An update and a story with a moral

Looking kinda like a violin top isn’t it? Carl says it’s time to bring the outline into shape cut the edge to final thickness. That’s exciting stuff people. More pics of it after a this parable:

As I’ve related, when I had a long day of carving last week I caused some damage to my right thumb. I think this was mostly from using the finger plane. No matter how sharp I got the blade, it still required so much effort to get shavings. Putting lots of force into your fingers when they’re holding a little object like that isn’t good for them at all.

So last night I reached the stage where I needed to switch over to the plane. I came home from work and I took 20 min to sharpen the blade. It was mirror sharp. Deadly sharp. It was scary just looking at the thing it was so sharp. I popped it back in the plane and once again, I could just barely get it to cut. I was annoying and slightly frightened. If I couldn’t muster the strength to push around a finger plane on spruce, the maple back would be impossible. I took the plane apart again and looked at it.

Let’s talk about planes for a moment. So far you’ve seen four planes on my workbench. Here’s the whole happy family again

So there’s the finger plane, two block planes, and the big jack plane. The interesting thing about planes is that the blades are all shaped roughly the same way, but the way they cut wood can be in two very different ways. A pic helps this point

In these side views, you can see that the plane blade has a bevel (like knives etc) but that the bevel is either up or down compared to the surface being cut. Bevel up makes the most intuitive sense as it’s kinda how you imagine a knife works when it skims a thin curl of butter off the stick etc.

Before fiddle making, I’d only used block planes and they all have the bevel up. The jack plane is bevel down, and I (incorrectly) made the assumption that this was because of it’s size When I got the finger plane, I never even wondered about which way the bevel went: it was closer in size to the block planes so the blade must work the same.

In fact, that is wrong.

The angle of the blade relative to the surface being worked is what determines if the bevel is up or down. With steep angled blades, the bevel is down. If you look at the angle of the blades on the jack and finger planes in the photo, they’re both much steeper than the block planes.

That long winded explanation of plane blade angle theory was to make it somewhat less likely than anyone would bother reading this far to learn that I put the damned finger plane blade in upside down. And then I used it that way by sheer muscle and screwed up my thumb in the process.

When I realized my dumbass mistake, I flipped the blade over and tried it. With next to no effort, I made thin, pretty shavings.

Moral of the story: make sure your tools are put together properly and if something seems wrong, it almost certainly is.