Permanence

A Huon Pine, native only to the Island of Tasmania

Serit arbores quae alteri seculo prosint – “He that plants trees labours for future generations.”
Caecilius Statius, quoted by Cicero. Motto of John Quincy Adams and his family, among others

This is a guest post by Dr. Antone Martinho-Truswell regarding a highly unusual tree, his adventures working its wood, and his thoughts about permanence. Enjoy.

What Does It Mean to Build Permanence?

Woodworkers – and especially we odder, curmudgeonly, hand tool woodworkers – have a vexed relationship with permanence.

On the one hand, spend any time reading, listening, or talking to a woodworker of any integrity (not least our distinguished host, Mr. Covington), and you will inevitably hear about building things that last, creating furniture or structures that will outlive the creator. Or else you might hear lamentation of the impermanent, throw-away culture represented by particle board, OSB, melamine, wire nails, and so forth and so on. Stan writes regularly here about building for future generations, about tool chests that preserve and workshop stools that endure. When we chop a mortice or fit a dovetail, the idea is that the end product is permanent – the strength and durability of the outcome justifying the labour-intensive process of creating it

And yet: wood. We are not stonemasons. We are not goldsmiths. We work with a biological material, one subject to biological processes such as mold, rot, borers, gnawing things, weather, sunlight, fire and friction which eat and wear away at wood until it’s gone. Japan’s venerable old wooden structures, record holders across all human construction efforts, pale in age compared to those made of stone. Wood perishes as do all living things (at least since Valinor was sundered from the sphere of the Earth).

This is the story of a permanent wood. A wood as magnificent as it is rare, a wood that is itself a lesson in permanence, and my attempts to make beautiful things for now and the future.

Old and Young Places

I like to think about old things. I was born and grew up in Southern California, where almost everything is new, even the old things. I remember as a child a small water tower near my elementary school, proudly fronted by a sign announcing that it was the oldest building in the area – an august 25 years old. The tower is older now and so am I, but there were old trees around even then. Up north, there are sequoias and redwoods, and of course, the oldest of all, bristlecone pines. I was young then, and didn’t think too much about wood or lumber, but I knew the trees were old.

As a young man, I moved to England for graduate school, and the world was much older. There was a sense of permanence, in the material things at least: old buildings and old furniture and old books and old wood. Oaken chapel pews and blanket chests and linenfold panelling – the sorts of adornments that, in the USA, are the enviable preserve of grand old institutions in grand old East coast cities, but in the UK, found in all manner of great and humble places. But the trees weren’t so old. England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ is green with farms and fens, but not so much old forest anymore. Like much of Europe, over aeons humans have harvested so much timber that little old-growth forest remains, only secondary growth, coppices and managed woodland. The trees in England are fairly young because the culture is relatively old. I was not yet a woodworker, and I did’nt think much on trees and timber at the time, but I knew the culture was old.

As a married man, I moved to Australia, and here I remain. The prevailing culture – that of the settlers rather than the indigenous people of Australia – is young, and so are the trees. Mostly.

Australia’s frequent natural fires mean that most of the trees that grow here are adapted to grow fast and big, but not long. Generations of forest turn over quickly – in ecological terms that is – with bushfires killing off adult trees and causing their scattered seeds to germinate and grow a generation of newer, younger trees. What’s more, as in America, the brash, youthful settler culture did not have a good track record as stewards of the natural gifts of the island continent, and the few old hardwood forests that once existed have been over-exploited.

Perhaps with age comes wisdom, but now I am both a father and a woodworker, and I ponder permanence, and wood, a great deal, and what all this youthful forest means for woodworking here in the sunburnt country.

Hard, Stringy Wood

If you know anything about Australian woods, you know they have a well-deserved reputation for being really, really hard.

The vast majority of our forests and the trees that grow in them are the various and many species of eucalyptus and its near relatives, with two qualities that make them a mixed blessing to woodworkers.

First, they are fast growing, so as to quickly repopulate the land after fire, and second, they are extremely hard – the softest commercially available eucalyptus wood is called “Victorian Ash” (or “Tasmanian Oak” – same wood, different source) in the timber trade with a hardness similar to white oak or rock maple. The hardness of other varieties can easily range up into ipe and ebony territory.

The result is an abundance of eucalyptus wood great for things like flooring and fenceposts, but fast growth makes it especially stringy, which together with phenomenal hardness makes it difficult to work with handtools. That same Victorian ash, the most common of all hardwoods in commercial use here, is among the best behaved, and a straight grained piece can take a nice glassy finish from a hand-plane, but we have nothing commonly available with the smooth texture of a maple or beech. Victorian ash works like oak at best. The other good furniture eucalypt is Jarrah, which is a lovely orange-brown colour and less splintery than most, but it’s expensive and a good bit harder than maple, so still a challenge. Moreover, it comes from Western Australia, which, along with Victoria, banned all native forestry at the start of 2024, so it is likely to recede to only niche use in the future.

There are many other beautiful, softer, easier working, and often fragrant Australian hardwoods, but for one reason or another all of them are scarce and hard to track down.

There are few species under plantation production here, and the fast-growing eucalypts crowd out most other species in our forests, so the best cabinetry timbers, like acacias and mahogany relatives, are rare. If you find these timbers for sale, it’s usually from a small-time operation that harvested a fallen tree – so you have to wait around for luck to smile on you. I try to snap up Australian Rosewood priced reasonably. The vast tracts of cabinet timber we once had – the famed Australian Red Cedar, which is actually a mahogany cousin, for example – were all irresponsibly exploited down to commercial extinction decades ago. A permanent culture of wood use requires a forestry industry with an eye toward permanence, which we didn’t have for a long time, and many argue we still don’t – hence the aforementioned bans and the limited selection of commercial wood.

A few government agencies and private companies are trying to improve sustainable forestry in Australia focusing on Australian blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon). This species should not be confused with the African blackwood of oboe, clarinet and bagpipe fame. Australian blackwood is a dead ringer for Hawaiian koa, and is its closest living relative. It has a rich, deep, brown colour with the same gleaming chatoyancy of koa, but its name comes not from the colour of the seasoned wood, but rather the black color the sap turns sawyers’ hands.

It’s a breathtaking timber deserving of widespread admiration, and one of the few beautiful cabinet timbers down here that weren’t over-exploited to near extinction in the last century. The blackwood timber industry is apparently a bit wiser than their forebears, and so harvests less and charges more to promote sustainability. It’s the nicest timber that can be bought here straightforwardly, and is priced accordingly.

The Ships that Took Our Trees

Clipper Ship, *City of Adelaide*, 1000 tons

Of particular interest to users of Japanese tools and Japanese woodworking methods and mindsets are softwoods, and this is where Australia is confusing. There are no true pines native to any part of the Southern Hemisphere – but settlers insisted on naming all the fascinating and unusual softwoods down here “pines” – and then importing a northern hemisphere species for most of our plantation wood.

Norfolk Island Pine

When Britain established the first penal colony at Sydney in 1787, the site was chosen partly because it was thought to offer a good strategic back-up to the British claims on Norfolk Island – a speck 900 miles out into the Pacific. The trees covering this island – Norfolk Island pines – were thought to be particularly valuable to the Royal Navy, as they tended to produce ramrod-straight single trunks, almost as if replacement masts had been conjured up from the Earth. However, the timber proved too flexible for masts, and the idea was abandoned, though the Norfolk pines got their second act as a popular ornamental plant (including a few all the way back in my home town in California).

Hoop Pine

Much more useful is hoop pine, a near cousin of the norfolk pine that grows on the Australian mainland, and is our only plantation-grown native conifer. I’ve made shoji from hoop pine; it has nice straight grain producing a good shine when hand-planed. The only other commercially available native softwood is Australian white cypress which has a beautiful smell and is famously insect resistant, but unlike most softwoods it’s harder than American oaks. It also doesn’t grow very big, so is mostly used for knotty, sapwood-sapwood edged fence posts, or equally knotty floorboards and decking. I understand that it is not a sustainably managed species, and conservationists often recommend against its use.

Monterey Pine

The Australian construction industry relies on plantation grown monterey pine (also called radiata or pinus radiata) for all of its general purpose lumber. This is an import from California, now very rare in its natural habitat but grown all over the Southern Hemisphere to compensate for a dearth of native pine species. It is a particular pet-hate of Australian woodworkers, in online forums and general conversation, who lament its often crumbly texture and poor strength. I don’t hate it though – it can take a lovely plane finish and the wide grain does make for beautiful patterns on clear, flat sawn boards.

Huon Pine

Like all Australian trees, huon pine is misnamed. It isn’t a pine at all but rather the only member of its genus – more akin to a cypress than anything else, yet still not a cypress, a thing of its own.

Fans of Tolkien’s works may lament that its name is Huon and not Huorn, but no tree was ever more deserving of association with Tolkien’s tree-herding Ents, that ancient race of sentient defenders of the forest.

Huon pines grow only in Tasmania, and only in the wet and mountainous western regions protected from fires. Provided they have that protection, they may achieve something most Australian trees do not – great age. Huon pines grow incredibly slowly, barely thickening as century after century wash over them, living at least 2000-3000 years, with some thought to be even older. This is best evidenced in the astonishing tightness of their annual growth rings. It is not uncommon to see specimens with annual growth less than half a millimetre – or to put it another way, the trees gain less than two inches of trunk radius per century. While immensely slow, these trees can still grow immensely large when given that precious critical thing – time. They are probably the longest-lived trees in the Southern hemisphere, and certainly in Australia.

There are lots of small huon pines growing now, though few big ones. They should be huge, but they are not, because the great ones were all mostly cut down to build boats – a vast fleet of huon pine watercraft were constructed in Tasmania, using up most of the big trees. The promise of the perfect tree for shipbuilding that had fallen flat on Norfolk Island paid off big time in Tasmania with the huon pine. The reason for the single-minded use of these ancient trees for shipbuilding will become obvious, but as a result of this hasty zeal, they are now the single most protected species of tree in Australia, both to allow the forest, with Ent-like patience, to recover, and to preserve the few very old and very large specimens that remain.

Beyond the Grey Rain-curtain

These trees are old, though their lives are but the beginning, and death, as Gandalf once taught young Peregrin Took before a fateful battle, is just another path beyond which the journey does not end. This is, cynically, true of all wood that gets put to human purpose, but it is true in a special way for huon pines because of a unique chemical in their wood. Not unlike other fragrant cypress-like softwoods – including Japanese hinoki – huon pines contain great amounts of oil, in this case, an oil called methyl eugenol that protects them from insects and other wood-hungry nasties. Methyl eugenol is, as it happens, the ticket to eternity for wood.

For whatever reason, methyl eugenol, in the very high concentrations in which it is found in huon pine, is astonishingly successful at preserving timber. Huon pine timber is highly prized for shipbuilding because it’s easy to bend and work, completely impervious to insects and fungus, and readily survives the rigors of the aquatic environment. All that ever seems to happen to huon pine is that the surface turns grey in the sun – much like teak. And then it simply endures.

And I mean it endures. The 3,000-year age of living huon pines is one thing, but researchers have found fallen huon pine logs on the floor of the forest that have lain there, unmolested by decay, for as much as 38,000 years! Not petrified, not fossilized, just oily wood under a weathered surface, simply enduring.

These characteristics are also why we still have a bit of precious huon pine timber available nowadays, reclaimed from time to time from old boats and old furniture, as durable and enduring as ever. Moreover, the foresight that was missing when the trees were mostly cut down a century ago was not blind when hydroelectric dams came to Tasmania. In the 1970s, with two valleys set to be flooded, the Tasmanian government allowed loggers to go into the valleys and cut down the pines – but not to take them. The loggers, working in tall boots even as the dam waters were rising, would leave the logs where they fell, to float up to the surface of the new lake as the waters rose.

That was 50 years ago – the logs are still there, floating on the lake. The outer layer turns grey to about 1-2mm in, and then, inside, the creamy golden wood, as perfect as the day it was felled, endures. The decades afloat harms it not at all, and every year a tiny portion is licensed to be taken for restoration and preservation jobs.

This is all the unreclaimed huon pine that there is or ever will be for woodworkers to use, and they estimate they have about 50 years’ worth left at current extraction rates. But with the wood so impervious and eternal, what is already in cabinets and drawers and tables and ships will continue to circulate and be reused. It is a wood with true permanence.

An Unexpected Responsibility

At this point I will enter the story to share the most harrowing and rewarding of my experiences as a woodworker.

By chance, I had the opportunity to acquire three large slabs of huon pine, cut and dried in ages past but never used. Compared to the tiny crafting boards and turning blanks that are generally available (at great price), this was a bit of a windfall. I could have, with all cynicism, listed each one for sale for several hundred dollars, pocketed the profits, and went on to buy more quotidian woods. I did not do this for two reasons.

First, and perhaps most pointedly, with visions of epoxy pours and hairpin legs plaguing my dreams, I was overcome with a sense of responsibility to “protect” this precious wood – whatever that means. I wish to acknowledge, in self-reflection and humility, that I am an amateur woodworker. A reasonably experienced and meticulous one – but an amateur nonetheless, albeit one who works with hand tools and has the hand tool mindset. My work is fine but not perfect. But I suppose I like to think that the tool marks I leave here and there, occasional tear-out, and other mistakes that remain have a certain honesty and worthiness to them, becoming of a slab of great age. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…

More than that though, I saw in these slabs of huon pine, and in the legends of these trees, an opportunity for permanence. Here were three great hulking slabs of a tree older than the nation-state it was felled in (I counted 800 growth rings on one of the slabs – and it wasn’t even a centre slab), thick and strong, and made of the closest wood comes to being an imperishable material. Here was the opportunity, if it was ever going to exist, for a piece of furniture that might outlive the memory of my name.

It had to be a table. Only a table could use to best effect the wide expanses of precious wood – laying them out on full display for all who saw them to admire. No matter how perfectly I might make a cabinet or chest, it would not do justice to the material. And, as history, archaeology, and literature show, only a table is so intimately connected to life and family and holiness by its proximity to hungry mouths, little hands, and eager minds as they first do their colouring and then their maths homework, and then their college applications. Only a table is ever so truly loved by generations as to be worthy of wood older than all those generations combined. I simply couldn’t bear cutting the beautiful slabs into small pieces. So for months I fretted; and worried; and stressed about the crushing responsibility of making the first cuts.

The Weight of History

I am an apartment woodworker. My family home is a house in the mountains west of Sydney, but I work as Dean of a university college and we live most of the time in the Dean’s residence, an apartment on campus. I am blessed with a very patient and indulgent wife and an apartment that happens to have a sort of wide corridor I use as a tiny woodshop. Space is still limited, though, and I try not to stockpile wood (in the interest of stockpiling tools – ahem). So, three slabs, two metres long and the best part of a metre wide, mocked me each time I had to shuffle past them. And still, I fretted.

I eventually decided upon a refectory table so that no matter how many chairs are crammed around it, none clash with the legs. And with a strong stretcher tusk-tenoned into each leg to allow it to knock down, so that I could make it big but still fit it through doorways. Most importantly, I needed to keep the two 800mm wide boards that made the tabletop flat – so sliding dovetails across the bottom to counteract any cupping. And those sliding dovetails would be a perfect place to pin the top to the legs, with removable dowels, again so it could be knocked down to move. Drawbored mortise and tenon joints to hold the I-shaped legs together without glue (since all that wonderful oil makes gluing troublesome anyway). A kanna-shiage (handplane finished) top for beauty and touch, with just a light coat of oil and hard wax, so that the wood itself can be appreciated. A magnificent vision. Complex and well-chosen joinery. Perfection worthy of the tree. Entirely beyond my experience or skills…

I had to start by getting to know the wood. Before any cutting or marking or anything, I realized I could not confront the massive task I had set myself without first knowing what it was to get huon pine under saw and plane, to see, feel it, and smell it.

.

I hoisted one of the slabs onto my sawhorses, and with a few strokes of the little aogami roughing plane on the left, and a few more of the shirogami finishing plane on the right, I had my first look at the slab, and my first curls of huon pine shavings. (No, Stan, I don’t London finish my plane bodies. They are dirty, it’s patina.)

The smell – oh the smell. The smell of huon pine is unlike anything I have ever experienced. It is sweet and rich and almost creamy, but without even a hint of sugariness or caramel, nor any of the medicinal notes of cedars or cypress. I suppose the aroma is a little like gardenia flowers, but different. And it’s persistent. I saved bags of little offcuts that are no less fragrant now than a year ago.

The scent was such that I almost did not notice the figure at first. From some angles, nothing more than a very tightly grained, golden softwood, with rippling grain caused by the irregular growth of the tree’s surface over the centuries is visible. But when the light strikes the surface of the top at the right angle, a shimmering sea of lamellar rays cutting across the grain pop out, almost obscuring the grain with its gleam. Beautiful but subtle – much like the scent. This image and this aroma is now linked with permanence in my senses.

With the feel, smell and appearance of the wood now embedded in my mind I began to feel more confident about beginning my table project. One serious concern remained, however, namely: tear-out.

Layout That Fills the Workshop

I started in with trepidation, hoisting the two closest matched slabs onto my horses and getting to work. In my little shop, I have no room for a great big assembly table, so the slab was my workbench, and took up the whole shop. Here you can see my cramped little shop, replete with little atedai against the wall, assorted tat taped and hung on the walls (including my Palm Sunday palm, awaiting the coming Ash Wednesday), my tool chest brusquely stolen from Stan’s design, and a lovely old tansu filled with bric-a-brac.

Layout was painstaking, although not because the joinery was especially complex. Before shaping, the two “I” shaped legs were six simple boards and the stretcher would resemble nothing so much as a 2×4. The only complexity to the initial layout arose from the graceful radius I had planned for the long edges of the two top slabs. I could have cut them with straight edges and cut the curved edges later but that problem would have been unnecessarily wasteful.

One simply cannot waste this wood. If you have any respect or regard for the trees that support our craft, it repulses the conscience to even put plane shavings into shop bins. Moreover, I absolutely refused to cut these slabs in anything but the most efficient, offcut-preserving way. As a result, layout took days (or, rather, nights. Amateur, remember?).

The two surfaces of the slabs I used for the top each had unique flaws and virtues. In the end, curving the tabletop’s edges to accommodate the natural edges and features of the slabs proved effective in maximizing the tabletop’s size while minimizing waste of this rare and valuable wood. For example, in the photo above you can see where the near right corner of the slab narrows towards the end, an inconsistency my layout had to accommodate. This layout was also necessary because two of the slabs were contiguous in the bole and one was not, such that the two contiguous, matched slabs had to be used for the top even though one was somewhat larger than the other.

Dealing with the constraints that imposed this layout taught me important lessons in collaborating and compromising with the wood. In line with Japanese tradition, I knew I wanted the “outside” surface of the board to be oriented upwards in the table, and so my layout prioritized that side. As a result, both slabs ended up with prominent natural flaws on the underside – like greyed areas, bark incursions, and even one gash that looked as though the tree had been struck with a red hot poker.

There is a school of thought in modern, machine assisted, YouTube recorded woodworking that cannot tolerate such defects, no matter how small or natural, in any piece of furniture, demanding they be either removed entirely or filled with colored epoxy. The first approach I reject because wood is natural and I believe it should feel natural. I enjoy the fragrance of the wood, and the feel of running my hand along the underside of the table, sensing the evidence of the tree’s story, together with the tool marks I intentionally left. The latter approach I reject because epoxy is plastic, and I work with wood. The table bears the scars it earned in life, but only reveals them to those with enough appreciation and humility to get down on their hands and knees to gaze upon them.

Putting Blade to Wood

I do not now, and suspect I never will, own a table saw. Someday I might own a bandsaw, but I’m not convinced. In any case, I won’t have any of these things in the house whilst my daughters are young, as much to spare my family’s lungs from dust as to avoid injuries, however unlikely.

So that meant I had to figure out a way to accurately break down these slabs along my layout lines with hand saws, in a room that barely contained the slabs.

I couldn’t do it on the sawhorses – that would require me to stand on the slabs to make the long rip cuts, which seemed risky to their integrity without a supporting table underneath, especially when sawing the narrower pieces. And the slabs were too long and too heavy to comfortably use the Japanese low horse and foot-clamp method, which I am normally fond of for long rips.

