Japanese plane setup (Wilbur's version) - II: plane blade rehab

[Note: this step should not be needed with a new Japanese plane.]

This being a used Japanese plane, the blade isn't perfect. It's got a fair amount of mushrooming around the top of the plane blade.

The mushrooming is in three spots — at the top, and on the sides. This speaks to how consistent the previous owner of the plane must have been when tapping the blade to adjust its position. It also makes me think that the previous owner might have used a 1500g hammer for the adjusting.

I could just leave the mushrooming alone, but to my eyes, it doesn't look great. From a more practical standpoint, I want to adjust the bevel angle when sharpening, which means that I'll want to use my Grintec sharpening jig, and the mushrooming prevents the blade from fitting into the jig.

The approach to fixing the mushrooming wasn't too sophisticated. I used a combination of hammering the mushroomed areas on a small anvil, grinding down the mushrooming, and a file. Here's the end result.

It's not perfect, but it's better than it was before. More importantly, the blade will now fit into my Grintec sharpening jig.

On to sharpening.

Upcoming talk at the Maine Japanese Woodworking Festival

Although I've alluded to this before, I realized today that I never explicitly mentioned this here. My bad.

The good folks at the Maine Japanese Woodworking Festival were kind enough to ask yours truly to teach and give a talk this year. The festival runs from July 26 - 28, 2024 in Mercer, Maine. The title of my talk is "The Japanese Tool Tradition: It’s Not What You Think It Is". I figured it's a good title — vague enough that I can keep tweaking the talk and still be in scope, and with just the right amount of clickbaitiness.

I know I'll be covering the things that make Japanese tools so awesome — Japanese tool steel, blacksmithing, and tool making techniques and construction, and so on. I'm also putting together thoughts about where Japanese woodworking sits in the wider woodworking world, some of which were informed by my trip to Japan last year.

Here's the link to register. Hope to see you there.

Japanese plane setup (Wilbur's version) - I: where to start

Back in 2010 I put together a series of posts on how to set up a Japanese plane. I've been told that these posts were good, but there are aspects of Japanese plane set up that I didn't cover back then, and other aspects that have changed a bit over time. I figured if Taylor Swift can rerecord her catalog, I could revisit Japanese plane set up.

This time, I'm starting with a used plane instead of a new one. The set up process will be the same with the exception of one step that may or may not be needed for a used plane. I'll be sure to point that out when we get there.

Here's our plane. I found it on eBay. It has a standard 70mm blade, and is in decent, but not great shape.

To my eye, the blade looks decent. The flat area between the hollow and the cutting edge is too narrow, but that can be fixed with sharpening. From what I can see on the bevel, the lamination looks even, and the hard steel layer is nice and thin. It's hard for this to show in a photo, as the bevel is a little rough, which hides the lamination a bit. We'll see how it looks once I sharpen it.

The body is in okay shape.

There's some waxy stuff on the bed of the plane. My guess is that the blade was projecting too far forward, and this stuff was applied to build the bed up to fix that. I will be getting rid of this at some point, and using what I think is a better way to fix this.

There's also an insert that was put in to tighten up the mouth. In the picture above, you can see three nails holding this in place. Here's the view from the bottom.

There's also a crack in the back part of the body. There's some stuff in the crack, and a nail that was driven through the body of the plane, which was clenched to hold this together.

So this is where we're starting. The first thing to do is to sharpen the blade.

Why sharpen the blade? It's not because Japanese tool fans are obsessed with sharpening. There's a practical reason for doing this. The blade of a Japanese plane is not perfectly even. There's a slight wedge shape to the blade which can be seen from the side.

The wedge shape matches the wedge-shaped side grooves in the throat of the plane, and this is what keeps the plane blade in place when you use a hammer to adjust it. If I worked on the plane bed to fit it to the blade without sharpening it, and then sharpened the blade, which shortens the plane blade, the fit would not be optimal after the sharpening.

So sharpening first it is.

