On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 20:57:36 GMT, Badger
wrote:

I did buy a cheapie (6 quid!) and after a bit of
tuning it'll do for roughing (the irons slot is far too wide and off
centre for starters)

How about opening it right up and using it as a scrub plane ?

I've a couple of ash logs sitting outside, which tomorrow I'm going to
split with a froe and then prepare as stock entirely by hand. Because
I have a scrubber (a recycled #4) I know I can do this, and do it in a
very short time. It's a time and cost effective way of making boards.
OK, so I'm doing medieval repro work at the minute and this sort of
tapered-thickness timber is useful to me, but 50 board feet of timber
"for free" is a good enough offer that it's worth thinking about.
It's like green woodturning - once you change the supply chain so that
you can start making use of any passing log, then it changes your
whole process and the type of work you choose to make.


Going to try advancing from scarysharp to the next plane ;-) as I have
3200 diamond polishing compound at work

I've never seen the point in that sort of finish on a plane. You need
to have glass-hard steel to even make a difference in the edge at
those levels, and that's not going to hold up on a plane iron. For
carving tools, maybe, but not for planes.

I take my plane irons to the 8,000 grit waterstone, because it's
_wider_ than my 10,000 grit stone and a bit harder, both of which make
it easier and thus quicker to use. There's no point in going any
further - I do for some tools, but not for planes and certainly not
for planes built around Stanley pattern irons.

The best plane iron I have is one of Steve Knight's Japanese irons.
Now that is hard enough to make a really top-end final polish worth
the effort, but that's just as much because I don't use that plane all
that often - it doesn't meet nasty timber and it only comes out for
the very final smoothing.

--
Socialism: Eric, not Tony