The solution I selected was to support the slabs horizontally on one long edge using my 6-inch thick planing beam, with the other long edge supported on low horses with extra boards taped to them to make up the difference in height. This provided enough vertical clearance under the slab for a kataba saw. This arrangement had other advantages too. As I ripped from one end of the slab to the other, I could stand on the slab directly above the supporting planing beam, which was in turn resting on the floor, preventing the slab from shifting position while avoiding downward deflection of the ever-narrowing slabs.

My back did not love this hunched sawing position, but it was more comfortable than you might expect, and in two long sessions of rip-sawing, I had everything broken down to pieces: two wide top planks, each tapered on one edge, two vertical leg pieces, four feet and aprons for the I-shaped legs, and one long stretcher. As it happened (and as you can see below) the offcut from the third slab was almost a perfect extra stretcher. I still have it and will use it for something someday. It is the world’s most magnificent (and I suspect valuable) pine 2×4. The two venerable katabas, one rip and one crosscut, may be seen taking a well-deserved rest after rendering magnificent service.

With designing, planning, layout and rough cutting done the project shifted to the shaping and joining phase requiring greater attention, so I put down the camera, and did not pick it up again until the job was done. Sadly, I don’t have photos of gorgeous shavings rippling off planes, or of the massive Anaya-nomi I used to cut the mortises for the stretcher to pass through the legs, or of the nakin-kanna rounding off edges.

This work was more-or-less conventional furniture-making; taking the neatly rectangular pieces of wood I made in the rip-fest above and shaping them into components using good steel and keen eye. I didn’t follow a borrowed or historic pattern for any of this, but worked out my own take on the refectory style of dining table with two I-shaped legs and a single stretcher.

I made a pattern of a single asymmetric curve using a bit of sturdy brown paper shopping bag, leaving the carry handle attached to hang it on my shop wall throughout the process so it was always to hand. I used this same curved pattern throughout to define all the curves in the project, starting with the concave slope from the mortise in the feet to their toes, the tapers from centre to ends on the vertical legs, and again as the most important curve in the project – the gentle swell of the tabletop’s long edges from one end to the middle and then tapering back to the opposite end again.

Once the base was completed, the conventional woodworking ended and the real gauntlet began – the top.

The top was made with the two long, wide boards shown with my kataba saws in the photo above. At almost 400mm wide each, they were a challenge to handle, a bigger challenge to plane, and an even bigger challenge to keep flat.

The work of planing the wood went alright. The swirly grain of huon pine is not terribly prone to tearout, and like all quality softwoods, is a joy to plane in the direction to which it agrees, producing shimmery, breathtaking surfaces. The trouble is that each 400mm board contained 800 years of growth rings with grain direction changing within each board many times due to storms, cool summers, and a lightning strike or two as empires rose and fell. And with such tight grain an entire century of growth, along with the changes in the tree’s environment that impacted that growth, ended up recorded within a mere five centimetres of width – narrower than the thickness of a standard 70mm kanna – and often without apparent visual clues. As a result, seemingly neat, fine ribbons of shavings pulled end to end would be followed by tiny but significant tearout here and there across the board.

Reader, this took days – days of sharpening by very best white #1, fine mouthed, perfectly (amateur-perfect, mind you) tuned kanna. Days of shaving just exactly to this specific point, in just this direction, just so, to clear up a spot of tear out, then switching sides and going the other way, hoping and praying and watching that I didn’t overstep the boundary and have to start over – which I did, many times. And all the while, awkwardly walking around the massive slab, leaning over it to plane the far side, getting half up onto it like a billiards player, and then doing it all over again on the other slab. There is still some tear out in the surface, especially around the teardrop-shaped bark inclusion that gracefully adorns one corner of the tabletop. But it’s pretty close.

Keeping it Flat

An important aspect of the project was ensuring the wide, solid-wood tabletop remained permanently flat through changes in temperature, humidity, loading and coverings. In the case of such wide slabs, there was only one realistic solution – sliding dovetailed battens on the underside. This design detail had the advantage of providing two level, perpendicular surfaces to connect the legs to the tabletop.

Of course, a hard cross-grain connection between the battens and the tabletop using glue and screws would end in tears after just a few years, so I cut two blind sliding dovetail slots in each half of the tabletop beginning at centre joint of the toward to about 8-10cm of the edges, then cut dovetails into the battens to fit. The two planks hold the battens captive between them once installed, and the friction in the sliding dovetails locks the two slabs together without glue, dowels or hardware.

To use glue anywhere in this project seemed wrong. In any case, the oils in huon pine don’t play nicely with glue, and the joinery connections were the better plan.

I cut the dovetails in the battens and tabletop planks using my cleverest of all Japanese planes – the male and female dovetail plane, a rare beast indeed.

With the battens installed I cut 10cm wide shallow bevels on all four lower edges of the top, tapering the top to create the illusion of a tabletop only 20mm thick from a slab about 40mm thick in the centre. This involved a lot of plane work.

I left the underside a bit more rustic, even allowing large areas of “live” bark to remain as a lagniappe to the worshipful person who surveys the underside. You might think that leaving bark on the underside meant that I contravened the usual practice of Japanese woodworkers of using the outside surface of a plank as the show surface, but no – though not Japanese, I cleave to this principle invariably, but in this case, the history of the tree involved so many twists and turns that the bark inclusion was exposed on the inner surface of the board.

For clarity, allow me to explain what may not be obvious from the photos. The two legs are connected by mortise and tenon joints to horizontal feet at their lower ends and horizontal beams at their upper ends. In turn, the trestle leg beams are connected to the two battens by four dowels, two at each batten, that pass through the beams and battens at an upwards angle. After exiting the batten, the end of each dowel presses tightly against the underside of the tabletop, slightly bending and binding it in place.

To disassemble the table in preparation for relocating it to our home in the mountains outside Sydney, I just need to knock out these four dowels and slide the battens out of their dovetail slots, and knock out the two wedges in the ends of the tusk tenons securing the spreader beam connecting the legs. This design has worked well, and the dowels are strong enough that the table can be lifted and carried by the top alone.

The Finish

Now, a great part of me wanted to leave the wood unfinished, both to enjoy the raw kanna-shiage surface, and to ensure the magnificent smell would not be diminished. But, to provide some protection and give a bit of extra visibility to the lovely grain, I gave the wood a couple of coats of thinned pure natural tung oil, and then rubbed on and buffed out several coats of carnauba wax creating a surface hard enough to help protect the relatively soft wood from dings and scratches. Also, my wife liked the colour better oiled than unfinished, a very important consideration for all of my woodworking efforts.

And that was the job done, and here it is, in its home on the covered veranda of my house:

As you can see, the finish turned the feet, which I cut from a discontiguous slab, a darker color than the rest of the table, but it’s an effect I rather like. The clouded figure of the top shimmers beautifully in the morning light from the East, and the little imperfections quietly witness to handwork, something for me to fret over in my quietude at meals around the table. The horizontal beams at the top of each leg that mate with the battens, not visible in the photos, are identical to the feet, except of course inverted.

I do not think I am testing the permanent nature of this table by using it outdoors – though I may move it inside for a different practical reason: it is now the largest table we have, and has already made a couple of trips inside for big family gatherings. Rather, faced with a true forever wood that can endure against the elements, it seems only right that it should experience them and demonstrate its aplomb. I am glad in the end that I did not glue the centre joint of the top surface because it allows the two slabs to move and stretch a bit on humid days without cracking or busting the seam, and while this does mean they become un-flush for a day or two, they settle back in becoming flush once again when the weather dries out. The table can breathe.

I will inevitably make little corrections as the table and I get used to each other. I remain unsatisfied with the very rectangular shape of the stretcher, and when the time comes to break down and refinish the table I will add some curvature to the stretcher. I will also probably resurface the top perhaps once a decade, as it ages and my skill with a kanna (hopefully) improves. Part of the joy of using a wood that should outlive my bloodline to make a table of great permanence that can be disassembled and reassembled as needed is the anticipation of ongoing minor improvements, and the relationship I and future generations will have with it.

In the end, I still do not quite deserve this wood, because no one does. It is right and just that the Tasmanian government has banned the felling of any more of these trees, and it is right and just that the remaining wood is hard to come by and cherished. I am happy for the opportunity to make something permanent with this magnificently permanent and beautiful material.

Antone Martinho-Truswell is a professional zoologist and amateur woodworker. His work can be found on Instagram at @stjosephwoodworks, where he posts his projects, experiments, and failures, and takes the odd commission. If you enjoy his writing and want to learn more about his day job, his book, The Parrot in the Mirror, is available from booksellers online and worldwide.

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Japanese Handplanes: The Kiwaganna Skewed Rabbet Plane

I made myself a snowball
As perfect as could be.
I thought I’d keep it as a pet
And let it sleep with me.
I made it some pajamas
And a pillow for its head.
Then last night it ran away,
But first it wet the bed.
Shel Silverstein

In this article your humble servant will introduce a Japanese plane called the Kiwaganna, meaning “skewed rabbet plane.”

This is an important handplane in common use in Japan, and one we sell, although it’s not well known in the West. So for the benefit our Beloved Customers, I will explain of some of the solutions learned over the years from senior Japanese craftsmen, and acquired during many decades of brutal study at the University of Stoopid, School of Hard Knocks (Lower Outhouse Campus), which may prove useful.

What is the Kiwaganna Handplane?

The Japanese Kiwaganna is written 際鉋 in Chinese characters, and pronounced kee/wha/gah/nah. “Kiwa” means “edge” or “verge,” and “ganna” means handplane.

While the design of the Japanese version of this handplane is unique, as far as your humble servant is aware many other versions exist around the globe. The Japanese version has a wooden body, a laminated blade, and is significantly lighter in weight and smaller in volume than its counterparts. It is a superior tool, IMHO, but it can be quirky.

This plane can handle a number of tasks, but it specializes in planing a straight-sided groove or rabbet right up to an edge or line with a clean 90˚ inside corner. A few common applications include planing the tongue around the perimeter of a board to make the bottom of a drawer, and raising a panel in frame and panel construction. In construction work it is frequently used to pare and clean tenons in timbers, especially those cut with circular saws which tend to leave a step, and to fit finish woodwork, among many other tasks.

This plane is of course used by joiners, cabinetmakers, sashimonoshi, and furniture makers but you would be surprised at how popular it is with carpenters and timber framers for cleaning the 90˚ inside corners of joints such as tenons.

Craftsmen who use kiwaganna typically own a two-piece set comprised of a right-hand and left-hand version to deal with tight access and changing grain direction. But the right-hand version is the most popular by far.

Advantages of the Kiwaganna Plane

In general, a skewed blade in a rabbet plane provides two benefits. The first is that the reaction forces pushing back on the blade include a vector that tends to push the plane towards the line, edge, inside corner or verge being planed to, making the plane more stable in the cut, an important factor where precision is necessary.

The second and perhaps most important benefit of the skewed blade, however, is the smoother cut and reduced tearout it makes possible, especially important when planing cross-grain.

Another benefit the skewed blade provides in the case of the Japanese kiwaganna is the point of the skewed blade penetrating the body of the plane and ending flush with the side of the body, making possible a zero-clearance cut to a line without the extra weight and cost of complicated mechanisms and reinforcing plates. It’s a deceptively simple but clever design.

Points to Keep In Mind

While a simple tool, the kiwaganna often proves frustrating to first-timers. Indeed, your humble servant struggled with kiwaganna for far too long before he figured them out. To avoid similar damage to brain and ego, Beloved Customers that wish to become proficient in using this elegant tool will find it useful to understand the following nine points. The articles linked to below, while not written specifically about the kiwaganna, are nonetheless relevant and may prove helpful

1. First, a brief inspection of the body and the cuts made to receive the blade will make it clear that kiwaganna dai (body) are more fragile than that of regular hiraganna planes, so when adjusting the blade, please use a wooden, plastic or rawhide mallet, not a steel hammer.

2. When removing the blade, strike the dai at the same angle as the blade is inlet into the dai to reduce unnecessary stresses. This means you will hit the top corner of the dai on the side opposite where the blade’s point exits. Clip off and round over this corner of the dai with a knife or chisel to prevent your mallet from chipping the dai. Striking the opposite corner can have bad results.

3. The first step in truing/adjusting the blade of a kiwaganna plane is to sharpen and polish the blade and uragane (chipbreaker) well, make sure they fit each other tightly without a gap near the cutting edge, and check that there is adequate and uniform clearance at the mouth so that shavings flow smoothly without clogging. The skewed nature of the blade and chipbreaker make this difficult to judge, so exercise caution. In many cases, the plane will work just fine, and maybe even better, without its uragane. The uragane has a bevel ground into its pointy corner. Make sure this is not touching the dai when inserted properly. Keep in mind that you will need to periodically grind this bevel down after sharpening the blade every few times or it will touch the dai creating a restriction where shavings will become jammed. When you sharpen the blade, you will also need to resharpen the uragane too to ensure they match each other tightly. Not every time, but once in a while. A lot of people fail to maintain the uragane and then suffer emotional anguish when their plane mysteriously stops working. Mystery solved.

4. The right and left side edges of the blade must fit the retention grooves tightly where they exit the top surface of the dai. If the fit is too loose, the blade will be difficult to keep in alignment, but if the fit is too tight the blade may crack the dai during seasonal shrinkage. Older dai are usually safe, but a plane shipped from a wet Tokyo summer to a hellishly dry Arizona may experience problems. This article provides more details about fitting the body to the blade.

If it becomes necessary to shave the grooves, work very slowly and carefully. Color the blade’s side edges with pencil lead, marking pen ink or Dykem. Insert it into the grooves and note the high colored areas. Shave these down just a tiny tiny bit with a very sharp chisel, or a metal file, then insert the blade and check. Repeat as necessary. Don’t create a big gap between the walls of the groove and the sides of the blade (versus face and underside of the blade which must be tightly pinched in the grooves), just make sure the width of the blade is not wedged tightly between the grooves.

5. Check that the “ear” of the blade (the chamfered corner at the cutting edge opposite the pointy corner) is ground back enough so it does not terminate inside the groove, because if it does, shavings will become jammed. Don’t forget that, with each sharpening, the sharp portion of the blade will become a little wider and this chamfer a little smaller. If it becomes too small, shavings will become jammed between the blade and retention groove, I promise you, so please grind this chamfer back after every few sharpenings.

6. Here is wisdom: Contact between the back of the blade and the block should not be too high-pressure, otherwise the area on the sole behind the mouth may be pushed out making the plane misbehave, an extremely common problem with this plane. You want uniform pressure where possible to ensure the blade is stable, but remember that it is the grooves pinching the blade that keep it in place, not pressure on its back. This is important: If you find your plane stops cutting, it may be because the portion of the dai at the sole behind the mouth is being pushed out as the blade becomes shorter/thicker. The surest way to check this is to use a notched straightedge like the 400mm Matsui Precision product we carry. If the sole behind the mouth is pushed out such that it contacts the straightedge, use a scraper or whatever to pare/shave/scrape excess material away. Indeed, a gap at this area is better than contact. As the blade becomes gradually shorter after much use, its wedging action on the dai may increase pushing the sole behind the mouth out, lifting the cutting edge away from the surface of the wood you need to plane thereby preventing it from cutting consistently, if at all, so check for proper clearance occasionally.

7. With the blade fitted to the grooves and most of the pressure relieved from its back, insert the blade. Check that it projects evenly from the mouth its full width. This is very important. If it projects further on one side than the other, resharpen/reshape the cutting edge so it projects perfectly uniformly. Uneven projection is almost always the result of the user unintentionally and gradually changing the angle of the skew over multiple sharpening sessions, and it always causes problems. Besides projecting uniformly from the mouth (when the sole is at the mouth is perfectly flat), the point of the blade must penetrate the dai (body) and be flush with the outside surface of the sidewall. Heed these words: Failure to get these two subtle details right is the most common cause of failure to perform in the Kiwaganna plane.

8. The mouth opening, in other words the gap between the blade and the sole of the dai where it exits the dai, must be narrow, and even in width, but not closed or skewed, otherwise shavings will jamb in the mouth, another common problem with kiwaganna. If the mouth is not even, use an adjustable steel protractor to match the angle of the blade measured from the side of the dai where the point of the blade exits. Remove the blade and mark the mouth with a sharp marking knife so the mouth is exactly the same angle as the blade. When doing this layout, be extremely careful to make the mouth opening of uniform width to match the cutting edge, but keep the mouth as narrow as possible. Use a sharp chisel to cut to this line making the mouth perfectly uniform. Insert a thin knife blade (or sharpened utility knife blade) into the mouth to shave and clean it after chiseling.

9. There is nothing wrong with leaving the sole perfectly flat instead of having the hollowed-out areas typically added to standard hiraganna planes. Just make sure it is truly perfectly flat. I have no problem with using sandpaper on float glass to true the sole of a kiwaganna, but a card scraper is a better tool for the job.

Juggling Blades

Although we addressed them above, let’s review the two critical factors you must juggle to keep a kiwaganna working well. I’m repeating these points not because I doubt Beloved Customer’s intelligence, but only because repetition improves understanding.

First, maintain the angle of the blade’s skew so that it projects a uniform distance from the mouth (with the mouth/sole flat and true). To do this you must pay more attention when sharpening the blade than is normally necessary. If you get this wrong, nothing will go right.

Second, as mentioned above, to cut into the corner of the rabbet cleanly, the point of the sharpened blade must penetrate the sidewall of the dai and be perfectly flush with the sidewall but without projecting out past the sidewall when the blade is projecting the right amount from the mouth and uniformly across its width. If the skew of the blade is wrong, or the dai is warped or worn, this point will end up being either recessed inside the sidewall or projecting outside it. It needs to be flush with the sidewall. If it is not, you may need to either shave material from the side of the plane (not recommended) or grind down the side edge of the blade near the point, a drastic measure. This is seldom necessary, and when it is, the reason is almost always a badly warped dai.

As you can see, this is a juggling act, but so long as you focus on these two points, and maintain the proper skew angle, all the blades will remain gleefully spinning in the air as you grin from ear to ear.

YMHOS

Relevant Articles:

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Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, thuggish Twitter or a US government IT consultant and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may my kiwaganna planes all warp to resemble mushy bananas.

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The London Finish

A 70mm handplane with a blade by Nakano-san and body by Inomoto-san with a London Finish applied by YMHOS

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein

here are more ways to finish wood than there are to cook beans, but unlike the musical fruit, the fragrant finishing technique that is the subject of this article became famous through the products of London’s elite gunsmiths such as Durs Egg (Est. 1772), John Rigby & Co (Est, in Dublin in 1775 and moved to London in 1866), Joseph Manton (1766 – 1835), Boss & Co (Est. 1812), James Purdey & Sons (Est. 1814), Holland & Holland (Est. 1835), and a hundred other European gunmakers. However, the technique actually pre-dates the 1700’s by many centuries.

The Traditional London Finish

While the traditional London Finish got its name from the justifiably-famous products of the high-end London gunmakers, some of the most famous of which are named above, since ancient times this technique used to seal and finish high-quality woodwork employed linseed oil, the squeezings from the seeds of a stringy plant called flax.

The difference between the linseed oil widely used for paint production and woodworking and the flax seed oil sold as a health product in the West nowadays is simply the method used to extract the oil from the flax plant.

Of course, Gentle Reader is no doubt aware that the fibers of the cotton plant have been used to make textiles since at least 6,000 BC, but what you may not realize is that it was rare and so labor intensive to produce that at times cotton fabrics cost more than silk in the West, as recorded in tax records of the time. Indeed, it wasn’t until the invention of the Cotton Gin in 1793 that cotton textiles became affordable for ordinary people. My point is that linen cloth made from the fiber of the flax plant, and spun cloth made from animal hair, such as wool, goat and camel, were the most common textiles available probably since Methuselah wore goatskin nappies.

Indeed, flax can be grown in even poor soil, and can be spun and woven into useable thread and cloth in small lots in most any home, so “homespun linen” was once the cheapest most widely-used textile available worldwide, used for everything cotton, polyester, rayon and silk is nowadays, and linseed oil was an ordinary but economically-important by-product of flax production.

The London Finish made famous by the gunsmiths of Olde Londinium consisted of many coats of boiled linseed oil, betimes with some added dryers, forcefully rubbed into the wood by hand (the warm, bare hand, as a matter of fact), allowing days and weeks between coats for the oil to partially polymerize. Indeed, this manual application technique is the source of the term “hand-rubbed finish” that furniture and cabinet companies everywhere lie about applying in our time. If you have a free month, please give it a try.

