You can get all kinds of stuff at fleas, but usually it’s another of something you have or something you don’t need because it’s a good deal. I bought a lot of that – another smoother, another three socket chisels, and so on. Every time I had an immediate need, it was never at a flea market with the exception of one single time – metal vise.

But I would buy other stuff and some of it I’ve used. The strike rate isn’t great, though. Most of my better tools came from online shopping, and I guess that’s an expensive way to go.

My mother is making a slow trip, it’s the end of one that starts with memory loss, and it puts burden on my dad, though she’s now in a facility. I visit home, four hours away, far more than I ever did in the past. Every three or four weeks, I drive past a building of flea market stuff thinking “i’m going to stop just to look in there”, but the feeling having crossed over to making is what will I buy and should I just save my money instead – there’s kids going to college in a few years, a cranky mrs. and hopefully funding for an early retirement. We’ll see.

I finally stopped last week. And somehow, I don’t have the urge to do it again because the results were better this time than they were when I had the bug to buy rather than the bug to look:

There’s one more thing missing from this that I forgot about – an old hand made pin gauge with a wooden screw. it works wonderfully. the only thing in this picture that I didn’t pick up is the cherry box bottom the stone shown is in.

I love a panel gauge, but have only one – the stanley pin panel gauge with a brass liner but all rosewood stem and head other than that. it’s a nice gauge, but I’d love to have one that could be fitted with a pencil. And I have to apologize for the picture here, because the opposite side of the beam is a treat here. It’s hand marked, very precisely, and the numbers written in for measurements at the measurement marks are done with charisma completely by hand. The pin sits in a round socket on the other end and needs to be replaced, but I think I can manage that. I can make a filler that goes in the round bits on the other end and use this gauge to mark with a pencil. Why not make it? This gauge was $7.

The little Arkansas finger size stone at the top , or pocket stone, is something I use to surface finish stuff that’s been ground so it doesn’t look like cheesy ceramic belt look, and the little green stone is one of the finest hand hones I’ve ever seen. I think it’s probably English slate, but it was about $3.

When I got to the counter, everything shown and the missing pin gauge was $30. The slip on the right is washita, and there’s a second one under it. I have india slips and a trans slip, and they work fine, but being a buffer of things, washita following the india would make more sense. It never was urgent enough to want to pay anything significant online, but at $5 for a pair of slips, I’m in.

My eyes were bothering me that morning, so the white ark stone, I thought maybe it was a washita. I have no idea – but it’s novaculite. it’s a little aggressive and an odd size, who knows. the green stone and the ark stone, I did think “why am I getting these?” and still kind of feel like that. they don’t address anything and it’s true that I have more stuff like them that I probably should sell rather than add to. But the two together were somewhere between $5 and $7.

When I was looking for something, I never found anything that was a deal outside of one type 1 millers falls smoother. that I didn’t need – it just stands out as one of the few things that weren’t full market or close.

The Other Option

Ebay and online sellers often have stuff far more like what I’m looking for, but at the moment, nothing that I need. I do have a turkish oilstone, but it’s light brown and i’d guess the light brown stones weren’t as highly regarded as the black stones that looked like they’re covered with fractures.

Last couple of weeks, someone on ebay posted broken parts from bigger older turkish oilstones, and most days, I’d wait a little bit with some internal argument and someone else would buy them.

But This time, I struck. this stone has enough obvious characteristics to show that it’s a legitimate turkish oilstone and not a currently-available cretan stone that you can get for $60.

it’s also the first time I’ve seen something of size that isn’t eye bleedling expensive. it was about $120 or something, which is a lot of money for a stone you don’t need, but it’s a stone I won’t probably find again with as little as I’m looking.

The deal with a lot of these is even if they haven’t broken off, the undersides are irregular and you have to fit them into a box. if you dropped this stone, it would break into a million pieces, and at the bottom, you can see the box fit is pretty bad. it wasn’t at first, but I took a hammer and tapped the thin tail off of this stone while fitting it It didn’t serve a purpose. Since the picture, I’ve lined the fitted box with plaster as the front and the back of the stone taper and need support. tung oiling and then topping this box with varnish will keep it from getting black right away.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the stone is like. the turkish stone I already have is slightly friable, but still immune from gouging with tool tips and this one was sold as soft and fast for a Turkish stone. It doesn’t feel like it’s very coarse, still – figure something like a 6-8k waterstone type action, but with a far better feel not such a fragile face. The surface is continuous and none of the lines in the stone are actually open. In a couple of days, everything will be dry, and if it’s interesting enough, I’ll see what the edge and speed are like compared to other stones, and maybe leave a post about it.