Into the gap

One of the things that resulted from the COVID pandemic was that I wound up teaching the OCIA course for our church (long story). The students got their sacraments at the Easter Vigil Mass, and I decided to make crucifixes for them as a gift. This should be a pretty straightforward project — mill out pieces of wood for the upright and crosspiece portions of the cross, cut a lap joint, glue, finish, and attach the corpus and INRI plaque.

But it is a truism in woodworking that the smaller projects are the hardest to do, because you see every detail. And for this crucifix, there was a detail that bugged me.

On the lower part of the bridle joint to the left, there's a bit of a gap. That's where I went a little off my line. It happens. Structurally, this joint would be fine, but visually this stuck out to me like a sore thumb. The good thing is that this is pretty easy to mitigate.

The way I fix small gaps in joinery like this is to use plane shavings to fill in the void. The first thing is to figure out the best orientation for that shaving. You want the shaving to go with the grain of one of the two parts of the joint. In this case, it would be along the grain of the crosspiece.

Then make some shavings from another piece of wood that's the same species as the piece. (It does occur to me that if you use a contrasting piece of wood for this, you've moved from fixing a gap in a joint to making inlay.)

Japanese planes are well known for their ability to make gossamer-thin shavings less than 0.001" thick. That's not what we want here.

I test fit the shaving until I find the section that fits well, and then trim down the shaving with a pair of scissors.

Then glue up and clamp the joint. I'm a big fan of liquid hide glue overall, but it's especially good in this situation because it makes the shavings slippery enough so that everything fits together. Don't worry that the joint will look like one of Phyllis Diller's outfits. We'll fix that later.

After the glue dries, the joint will look like a mess. Again, don't worry.

Now I use a chisel to get rid of most of the shavings hanging off the joint as well as the dried glue squeeze out, and a plane to bring everything flush. The joint looks much better now.

As it turned out, I was also making a small divider for a container that sits in one of our kitchen drawers, and left a little gap in that joint as well. I used the same technique to fix that, even though it will sit in a drawer, and will never see the light of day, because that's what woodworking has done to me.

For the crucifix, I used shellac and wax for the finish, and attached the corpus and INRI plaque. It turned out pretty nice.

And that's when I noticed that Jesus's head would have covered up that gap anyway. I guess Jesus really does save.

It Was 25 Years Ago Today! →

Joel Moskowitz celebrates the 25th anniversary of Tools For Working Wood.

Congratulations! Joel's one of the good guys.

Happy Easter from the King of the Monsters and Giant Cypress!

I Go To Pieces

I picked up this Japanese plane from eBay for a completely different reason than what I’m highlighting in this post. When it arrived, I was a bit surprised by the body of the plane, as it was made in a way that I had heard about, but never had seen in person. I didn't anticipate this, because of low-res pictures on the eBay listing.

The body of this plane was not a single piece of wood, as usual. Instead, it was laminated together from multiple pieces of wood. Here's a closeup of the top.

Here's the bottom of the plane.

And a view from the end of the plane.

Taking a close look at the side, there's evidence of machine-made finger joints for the end-to-end connections between the pieces.

Without any other information, my guess is that this plane body was made from a piece of butcher block countertop, or something like that. I don't think this is a usual method of making planes, as I've not run across this in over a dozen years looking at used plane auctions. And no Japanese tool seller that I know of offers plane bodies made like this.

The plane works pretty well, though. I gave it a try on a scrap piece of walnut without conditioning the sole or any of the usual Japanese plane set up procedures, because I was impatient. It still pulled nice shavings and left a nice surface on the walnut.

It will be interesting to see how this plane works once I actually set it up.

I teach the OCIA class at St. Bartholomew, our church. For this year's group, I made some pens as gifts. The pen blanks are all some sort of unidentified Brazilian hardwood.

The first step in making these pens is to cut the pen blanks into two pieces, and I used my dozuki for that. I forgot that you can't use Japanese saws on hardwoods, much less tropical species.