This finish was also used for furniture and cabinetry since ancient times as referenced in texts of the era which is probably why some modern woodworkers, ignorant of chemistry and eager to employ historical techniques, still soak their projects in linseed oil potions.

While the final product of the traditional London Finish is indeed subtly beautiful, it takes a long time to accomplish, it’s expensive, it does little to prevent moisture from moving in and out of the wood (and therefore allows the wood to rapidly expand and contract with varying moisture content), and it does little to protect the wood from damage. Other downsides include the fact that linseed oil gives a yellow cast to wood, which gunstock makers and other woodworkers historically compensated for by dying the wood slightly red using alcanet root.

Also, linseed oil never fully solidifies and so attracts grime, eventually oxidizing and turning black forming a “patina” many people admire without realizing its dirty nature.

The Modern London Finish

The wood finishing technique described in this article is a modern, improved version of the traditional London Finish, one developed by American custom gunstock makers looking to replicate the beauty of the antique London Finish while providing better durability and moisture resistance for their customer’s expensive firearms and eliminating the expensive and time consuming work of rubbing in stinky, yellowing, dirt-magnet, spontaneously combusting linseed oil.

I learned about it when I was looking for a better finish for the stocks I made for my own smokepoles, everything from flintlock rifles and pistols to large-caliber bolt-action rifles. Through applying, using in the field, and comparing the long-term results of both the traditional linseed oil London Finish and this modern version, I came to treasure the modern version’s subtle beauty, durability and effectiveness at moisture control. Soon I was using it for everything from tool handles to furniture and casework with excellent results.

The primary difference between the traditional and modern versions of the London Finish is that the traditional technique relies heavily on boiled linseed oil, a product that does little to protect wood, while the modern technique relies on modern varnish or polyurethane resins, but with a twist.

Where the two finishes are alike is that neither are surface finishes, but are soaked into the wood’s fibers. By contrast, normally-applied varnish or PU finishes are film finishes that, while they may adhere to the wood well when fresh, do not penetrate deeply, but remain on the surface where they quickly degrade due to UV light exposure, and the stress cracks resulting from expansion and contraction of the wood. Eventually and unavoidably their bond with the wood they are tasked to protect or beautify always fails, usually sooner than later, whereupon it stops doing its job.

The modern London Finish is not a surface film but soaks into the wood’s fibers where it hardens, and is protected from UV and shrinkage damage. It also fills the wood’s pores sealing them long-term and forming a smooth, flat surface free of the dents and streaks at the wood pores that always develop when shrinkable varnish or PU are applied as a surface finish.

Most importantly, it seals the wood with a durable material that cannot be removed without actually carving or abrading the wood away, protecting it from moisture/dirt/oil intrusion. This makes it a better and more attractive long-term finishing solution, one that, unlike the traditional London Finish, doesn’t need to be refreshed annually (yes indeed, annually).

Next, allow your humble servant to present the performance criteria I consider important when selecting a wood finish for tools.

Performance Criteria

The following criteria are focused on improving the longevity, durability and stability of the wooden components of handtools used in woodworking. These include the wooden bodies of handplanes, and the wooden handles of chisels, axes, hammers and gennou.

So what do we need a finish used in these applications to accomplish?

Stability: Minimize moisture movement into and out of the wood cells due to humidity changes, perspiration and rain thereby reducing the swelling, shrinking and warpage of the wood. This is specially important for handplanes, gennou handles, and some types of furniture and cabinetry. A surface finish that quickly oxidizes, suffers UV degradation, becomes inflexible and suffers shrinkage cracks or is easily chipped and/or abraded won’t get the job done for long.
Protection from oil and dirt: Prevent dirt, dust and oil from the user’s hands or the environment from penetrating below the wood’s surface keeping it cleaner. To accomplish this a finish must both fill the ends of open cells exposed at the surface with a water-proof, non-shrink plug (a “filler”) and seal the cells with a waterproof and oil-resistant chemical binder.
Insect and Bacteria Protection: The finish must lock away the yummy smell of raw wood so bugs will go beetling on by without stopping to snack, set up house, or lay eggs. It must also prevent bacteria spores, nasty things always present in dirt, from taking root.
Appearance: A smooth surface that looks like wood, not plastic or varnish.

These are only your humble servant’s criteria, of course; Your needs and expectations may vary.

Why Is the Expansion, Contraction and Stability of a Wooden Tool Component a Concern?

Trees are water pumps. Evaporation at the leaves sucks water, and with it, dissolved chemicals up from the ground. After a tree dies, most of the water contained in its cells migrates out of the wood, the individual cells shrink in size and crinkle as they dry, and the cell walls become stiffer and much stronger. However, despite its transition from a flexible, moist, growing plant to a stiff, dry board, left as-is a dead wood cell does not abandon its God-appointed duty to pump water but will faithfully continue to absorb and expel water, albeit to a more limited degree than when it was alive and kicking, causing its dimensions to shrink and swell in response to changing moisture conditions in the surrounding environment.

The problem is that the rate water enters or leaves the wood cells varies with a number of factors. One such factor is the location of the cell within the block of wood, producing differential expansion/shrinkage along with stresses and warpage. Most importantly, end grain absorbs and releases moisture much more quickly than side/face grain does. Slowing down the rate of water gain/loss is important to minimize and equalize internal stresses and to keep a wood product stable.

Besides the natural seasonal changes in humidity, modern air conditioning and heating equipment can create wild swings in ambient humidity, causing wooden components of furniture and tools, such as the bodies of Japanese handplanes, to warp, harming their ability to plane wood as intended. When this happens, and it will, time and effort is periodically required to adjust a wooden-bodied plane’s sole. This can be frustrating. Short of using a vacuum pump to suck heavy hardening resins into a board’s cells, it is nigh impossible to entirely prevent moisture from entering and leaving wood with changes in environmental humidity, and the dimensional changes, internal stresses, and warping that results.

In the case of a wooden-bodied plane, both ends and the surfaces inside the hole cut to receive the blade have exposed endgrain which absorbs and releases moisture quicker than side grain, so that when the humidity of the surrounding air increases, airborne water penetrates the endgrain faster than the sidegrain, and the endgrain surface at the body’s ends and inside the mouth swell first, causing dimensional changes and differential stresses, and often, warping.

By reducing the rate of absorption of moisture by the endgrain fibers to more closely match that of sidegrain fibers, swelling, shrinking and warping can be reduced. This is where the London Finish shines.

Since learning this method, I have used it not only on my guns, but also on timber frames, doors, tools, workbenches, furniture, cabinets, chests, tansu, tsuitate, and other wood products with excellent results.

Danish Oil

A note about so-called “Danish Oil” finishes is called for at this point. Danish Oil is boiled linseed oil combined with thinners, dryers, and resins. It polymerizes much quicker than simple boiled linseed oil, and is much easier to apply. By itself, varnishes and polyurethanes will not soak far into the pores of the wood (xylem tracheid), but by reducing its viscosity with linseed oil and thinner, the liquid will soak further into the grain and pores before more-or-less hardening. While superior to plain BLO (boiled linseed oil), Danish Oil is still not effective at either preventing water migration, or protecting the wood from dirt and oils. And besides, it changes the color of the wood to which it is applied, it stinks and it starts fires. Nothing good.

A gennou hammer with a Kosaburo head and black persimmon handle with a London Finish

Applying the Modern London Finish

This technique requires only a few inexpensive tools and materials, and no equipment of any kind, but it does take some time and effort to apply.

Tools and Supplies

You will need the following tools and supplies:

Clear varnish or polyurethane finish in a can. Gloss finish is fine, but I prefer a satin finish. Minwax PU works well, while Epifanes is the best I have experience using.
Thinner or mineral spirits. Not the water/acetone/oil-based low-VOC toilet cleaner sold at home centers. A professional-grade thinner from a Sherwin Williams store or other specialist paint store selling professional-grade materials is best.
Mixing container the size of a soup can or jam jar with a lid.
Small paintbrush, perhaps 3/4″ wide. Cheap is fine.
320 grit and 600 grit wet-or-dry sandpaper.
Clean rags,
Brown paper from shopping bags
Latex/rubber gloves to keep finish mixture off hands. It can get messy.
Masking tape.

The Finish Mixture

The finish mixture to be used is the varnish or PU you selected thinned 100% with thinner. You won’t need much to complete a few plane bodies or tool handles, less than half a soup can in fact, and it’s best to use in small batches. The lid will keep it from hardening between sessions. It’s not a lot of work, but with drying time, the process may take five or six days.

The Steps in Finishing a Wooden Handplane Body or Tool Handle

1. Remove the blade and chipbreaker. Tape the chipbreaker retention rod with masking tape. In the case of gennou handles, tape the entire head except the wood exposed at the top surface of the eye. For chisel handles, tape the ferrule, crown and the striking end of the handle (you don’t want the finish mixture to soak into the end of the chisel handle because it will make the fibers too brittle.) For paring chisels like usunomi that are not struck with a hammer, soak as much of the mixture into the handle’s end as possible

2. Apply the finish mixture to the end grain at the plane body’s ends and all surfaces inside the mouth. In the case of hammer/gennou handles, apply it most heavily to the butt and eye. Apply it heavily, frequently, and forcefully to encourage the wood to soak up as much as possible. Repeat until the wood won’t soak up more. This is the step that matters most. Apply to all other surface of the dai as well. Allow to dry overnight. There’s absolutely no need to put any effort into making it pretty at this stage.

3. Repeat Step 2.

4. Apply another coat of finish mixture, and while it is still wet, use small pieces of 320WD paper with fingers and sticks to wet-sand all surfaces thoroughly. The goal is to produce a fine slurry of finish mixture and sawdust, and to force this deep into the wood’s grain, especially end-grain, clogging the pores solid. Don’t sand the area in front of the plane body’s mouth hard enough or long enough to remove material, change its shape, or round over the corners, though! This is extremely important. This slurry, combined with the varnish/PU already hardened in the wood’s pores, will serve to drastically slow down moisture movement once it sets. It won’t stop it entirely, but it will moderate it more than spindle oil, linseed oil or Danish oil ever could, and it won’t crack or flake off leaving the wood unprotected. Don’t wipe off the wet slurry, but leave it standing/smeared on the wood’s surface and let it dry overnight. It will look terrible for now, but never fear for tis all part of a cunning plan (ツ)!

5. Apply another coat of finish and wet sand with 320 grit WD paper again making sure to hit all the places you might have missed before and knocking down any hardened slurry from step 4. Allow to dry overnight.

6. Wet sand with the finish mixture using 600 grit WD sandpaper this time. Be sure to sand down and completely and thoroughly remove any hardened finish or slurry remaining on the wood’s surface. This is important. After sanding, but before the mixture hardens, scrub it down with clean rags and/or brown paper from shopping bags to remove all remaining finish from the wood’s surface. Allow to dry overnight. You may need to repeat this step for best results.

7. The next day examine the wood’s surface for any remaining finish/slurry visible on surfaces. Remove any you find with 600 grit WD sandpaper and the mixture.

8. Allow to dry for 24 hours.

9. Scrub with brown paper from a shopping bag.

10. Apply automotive carnuba paste wax, and polish out.

Remember that, if applied correctly, the London Finish as described herein should not create interference or change tolerances in the tool because there shouldn’t be any finish material left proud of any of the tool’s surfaces to cause interference.

When finishing the blade retention grooves, you will find it difficult to sand up inside them with your fingers, so use sticks. But don’t remove much material in creating a slurry or the blade may become too loose. And be sure to remove any and all slurry or finish that remains on the surface.

At this point in the process, the London Finish is complete. It is well suited, in my opinion, for guns, tools, workbenches, doors, timber frames, as well as any furniture or casework where protection is desired but a surface finish is not desired. This finish also works exceptionally well for carved wooden surfaces, but with less sanding. It also has the distinct advantage that it does not require careful application, so if brush hairs or sawdust get caught in the finish, or bubbles or sags develop, never fear, because in accordance with our plan so cunning we could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel, they are all going to be wet-sanded away. If you decide to apply a final surface coat, however, then greater care is necessary for the final coat.

If you are doing casework or need an attractive surface finish, a topcoat or two of the same mixture, freshly made, applied with a clean brush is just the ticket. If a really nice finish is desired, several coats can be applied, wet sanding between each, and finally polishing with polishing compound (automotive paint supply houses carry this in many grits) to create a mirror finish.

If you feel brave enough to tackle large surfaces, such as a tabletop where this finishing technique excels, some time and effort can be saved by using a pneumatic or brushless random orbital sander. The type of motor matters because you don’t want a spark to ignite the thinner when wet sanding. You have been warned.

A quick note on frame and panel construction is warranted at this point. If possible, it is best to apply the finish (any finish for that matter) to all surfaces of panels, especially endgrain, before gluing them into their frames. In any case, a bit of paste wax (I use beeswax-based Briwax) applied to the inside of frame rabbets and the edges of panels before assembly will prevent finish from accidentally gluing the panels into the frames, thereby restricting expansion and contraction, and eventually producing cracked panels.

An 80mm handplane with a blade by Yokosaka-san and body by Koyoshiya with a London Finish. If it looks as if no finish at all has been applied, that’s because there is no film finish on the wood’s surface to be seen.

The Story of Why I Started Using the London Finish for Plane Bodies

Back in 2010 I was transferred from Orange County in Southern California to Tokyo, Japan. Due to an error by the moving company, most of my beloved tools were left behind in a storage unit In Las Vegas, Nevada, placing my sanity at imminent risk. I bought replacement chisels and planes (hiraganna, mentori, shakuri, etc) in Tokyo at that time. I had become dreadfully tired of the warpage that often developed in my plane bodies each time I moved, so I considered ways to reduce this nasty tendency, and of course, tried the London Finish I had been using on my gunstocks back in the USA. The results were perfect.

After applying the London Finish to them in Tokyo, I used them for about a year through all the seasonal humidity changes common to Japan and exposed to indoor heating and cooling. They stayed straight the entire time. My job then transferred me to the Pacific island of Guam, with high temperatures and constant 85% humidity, where I used and stored these high-quality planes in a hot and humid garage for 1.5 years. They still stayed straight. When I returned to Tokyo, my wooden bodied planes again made the 35 day land and sea voyage inside a hot and humid container. They arrived at their new home straight. At the time I am writing this, those same planes have been in my home here in Tokyo for over 8 years through the various seasons and humidity changes, and have mostly remained straight.

Not having to regularly true the soles of my wooden planes since then has saved me a lot of time and headaches (as he is wont, Murphy carefully ensured that they warped and stopped working at the most inconvenient time possible), and of course has extended their useful life.

Another special benefit in my case is the resistance the finish has to sweat, oils, acid and dirt from my hands, which, in my case, causes white oak to turn black almost immediately. This is doubly true in the case of my chisel and hammer handles.

I have taught this method to many people that admired my completed woodworking projects and cabinets and handmade gunstocks, but few have had the patience required to actually attempt it. Of course, being all handwork, and taking quite a bit of time to accomplish, it is not suited to most commercial situations.

As for hobby woodworkers, there seem to be two schools of thought. The first hasn’t the patience to deal with any finish that can’t be applied with either a spraygun or power roller. Most of the woodworking publications energetically promote equipment-intensive commercial production methods even to the amateur, and feverishly foster this attitude. At the the risk of sounding cynical, I ask you Gentle Reader, is owning an airless spray system really necessary to perform quality woodworking, or is such equipment more of a profit center for manufacturers and retailers?

With this statement, I am certain I would receive piles of poisonous complaints from advertisers to this blog (if I had any), and perhaps even threats about pulling said advertisements. Good thing I don’t give a rodent’s ruddy fundament about such things or the feeling of rejection might crush my fragile ego like a raw egg in a little boy’s back pocket (シ)。

At the other extreme, there are devotees of the Neanderthal school that have been indoctrinated by romantic viewpoints in the woodworking press, or influenced by things written in books a hundred years ago. These gentle souls are drawn to archaic finishes such as boiled linseed oil, beeswax, and unicorn piss.

To the production-method advocates I say save production methods for production work, and seek better quality for your handmade projects.

To the Birkinstock-wearing Neanderthals I say, there is a reason old unrestored furniture and gunstocks are dark, grungy, and yes, dirty: Linseed oil and beeswax. Consider what you want your work to look like in 100 years. Certainly not cracked, water-damaged, and dirty. And genuine unicorn tinkle is practically impossible to come by nowadays, anyway, even on Amazon.

I promise you the results will be worthy, with no downside, and your planes, tools handles and wooden projects will not only look better longer, but will be tougher and more stable.

The Abura Dai

I would like to add a note here about a Japanese technique intended to improve the stability of handplane bodies, namely the “Abura Dai 油台” which translates to “Oil Body.”

The idea is to soak the oak body (dai) of a handplane in low-viscosity spindle oil until it takes up a significant amount thereby minimizing moisture exchange and improving the stability of the handplane’s body. Does it work?

I own and use a 65mm abura dai handplane I purchased as a sample around 10 years ago, and which seems to be fairly stable. But I am not a fan of abura dai for two reasons. First, by design spindle oil never dries and is always wet. Therefore, the dai is always a little oily and definitely stinky. I don’t like the smell of spindle oil nor do I want to feel it on my hands unless I’m being paid for it.

Second, it makes the sole of the handplane softer, an area I would prefer remain harder, increasing wear noticeably. I was told about the failings of the abura dai by professional woodworkers many years ago, and the wear on the sole of this 65mm plane confirms their observations.

I encourage Gentle Reader to give the London Finish a try. You will like the results. And please share your impressions with your humble servant and other Gentle Readers.

Until then, I have the honor to remain,

YMHOS

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The Japanese Handplane Part 5: The Chipbreaker

A 60mm plane blade with its chipbreaker resting on the ura as when installed into the wooden body. Please note that there are no screws connecting these two parts making it a simple and reliable system.

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.
Benjamin Franklin

In this fifth post in our series about the Japanese handplane, we will discuss a single component of the handplane, the chipbreaker.

Professional woodworkers that use handplanes daily usually have this simple widget thoroughly figured out, but your humble servant has been asked to clarify why the chipbreaker is necessary and how to make it work so many times recently that I can no longer gracefully avoid publishing a more complete, BS-free explanation for the benefit of our Beloved Customers, may the hair on their toes ever grow long.

As always, this post is intended to provide a bit of insight, or at least a different viewpoint, to our Beloved Customers, many of whom are professional woodworkers and Luthiers.

This is a longish article. If your humble servant was a lazy man I would simply state stand-alone conclusions as have so many with half-baked knowledge of handplanes, and leave it up to Beloved Customer to figure out the why of things on your own, but that would be boorish behavior.

Even if you already know everything there is know about the chipbreaker, you may still find a new crunchy, scrumptious tidbit or two in this mess of scribbling if you look.

Factors Critical to Controlling Tearout

The sole purpose of the chipbreaker is to control, and whenever possible, completely prevent the unsightly and wasteful tearout that often occurs when using a handplane to surface wood. We will examine the causes of and some solutions to tearout below, but let’s begin this discussion by examining factors critical to controlling/eliminating tearout that actually take precedence over the chipbreaker. Your efforts to control tearout should always begin with these factors. But first allow me to share a story.

Back in the mists of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and your humble servant was but a slender young man with much more hair on his head and far less dignity under his belt, I liked to think I had a sound understanding of both steel and wooden Western-style planes, but I knew little of Japanese planes. Later I was blessed with the opportunity to learn about the Japanese handplane in Japan from master craftsmen.

As is the case with excellent craftsmen of all ages, these gentlemen talked very little but assigned me what seemed at the time to be daunting work assignments.

While they would allow me to examine their tools and observe their techniques in-person, the only instruction they would provide initially were two or three-word critiques of my frequent mistakes. I understand now that they were kind gentlemen, albeit 40~50 years older than me, but at the time this apprenticeship-style of training was frustrating. Only when I showed true progress would their answers stretch to 5 or 6 words because, unlike your humble servant at the time, (here is wisdom) they understood that lessons learned through many failures and a few success are learned best.

The first assignments given me were to sharpen everything in the workshop that would hold still long enough to touch with a stone, from axes and adzes to chisels, handplanes and even saws. This went on for months. They weren’t being mean, just wise, because sharpening is the first and most important woodworking skill. Only when I had demonstrated competence in all aspects of blade preparation and sharpening did they share further light and knowledge with me because any sooner would have been a waste of their time, you see.