Side comment that goes with this – thank goodness for coming across the buffer – that one discovery had really curtailed much of this stone buying. I’m sure if not for anyone reading this, that it’s saved a few other folks plenty, too – from falling into the trap of buying gimmick multi-hundred dollar synthetic stones, and “systems”, too. It couldn’t quite save me from blowing money on another Turkish oilstone, though.

A few weeks ago, someone emailed me and mentioned they had a LV shooting plane, and they couldn’t get the iron to hold up with a V11 iron. This request was after getting a replacement, which was better than the original iron but still not suitable. I haven’t bought a V11 iron in a very long time, but when I did, they were tempered a little hard. So this was kind of a surprise.

Shooting is more like chiseling than planing, and when I tested irons even with wood in the vise planing end grain, the wear life of V11 vs. O1 wasn’t nearly at the same interval. In long grain with no challenges, V11 doubles good O1 if the V11 and O1 are in the same hardness range. You can’t actually get this interval in regular work, but in a test situation where you’re just continuing to plane clean wood that’s already planed, it’s pretty spectacular. LV’s O1 isn’t really a good comparison because it’s too soft – my opinion, of course. I don’t know what woodworkers do with 59 hardness steel in dry wood, but issues where there is an edge strength need – like chiseling or shooting, will relate to accelerated wear.

But V11 was a puzzler, just from what I remembered. I remember it lasting about 15% or so longer planing end grain in a vise, which is a more gentle operation, but certainly nothing that would lead to it not holding up.

I have made XHP irons that are 61/62 – same steel, as far as I know. if the steel is below that or even at 61, it does change behavior a lot and will deflect more easily. This can be seen in knives, but a knife isn’t shooting end grain and you can tolerate more deflection.

Regardless, the request was whether or not I could make an iron that wouldn’t fail.

I accepted the challenge, but then realized all I have in 3/16″ steel is O1. Or that was the case. I figured I’d make an O1 iron pushed a little to 62/63 but with a strong temper at that to avoid chippiness. What does this compare to? I match Hock’s 64 in the one hock iron I have by tempering to 350F. it’s tempting to be impressed by that in test shavings because the iron is very crisp. I suspect the actual hock irons might be pushed less in the quench and be tempered just below that, like around 325F, but I could be wrong. It doesn’t matter that much. This test isn’t about duplicating Hock, but rather knowing that if O1 is to better V11, it will need to have edge strength that comes from hardness, but not chip easily. Tempering my hock iron would’ve improved it for day to day use, but I broke it instead to get a look at the grain. LV offers nothing similar, which gives me a lot of options.

26c3 is the apple of my eye for chisels. It hits 64 hardness with a strong light straw double temper, but upon looking it up, you can get it in .14″ or .25″, and no 3/16ths. O1 steel is, of course, an option, and so is 52100. I don’t love 52100 in irons for planing long grain, but I know I can get it to 64 after a 400F double temper as well, without brittle grain growth.

But looking around, I’m chasing comfortable hardness without having to freehand grind and then float/flatten/file a .25″ bar stock to 3/16ths or close. So 26c3 is out – unfortunately. There’s one other option, though, which is 125cr1 – a similar composition steel but not made with the high cost process (remelting, which improves uniformity at a microlevel) that 26c3 gets. I’ve fiddled with 125cr1 and you can see in snapped samples that some of the alloying isn’t as well distributed, or at least that may be the case, and if that’s not the case, something .

that’s 125cr1 at high hardness. What are the white bits? Talking with a metallurgist in the past didn’t help. the internet creates too big of a distance and a metallurgist will just assume you did something wrong and pose 10 ways you could’ve failed and insist “you don’t know”. That’s correct, I don’t know – I’m not staking a professional reputation on this, I want to know if it could be a “not worth using it” it matter, and have seen the same thing in some samples of 52100.

