[gatortrial]

Hi,

Am working on a board of figured maple with this smoother and experiencing quite a bit of tearout. I'll be rehoning the blade to achieve a higher angle of attack and hopefully a better result. I was wondering what angle folks would recommend for this plane to achieve the best result?

Indeed, from what i've read about the effectiveness of using a higher angle on bevel up planes, i'm not sure why the blade is not honed and left at a high angle from the very beginning. I mean, what is the benefit of using it at the standard 42 degrees at all?

Best wishes,

 

[Dave Paine]

The higher the angle, the closer you are to scraping rather than cutting.

I feel lower angles cut easier for normal grain.

If you have figured maple, I would try using card scraper with this wood rather than planing. Easier to control tearout with scraping.

If you put a steeper angle on the plane blade, I expect you would still get some tearout.

 

[Billy De]

Dave is mostly right but also a little bit wrong, take your honing angle up to 50 degrees and you should see the difference.
The old masters when they had the problem of curly grains would revert to the over stuffed smoother s and panel planes with there york pitch.
Just as Dave says the more you alter the honing angle the more you turn the plane into a scraper. Bevel up goes in one direction bevel down in the other but the out come is very much the same.

 

[gatortrial]

Thanks for the feedback, Gents!

 

[tc65]

Christopher Schwarz wrote a series of articles on reducing tear out in the Lost Art Press Blog starting in November 2007. Here is the link to the first article: http://blog.lostartpress.com/2007/11/ You can find more of his articles on the subject by going to Dec 2007 in the blog archive on the right side of the page.

Lots of interesting reading and he talks about most methods for reducing tear out from York Pitch, high blade angles, back bevels, low angles, etc.

 

[HandMadeInWood]

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Getting back to the original question, I suppose that the optimal angle is the one best suited for the job in hand – in this case dealing with curly grain. I seem to recall that some of the B U plane makers are offering spare blades at different angles, presumably to deal with this eventuality.

Personally I work a lot of figured Oak, some of which has a very well-knitted grain layout and is much prone to tearing whichever way you approach with planes bedded at the standard pitches in the region of 45 degrees.



So in the majority of cases, I use planes bedded at half-pitch (60 degrees). Specifically, have a look at Denis Laney’s blog on these Chinese plane: http://dblaney.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/shocked-and-pleasantly-surprised/



I have a set of these half-pitch planes and they are definitely NOT junk! There is very little awkward grain that they will not handle once set up.


In short, as planing is your firs-choice approach why not try planing at 60 degrees. As an initial step, try a slim secondary bevel on your B U plane to increase the cutting angle to about 60 degrees? Not too much bevel that you can't reverse out of it if not happy with the results. The first few strokes will tell you.



If it doesn’t work,, you won’t have expended anything more than a bit of elbow-grease on the sharpening stones, then it is back to Plan B - more elbow-grease with a scarper scraper.

Hope that this helps…