They then assigned me the task of making an old-fashioned Japanese handplane, one without a chipbreaker, entirely by hand using a hand-forged blade by Mr. Masato Yokosaka. This was before he and his products became famous, BTW. This was an educational effort, one that I magnificently failed twice before finally getting it right, but it taught me the three most important factors in reducing tearout in handplanes, whether with wooden or steel body, with chipbreaker or without. Unlike my curmudgeonly old masters, I won’t insist Beloved Customer stop reading until they have mastered all three of these factors, but master them you must if you are to achieve excellence with the handplane.

Factor 1: The blade must be sharp. This factor depends on the quality of the blade and the skill of the person who sharpens it. We have a series of 30 posts about sharpening Japanese woodworking blades Beloved Customers may find beneficial. The series starts with this LINK.

Factor 2: The mouth opening (gap between the sole and the cutting edge) must be as tight as practically possible and still pass shavings. Please make an effort to truly understand what this means, because it is not always easily accomplished. Of course, the mouth opening of a super finishing plane intended to take transparent shavings will of necessity be narrower than that of a plane intended to dimension boards by taking thicker shavings; Horses for courses;

Factor 3: The area on the sole directly in front of the mouth opening, a strip across the entire width of the sole of the plane and perhaps 3~6mm wide, must be true and flat and apply even pressure on the board being planed right up to the last few microns of the mouth opening. This is not an exaggeration. Much else can be out of wack but if this is right the plane will usually cut well.

Why are these three factors critical? To begin with, a dull blade won’t sever fibers cleanly but will tend to tear contrary fibers up and out of the board’s surface, the very definition of “tear out.” Can’t have that, ergo, Factor 1.

Since the soles of handplanes wear and consequently the width of mouth openings change with that wear, Factors 2 & 3 are dependent on the team of craftsmen that originally made the handplane as well as the craftsman/owner that uses and maintains the handplane over its lifetime. That’s you, Beloved Customer, so please pay attention, learn the lessons and develop the necessary skills.

Indeed, Factors 2 & 3 act in unison to control the movement of contrary fibers immediately before and after they contact the blade directing them into the cutting edge to be cleanly severed by the sharp blade (Factor 1), while at the same time serving to bend, buckle and weaken those fibers that would otherwise tend to develop a lever arm and tear out below the surface of the board. If this doesn’t make sense to you, please give it careful thought because you must figure it out if you intend to become proficient with handplanes.

These three factors are bedrock essential to controlling tearout regardless of the type of handplane in question and whether it has a chipbreaker or not. Few new planes, whether made of wood or steel, meet these conditions. And after regular use, resharpening and adjustments become necessary, so Beloved Customers are strongly encouraged to understand how to evaluate these three factors in your handplanes and learn how fettle them. We will address the necessary techniques in future posts, but it will take more than just reading, so consider it an assignment. Indeed, expect to screw it up royally at first and learn from your mistakes, just as your humble servant once did.

The Chipbreaker & Historical Lumber Processing Techniques

To better understand the chipbreaker, Beloved Customer may find it useful to understand a few historical factors about the wood they are shaving and some background about the tool used for making those shavings.

Before the proliferation of the large rip saw, and especially the water-powered sawmill, the only practical method of producing boards and beams from logs was to “rive” (split) them out using wedges and axes. This is the same worldwide.

The thing about logs is that not all of them have grain straight enough to produce useful lumber when riven. Large, long, straight, old-growth trees are most efficiently processed. As nearby old-growth primeval forests with large, straight trees were cut down and premium-quality logs became harder to come by, much construction and shipbuilding came to rely on more economical beams, posts and boards sawed from logs with wonky grain.

Riven wood has two convenient advantages. The first one is that, because the grain of the lumber is relatively straight and continuous, grain runout is reduced, making it somewhat stronger structurally. And second, the occurrence of tearout when surfacing riven lumber is often less than what typically occurs in sawn lumber.

A beam sawn from a log to make an exposed structural beam in a traditional Japanese house. Instead of trying to square it off, the carpenters have taken advantage of the natural curvature of the tree trunk to add strength as well as an interesting appearance. Please note, however, that being sawn, much contrary grain has been exposed that would have made riving such a log to this shape impossible, with the result that tearout is unavoidable. Also, and while this has nothing to do with tearout, the knots exposed at the bottom beam are in the worst possible location seriously weakening the integrity of this member in bending.

Unlike a team using axes and wedges, large rip saws in the hands of sawyers made practical through the proliferation of inexpensive, reliable steel, and especially the water-driven sawmill, could more easily and quickly cut long, straight boards and beams out of most any log regardless of grain direction. Consequently, logs that would have been rejected before the days of the sawmill can now be readily processed reducing the man-hours/cost of producing lumber significantly. On the other hand, the grain direction of lumber produced using large saws and sawmills tends to wander everywhere increasing runout and making the job of cleanly surfacing the boards more difficult for subsequent craftsmen. This is the situation we face now.

We don’t know when or where the chipbreaker was invented, or how the concept spread around the world, but it’s a safe bet to assume its ability to calm the wild grain of sawn lumber during surfacing was one reason for its popularity. At least, that’s how it went in Japan. And wood is wood no matter where you are.

Two carpenters selecting a curved log to use a roof beam

Naturally-shaped logs used as roof beams in the restoration of a historically-significant building in Japan

Why Does Tearout Occur?

Let’s next examine some basic causes of tearout.

Please recall that wood is comprised of various types of cells, each with a job to do, but most of those that eventually become lumber specialize in transporting water up from the ground to the leaves, and nutrients formed in the leaves to the rest of the tree. Transporting literally tons of water daily from the roots far up into the sky is the job of continuous groups of cells that form what are effectively continuous waterpipes connecting the roots to the stomata in the leaves. In a living tree these pipes have semi-flexible cell walls, and while they mostly grow parallel with roots, limbs and trunk, their shape is influenced by wind, rain, snowload, shifting soil, microbes, bugs and ever-changing exposure to the sun over the life of the tree, so they are seldom perfectly straight. Indeed, once dried, it’s partly the changes in direction of these tubular cells, often called fibers, that gives harvested lumber its beautiful grain patterns and shimmering chatoyance.

The blade on the left is cutting with the grain and is unlikely to produce tearout, while the blade on right is cutting against the grain and is more likely to produce tearout.

When planing with the grain, the blade severs fibers which are oriented either parallel with or sloping up to the board’s surface and angled in the plane’s direction of travel producing pretty shavings comprised of relatively short, flexible segments of fiber.

But when planing against the grain, the blade must sever fibers that are diving down into the board. Instead of consenting to being cleanly severed, often these longer, more rigid fibers tend to ride up the face of the blade, bridging and avoiding the cutting edge.

When this happens, instead of severing them cleanly, the blade tends to lever these longer fibers up out of the board’s surface until they suddenly break off below the surface of the board leaving a rough uneven surface. This damage is called “tear-out” in English and Sakame (sah/kah/meh 逆目) in Japanese, which translates directly to “reverse grain.”

How Does the Chipbreaker Work?

Whether the handplane in question be Western or Japanese in design, the chipbreaker, or Uragane 裏金 (oo/rah/gah/neh) as it is called in Japan, seems at first glance to provide little benefit in exchange for the added weight and complication. Indeed, if all the cuts you make when planing wood are in the direction of the grain (id est fibers either oriented parallel with, or rising up to, the surface of the board and angled away from the direction of the cut), the chipbreaker will be about as useful as a lace brassier on a boar. But wood grain is seldom so cooperative, donchano.

With the addition of the chipbreaker, and in combination with the three factors listed above, those contrary fibers that try to bridge and ride up the face of the blade without being severed immediately run smack dab into the abrupt face of the chipbreaker thereby bending and buckling them and preventing them from bridging and developing the lever arm necessary to break them off below the surface of the board.

At the same time the collision with the chipbreaker redirects many of these mischievous fibers into the cutting edge to be severed, thereby preventing, or at least reducing, nasty tearout.

Bless us and splash us, preciousss! What a wonderful counterintuitive thing!

To better understand how the chipbreaker works, I highly recommend Beloved Customers devour, like starving little piggies, the video titled “Influence of the Cap-iron on Hand Plane,” Created by Professor Yasunori Kawai and Honorary Professor Chutaro Kato, Faculty of Education, Art and Science, Yamagata University (with subtitles). Much will come into focus after watching this.

Downsides to the Chipbreaker

While your humble servant has written glowing things about the chipbreaker, I do not suggest all is blue bunnies and fairy farts because the chipbreaker has some downsides:

The chipbreaker adds weight, complication and cost;
The impact of wood fibers on the chipbreaker produces friction heat and consumes energy whether cutting with or against the grain. This energy loss is not insignificant;
When cutting with the grain, the chipbreaker adds little benefit while tending to reduce the luster of the planed surface;
To be effective, the chipbreaker must be setup, tuned, installed and maintained properly, requiring the user to have adequate knowledge and to put forth effort periodically.

Despite these downsides, your humble servant believes, as have millions of craftsmen over untold centuries, that the chipbreaker is a component worth mastering.

Alternatives to the Chipbreak

In light of the gains and losses associated with the chipbreaker, it would be short-sighted, indeed amateurish, to assume it is always necessary, and just as short-sighted and amateurish to assume it is never necessary. So let’s examine some alternatives next.

Alternative 1: No Chipbreaker

The first alternative to the chipbreaker we must consider is, of course, no chipbreaker. Indeed, if you always plane with the grain of the wood, as mentioned above the chipbreaker adds no value while wasting energy. Indeed it may even reduce the quality of the finished surface’s appearance.

In the case of the Bailey pattern plane or other styles with cap irons and the chipbreaker and blade attached to each other by screws, using the plane without the chipbreaker is inconvenient. But in the case of Japanese plane, the chipbreaker can be easily and speedily removed without influencing the cutter. The resulting finish created by the plane may or may not be improved, but the force required to motivate the tool will absolutely decrease. Sadly, such cooperative wood can be elusive.

This is an excellent solution, one I highly recommend to Beloved Customers.

Alternative 2: High Bedding Angle Without a Chipbreaker

Another option with a long history worldwide is to install the cutting blade in the plane’s body at a higher bedding angle, perhaps 50~55˚+. Combined with a sharp blade, tight mouth and solid uniform contact/pressure between the board being planed and the area of the sole directly in front of the mouth opening, the more abrupt change in direction forced on shavings by this high-angle blade will then tend to buckle the long contrary fibers on its own without a chipbreaker. But no guarantees.

While a high bedding angle does indeed tend to reduce tearout, adding a chipbreaker is a proven way to further reduce tearout in woods with contrary grain even more.

The one constant downside to a high bedding angle is the extra energy one must always expend to motivate the plane.

Alternative 3: Bevel-up Handplanes Without a Chipbreaker

Another alternative is the “bevel-up” planes that have become popular in recent years. This style of plane is not a new solution. I own some and have used them, but other than the block plane versions, I regret falling prey to specious marketing claims spouted by shills.

Amateurs like them because parts are fewer, maintenance is easier, and the necessary skills one must acquire are fewer.

One gentleman boldly informed me that he believes bevel-up planes to be superior to all others because he would rather spend the time it takes to master the chipbreaker on making wooden objects. My mind boggled like a weasel binging on crystal meth….

Bevel-up planes work in exactly the same way high bedding-angle planes do by presenting a steeper angle for contrary fibers to climb causing them to either be severed or to buckle instead of tearing-out. This assumes, of course, that the blade is sharp, the mouth is tight and contact between the board being planed and the area of the sole directly in front of the mouth opening is uniform.

Sadly, the efficacy of this action is no more consistent than the high-angle blade without a chipbreaker discussed above.

The downside to the bevel-up plane is that the additional, more-consistent results afforded by a well-tuned chipbreaker are, like heaven’s pearly gates to a San Francisco politician, forever unattainable.

Alternative 4: Back-bevels

Another alternative is the quick and dirty back bevel applied to the ura or face side of the cutting edge, as discussed in a previous post. This works for the same reason the high-angle blade does, but it is not an effective long-term solution, and certainly qualifies as tool abuse in the case of Japanese handplanes IMHO. Consider yourself well and truly warned.

I highly recommend Beloved Customers use planes with chipbreakers and learn how to sharpen, properly setup, maintain, and adjust them for maximum results. It’s the way advanced professional woodworkers with real skills get the job done.

Keys to Making Chipbreakers Work Effectively

A naturally curved log shaped as a “Nijibari” rainbow beam at the main entrance to a Buddhist temple.

The following is a condensed list of tasks Beloved Customer needs to accomplish to get consistently good results from their chipbreakers. We will discuss all these items in greater detail in future articles in this series. I strongly encourage you to invest in yourself by developing the requisite skills:

Fit the chipbreaker to the blade as lovey dovey as two newlyweds and so there is no gap between the cutting blade and extreme edge of the chipbreaker. This is not difficult to achieve, but the fit must be nearly perfect to prevent naughty shavings from wiggling between the blade and chipbreaker, because if they do get jammed, back-pressure will increase and the finished surface will look like poached crap on toast. We will discuss this more in the next post in this series;
Fit the chipbreaker to both the plane’s body and retention rod so the chipbreaker will remain in-place;
Grind a 70˚~80˚ striking bevel at the cutting edge of the chipbreaker to effectively buckle shavings. It doesn’t need to be a perfect bevel, and if it is rounded, that’s OK too. Yes, I know this seems ridiculously steep; If you don’t like it by all means experiment until your little pink heart sings, but after you’ve wasted a few months on hit-and-miss research, please remember that YMHOS toldjahso;
Polish the striking bevel to reduce friction and prevent wood sap from building up on it too quickly. Re-polish it as necessary. If you pay attention to the condition of this abrupt bevel you will notice that it may actually become pitted from the heat and friction of the wood shavings, especially when planing wood containing hardish minerals. Total neglect will harm efficiency;
Clean accumulated wood sap from the striking face regularly and oil it occasionally with your oilpot to reduce friction;
If shavings tend to become stuck in the mouth, check to see that the chipbreaker is not so thick as to obstruct their smooth passage. If necessary, grind the chipbreaker thinner near the mouth and polish it to improve the flow of shavings;
When you deem the chipbreaker to be necessary, install it as close as practical to the cutting edge. The ideal distance will depend on your plane, the wood you are cutting, and the depth of cut, but 0.5~0.8mm is usually a good place to start. I highly recommend you actively experiment to find the best distance. With practice it will become second nature. While it is not applicable to Japanese handplanes, Rhett Fulkerson of Nice Planes in Frankfort, Ky., has an intelligent technique for systematically setting chipbreakers and cap irons I find useful. LAP has an article about it here.

Conclusions

The chip breaker has been around a long time only because it consistently works.

In Japan, where the single-blade plane was the standard for hundreds of years, with the shift from riven lumber to more economical sawn lumber, the chipbreaker was added to the handplane, perhaps 150+ years ago, and remains in-use even today, solely because it consistently works.

The chip breaker won’t solve all your tearout problems, but it will definitely help on condition that you set it up and maintain it properly. It isn’t difficult and the results of doing so set the professional apart from the amateur.

In the next post in this swashbuckling tale of bare-chested Scottish warriors riding feather-footed war horses over the highlands to rescue buxom lassies clad in flowing gowns from evil leering Lords, we will describe in detail how to setup and maintain the awesome chip breaker. Don’t forget your kilt and claymore!

YMHOS

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Japanese Handplanes – Part 4: The Marriage of Blade & Body

After tumbling down the rabbit hole, Alice discusses her options with her new friends Gryphon and Mock Turtle. After perusing this article, I hope Beloved Customer will be less discombobulated than poor Alice, less tearful than tender-hearted Mock Turtle, and less indignant than Noble Gryphon.

A Bruise Is A Lesson… And Each Lesson Makes Us Better.
George R.R. Martin, Syrio Forel, Game of Thrones,

In this the fourth article in our series about the Japanese hiraganna handplane, we will discuss how to fit the plane’s wooden body to the blade thereby improving the tool’s performance.

As is the case for most of the articles in this blog, this one too is intended primarily for the information and entertainment of our Beloved Customers, but all well-behaved Gentle Readers are welcome to partake. Bon apetit.

Why Fit Body to Blade?

Beloved Customers may wonder why your your most humble and obedient servant is inflicting the digital world with another pointless article about Japanese planes, especially since the handplanes purveyed by C&S Tools are advertised as “ready to use” when new. Please allow me to address this absolutely valid concern herein.

As mentioned in the Part 3 of the Japanese Handplane Series, Mr. Inomoto, the daiuchi shokunin that cuts the bodies of our planes from Japanese White Oak to fit the blades forged and sharpened by Mr. Nakano, does indeed do more than just cut a gap for a blade to slot into, but fits the body to fit the blade so each plane is able to produce a decent shaving before it leaves his workshop. However, due to cost considerations and practical limitations to his prodigious prophetic talents and clairvoyant insights regarding who will eventually own each plane, and their preferences for the blade-body marriage, he fits the blade on the tight side, assuming the end-user will fettle the body to best suit his own purposes. Ergo the paragraph titled “Plane Philosophy” in Part 3.

I suspect relatively few Beloved Customers have given the subject serious thought, but it is nonetheless true that each owner of a Japanese plane must develop their own philosophy regarding the relationship between blade and body, and if they deem it necessary, adjust their plane body accordingly.

This article assumes Beloved Customer has decided to refine the fit between blade and body, and instructs in how to achieve those refinements. Are they absolutely necessary? Nah. Will they make a difference? Yes, but the degree of improvement achieved will vary from plane to plane and person to person.

Nonetheless, your humble servant recommends Beloved Customers, especially those interested in obtaining professional-level plane maintenance and usage skills, to perform the operations described in this and future articles in this series. You’ll be glad you did even if it may take some years for the benefits obtained to become evident. At the very least you may be fortunate enough to avoid the stupid mistakes YMHOS made when he was green.

So with that out of the way, let’s assemble the tools we will need to make some righteous sawdust.

Tools

The following is a list of tools I recommend for this job.

Wooden, plastic or rawhide mallet for striking the blade and body;
Carpenter’s pencil and/or marking pen;
Masking tape to protect the wooden body from oily/graphity fingerprints;
Caliper (vernier, dial or digital) and/or divider for measuring and comparing;
Various chisels (e.g. 3mm, 6mm, 9mm usunomi paring chisels). Although it may seem strange, wider chisels are typically not necessary for this task.
Metal file (to be modified) or a 15~18mm wide chisel (to be modified).

The tools needed for fitting the body to the blade. The chisel next to the vernier caliper is an old Sorby chisel modified especially for working on plane beds and gifted to me by Chris Vandiver. Thanks, Chris.

Regarding the modified file or chisel listed above, this is a push scraper, a truly ancient tool once commonly used for precision metalwork. Your humble servant uses it to shave the bed to fit the blade. You can make this tool as wide as you wish, but please note that if the blade of either file or chisel is too wide, your shaving efforts may not produce smooth results.

You can easily make this scraping tool from a chisel or an old file by grinding a flat on the end of the file or cutting edge of the chisel square to the centerline of the blade and at an 80~90˚bevel angle. Then hone this square cutting edge and at least one of the two adjoining surfaces to 1000 grit. Voila.

If you adapt a file to make this tool you will want to attach a handle to its tang to avoid getting red sticky stuff on your pretty wood.

If you prefer to use a regular chisel, that’s OK too, but you will find this scraper does a cleaner job with less effort.

Blade Preparation

This explanation assumes the blade is sharp and the ura is in good shape. If not, please sharpen the blade because it will of course affect the fit of blade to body.

While you are at it, check that the side edges of the blade are free of burrs or rough grinder marks which might abrade the grooves after some use. Some grinder marks may be unavoidable, but if the sides feel rough and abrasive to the back of your hand, smooth the edges a little using a sander and/or sharpening stones.

In addition, please make sure the right and left clipped corners of the blade’s cutting edge, called “ears,” are properly trimmed, meaning that they are ground large enough to reduce the width of the sharp cutting edge so the cutting edge fills the width of the plane’s mouth but does not extend into the grooves, because if it does get into the grooves, shavings will become jammed between the blade and groove wasting your energy and leaving nasty scuff marks and sometimes even tracks on the planed surface. それは困る.

When sharpening a plane blade, therefore, it is important to check and trim these ears periodically. A few passes on a diamond plate or rough stone will do the job; It doesn’t need to be pretty, and the ears don’t need to be sharpened because they will never touch the surfaces to be planed.