Three of Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji →

On the occasion of a complete set of Katsushika Hokusai's "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" being offered for auction by Christie's, Joel Moskowitz offers some great information and insights on them, including this tidbit:

So if I win the lottery, I know what I'll be shopping for.

Here's an Asian who rocks. And maybe moonwalks, too.

Happy Friday!

At last.

Maine Japanese Woodworking Festival 2024 →

if you're thinking about going to this, there's an early bird discount that ends tomorrow.

Also, Yann Giguère and Jason Fox was kind enough to ask yours truly to give a talk at this event this year. Despite the fact that I'll be yammering on for an hour, it should be a great time anyway.

Creating the camber for a Japanese jack plane

Just in case you haven't seen this, here's the writeup on my Japanese jack plane. One of the distinguishing features about this plane is the pronounced camber that's on the blade. The camber is what allows this plane to take thick shavings and get rid of wood in a hurry. We're not going to win any planing contest with this thing, but it's awesome at what it does.

Rich asked about how the camber is established. The first step is to realize that this is not a precision operation, so no need to be too precious about this.

The next step is marking the camber on the plane blade. Using a 10" radius arc is a good starting point for this. I don't have a compass large enough to trace a 10" radius arc, but if you have a scrap piece of wood, this is easy to trace out.

Here's the arc tracing tool. I'm sure there's a better name for this, but can't remember what it is.

It's a scrap piece of wood with a screw through it towards one end, and a 5/16" hole drilled 10" away. The hole will be just large enough to put a pencil through. It won't be a tight fit, but it will be good enough. Remember, this is not a precision operation.

The arc tracing tool pivots on the screw, which rests on my workbench, while the pencil traces the arc. I use the arc tracing tool to trace a 10" radius arc on an index card, although any piece of paper or cardboard will do. The blue tape is to hold the index card in place, since I don't have three hands.

After that, I cut along the arc, and use the index card as a template to trace the arc onto the back of the Japanese plane blade. I used a Sharpie for this.

Here's the result.

At this point you'll want to get your hands on a grinder. I know there's a lot of talk about how you can't use a grinder on a Japanese tool because the grinder will overheat the tool and cause it to lose its temper. This is not completely true, as long as you're aggressive about keeping the tool cool. I have a Tormek, so I don't have to worry about this issue, but drawing out the temper is not why I have a Tormek. I have a Tormek because my basement shop has no ventilation, and I didn't want to have to deal with breathing grinder wheel and metal dust.

In any case, the next step is to grind the corners of the plane blade until the Sharpie marks go away. At that point, you'll have an approximately 10" camber on your blade. Remember, this is not a precision operation.

You can then take the plane blade to your usual sharpening set up and sharpen away. The only difference here is that you'll be rocking the plane blade side to side to cover the camber. This is easier than it sounds.

In this photo you can see my fingers right on the corner. WHat's not as apparent is that I'll constantly reposition my fingers, moving them from corner to corner as I rock the plane blade side to side.

Again, this is easier than it sounds. Remember, this is not a precision operation.

Here's what the plane blade will look like when you're done. Not the prettiest looking plane blade, but it will do a great job removing wood fast. Remember, this is not a precision operation.

As for the chipbreaker, again, this is not a precision task. I didn't do anything special with my chipbreaker other than to make sure that it rests flat on the plane blade.

You can see that the edge of the chipbreaker sits back from the cutting edge. This is okay. The shavings this plane will be taking are going to be pretty thick. A good rule of thumb for chipbreaker placement is that the gap between the cutting edge and the chipbreaker should be around the thickness of the shaving you want to take. That's why the chipbreaker on a smoothing plane is so close to the edge. But we're not going to be taking super-thin shavings with this plane, so the chipbreaker can be further back. (For more on chipbreakers, I wrote an article on chipbreakers for Popular Woodworking.)

Remember, this is not a precision operation.

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the kind comment. I really appreciate it

To answer your questions, I created a separate post. I had too many photos to be ideal for a Tumblr Answer post.