What happens when it looks like this rather than uniform gray? Well, in 52100 and in the 1.25% carbon 125cr1 above, the steel needs to be pushed a little further to get full hardness vs. very clean looking samples. Speaking of, clean is a word being used here for how these look – the 125cr1 melt sheet shows that the actual composition is really high quality and aside from a tiny 0.25% addition of chromium, the other stuff is pretty close to being in line with hitachi white 1 spec.

I decided to buy 3/16 125cr1 and give it a try. I’ve seen defective 1095 first hand – when there is a defect for real, it shows up in the edge. This stuff might not, and there should be a potential to get edge strength.

I asked the person making the request to send the V11 iron so that I could hardness test it and so that i could use it as a template. I don’t care for the aesthetics, especially in the slot, but I don’t have the shooting plane – did at one point, but don’t now.

My first attempt at making one from 125c1 is this:

This iron came out a point softer than I’d hoped, so I tempered it at 375F or so instead. that left it at 64.5 hardness in the middle. It’s not hard to hone because there’s little in it for abrasion resistance, but you can feel it’s hard. the black is 95% scale from the forge, and to make it uniform, anywhere I dinged or marked the surface, I just put cold blue on to make it uniform. I can’t see a reason to remove it. But I’d sure like the slot to be rounded and not to a point. it would look better and be easier for a hand maker to make vs filing this in.

I sent this iron off, and the first reports of it are solid – it’s better.

I decided also that maybe I’d send one to Bill T – who some of you may remember from forums. Bill does a lot of woodworking and I can count on him to say “i don’t see the point” if I make something I think is better but he doesn’t see that it matters. that kind of feedback is valuable.

I pushed heat treatment harder on Bill’s, fiddling around to try to get as even of heat as possible visually. The thickness is really reactive with the induction forge (of course i’m not sending these out or using a furnace), so it’s a challenge to get the sides and center to the same color for the same amount of time. When you push heat for a short time, it has to go well above the furnace schedule protocol, but you’re playing with fire doing that despite using magnetics (har). A little too much for 10 seconds too long and you can have grain growth. The second iron looks like this:

I don’t sell stuff to Bill, and admittedly, the geometry on the sides of this second one isn’t so accurate – they’re not straight on the edges but rather a little bell shaped – oops! But this one came out of the quench after that kind of fiddling at 70 hardness, and it tempers back with a double 400F temper to 64.5. It makes no sense to send something with a little grain growth to someone, so I was pondering making it over again and realized that it’s not a sold product, so I can just set up the edge, and then strike it with a punch and break it out:

This broken out section show is about half of the width of a BB – looks fine. what you’re looking for in a snapped sample is something that looks like coarse silicon carbide with shiny facets all over the place. That’s large grain. none of it shows up here. Also, where did the blotches go? No clue. I haven’t noticed extra heat to fix the issue in the past, but maybe it does.

I’ll see what Bill says. As far as I know, he has no issues with his.

Does this experiment to beat Goliath offer some kind of eureka if these are notably better? Not really – nobody is going to make these on a commercial basis because the steel is water hardening, and on top of that, the furnace samples of 26c3, which are sort of a ceiling for this, don’t have as much toughness as the forge samples I had tested. that’s rarely going to occur, but I think surplus steel simple carbon steels probably have the potential to be better out of a forge.

So, How did the V11 Test?

First, I looked over the iron when I got it, and I didn’t see anything unusual in the edge in terms of how it was set up. I did see some artifacts of deflection that still existed behind the honed edge from prior damage. That’s unusual. I tested the iron a little hastily and got 62 hardness as a result. But going back later with four more strikes, it’s a half point less hard than that. I don’t know if that matters, but using a plane for shooting in a steel that’s not that great with edge stability, not much hardness can be sacrificed.

To make sure the edge itself wasn’t at all overheated, I filed it. Nope, damages a file – fine there, and no color anywhere on the top or bottom side of the bevel.

I really don’t know, and I don’t have any real suggestion about what might be better aside from 64 hardness M2 as an offering. That wouldn’t be that expensive, and it’s a steel that comfortably hits that hardness, and on top of that, it would be hard to overheat an edge. It’s not hard to overheat V11, which isn’t high speed and grinds at half the speed of O1, retaining a lot of heat. I think it’s just an odd choice to offer a soft O1 iron that would probably be good at 62/63, and then offer a steel that is highly abrasion resistant but may land in the hand of the user at 61 hardness and also grind a bit warm threatening loss of even that.