The disassembled plane used as an example in this article, a 70mm finish plane with a Blue-label steel blade hand-forged by Mr. Nakano Takeo and a Japanese White Oak body by Mr. Inomoto Isao. An excellent tool.

Checking & Tuning the Mouth

Beloved Customers won’t need to worry about this, but Gentle Readers fettling plane bodies made by themselves or others should be careful the first time they adjust the blade’s cutting edge to project through the mouth to ensure there is adequate clearance because if the mouth isn’t wide enough to allow the cutting edge to pass through cleanly with a little clearance to spare, the blade may chip out the sole.

If there is any question about the adequacy of your plane’s mouth/blade clearance, the first time you extend the blade through the mouth press the plane sole-down on a piece of clean wood while tapping the head of the blade with your mallet to make a zero clearance cut at the mouth. The supporting board will prevent the mouth from chipping. This is also standard practice when opening the mouth of a new plane body.

Hold the plane up to a light and peer through the mouth to observe the gap between cutting edge and body. The width of this gap must be greater than zero, and it should be constant the full width of the blade, but how wide it needs to be will depend on the thickness of the shaving you intend to cut.

Ugly tear-out can be minimized and the polish of the planed surface increased by having a tight mouth. Indeed, the tightness of the mouth and the area of the sole directly in front of the mouth applying uniform pressure on the wooden surface being planed up to the last .001 millimeter in front of the mouth is critical for exceptionally fine tearout-free cuts. On the other hand a mouth gap that is too narrow to pass the intended thickness of shaving will jamb every time, so the user must balance the width of the mouth, the desired shaving thickness, and blade projection to obtain good results.

Here is wisdom: allowing shavings to repeatedly become tightly jammed in the mouth is not only hard on the blade, but it will damage the mouth, so before this happens too many times, you want to either adjust the mouth or your expectations for shaving thickness.

To open up or adjust the mouth, cut a hardwood guide block to use with a chisel to pare the mouth opening, and clamp it to the sole. The angle of the block will vary with the angle of the blade.

Then, using an exceptionally sharp paring chisel and this guide block, take minute shavings at the mouth using skewed strokes. A paring chisel with a three-hollow mitsuura ura is ideal for this task, but any sharp chisel with a longish blade will do the job.

Body Protection

This process will involve graphite pencils, marking pen ink and fingers, so to keep the wooden body from looking dirty, please cover the top and sides with a low-tack masking tape. In this example, I used a pretty pink tape.

Adjusting the Blade to the Mouth

As mentioned above, the blade fits into and is clamped in-place in the wooden body by the two tapered grooves cut into the body. Sometimes the fit between the side edges of the blade and the bottom of these grooves is too tight. This can occur in a new plane if the body was improperly cut to begin with, but the most common cause is shrinkage of the body due to humidity changes.

Of course, the wooden body will change dimensions with changes in ambient humidity, while the blade won’t. If a plane is shipped from a highly humid climate like Japan (at some times of the year) to a dry climate like the Mojave Desert (all times of the year), for example, the body may shrink in width developing tremendous pressure on the side edges of the blade, sometimes enough to crack or split the body. Therefore, if you are located in a dry climate and acquire a plane from a wetter climate, it may be wise to remove the blade and let the body acclimatize for a week or so.

As mentioned above, the blade is tapered in width, being wider at the head and narrowest near the cutting edge. This is intentional. Ideally, you want the side edges of the blade to just kiss the bottom of the grooves where they exit the top surface of the body, and not touch the bottom of the grooves anywhere else. This type of fit will make it easy to make minute right or left adjustments to the cutting edge’s projection by tapping the shoulders of the blade right or left.

Obviously (and this is an important point to understand), if both of the blade’s side edges are in close contact with the bottom of the grooves their full-length, this important method of adjustment will no bueno.

The width of the blade where it touches the bottom of the grooves at the top surface of the body. Compare this to the measurement in the photo below.

Use you vernier, dial or digital caliper or mechanical divider to check that the the blade does indeed become narrower in width from the point where it exits the grooves at the top surface of the body and the point where the cutting bevel begins. If it doesn’t, you will need to grind in some taper. How much? Mr. Nakano’s blades typically taper the amounts shown in the photos above, but they are handmade and each one is little different.

The distance measured between the blade grooves where the blade makes contact at the top of the grooves. Please notice that this distance is slightly greater than the width of the blade at this point as shown in the photo on the right above.

In any case, please ensure the body provides adequate clearance to just accommodate the blade’s width. Mark-1 Eyeball is often good enough for this task, but a divider is better and a caliper is ideal for this task.

Make a final check by applying marking pen ink to the sides of the blade 1cm down from where the blade would normally exit the grooves at the top surface of the body. More ink is not necessary.

If some paring of the grooves is necessary to provide adequate clearance, please remove no more wood than is absolutely necessary.

Remember that we want just a little clearance between the blade’s sides and the top of the grooves, as shown in the photos above, and more clearance at the bottom of the grooves to make it easy to adjust the blade’s projection from the mouth.

Groove Maintenance

A common problem we see with old planes is cracked and split bodies caused by the tapered blade becoming shorter over the years due to repeated sharpenings, and therefore the edges of the blade exerting excessive pressure on the bottom of the grooves when a careless user mercilessly pounds the blade into the body. This sort of damage is entirely avoidable by humans, but some gorillas advocate paring the bottom of the grooves of new planes to create a gap of 2~2.5mm between the groove and blade to accommodate all the reduction in length the blade may experience over many years of service at once. To this practice, your most humble and obedient servant can only respond “Poppycock!”

Why do I object to what seems to be a logical solution? Glad you asked.

If you chisel out a big gap between the side edges of the blade and bottom of the groove, not only will you unnecessarily weaken the body by severing continuous wood fibers at the narrowest, weakest, most critical point of the body (think about it real frikin hard), but the pivoting action required to adjust the blade’s projection right and left by tapping the head right and left will become more difficult, while at the same time the blade will become less stable in the body.

I write this based on bitter experience obtained from following bad advice received before I knew better, and later being mocked by more experienced craftsmen who noticed my silly error. An embarrassing episode indeed, one I was ashamed of for many years.

Beloved Customers will of course have purchased a high-quality plane from C&S Tools, with a blade hand-forged by Mr. Nakano Takeo and a Japanese White Oak body cut by Mr. Inomoto Isao, but just in case you are working on a lower-grade tool, here are some things you need to check.

The way to avoid body damage due to shrinkage of body or blade is simple: (1) Pay attention to the fit of the blade in the grooves; (2) Adjust the clearance when appropriate, and; (3) Avoid excessive use of recreational mushrooms which may dull the senses and cause chronic tool neglect.

In other words, when you notice the blade becoming tight in the grooves, simply pare the bottom of the grooves a nat’s mustache hair deeper. Don’t get carried away because a little contact is a good thing!

Our 6mm and 3mm usunomi paring chisels are ideal for this job. but standard oiirenomi chisels can accomplish the task too.

Another option is to grind the sides of the blade making the blade a little narrower in width.

Beloved Customer has the choice of learning from your humble servant’s stupid mistakes or from your own. Of course, I suppose there’s always the default option too many lost and wandering souls select of neglecting to learn anything at all…

Fitting the Bed to the Blade’s Back

Assuming Beloved Customer has completed the checks and adjustments in the previous sections, the general steps for fitting the bed to the blade are as follows:

Begin by rubbing the back of the blade from where the cutting bevel begins to the end of the steel lamination with your carpenter’s pencil giving it decent coat of graphite. Marking pen ink or Dykem works too.
Insert the blade into the grooves and tap it with your wood, plastic or rawhide metal mallet (not a metal hammer!) until the cutting edge is nearly projecting from the mouth. You may need to really wack the blade hard 5~10 times to accomplish this the first time.
Next remove the blade by holding the plane in your hand and alternating strikes on the right and left sides of the chamfer on the body behind the blade’s head. Don’t strike the flat end of the body! The blade should wiggle out after some less-than-gentle persuasion. If your plane doesn’t already have a pretty 6~8mm wide chamfer cut on this edge, please make one.
Examine the bed. You will notice how the areas in contact with the blade are now marked with graphite. We need to pare or scrape down these contact points to achieve a more uniform contact. Don’t fiddle with the grooves yet.
Use your chisel or scraper tool to carefully shave down the high spots marked with graphite. Cut/scrape only those areas marked with graphite. Before you begin making sawdust, however, please be careful to not remove any wood from any of the three surfaces inside each side groove for now. You need to sneak up on the final shape of the bed like a kitten stalking a grasshopper, with eyes wide open, gently and a little bit at a time. It would be a serious mistake to try to make a perfect fit after only a few passes.
Repeat steps 2~5. You may need to do this kitten stalk 10 times to get it right. You won’t need to apply more graphite each time, just rub the back with a piece of cloth to redistribute the graphite. Or you can use your carpenter’s pencil again. With each iteration, the graphite marks left on the bed will increase in number and become larger. You want to be able to seat the plane blade with only three or four medium strikes with your mallet, and make fine adjustments with just a few more. At no time should your plane squeal a complaint.
When the blade can be easily seated with 3 or four medium wacks of your mallet, use a metal file to lightly smooth out the rest of the bed. Perfection is neither attainable nor should it be sought.

The bed before applying graphite and any shaving. Mr. Inomoto Isao does a nice job, so contact is good, but still tighter than I prefer. The No.13 is a mark he made to keep blade and body matched. Notice the “tsutsumi” shelf cut at the bed just inside the mouth. This is a nice, pretty detail that aids in preventing the blade from “sniping” the ends of narrow boards, but sometimes it gets in the way, and after much use, it becomes so thin it must be removed. It is neither necessary nor sacred.

The back of the blade has been rubbed with a graphite pencil, and is being tapped into the body. It takes some forceful strikes to get it into position. Notice the purty-pink low-tack masking tape applied to the body to help keep it free of graphity fingerprints. My planes seem to appreciate brighter, feminine colors.

Graphite marks left on the bed from the first insertion of the blade. Not terrible, but contact could be better.

Shaving the bed with a scraper chisel the first time

Shaving the bed with a scraper chisel after the blade was seated a second time

The bed after shaving it the third time.

The completed bed following final cleanup with a file. The blade can be inserted with three medium mallet strikes, and fine adjustments made in 3~4 strikes. The blade does not tend to twist out of alignment. Notice the graphite marks left on the tsutsumi shelf where the blade has contacted it.

The Peppermint Twist

Now that the bed is fitted to the blade, we need to return our attention to the grooves.

If one groove is pinching the blade significantly more than the other, the blade will want to twist out of alignment. This can be very irritating.

The surfaces inside the grooves touching the ura and back of the blade should be clean and straight. In any case, unless it causes a serious performance problem, it’s best to leave these surfaces alone for a while because after inserting and removing the blade several times the fit may improve automatically.

If the blade continues to twist out of alignment, however, determine where the high points are on the surface of the groove touching the blade’s ura. You can do this by peering into and through the mouth while shining a light into the groove.

Once you have identified the high spot(s) glue a piece of fine sandpaper to a thin stick of wood and sand it down a little bit at a time between inserting and removing the blade frequently to check the fit.

Don’t sand down the surface inside the groove which contacts the blade’s back unless absolutely necessary because this will effectively open up the mouth, something we want to avoid for as long as possible.

With this, your plane’s hard, sharp blade and soft wooden body should fit together like hand in glove. It may sound like a lot of work, but it usually isn’t. In fact, besides prepping the blade, the whole process can usually be completed in less time than it takes to read about it.

So far in this series your humble servant has provided a lot more detail and explanation than I have ever seen in writing elsewhere. It took me many years of fumbling in the dark, much consultation with older, more experienced craftsmen, no few curses and ungentle slaps to the back of the head, and numerous expensive mistakes to learn these things. I hope Beloved Customer profits from them.

In the next post in this ongoing adventure towards the perfect Japanese handplane we will shift our attention to marrying the chipbreaker (uragane 裏金) to the blade.

Y’all come back now, y’hear.

YMHOS

Alice asking advice of a caterpillar sitting on a magic mushroom, smoking magic mushroom. This nasty habit is perhaps the reason why this bug is never described in the story as having skill with a handplane.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.

Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie, may the ears of all my plane blades become clogged with wax.

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Japanese Handplanes – Part 3: The Blade

A beautiful and even poetic plane blade forged by the famous Chiyozuru Korehide. The carved inscription reads ”Shin, Un, Mu” meaning “God, Cloud, Dream.”

The best steel doesn’t always shine the brightest.
Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

In this the third article in our series about the Japanese hiraganna handplane your most humble and obedient servant will review some of the design details of iron and steel plane blade. Why? Because to become proficient at using and maintaining the Japanese handplane, one must understand it more than just superficially, indeed, a healthy and mutually respectful relationship should be Beloved Customer’s goal.

In addition, I will be so bold as to briefly present the story of a single plane blade made for a famous carpenter by a famous blacksmith.

The Shin Un Mu Blade 神雲夢の刃

The plane blade pictured at the top of this article was forged 6 years after the end of World War II by a famous Tokyo blacksmith named Kato Hiroshi (加藤廣 1874～1957), who used the nom de forge of Chiyozuru Korehide, (千代鶴是秀 ). The Chiyozuru name has been copyrighted and is still in use to this day, although the current holders of the rights to the name are unworthy to even pour Mr. Kato a beer, if Mr. Kato was still a drinking man.

Chiyozuru-san forged this blade at the request of a famous Tokyo carpenter named Nomura Sadao. The engraving on the back states the blade (and matching chipbreaker) was made by him for Nomura Sadao and was completed on June 4, 1951. I’m told Chiyozuru-san charged Nomura-san ¥10,000, a huge amount back in the day.

You will notice that it looks different from most plane blades in that it lacks the beveled “ears” at the right and left corners of the blade’s cutting edge commonly seen in Japanese plane blades intended to prevent the cutting edge from extending into the grooves on each side of the blade opening used to retain the wedge-shaped blade in-place thereby preventing wood shavings from becoming jammed between the groove and blade leaving unsightly marks on the surface of the wood being planed. More on this below.

The blade in question, however, has rabbets cut into the jigane at the left and right edges of the blade so the ura area is thicker than the sides which fit into the retaining grooves, and the cutting edge, therefore, does not intrude into the grooves, making beveled ears unnecessary. This is a very logical solution, although as it was explained to me by Tsuchida Noboru-san, it was not actually invented by either Chiyozuru-san or Nomura-san, but a design Nomura-san first observed at a technical school for cabinetmakers. He then made a wooden full-scale model and asked Chiyozuru-san to forge it for him.

While it is an elegant solution to a real performance issue, it is much more difficult to make this style of blade than the conventional one, and so never became popular.

On the subject of materials, Chiyozuru is well known for preferring to use imported steel, mostly from England, instead of traditional domestic Tamahagane steel. Although the source of the soft jigane is uncertain, there can be no doubt the steel lamination is made of British high-carbon steel.

Gentle Readers are no doubt aware that Japan has always been a land of many disasters, some man-made and others natural, with earthquakes and city-destroying fires being especially common. To protect this important blade from becoming lost to posterity, as were so many valuable things during the war, upon his retirement Nomura-san entrusted the blade to the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum located in Kobe, Japan.

Ironically, a large earthquake struck Kobe on January 17, 1995 killing over 6,400 people and tearing the city a new one. Fortunately, while the museum’s exhibits were jumbled up, this blade was not damaged.

Upon Nomura-san’s reassignment to the big lumberyard in the sky, his heirs formally donated the blade to the same museum where it remains to this day.

The four Chinese characters engraved into the face of the blade read, from top down, 神雲夢, pronounced “Shin, Un, Mu” which translates directly into English as “God, Cloud, Dream.” No doubt there is some deep poetic meaning being expressed through these three characters, but it is far above the poor understanding of your humble, barely-literate servant.

Interpretations from Beloved Customers and Gentle Readers are welcome.

Definition of Fettle

While we are on the subject of literacy, I would like to clarify the meaning of a word pertaining to working on tools, and especially planes.

Gentle readers have no doubt heard the word “fettle” used in the phrase “fine fettle,” usually referring to someone being in good health or physical condition. But it has other, older meanings.

In the British dialect, it means “to set in order,” or “to get ready,” from Middle English fetlen to shape, prepare; perhaps akin to Old English fetian to fetch.

Your humble servant commonly uses the word fettle as a verb, mostly for truing or adjusting a plane or other tool.

Never let it be said that the Gentle Readers of the C&S Tools blog are less than exquisitely erudite and edumacated.

Blade Details

Misunderstandings abound and deep, pungent rivers of BS frequently burst their banks when the details of the Japanese hiraganna plane’s blade are discussed; Buckets, mops and even garbage pumps are necessary to clean up the mess. I despair: What to do, what to do?

While it appears to be a simple, crude, even haphazard component to the uninformed, the design of a well-made plane blade is subtle and its execution elegant. I am confident Beloved Customers willing to ignore ridiculous internet rumor along with the squeals, grunts and farts emanating from the orc-infested woodworking forums, and forego magic mushrooms for a time will quickly understand. So without further ado, let’s turn on the pumps and get our mops moving.

Laminated Construction

The plane’s blade is made by forge-weld laminating a piece of hard high-carbon steel to a larger piece of softer low/no carbon steel/iron. These details are discussed in more detail in the two posts linked to below. It is important to understand these details if Beloved Customer intends to become skillful in using and maintaining Japanese planes.

Sharpening Part 8 – Soft Iron 地金

Sharpening Part 9 – Hard Steel & Soft Iron 鍛接

The Ura

The blades of quality Japanese chisels and planes have a hollow-ground area on the surface of the blade called the “flat” in the case of Western planes. In the case of plane blades, it is located on the surface your humble servant calls the “face,” which is oriented upwards facing the user when installed in the body. An accurate understanding of this structural detail is essential to using and maintaining the Japanese handplane. We discussed this detail in a previous article linked to below. Please review this post if you haven’t done so previously.

Sharpening Part 10 – The Ura 浦

We discussed how to perform periodical maintenance on the ura in an earlier post. Oh joy!

The face of another plane blade by Chiyozuru Korehide engraved with many of the brands he used during his career. His Korehide brand is the the lozenge-shaped mark at the lower left. It has a sweet, sculptural ura.

Blade Retention

The blade of the Japanese handplane is retained in its wooden body by the pinching action on the face and back (top and bottom surfaces) of the blade inside the tapered grooves cut into each side of the mouth opening, not pressure on the side edges. This arrangement eliminates the dedicated wedges, usually made of wood, employed since at least Roman times to retain the blades of Western planes. It also makes irrelevant the widgets and linkages common to modern planes such as the Bailey-pattern, considered by many to be the pinnacle of plane design in the West. Simple is best, don’t you agree?

A common misunderstanding about Japanese planes is that pressure between the wooden body and the back of the blade is necessary to both lock the blade into the body and to eliminate chatter resulting from blade vibration. In response, your humble servant can only turn up the speed dial on the garbage pump and say “poppycock!”

Except in the case of a poor quality body/blade, or one damaged through improper setup and maintenance, the pinching forces, and resulting friction, acting on the front and back of the narrow portion of the blade inserted into the two grooves in the body’s mouth must be sufficient to hold the blade in-place without relying on pressure on the blade’s back. If you know anyone who disagrees with this statement, rest assured the brown stuff dribbling out of their ears is not chocolate mousse.

Unlike the potato chip-thin blades common to many Western planes, the quality Japanese plane blade of the sort we carry with its relatively thick, laminated construction may have a few female characteristics such as beauty, elegance, and a cutting wit, but despite fitting into a truly tiny mouth it simply will not chatter. After all, it’s chisels and squares that love to gossip.

While a tiny amount of uniform contact and pressure between the bed in the wooden body and the back of the blade is desirable to steady the blade in-use, many fit their blades (or perhaps “neglect to properly fit their blades” would be a more accurate description) to develop high pressure between blade and bed, making it difficult to adjust the blade and distorting the body unnecessarily. In extreme cases, this pressure can even push out the sole, preventing the plane from working entirely, a situation that has shaken many a poor woodworker to the core! Pixie involvement cannot be dismissed. If your plane is misbehaving, this bulging sole phenomenon is something you would be wise to check for and remedy if found. You have been warned.

We will discuss this subject more in future posts.

