"Eric Anderson" wrote in message
om...
I guess what I am really looking for is a plane that takes shavings
off (for fine tuning) with the same adeptness that my Veritas shoulder
plane does. I think it has the most satisfying "tuning" ability of
any of my planes. Oh, the others take off nice shavings, but the
Veritas shoulder plane adjusts so finely and the shavings look about 3
or 4 thousandths thick. It is real hard to get the others tuned to
that level. I wish I could find a bench plane that would work like
that. I would be using it for general purpose, but also for shooting
and drawer tune-ups.


My LN Large Shoulder Plane (93) takes a very fine shaving, to be sure. The
key, of course, is the mouth. The adjustable mouth block planes are about
as easy to take a fine shaving because of the simplicity of setting a very
narrow mouth. With bench planes, it takes a bit more work. The first thing
you have to realize, if dealing with a new LN (and probably Veritas as
well), is they come from the factory set for general use. To take a very
fine shaving, you will want to close the mouth down to support it. To do
this with a LN, you have to look under the blade. There are three screws.
The outside screws loosen the frog and the center screw adjusts the frog in
a forward or backward manner. Of course, as soon as you move the frog, the
blade depth is wrong, so then you have to adjust the depth. When you adjust
the depth, the mouth opening is wrong, so you adjust that. And so on...
It's not hard, and once you get a feel for it, you won't have to fish for
the correct setting so much.

Get the blade sharp (and I mean really sharp), get the mouth set very small,
get the blade set for a very fine cut, and set the chipbreaker very close to
the edge of the blade, tune the chipbreaker so it fits the blade properly,
and you should be able to take a very fine shaving with a bench plane. In
fact, those 3-4 thou shavings will look like planks compared to what you can
take off with a finely tuned bench plane.

Cheers,
Eric