Who knows.

If anyone is concerned about the tracing of the center slot including the characteristic V, don’t worry – neither of these irons is being sold. Is that a trade dress thing? I don’t know. I could make more of these, but they will not look the same if I do, they’ll look a little more human did in elements.

Also, there’s a little Easter Egg in the second iron – look below the slot. I pushed the limits on temperature, but heated only a little past the slot and then quenched the entire length of the iron chasing hardness. The result is a tiny hairline crack, but one that doesn’t go far, and fortunately it isn’t on the bevel end.

Isn’t that just filthy garish grand? it’ a type 20 formerly blue “was rusty” stanley 5 that I picked off of ebay.

I’ll type more later about making japanning and what I’ve learned, and by saying making japanning, it’s a little misleading. It’s just varnish with pigment in it, and the pigment is ground into linseed oil before mixing it into the varnish.

Because the pigmented varnish after baking will still degloss very easily, I brushed a short oil tung and limed rosin varnish, but that’s also something in the presence of metal dust hands and wood dust and such, it will degloss, too.

if you want to see a closer picture of this, here’s a link.

What’s wonderful to me is it’s kind of ugly. I forgot that there are some second line planes that are red, and when conversing with a few folks online the other day, remarked that chrome ox green might be nice, but then was reminded that’s Kunz. So, we’ll have to do a little thinking.

While I was at it, i brine quenched the iron – it was 61.5 hardness before quenching, as in from the factory at stanley, and I really was only able to get it just north of 62. It’s plain steel with alloying that feels like chromium and something else when you put it to the stones – probably a little excess manganese, and it’s short carbon. As in, I think it’s probably somewhere between 0.6% and 0.75% carbon as no carbides appear in a worn section of the blade.

That translates to if you can get it to 62.5 hardness or something after temper, there’s nothing else there to gain. What’s surprising is that I’ve now tested a whole bunch of type 20 and later irons – they’re all short carbon like this, probably because that became the modern way. Short carbon means little to normalize and the heat treatment process can be something more akin to a bottling line than a furnace.

But every single bench plane iron I’ve tested has been 61-61.5 from Stanley during that era. The short carbon doesn’t impress because it affects fine edge feel a little and also makes the irons really tough, so they hold a burr and give the impression they’re softer than they are. Carbon 0.8-1.25% gives a range of kind of bite to an edge that shorter carbon doesn’t maintain. But it’s not hardness that’s lacking, and given all of the comments from gurus over the years about inconsistent heat treatment and softness and things of the like.

It’s bullshit. Stanley may not provide exactly what we like, but even in their cost cut era, they are fabulously consistent.

Modern block plane irons with “lots of slots”, not the three slot super modern type, but what you find on 9 1/2s – I’ve tested three made at different times, bought at random. 62.5, 62.5 and slightly above 62.5 in hardness (but not 63).

Again. not exactly a 50,000 iron sample, but there are 7 irons in two types here – in the small sample not differing by more than half a point.

They’re better than I thought. I learned long ago that the derided type 20s are better than i thought they would be, too – they’re lovely. If the short carbon iron is undesirable, it’s $10 and an hour of time for me to make another one in something else, but i could not make a case that any of these irons couldn’t work on any wood that’s come through the shop and be adjusted to deal with anything (including silica), because they don’t have the fatal sub-60 hardness that a lot of low and mid grade tools do out on the market at present from other sources. I’ve had LV’s O1 irons – they are just not up to the task of end grain or dedicated smoothing work. While the Stanley irons here aren’t better than a Hock iron, they’re better than LV’s version of O1 in metal planes.

OK, a dose of reality before you look on amazon -these irons are short carbon, they’re blanked, and probably cost a dollar each to make. They’re practical. Amazon says $20 each. I’d still go find a vintage iron instead – they’re not short carbon if they are from the era before this and are just a little better. But if you have one of these laying around, at the very least, the bench plane irons could be made into two stellar marking knives.

I just wonder what our perception of some of the pedestrian things available would be if we spent as much time figuring them out as we are willing to spend if we waste a bunch of money on something we don’t need.