Lengthwise Taper

A casual observation reveals that the blade is tapered in thickness along its length, being thickest at the head sticking proud of the body, and thinnest at the cutting edge bevel.

The purpose of this taper is simply to wedge the blade into the grooves in the body. Please note that this wedging action does tend to cause the body to deflect to some degree, something which must be taken into account when fettling the sole, a subject we will discuss in a future post in this series.

Transverse Taper

The blade is also tapered in its width, being widest at the head and narrowest at the cutting bevel.

Ideally the side edges of the blade are in intimate contact with the bottoms of the retention grooves only where they exit at the top surface of the body, but should normally have no contact in the grooves elsewhere, making it possible to adjust the blade’s projection through the mouth to a uniform distance by gently tapping its head either right or left a small amount.

Curved Back

Finally, please observe that the back (vs. the ura) of a quality blade is not flat, but is slightly hollow-ground around the centerline of the blade’s length. The depth of this hollow should be more-or-less uniform over the blade’s length, disappearing near the head and shoulders.

One purpose of this detail is of course to lighten the blade’s weight, but more importantly it helps keep the blade from twisting out of alignment in-use. If you have ever made a wooden plane body in the Krenovian style to fit a blade with a flat back, you may have experienced the irritating tendency of the blade to twist out of alignment under heavy planing forces. This is typically not a concern with the Japanese design because of the curved back detail, so long as the body’s bed is well-fitted to the blade.

Since each blade and its matched wooden body are a little different, and not yet in perfect accord when new, fitting the body to the blade is one of the first things one must do to a new plane. This fettling operation will be the subject of a future post.

A plane blade by Mr. Ogata. Notice the curved back. Notice also the trimmed and beveled “ears” at the right and left corners of the cutting edge.

Common Sense and Plane Philosophy

Traditionally, everywhere planes were used around the world, a craftsman would commission or purchase the metal parts for his plane and cut the wooden body himself.

In recent history in Japan professional plane body makers called “daiuchi shokunin” 台打ち職人, which translates directly to “plane-body beater” (I kid you not) have become common. These craftsmen fit blade to body making a nearly complete retail product.

Many of these ostensibly completed planes are sold in a “sugu tsukai” 直ぐ使い condition, meaning “ready-to-use.” As witness of this, such planes usually have a wood shaving resting in their mouths when sold. However, the fit between blade and body is intentionally very tight to allow for the end-user to fit the body to the blade and adjust it to his preferences. This is where philosophy comes into play.

There are regional preferences in Japan when it comes to tools, including sickles, saws, axes, adzes, chisels and of course plane blades. In far Eastern Japan, especially the Tohoku area and Hokkaido, thicker, heavier plane blades are preferred, whereas in Tokyo and Western Japan, thinner blades are traditional.

But while discussions of these differences make the hearts of historians go pitter patter, they are irrelevant to persons living outside Japan, so we will ignore them for now.

There are, however, two general, practical approaches to blade size and fit of which Beloved Customers should be aware. Namely, architectural (residential and temple) carpenters tend to prefer thicker blades that fit very tightly into the body because such planes tend to retain their settings better in the rough conditions of a construction jobsite. The downside to the thick blade is that it’s heavier, it takes longer to sharpen, and it’s more difficult to make fine adjustments to.

Craftsmen that do finer, more precise work such as joiners, sashimonoshi, furniture makers and cabinet/tansu makers typically prefer thinner blades that are quicker to sharpen and easier to frequently adjust to make fine, precise cuts. Is your humble servant suggesting that carpenters tend to be less-skilled, or less delicate in using planes than joiners, furniture makers and cabinetmakers? In general, yes.

We have Mr. Nakano forge the blades for our planes more in the Tokyo style: thicker than some but thinner than most.

Not knowing who will purchase the plane, unless directed otherwise most daiuchi shokunin cut tight-fitting bodies more suited to the carpenter, and assume the user will adjust the blade/body fit to their preference. This is the only practical solution in a “ride it like you stole it” handplane, but the reality is that too often the pressure on the back of the blade is so high it ends up creating problems for the user.

Too many inexperienced users of Japanese planes, especially amateurs located overseas, learn how to use Japanese planes without knowledgeable supervisors or fellow workers near at hand to notice their mistakes, wack them upside the head, and tell them how to correct their errors (welcome to the gentle world of the Japanese craftsman), and consequently never really figure out how to setup, fettle and maintain Japanese handplanes. I suspect a similar lack of expert supervision is why so many Western woodworkers who give Japanese planes a try fail to ever get satisfactory performance out of them and become frustrated, eventually selling them on PeeBay.

While your humble servant is eager to provide Beloved Customers all practical support and encouragement, the guidance I can provide is limited by distance, the written word, and the undeniable fact that he is a gentleman of great refinement and exquisite sensitivity (She Who Must Be Obeyed has been known to disagree, but what does she know?).

Therefore, upon making a significant mistake, Beloved Customers must instead call themselves rude names and slap their own heads to aid learning retention. May I suggest “Blockhead” as an appropriate self-imprecation in the case of planes? (ツ)

Conclusion

In this post we considered some of the unique design features of the Japanese hiraganna handplane’s uncompromising and bitterly sharp iron and steel blade.

We even examined a historically-important, unusual, and exceptionally beautiful blade made by a famous blacksmith for a famous craftsman with curious engraving of mysterious meaning.

And we discussed regional differences in tool design. You can’t make this stuff up, ladies and germs.

In the next adventure in this series we will turn our attention to the body of the Japanese handplane, the softer, gentler, wooden component of the tool, the one with the tiny mouth that directs and controls the work of cutting.

And I promise we will make some sawdust. Until then, I have the exquisite honor to remain,

YMHOS

Chiyozuru Korehide (1874~1957), the blacksmith of the blade shown above.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.

Please share your insights and comments with everyone using the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie, may my plane blades chatter and gossip unceasingly!

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Sharpening Japanese Tools Part 30 : Uradashi & Uraoshi

And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!
J. R. R. Tolkien

This article is a continuation of, and probably the conclusion to, our “Sharpening Japanese Tools” series. The last article was one year ago and gave an example of how to employ the lessons taught in the previous 29 posts. At that time, your humble servant promised to discuss the subjects of this article at a later date. It’s later.

Why the delay? Simply because I am an excessively compassionate sumbitch who wanted Beloved Customers who hadn’t already figured out plane blade sharpening on their own to become proficient at regular sharpening operations before worrying about something as bizarre as wacking hard steel blades with hard steel hammers. After all, in the words of Miss Benatar, it’s sometimes a heartbreaker.

But now with the blog teetering on the loose and crumbly edge of the rabbit hole that is the Japanese handplane, we have the choice of either gliding gracefully into its depths or clumsily tumbling down ass over tea kettle (oh my!). Alas, we can tarry balanced in this precarious position no longer.

With his article we will begin our graceful swan-like journey by studying a matched set of operations Beloved Customers need to master to become proficient at maintaining Japanese woodworking blades: one called “Uradashi,” and a related operation called “Uraoshi. If you already have these skills, accept my highest praise. The target audience for this post, however, is those that don’t have experience with uradashi and uraoshi as well as those that want to review and improve the skills they already have.

So spread your wings and fly, my brave cygnets!

Definitions

Beloved Customers should already be aware of the hollow-ground “uratsuki,” typical to Japanese chisel and plane blades. If not, please review the article at this link.

Uradashi is pronounced oo/rah/dah/she and written 浦出し in the Chinese characters as they are used in Japan. These characters translate directly to “push-out the ura.”

Uraoshi is pronounced oo/rah/oh/she and written 浦押しwhich translates directly to “press the ura.”

These two maintenance operations are performed to restore the blade’s cutting edge to useful condition when the thin land at the cutting edge is almost worn out. We will discuss the why and how below.

Long-term Strategy

Before we start pecking on steel, let’s consider our sharpening strategy.

Professional-grade blades are not only expensive, they are difficult to make, hard to find, and require an investment of time and effort from the user if they are to deliver high-performance results over many years. To minimize the required expenditure of time and effort, and to maximize the benefits achieved we need more than just technique, we need a maintenance strategy.

In previous posts in this series we have discussed multiple strategies, some physical, some psychological, and even a few supernatural ones. The following is one I strongly urge Beloved Customers to adopt:

Get the ura in good fettle, and then;
Avoid working the ura on anything but one’s finest-grit sharpening stone thereafter, (with the exception of uraoshi following uradashi, of course).

Simple, no?

The ura is formed by grinding the lamination of extra-hard high-carbon steel to form a hollow area. Because hard steel is time-consuming to abrade, a wise craftsman will work to keep the ura as deep as possible, and the flat lands surrounding the hollow-ground ura as narrow as possible, for as long as possible, thereby minimizing the area of hard steel that must be abraded with each sharpening.

But no matter how careful we are to preserve the ura, sharpening the bevel makes the blade incrementally shorter, so the day will come, at least in the case of plane blades, when the land at the ura immediately behind the cutting edge, called the “itoura,” (pronounced ee/toh/oo/rah, meaning “ thread ura” ) becomes as thin as a thread. Once it disappears, the blade will no longer function. This is the only drawback to the Japanese ura feature, and can only be solved by drastic methods.

Bending Hard Steel

The goal of uradashi is to cause the lamination of hard steel at the cutting edge to bend towards the ura so that when we subsequently abrade the bent portion of the ura the itoura land will be restored.

Now if you think about this for a second you will realize that trying to bend a thin plate of steel hardened to Rc65~66 without snapping it is a fool’s errand. In the case of Japanese blades it is possible to accomplish but only because of the thicker, supporting layer of soft low-carbon/no-carbon iron, called the “jigane,” to which the hard steel layer is laminated.

Your humble servant struggled at first with uradashi, in part because every explanation I read about the process in both English and Japanese was written by people who either didn’t really know what they were talking about, or were too lazy to explain it well. Some years, several broken blades, and much heartbreak later I finally figured it out. Better information is available nowadays, but there is still plenty of BS out there to shovel.

Despite the title of this section, the first key point to understand and always remember is that uradashi is not about using a hammer to bend the hard steel layer; Never ever ever never touch this steel with your hammer! I forbid it on pain of 20 lashes with a wet noodle.

Instead, the goal is to peck on the soft iron jigane layer of the laminated blade at the bevel, as described below, deforming it and causing it to expand.

The jigane would normally just deform away from the hammer’s impact point, but the hard steel hagane lamination on the ura side of the blade restrains it causing the entire blade at the cutting bevel to curve in the direction of the ura without snapping or cracking. This is another aspect of the blacksmith’s magic unique to the Japanese plane blade.

The second key point you need to grasp around the neck with both hands and dig your Jimmy Choos deep into is that it is indeed a fool’s errand to try to bend the soft iron lamination by the power of your mighty arm, Oh Lord of Thunder. No, we must be as clever as Loki.

So, how do we cleverly do this job, and what tools should we use?

The 60mm blade used in this example forged by Mr. Uchihashi Keisuke from Swedish K-120 steel. The brand name is “Keisaburo.” An excellent blade and still functional, but the itoura is getting a little skinny.

Tools

You will need the following tools to properly perform uradashi and uraoshi on a blade:

A small hammer. Great force is neither necessary nor useful; Indeed you must be able to control this hammer very precisely, so the lighter it is the better. One with a pointy end like a funate or a Yamakichi, or a corner of the thin end of a Warrington hammer or tack hammer is ideal because it focuses maximum pressure on a small area, deforming the jigane efficiently. A small, pointy hammer also makes it easier to guide and control the hammer to ensure precise impacts. And control matters a lot because if you miss and strike the hard steel at the cutting edge it will be damaged and bitter tears will flow. Consider yourself duly warned, Oh Might Thor;
An anvil of sorts. This can be any piece of steel with some mass and with a rounded-over corner. A piece of railroad track is great. I use the face of a small sledge-hammer clamped in my vise. A sharp corner is not good, so round a corner by grinding or filing and then smoothing it. A piece of thin postcard material glued to this rounded corner help keeps the blade from slipping;
A small square or straightedge;
A marking pen or scribe to mark the “target area” on the bevel;
A rough diamond plate/stone or a mild-steel kanaban plate + carborundum powder;
Parking pen or Dykem for coloring the ura’s lands;
Regular sharpening tools (stones, water, etc.).

A small sledge hammer used as an anvil by clamping it in a vise with another clamp as a stabilizer.

Target Area Layout

Let’s begin by laying out the target area on the soft iron jigane at the blade’s bevel with a marking pen. Or you can scratch lines into the jigane with a metal scribe. This target area will indicate the area you will peck with your little hammer producing many small dents. You must not strike outside this target area even if tempted with donuts. Not even if they sparkly sprinkles on top.

The striking area marked with marking pen.

The dents you will make with your little hammer need to be limited to a band on the jigane parallel to the cutting edge and beginning 2~3mm from where the jigane lamination begins extending to the end of the jigane lamination at the blade’s back, in the case of plane blades, or the face where the brandname is engraved in the case of chisel blades.

Make a line with your scribe or marking pen the full width of the bevel at this distance from and parallel to the cutting edge. Everything above this line in the direction of the blade’s back, in the case of plane blades, or the face where the brandname is engraved in the case of chisels and knives, is the primary target area. Make sure you get this right.

The dents need to extend across the full width of the jigane layer, except where the corners (ears) have been ground to a bevel at the right and left end of the blade, so the right and left limits of the target area are delineated by the ears.

Although we need to tap the full width of the blade to avoid stress concentrations, there is nothing to be gained by trying to bend the far right and left corners of the blade, so we want to focus approximately 2/3rds of our hammer impacts and the resulting dents near the center 1/3 of the blade’s width. Mark the right and left limits of this central area on your blade with a marking pen or scribe.

The Grip

If you are right handed, hold the blade in your left hand with your index finger extended and pressed against the ura parallel with the cutting edge, and about 5~10mm away from it. Press down with your thumb on the blade’s back clamping the blade between your thumb and the side of your index finger. Your other fingers should support the blade from the ura side.

This photo shows how to hold the blade against the anvil.

Your index finger will be the fence that keeps the blade in proper alignment during the tapping-out process.

Next, we need to figure out how to align and move the blade on the anvil, as well as where to place hammer blows in relation to the blade and anvil.

This photo shows the grip without the blade in the way. Notice how the index finger is touching the anvil. The blade is shifted right and left using the index finger as a fence to keep blade and hammer in precise alignment and under tight control.

Manipulating the Blade on the Anvil

Place the blade’s ura on the rounded corner of your anvil. You may want to tape or glue a piece of thin cardboard, postcard, or manila file folder to the anvil’s corner, not so much as a cushion, but to help prevent the blade from slipping, but this is not mandatory.

Adjust the distance between your extended index finger and the cutting edge as necessary so your finger is touching the anvil stabilizing its position, and so you can slide the blade to the left and right indexing off your finger to keep the target area in proper alignment.

Next, while still in position facing your anvil and with hammer in hand, move the blade aside and tap the rounded corner of your anvil with your hammer lightly. Memorize this location and your position because every tap from now on must be aimed at this same exact spot on the anvil.

The Tap Dance

The time has come to begin the dance.

Reposition the blade on the anvil and use your little hammer to tap the soft jigane layer at the bevel (only the jigane!) in the target area you marked earlier making a row of small dents in it.

These small dents don’t need to be pretty or uniform. Be patient because you may need to make hundreds of pecks, each one quite precisely.

Here is the key point to understand: You want each little dent to cause the jigane to deform and expand in length and width a tiny bit, gradually, until a significant degree of deformation accumulates. The hard steel layer, however, will constrain the jigane layer from expanding, causing the blade to bend, and causing the hard steel layer to deflect and curve towards the ura, bending it without breaking it. It doesn’t seem possible at first, but I promise it will happen, so please be patient.

The trick then is to use the grip described above with your forefinger indexing the blade against the anvil while moving your hand, along with the blade, a tiny bit right or left with each strike, with the each point of impact firmly supported on the anvil, in-line with the hammer blow, thereby squishing the jigane between hammer and anvil. In this way, since the hammer is always aimed at the same exact point on the anvil, you don’t need to worry about realigning it with each blow, removing several difficult-to-control variables from the tap dance at once.

Remember, keep the hammer and anvil precisely aligned, and move the blade left and right, not the hammer. It helps to touch the inside of the elbow of the arm using the hammer against your side in a fixed location to help maintain a consistent hammer swing and distance. Until you have mastered consistency, speed is risky.

Another key point to understand is that, if the point of impact of your little hammer is not directly in-line with the point where the ura on the opposite side of the blade is touching the anvil, the force of the hammer’s impact will tend to cause the blade to jump and wiggle around instead of deforming the jigane. This wastes time and energy and makes it difficult to make precise taps.

Here’s a video of Eleanor Powell tapping away with great control, and with the aid of her faithful Fido. I don’t recommend including a benchdog in your tapping-out routine other than as a deterrent to any pernicious pixies lurking in your workshop eager to cause you to miss with your hammer and chip your blade. Evil pixies!

Here’s a video of Sarah Reich tap dancing with every strike landing precisely in the target area. I need to get a pair of shiny red lycra pants like her to go with my most excellent aluminum foil hat with the curly copper wires and red fringe. Do you think they would make my butt look huge?

Remember, force is neither necessary nor useful. The goals is to make many precisely aligned tiny taps producing many small deformations in the target area, with no impacts on the hard steel layer.

Dent Removal

We talked about “dents” above. If you are using a round-faced hammer, those dents will be little crescents. If you use a hammer with a tiny striking face on one end like a Yamakichi or Funate, that tiny face will dig into the metal making ugly little peck marks instead of pretty little crescents. I have used all varieties of hammers but prefer the ones with pointy ends because they impact face is small and, it seems to me, easier to control. Six of one half-dozen of the other.

But remember that we will abrade away all those dents/craters after a few sharpening sessions, so appearance is of zero importance.

The Goldilocks Itoura

The goal, of course, is to bend the blade at the ura land just behind the cutting edge enough to create a useful, flat ura. But how wide should the itoura be when the process is complete? Among plane connoisseurs a narrow itoura is, like a willowy super model, considered a thing of beauty. By narrow I mean some where around 0.50~1.0mm.

A narrow itoura does indeed look sexy, so much so that fashion-conscious plane blade blacksmiths make a skinny ura a point of pride. And, in fact, a bulimic itoura makes it easier and quicker to sharpen the blade because the square millimeters of hard steel one must abrade/polish is minimal compared to a wider itoura.

The downside to the super-skinny itoura is that it wears out sooner, making it high maintenance. Now, I’m not suggesting that if your plane blade has a slender itoura it will demand weekly spa visits, twice monthly trips on a G700 jet to the Vienna Opera, annual ski holidays in Verbier, and bi-annual boob jobs, but there is no doubt you will need to do the uradashi tap-dance more often. Shiny lycra pants are optional, but ooh sooo sexy! (シ)

On the other hand, a wider itoura of 3~4mm has some advantages too. It’s easier to fit the chipbreaker (uragane), and you don’t need to do uradashi/uraoshi as often. Much wider than this, however, and I find it can be difficult to get a screaming-sharp edge at times. Moderation in all things, I guess.

I don’t know how to describe when to stop tapping-out the ura to obtain a good width for your itorura because every blade is a little different, but after doing it a few times you will develop a sense of when enough is enough. However, to develop that sense you should make frequent checks on your tapping-out progress by placing your handy dandy straightedge or square right on the itoura parallel to the cutting edge and sighting between the blade and the straightedge/square with a strong light shining at the gap. You will be able to see the itoura gradually bulge upwards at the center. Even a little bit of a bulge will give you a useful itoura, so don’t get carried away.

Uraoshi

Once the tap dance is done, we need to grind down the ura to form a new itoura, a process called “ uraoshi” (ooh/rah/oh/she)

The traditional method is to use the mild steel kanaban lapping plate mentioned above, although any true lapping plate will work. One sprinkles a small amount of carborundum powder on the plate along with a little water, and works the ura side to side grinding down the bulged area to make a flat.

The problem with using lapping plates and carborundum powder is that not only is it a messy process, but unless you are careful to keep the right amount of wet grit on the plate, the results tend to be a tad irregular. I recommend using diamond plates or diamond stones (like those made by Naniwa) because they produce more consistent results quicker.

Whether you use a kanaban lapping plate or a diamond plate/stone, it is important to focus pressure on the thin area where you need the itoura to develop. Pressure anywhere else is not helpful, but only wears out the itoura prematurely.

Here is wisdom: When they first attempt uraoshi most people try to stabilize the blade by applying uniform pressure across the back of the blade. This seems to makes perfect sense, but it always results in grinding a nasty little trench in the ura where it touches the extreme edge of the kanaban or diamond plate. Remember, the uraoshi process tapped out a bit of metal right at the cutting edge, and mostly at its center. This is what you need to abrade, NOT the right and left lands of the ura, and certainly no more than 3~4mm from the cutting edge. So carefully focus the pressure you apply during uraoshi only on the thin area where you need to restore the uraoshi.

Some people like to apply a thin strip of paste wax, perhaps 3~4mm wide, on the edge of their kanaban or diamond plate to prevent it from digging ugly trenches in their beautiful and delicate side lands. Others like to apply a thin strip of mylar tape at the same place for the same reason. These techniques all work, but professional sharpeners don’t use them because they know how to apply pressure correctly.

A quick touch of the blade on the diamond plate shows where the black marking pen ink has been removed along with the highest spots on the bent itoura.

After the itoura has been restored (perfection is not necessary), polish the blade using your normal sharpening routine.

The restored itoura. Please notice the lack of trenches.

The bevel after working it on the diamond plate and stones. The remaining peck marks will disappear entirely after a few sharpening sessions. Notice how your unworthy servant has focused his abrasion efforts nearest the cutting edge. Good boy.

Chisel Blades Versus Plane Blades

Uraoshi and uradashi are operations typically, but not exclusively, performed on plane blades. About the only time chisels need to have uradashi performed is to restore the itoura after the blade receives major damage, like a big chip, a sad event all users of Japanese tools experience from time to time

There is a structural difference between plane blades and chisel blades Beloved Customer must understand when considering performing uradashi on a chisel blade.

Plane blades have a steel lamination that is more-or-less uniform in thickness because that’s all that’s necessary. Chisel blades, on the other hand, are subject to much higher bending stresses than plane blades, so to prevent yielding and failure, traditional chisels are forge-laminated with the steel lamination wrapped up the right and left sides of the blade, forming something akin to a structural steel U-channel, producing a higher moment of inertia, and therefore greater strength and rigidity,

Because of this additional strength, chisel blades are more difficult to bend at the right and left sides using uradashi techniques compared to plane blades. Indeed, they may break if you try.

Since you can hope to safely bend the steel lamination only in areas away from the more rigid sides, uradashi operations on narrow chisel blades will go as smoothly as throwing a cat through a screen door. I wouldn’t even try it on any chisel narrower than 18mm. Beloved Customers have been warned.

If you feel compelled to attempt uradashi on a chisel blade, my only advice is don’t peck within 3mm of the right and left sides.

With this article, our Sharpening Japanese Tools Series is complete (probably). Your humble servant hopes it has been informative. If Beloved Customer had the patience to read it all, and the clairvoyant ability needed to understand most of it, then you know a heck of a lot more on the subject of sharpening than I did when I started the journey. At least you have received some great ideas for sexy new additions to your simply mahvelous woodworking wardrobe!

YMHOS

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Links to Other Posts in the “Sharpening” Series

Four Habits and Three Mysteries

The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass

The efficient woodworker must continue accurately cutting or shaving wood just as long as possible without stopping to sharpen his blades too frequently because time spent sharpening is time the primary job isn’t getting done. He must therefore develop unconscious habits to help him constantly monitor the condition of his blades and the quality of the work being performed.

The Four Habits

As the saying goes, “timing is everything.”

If Beloved Customer pays attention, you will discover there is a point where a woodworking tool’s blade still cuts, but its cutting performance begins to drop off. Sensing this transition point is critical because if you continue cutting wood much past it, three things are likely to result.

The energy needed to motivate the blade will increase dramatically;
The quality of the cut will quickly deteriorate;
The time and stone expenditure necessary to resharpen the blade will increase.

That’s three variables that could be expressed in a pretty graph if one was so inclined, a graph that would have at least one inflection point. Which variable is most important to you?

Most woodworkers fail to consider these efficiency variables; They simply keep cutting away until the tool either becomes too difficult to motivate, or the results resemble canine cuisine, then stop work, curse the poor innocent tool (often hurting its feelings) and resharpen the blade. But the wise woodworker will focus on minimizing the total time and total cost required to maintain his tools even if it means he must pause work to resharpen his blade well before its performance deteriorates badly.

This sharpening inflection point will vary from blade to blade and job to job because every blade, every piece of wood and and every user are unique. Simply counting strokes is not enough. It takes attention and practice to sense when a blade has reached this point.

The following are some things you should pay attention to, and habits you should develop, to help you identify the sharpening inflection point.

Habit No.1: Sense Resistance Forces: As you use a tool such as a plane, chisel, or saw, tune your senses to detect the point at which the blade becomes more difficult to motivate. As the blade dulls, the force that you must apply to the tool to keep it cutting will gradually increase. This is especially noticeable when planing and sawing. Develop the habit of paying attention to this force so you can determine when it is time to resharpen.

Your humble servant recommends you regularly use an oilpot to ensure any increased resistance is actually due to a dulled blade and not just increased friction between the tool and the wood (or pixie predations (ツ)).

Habit No.2: Listen to the Music: Pay attention to the tool’s song. That’s right, turn off the radio and CD player, shush that jabbering little 3 year old rolling around in plane shavings under your bench, and listen to the music your blades make instead. If you do, you will notice that each tool sings its own song, one that varies with the wood, the cut, and the condition of the blade. Is the blade singing, lisping, or croaking as it chews wood? Is it a saw with a basso profundo voice, or a mortise chisel with vibrant tenor tones, or perhaps a soprano finishing plane singing a woody aria? A sharp blade makes a clearer, happier sound when cutting or shaving wood than a dull one does. Learn the bright song it sings when it’s sharp and the sad noise it makes when it’s dull, and all the tones in between. If you have ears to hear, it will tell you what kind of job it is doing and when the time has come to resharpen it.

Habit No.3: Eyeball Your Cuts: Watch the tool and the wood it has cut. Is your chisel cutting cleanly, or is it crushing the wood cells? A sharp chisel blade cuts cleaner than a dull one. You can feel and hear the difference. And you can see the difference in both the shavings or chips and the surfaces the tool leaves behind. Don’t be a wood butcher: develop the habit of frequently checking the quality of your cuts. It doesn’t take extra time, and your tools will wiggle with happiness at the attention you give their efforts.

Habit No. 4: Feel the Surface of the Wood: Is your plane shaving the wood cleanly, or are the surfaces it leaves behind rough with tearout? Develop the habit of running your fingertips along the path your plane just cut to sense surface quality. If you detect roughness or tearout, the plane may be out of adjustment, or more likely, the blade is becoming dull. Or maybe you need to skew the blade, change the direction of the cut, or moisten the wood’s surface with a rag dampened with planing fluid (I use industrial-grade busthead whiskey, or unicorn wee wee when I can get it).

Next, run your fingertips across the path of the cut your plane just made to detect ridges that may have been created by irregularities or chips in your blade’s cutting edge. Every one of those ridges indicates a small waste of your time and energy and a flaw created in the wood. Don’t forget that the tops of those ridges contain compressed cells (kigoroshi) that may swell back to their original position and become even more pronounced with time. These tasks are easily accomplished in passing with a few swipes of the fingertips along and across the wood between cuts without spending any extra time.

These techniques are not rocket surgery. They don’t take extra time. They can be applied to any cutting tool all the time. The key is to pay attention; To listen to one’s tools; To watch their work; To feel their work.

Let’s next shift our attention to three of the Mysteries of Woodworking, their potential impacts on mental health, and how to avoid unfortunate wardrobe decisions.

The Mystery of the Tilting Board

To discuss this Mystery, we will call on the services of my old buddy Richard W. (Woody) Woodward. You may remember him from a mystery story in a previous article. Yes, it was a near thing, but he has fully recovered from alcohol poisoning after chugging a 5th of tequila in an emotionally-charged bout of drama over a brittle blade.

Anyway, this mystery goes something like this. Woody is planing a board about the same width as his plane’s blade down to a specific thickness, but for some unfathomable reason, the board ends up thinner on one side of its width than the other. He checks the blade’s projection from the plane’s mouth, but it is absolutely uniform. In fact, to plane the board to the correct thickness he ends up having to tilt the blade to take less of a cut on one side of the board than the other.

Most everyone has experienced this curious and wasteful phenomenon, but because it is not consistent, many never solve the mystery of the tilting board, blaming it on Murphy’s ministrations or pixie perfidiousness. But never fear, because the solution is elementary, Dear Watson.

In Habit No.4 listed above, your humble servant mentioned residual “ridges.” Please be aware that these ridges are not only unsightly and may damage applied finishes later, but they can actually keep your plane from cutting shavings of uniform thickness. Think about it.

Let’s assume you are planing a board the same width as your plane blade, but the blade has a tiny chip near the right end of the blade that leaves behind a .0005″ high ridge on the board’s surface. With each subsequent cut using this same blade with the same defect the right side of the plane’s body and likewise its blade will be elevated above the board’s surface by .0005″, while the left hand side, which doesn’t have any ridges for the plane’s sole to ride on, is shaved the normal amount. The difference in the amount of wood shaved from the right and left sides with each individual cut is minute, of course, but it accumulates with each pass sure as eggses is eggses

Assuming you checked that the blade is projecting from the plane’s mouth the same distance across its entire width, with each pass the surface of the board becomes tilted, a little high on the right side and a little low on the left, so that instead of a flat surface square to the board’s sides, you have produced a flat surface that is thinner on the left side and thicker on the right. Muy malo, amigo.

If, while performing the checks listed above, you detect ridges on a freshly-planed surface, immediately check the blade’s cutting edge by running a fingernail along it’s width. Don’t worry, it won’t dull the blade unless you are also a bricklayer. Your nail will feel the catch and grab of defects too small for your eye to see. A few small ones may make no difference, but on the other hand, they might make a big difference.

Often these ridges will show up as lines of thicker wood in your plane shavings. You do occasionally examine your shavings, right?

With this, the Mystery of the Tilting Board, one that has driven many a woodworker to distraction, too often leading to regrettable fashion decisions involving stiff, canvas jackets with long sleeves connected to straps and buckles that fasten behind the barking woodworker’s back and even pass under the crotch (decidedly uncomfortable, I assure you), has been solved. Rest assured, only the Beloved Customers and Gentle Readers of the C&S Tools Blog can be certain of avoiding this undignified state of dress.

The Mystery of the Missing Plan

Here is another mystery of woodworking, one that especially vexes those tender souls new to the calorie-burning fun of dimensioning boards by hand.

Let’s say Woody needs to turn a bunch of twisty, banana-shaped boards into flat, square, precisely dimensioned and cleanly-surfaced drawer fronts to make 24 piston-fit drawers. Let’s also assume the wood he uses for each drawer-front is unique in both appearance and warpage. It’s a heck of a lot of wood to cut with no time to waste, so our erstwhile wood butcher gets out his trusty handplane, sharpens it up, adjusts the blade and chipbreaker, gives it a kiss for luck, and send wood shavings fly through the air with gleeful abandon!

But wait just one frikin minute! No matter how much Woody planes, he just can’t seem to make some of the surfaces flat, free of wind and the sides square to the faces. It’s like some kinda moving target! Indeed, eventually he is dismayed to discover some of the board’s edges are getting too thin. What to do, what to do!?

Drama queens like dear Woody typically begin interesting antics at this point, but not so our Beloved Customers who, unlike Woody, are stoic, laconic, intelligent and of course, sharply-dressed, and therefore pause their physical efforts to focus their mental powers on solving this mystery.

At this point the resident benchdog may perk up his ears, tucks in his tail and beetle away in fear of the smoke and humming sound emanating from BC’s ears; Master Benchcat arches his backs, hisses like a goose, and flees the workshop as if his tail is on fire; And the resident pixies frantically hide in the lumberpile to avoid being disrupted by the power they sense radiating from BC’s mighty brain!

Of course, the culprit is operator error.

Don’t forget to clean up the cat urine because it’s toxic to tools. Seriously.

Too few people really pay attention when using their tools, focusing like a badger after a squirrel on making as many chips or shavings as quickly as possible without a plan. For example, a failure common to many woodworkers is to start planing without first identifying and marking the high spots that must be cut down first, and then areas to be cut down next. In other words, they fail to plan the sequence of the work. The result is that time, steel and sweat is wasted cutting wood that didn’t need to be cut while ignoring wood that should have been cut first. And all for lack of a plan measured with a straightedge or dryline and marked on the board with a few strokes or circles of a lumber crayon or carpenter pencil

This mystery too has been known to increase profits of the mental health industry and even (heaven forfend!) fashion decisions involving poorly-tailored canvas jackets with crotch straps. Simply not to be borne!

Remember, when the goal is to make a board flat efficiently, always begin the job by identifying high spots and low spots and marking them. Then, always begin by planing down the high spots while avoiding the low spots. One mystery solved!

The Mystery of the Sounding Board

Lastly, we come to perhaps the most frustrating and least-understood of the Mysteries of Woodworking. Not to say there are no other mysteries, because there is always that most ancient of riddles that baffled even the enigmatic Sphinx, one which has tortured men since before Pharaoh wore papyrus nappies, namely that of honestly answering one’s wife when she asks him if her new pair of jeans makes her bottom look “simply humongous.” Sadly, this is one mystery upon which your humble servant is unable to shed light because even I “never could find no sign on a woman’s heart.”

But I digress. This Mystery is one that torments those badly befuddled souls like friend Woody who, lacking a plan to follow, eyes that see, hands that feel and ears that hear, unwisely assume the board they are planing is stable simply because it doesn’t walk away. Perhaps it is the malevolent influence of pernicious pixies that causes him to ignore that the downward deflection the pressure of the plane unavoidably induces in a warped, unevenly supported board, or in a board being planed on a flimsy or crooked workbench.

This unintentional, indeed unnoticed deflection too often causes the board to escape the cutting blade resulting in hills being raised and valleys remaining low where flat surfaces were required. Of course, this leaves the handplane bitterly dissatisfied.

But this waste of wood, steel, sweat and goodwill can be avoided because, even if the board isn’t rocking like Zepplin and dear Woody can’t feel the board deflecting away from his plane’s cutting edge, he could detect the change in his plane’s song when it is cutting an unsupported area of a board if he only listened because the piece of wood he is shaping is also a “sounding board.”

Think of all the money saved that Woody would otherwise spend on lithium, Prozac, and small hotel rooms with padded walls to ease his mental anguish if only he had the foresight to make a plan, train his hands and eyes to confirm his tool’s performance, and his ears to listen to what his plane tries to tell him.

Here is wisdom: The experienced professional will investigate each board, make a plan for his work, mark the plan on the wood, shim the board so it is evenly supported on a flat workbench surface, and sharpen his blade if necessary before making a single cut. Then instead of cutting randomly like a paintbrush-wielding modern monkey artiste, he will make each cut intentionally, purposefully, in accordance with his plan to make the work go as efficiently as possible.

He will also pay attention to the reaction of the wood and feedback from his tools during each cut. He will use the four habits discussed above, and maybe even a drop or two of unicorn wee wee to limit tearout if his budget allows.

If Beloved Customer doesn’t have a master to give you a dirty look or to box your ears when you impatiently err, you must train yourself. Slow down. Make a plan. Execute the plan. Pay attention, use your senses, and spend the time needed to evaluate progress against the plan. Consider carefully why the work is going well or why it is not.

This process will slow the work down at first, but over time it will sharpen your instincts, tune your senses, and help you develop good habits that eventually accelerate your work while improving the quality of the end product.

It will guide you along the path to becoming a master craftsman.

May the gods of handsaws smile upon you always.

Until we meet again, I have the honor to remain,

YMHOS

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the see the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.

Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may my straight-jacket straps dig infected furrows into my crotch.

Japanese Handplanes – Part 1: East Vs. West

C&S Tools Sukezane brand 70mm finish plane. Shirogami No.1 steel blade hand-forged by Nakano Takeo, body by Inomoto-san.

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
Bilbo Baggins

Your humble servant has received many inquiries over the years from Honorable Friends and Beloved Customers (may the hair on their toes never fall out!) about how to setup, maintain and use Japanese planes to which I have gladly responded when the request for information was made politely.

The Japanese hiraganna handplane is an elegant tool with a simple yet deceptively sophisticated design, not a difficult tool to master once one understands its unique design principles and learns a few basic techniques easily taught in person; But it can be frustrating to master them using only written guidance.

But despite my hesitation heretofore, I believe the time has come to begin this journey. I pray Beloved Customers will have the courage to accompany me down this road that goes ever on and on until we reach the lighted inn. When we arrive, the first round of root beer will be on me, so drink up!

Let’s begin the journey by examining some relevant terminology. Don’t forget your handkerchief!

Terminology

The Japanese Yariganna in-use. Prior to the advent of the handplane to the islands of Japan, an approximation of this tool was used for finish-planing the surfaces of wood following the adze. It creates a unique and practical surface texture.

In this and subsequent posts in this series your humble servant will not attempt to educate Beloved Customers in all the Japanese language terms for every part of the plane, nor will I use Japanese conventions for describing handplanes, since that would be about as useful as ice-skates on a hog. Instead I will use standard English language terms wherever possible. There is an illustration below that shows the various components and features along with Japanese language labels for those interested.

Indeed, since the plane is a relatively recent tool in the Japanese woodworker’s toolbox, and has a much longer archeological history in the West, it seems silly to use more Japanese words than absolutely necessary to describe something that did not originate in Japan, and can easily be described in English. I will, however, venture to describe some of the more common general terms specific to the Japanese handplane.

I am neither a lawyer nor a government employee and so see no need to make things more confusing than necessary. I humbly apologize in advance to any purists who enjoy being confused.

The standard handplane in Japan, and the one used for creating and/or smoothing flat surfaces (versus rabbet, chamfer or molding planes) is called the “hiraganna,” pronounced hee/rah/gahn/nah, and written using the Chinese ideograms 平鉋 , without emphasis on any part of the word.

The first character 平 is pronounced, in this case, “hira” (there are at least 6 standard pronunciations for this character as it is used in Japan) and means “flat.” makes sense, right?

The second character 鉋 , written “kanna” in the Latin alphabet and pronounced “kan/nah,” means “plane” (as in “handplane”). This character is comprised of two standalone characters combined to make a single character, a common practice in the Chinese and Japanese languages. The one on the left side, 金, means gold or metal, while the one on the right, 包 means “to wrap.” Kinda sorta makes sense; Almost hardly.

The character for kanna was not invented in Japan but is said to have been used in China since the Táng period AD618 – 907, although the tool it represented at the time was a multi-blade scraper of sorts and not a handplane.

Comparison Between Western and Japanese Wooden-bodied Bench Planes

If your humble servant may be permitted a brief digression on a personal subject, I would like to clarify a point of some small relevance to this explanation of the Japanese handplane.

I have at times been called a Japanophile, and although I confess to being fond of the mountainous islands and the wonderful people of Japan, the years I have spent living in Japan, and my ability to read, write and speak the language were not born of some starry-eyed infatuation with or even simple admiration of Japan, but by practical service obligations, educational pursuits and my work in the construction industry.

My point is that I prefer Japanese tools and techniques when I think they are superior, and by the same token prefer Western tools and techniques when I believe they are superior. Consequently, I like to flatter myself that I can provide a relatively unbiased viewpoint, one which will come into clearer focus near the end of this article.

Of course, those who prefer Western tools and techniques above all others will say I am biased towards the Japanese way, while those who prefer Japanese tools and techniques above all others will insist I am biased toward Western tools and techniques. There is no way to win such an argument, so Beloved Customers must judge for themselves. Anyway, back to the subject at hand.

A detailed treatise comparing wooden-bodied Japanese handplanes to steel-bodied Western handplanes would be an extravagant waste of Beloved Customer’s precious time, so I will resist the temptation. But I would be remiss to not point out that Bailey-pattern steel-body handplanes do have a few serious advantages over wooden-bodied planes in general, while wooden-bodied planes in general, and Japanese hiraganna planes in particular, have several serious advantages over modern Bailey-pattern planes the thoughtful woodworker should understand.

Some of the advantages of modern steel-bodied Baily-pattern planes over all wooden-bodied planes include the following:

The steel plane’s body is unaffected by seasonal humidity changes and therefore warps less and requires less fettling. This is a huge advantage;
The steel plane’s sole is harder and wears slower than a wooden sole, and therefore lasts longer and requires less fettling. Also, since the sole wears slower, the mouth does not easily become wider as soon, and seldom if ever needs to have a new mouth inlet. This is another huge advantage.

Both of these advantages can have a humongous impact on the effectiveness and productivity of the tool over the years.

Some of the advantages of Japanese wooden-bodied planes over steel-bodied planes include the following:

The wooden body is not as easily damaged as a traditional cast-iron steel-bodied plane’s body which will bend and/or fracture if dropped onto a hard surface (the ductile cast iron used in some high-end planes nowadays is a significant improvement in this regard). Fracturing has been the bane of cast-iron-bodied planes since the beginning. This is a huge advantage;
The plane’s Owner can modify, repair, or make a replacement wooden body exactly to his preferences quickly and inexpensively;
The wooden sole is softer than a steel sole and therefore is not only less likely to scratch the surface being planed, but will tend to burnish it instead;
The wooden sole is easier to true, fettle, and even modify;
The wooden body is lighter in weight and therefore both less tiring to use and easier to transport;
Japanese handplanes have lower profiles so they take up less volume in the toolchest and/or toolbag, and are easier to store and transport;
Japanese handplanes have few if any screws and no levers so adjustment is simpler, more intuitive, and entirely dispenses with the clumsy, often sloppy mechanical linkage common to mass-produced Bailey-pattern steel-bodied planes;
And finally, the biggest advantage of the Japanese handplane is, (drumroll please), the blade. If hand-forged from high-quality steel and properly heat-treated, will become much sharper, stay sharper longer and will be easier to sharpen than the blades of modern steel-bodied Bailey-pattern handplanes. No contest. Your humble servant believes the blade’s performance is the most important aspect of a handplane because, after all, it is a cutting tool, not a paperweight (although I admit to having a pretty little LN No.1 benchplane in white bronze I place on my desk and use as a paperweight. My associates here in Japan can’t figure out what it is so I tell them it’s for shaving kiwi fruit (ツ)).

Allow me to expound a little further on the advantages of the Japanese handplane:

Blade Performance:

A beautifully-polished kanna blade with what appears to be excellent grey jigane and a milky-silver hagane cutting edge. It takes your humble servant’s breathe away.

The Japanese planes we carry have hand-forged laminated blades made from specialized high-carbon tool steel to meet the performance expectations of professional woodworkers in Japan. The crystalline structure of this steel once made into a blade by our blacksmiths is fine-grained and uniform. Blades are exceptionally hard at 65~66Rc, and remain sharp a long time while being easily sharpened.

There was a time in centuries past when Western blades were of near equal quality, but no longer. Sadly, the blades of most Bailey-pattern planes manufactured nowadays are made of high-alloy steels for which quality control can be easily automated, but which were never intended for handplane blades. These steels are undeniably tough, but won’t become very sharp initially, quickly dull, and are, relatively speaking, an “evil screaming bitch” to sharpen (pardon the excessively-technical jargon).

Blade Appearance:

While it used to be that Western wooden-bodied planes had interesting maker’s marks stamped in their blades, such is no longer the case. Japanese planes, on the other hand, make a point of having decorative engraving, stampings and surface treatments applied to their blades for a significantly more interesting presentation of the blacksmith’s art than the plain, boring sanded steel of modern Western planes.

A plane by Usui Kengo with a nekkiri yabane (cut arrow feather) ground and stunningly artful calligraphy handcut into the face.

Reliable Blade Retention:

The blade of Japanese handplanes is wedged tightly into two grooves in the side of the body preventing shifting and rotation, and providing reliable settings. Most modern Western handplanes rely on a relatively complicated and less-secure blade retention and adjustment mechanism.

Simplicity:

The standard Japanese hiraganna plane has at most 4 components: The body, blade, chipbreaker (uragane), and chipbreaker rod. Planes with adjustable mouths will have more parts, but those are not standard planes. Screwdrivers and wrenches are not necessary for adjusting or disassembly of Japanese handplanes. Western planes often, but not always, have at least 21 and sometimes more components and require tools to field-strip.

And all the parts in Bailey-pattern handplanes have built-in slop which grows worse with use and often makes adjustment irritating and sometimes even unreliable.

The Japanese hiraganna does not have a separate wedge or a mechanical assembly securing the blade in-place. Instead, the blade itself is wedge-shaped, narrowing in thickness from the head to the cutting edge, so that it fits tightly into two grooves, one cut into each sidewall of the mouth opening, for a secure fit, an elegant, simple and utterly reliable design.

The various component parts of a Japanese Hiraganna. There are only 4.

Lower Profile and Reduced Weight:

Japanese hiraganna have thinner bodies and a lower profile than Western Bailey-pattern planes and even Western wooden-bodied planes. Accordingly, they weigh less and take up less space in the toolbox.

While there are times when your humble servant appreciates the extra momentum a heavier steel body affords when making deep cuts, those instances are limited to specific applications. The rest of the time the extra mass is like a bloated and corrupt government agency: a pointless burden.

In all other applications, the lighter weight of the wooden-bodied Japanese hiraganna plane is a blessing.

Smoother Surface

Where wooden-bodied planes of all types excel is the superior finish they leave on the wood they are used to plane. That is not to say steel-bodied planes cannot create a perfectly smooth surface, but it is the nature of steel to develop dings and burrs in-use that frequently leave scratches in the wood they are planing. And while a wooden sole will burnish a wooden surface, the best steel can do is rub it.

Western Steel-bodied Handplanes: The Right Tool for the Right Job 適材適所

There is a saying in Japan I am told that comes from the boat-building tradition where many types of wood are used for the various components in a quality vessel, and it goes something like this: Tekizai tekisho 適材適所 meaning: “The right wood for the right place.”

Your humble servant is a pragmatic son of a gun, and a firm believer in using the best tool available to achieve the best results possible. Accordingly, it would be exceedingly foolish to insist that Japanese handplanes are always the best tool for every planing job. Indeed, I have used a combination of both Bailey-pattern steel-bodied handplanes and Japanese-style handplanes for many decades, selecting the best tool for the specific job at-hand. So what steel-bodied planes do I believe excel?

Scrub Plane

I have found the Stanley No.40 furring plane and especially its more modern equivalent the Lie-Nielson 40 1/2 scrub plane to be superior for removing material when dimensioning lumber (making it thinner and flatter).

This is an extremely simple plane with a narrow, thick blade 1.450″ x 3/16″ ground to a large curvature and a big mouth designed to hog lots of wood. The handles make it easier to leverage body weight into the cuts.

In the case of the LN model, the blade is A2 steel, a material developed originally for dies, not plane blades, a tool steel that will never become especially sharp, and which dulls quickly, but once it has dulled to a certain point simply keeps on cutting, seemingly forever. And while the blade may become dented and dinged, it will not easily chip, perfect for the rough work of dimensioning dirty and stone-infested rough-sawn lumber.

The ductile iron sole of the LN product will be of course be scratched by dirt and stones hidden in the wood, but who cares? Better a steel scrub plane than the white oak of my Japanese planes. I consider Lie-Nielson 40 1/2 to be an essential plane in my toolchest.

Block Plane

The steel-bodied Western block plane is also an essential tool IMHO.

There are of course Japanese planes with similar dimensions, of lighter weight and with better blades, but they all have one weak point, namely the area right in front of the mouth becomes scratched and grooved and wears quickly because block planes are often used to trim and clean edges a job applies a high point load on the mouth. The fix used in Japan is to inlet a brass plate at the mouth. We carry small planes with this feature when new.

Also, I use my block planes for finish carpentry and installations which involves working around hidden finish nails, little pieces of steel that damage wooden bodies and hard blades, but which a steel block plane shrugs off.

I own several block planes, being fond of experimenting with tools, but have found the Lie-Nielson No. 60-1/2 rabbet block plane with nicker to be the one most useful for me.

Jointer Plane

Another Bailey-pattern steel-bodied plane I consider to be excellent is the jointer plane. When a young man I owned an old Stanley No.7 jointer plane I bought at a flea market, but it fell from the back of my 1966 VW van many moons ago and suffered the fate common to most old cast-iron planes, breaking both the body and my heart in half. I bought the Lie-Nielson version many years later and have been pleased with it’s performance (my expectations were never very high).

It’s a monster at 22″ long and weighing 8-1/4 lbs. I hate the heck out of the A2 steel blade. To make things worse, the sole was warped when I bought it new, so I had to spend hours flattening it on sandpaper and glass. Why do I like it? The cast ductile iron sole is tough and never warps (or at least hasn’t since it came to me). The extra length makes it especially stable for cuts ending or starting off the piece of wood I am planing. When I have a large surface such as a table to flatten, my No.7 may not cut like a dream or be easy to use, but it always makes the job go quicker.

Conclusion

In this post we have briefly touched on the history, terminology, advantages and disadvantages of the Japanese hiraganna plane. We have also compared it to Western planes, and concluded with several examples of Western handplanes your humble servant believes to be superior to their Japanese counterpart.

I hope you will agree that the Japanese handplane is a tool worth mastering if only because of the excellent work it can help you execute. Besides, they’re a lot of fun.

In the next post in this story of supernatural intrigue and inter-dimensional romance we will discuss how to properly adjust a Japanese hiraganna plane without hurting its feelings.

YMHOS

‘*Look at them,’ mother Troll said. ‘Look at my sons! You won’t find more beautiful trolls on this side of the moon’* (John Albert Bauer (1882–1918) A difficult choice indeed for a fairy princess.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.

Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may my jointer plane break in half and bust my toes.

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The Mystery of the Scratched Blade

The wiser a man is, the more he stands ready to be educated.”
Joe Abercrombie, A Little Hatred

In this post your humble servant will offer some advice that, if followed, will save Gentle Readers time, money, and wear and tear on their valuable woodworking tools. These are not original techniques; I stole them long ago from professional woodworkers in Japan. Wise Gentle Readers will be as bold.

But first we must solve another mystery, so prepare to enlist the help of your inner Agatha Christy.

As with the other mysteries we have examined, this one involves no dark and foreboding alleys shrouded by ominous mist and concealing footpads with rubber knives, or bottles of vintage Tabasco Sauce spiked with arsenic. Indeed, nothing so mundane.

Investigating the Scene of the Crime

Last December your humble servant received an ordinary Christmas Card from an old friend, probably a “re-gift.” It was unusual in that it contained brick dust. The sender of the card was my old friend Woody, a charming fellow, diligent woodworker, amateur thespian, and possible alcoholic. Gentle Reader may recall this gentleman from a previous adventure I wrote about called The Mystery of the Brittle Blade. Wait a minute! Now that I think about it, you went with me to visit Woody at that time and actually helped solve his little mystery. Thanks for your help!

BTW, the screenplay for that story is currently being reviewed by top producers and directors in Hollywood, at least that’s what the movie promoter I met at Krispy Creme Donuts here in Tokyo promised (ツ). He seemed like a reliable guy so I paid for his donuts and coffee.

Obviously, Woody’s dusty Christmas Card was a subtle cry for help so I went to visit him in his rickety, leaning workshop during my international travels last January. When I got onto the airplane I was shocked to find myself only one of approximately sixty travelers on a commercial flight that normally carries 350+ passengers, so I reclined across the center aisle of seats in cattle-class and slept like Nero after a night on the town.

Gentle Reader may recall Woody’s shop from the visit we made there together. Yes, it’s, still cold and dark and filled with the pungent funk of his faithful mutt Stinky.

Upon entering his shop I found Woody collapsed on the floor, an empty tequila bottle in one hand and a shiny bronze No.4 smoothing plane by Lie-Nielson in the other blubbering like a fool and muttering something like “Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” Woody ain’t much of a scholar but he has a romantic soul that sees every difficulty in life as Shakespearean in nature.

Seeing that my friend would be of no help in solving this mystery, I left him on the floor to practice his lines while I began my investigation of what, judging from the source material he was reciting, could only have been caused by something akin to Brutus’s betrayal.

The obvious first clue was his No.4 smoother, so I pried it out of his paws, dried the tears he had dribbled all over it, and observed a series of deep, uneven scratches on its sole, more or less in line with its the long direction. Whereupon, I twirled my white mustaches like an older, more handsome Hercule Poroit, and asked myself the following questions:

Question 1: What could have possibly created these scratches? Had iron pixies been using Woody’s beautiful plane to shave bricks?

A quick investigation of the workshop revealed several suspect bricks, but no signs of iron pixies at play. I remembered seeing Woody use these same bricks to brace the legs of his combination router table and barbecue betimes (he makes wonderful barbecued pork ribs, marinated in a whiskey sauce, BTW). I concluded it unlikely that either Woody or pesky pixies would have used this valuable plane to shave bricks at the unthinkable risk of disturbing a delicate combination tool (router table/barbecue) of such importance.

As I considered the wood Woody had been working, another question popped out of my brain like an egg from a hen:

Question 2: Is there anything that grows naturally inside a tree that is harder than a handplane’s sole and large enough to have caused such deep scratches? And if they do exist, could these particles have been maliciously concealed inside the growing tree by compadres of the shambling horde of 6-armed, green-skinned, Fanta-guzzling aliens that follow me everywhere? BTW, If you have seen these aliens, please send photos!

I next removed the plane’s blade, which was made of a tough and difficult to sharpen metal called A2, developed for making dies and other industrial components, and checked its condition. As suspected, the edge was not just deadly dull, but exhibited dents perfectly in-line with the deepest scratches in the plane’s sole. Egads! The thlot pickens!

Of course, Gentle Reader is aware that many varieties of wood contain hard silica particles that can wear out tools and quickly dull cutters, but they are seldom large enough to create deep scratches of the kind I saw on Woody’s plane’s sole. Hmmm.

Question 3: If these hideously-hard particles did not grow inside the tree, and were not concealed inside the tree by aliens, exactly how did the infernal particles that made these scratches come into contact with Woody’s pretty plane?

To make a closer visual inspection possible, I recovered my magnifying glass and deerstalker hat from my truck parked in Woody’s beer can-cluttered driveway.

Could the damage have been caused by nails, screws or staples left in the wood? Perhaps, but the appearance of the damage to the blade would have been different.

Pixie toenail clippings? Happens more often than we realize.

A tiny fragment from a divorce lawyer’s heart? Certainly any piece of such an organ would be harder than stellite, but being a fragment of a microscopic organ, such particles are harder to find than an honest politician in Shat Francisco.

“No,” I confidently declared; The culprit was harder than all these substances, more insidious than even Murphy’s pointy purple pecker, a substance all around us, one we often ignore. Rejoice Woody, for the mystery is solved!

Dust & Grit

Logging Redwoods in Humbolt County California, 1905

Politics and journalism aside, we live in a dusty, dirty world, and although the steel in your tool blades is very hard, ordinary dust and dirt contain plenty of particles much harder. I guaran-frikin-tee you that collision with even a small particle of mineral grit embedded in the surface of a piece of wood can and will damage a blade’s cutting edge.

You may believe the damage is minimal and of little concern, but every time your blade becomes dull, you must resharpen it. Every sharpening session costs you time pushing the blade around on stones, time not spent cutting wood. And sharpening turns expensive blades and stones into mud. This is time and money lost forever.

And the abrasive action of dirt and grit embedded in wood is not hard on just chisel blades, plane blades and the soles of steel planes, but is even harder on sawteeth and wooden planes.

And the damage is not limited to just your handtools either. Take a closer look at the steel tables of your stationary equipment such as your jointer or tablesaw. Unless they are new, you will find scratches. Has that purple pervert Murphy been smokin dope and humpin sumpin on your jointer’s bed when you weren’t lookin?

Nay, Gentle Reader, supernatural causes aside, and unless you have been dismembering the bodies of divorce lawyers in your workshop, these scratches are clear evidence that the wood you’ve been working is neither as clean as it looks, nor as clean as it should be. You’ve gotta do something about that.

Ruba Dub Dub

So what can you do about damaging dust and grit? Strange as it may seem, the simplest and surest way to get rid of dirt and grit is to follow your mother’s instructions about cleaning the bathtub: Simply wash it with soap, water and a wire brush, followed by a rinse.

Bet you never thought of washing wood before have you?

The idea is to wet, scrub with a wire brush, and quickly rinse the dirt and grit off the wood, not to make the wood soaking wet, so none of that “rinse and repeat” nonsense, and don’t get carried away with the water hose. A bit of dishwashing soap or washing soda mixed in the water bucket will help lift out dirt and grit.

Don’t forget to pat each board down immediately afterwards with clean rags to remove surface water. Then separate each board, rest it on stickers on-edge out of direct sunlight, and allow time and circulating air to dry it.

Remember to wet both sides of each board to minimize warping. And don’t soak a lot of water into the ends.

Disclaimer: Rubba-dub-dub is not well suited for thin material or laminated wood products that might easily warp, or delaminate, or if you are in a hurry, or if you lack adequate space to properly air-dry the wood.

Whether you wash the wood with water or not, be sure to do at least the following two steps on every board before you process it with your valuable tools.

Scrub Scrub Scrub

If you can’t wash the boards, use a steel wire brush to dry-scrub all the board’s faces both with and across the grain. Yes, I know it makes the surface rougher. Tough pixie toenails. Scrubbing with a stiff steel brush is extremely effective at removing dust, dirt, embedded particles of grit, and even small stones from long grain. Give it a try and you will both see and smell the dirt and particles expelled. Pretty nasty stuff sometimes.

Saw Saw Saw

Second, and this is supremely important, before planing a board either by hand or using powertools, saw 2~3mm off both ends. This is why you have that circular saw with the carbide-tipped blade. If you can’t do that, at least use a steel block plane, drawknife, or other tool to chamfer all eight corners of the board’s ends to remove both surface dirt and the worst of the embedded grit thereby saving your planes, planer and/or jointer blades from scratches.

This step is critical because grit and even small stones frequently become so deeply embedded in endgrain that even a steel brush can’t dig them out. But sure as God made little green apples, Murphy will place them directly in the path of your plane blade.

If you do these things, I promise your tools will thank you over many years with abundant chips, shiny shavings and cheerful little songs.

Well, until either Woody sobers up or we meet again, I have the honor to remain,

YMHOS

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.

Please share your insights and comments with all Gentle Readers using the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, thuggish Twitter, nor a US Senator’s Communist Chinese girlfriend and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. May Murphy poke me with his pointy purple pecker if I lie (say that ten times fast!) (ツ).

What Does It Mean to Build Permanence?

Old and Young Places

Hard, Stringy Wood

The Ships that Took Our Trees

Norfolk Island Pine

Hoop Pine

Monterey Pine

Huon Pine

Beyond the Grey Rain-curtain

An Unexpected Responsibility

The Weight of History

.

Layout That Fills the Workshop

Putting Blade to Wood

Keeping it Flat

The Finish

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What is the Kiwaganna Handplane?

Advantages of the Kiwaganna Plane

Points to Keep In Mind

Juggling Blades

Relevant Articles:

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The Traditional London Finish

The Modern London Finish

Performance Criteria

Why Is the Expansion, Contraction and Stability of a Wooden Tool Component a Concern?

Danish Oil

Applying the Modern London Finish

Tools and Supplies

The Finish Mixture

The Steps in Finishing a Wooden Handplane Body or Tool Handle

The Story of Why I Started Using the London Finish for Plane Bodies

The Abura Dai

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Factors Critical to Controlling Tearout

The Chipbreaker & Historical Lumber Processing Techniques

Why Does Tearout Occur?

How Does the Chipbreaker Work?

Downsides to the Chipbreaker

Alternatives to the Chipbreak

Alternative 1: No Chipbreaker

Alternative 2: High Bedding Angle Without a Chipbreaker

Alternative 3: Bevel-up Handplanes Without a Chipbreaker

Alternative 4: Back-bevels

Keys to Making Chipbreakers Work Effectively

Conclusions

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Other Posts in the Japanese Handplane Series:

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Why Fit Body to Blade?

Tools

Blade Preparation

Checking & Tuning the Mouth

Body Protection

Adjusting the Blade to the Mouth

Groove Maintenance

Fitting the Bed to the Blade’s Back

The Peppermint Twist

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The Shin Un Mu Blade 神雲夢の刃

Definition of Fettle

Blade Details

Laminated Construction

The Ura

Blade Retention

Lengthwise Taper

Transverse Taper

Curved Back

Common Sense and Plane Philosophy

Conclusion

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Definitions