Popular Woodworking 2008-10 № 171, страница 51

shavingthickness. Squeeze a dial caliper hard enough and you can make almost any shaving inioa"sub-thou" shaving Wood compresses. Metal bends.

So I go for visual cues instead.

If the wood is well-behaved, 1 go for an opaque shaving- that is, as long as the curva-tureofthecuttingedge of my iron is significant enough to keep the corners of my iron from digging into my work. See the photo at bottom left to see what this shaving looks like. This shaving gets the work done fast. If the surface has been flattened by a jointer plane, a shaving li ke this will dress a surface for final finishing in one or two passes.

If I get tear-out with a beefy shaving. I retract the iron into the mouth of the hand-plane and extend it until the shaving looks like the photo at bottom center.

This shaving will clean up my surfaces in three of four passes. It usually eliminates tear-out more than the shaving above. But sometimes I need to get nuttier.

And that's when I push my tool to get a shaving like the one at bottom right. This thingisabouttofall apart. Infact.it sometimes will fall apart when you remove it from the mouth. Usually, this son of shaving requires a persnickety setuptoachieve. I can't get this shaving with an Anant, new Stanley or Groz plane. They are just too coarse to tune tothis high level. This is what you are paying your mot*)- for when you buy a premium tool. Pre

mium tools will do this with little fettling. My vintage planes that I've fussed over will dothisaswell.

The downside to this shaving is that you will be making a lot of them to remove the tear-out on the board. About 10 cycles or nuw is typical for some small tear-out.

Can you get nuttier? Sure. If all else fails, 1 can set my plane to remove something between a shaving and dust. These "shavings* don't really look like much. How do you get them? That's easy. When I get my thinnest smoothing-planc shaving possible. 111 rub some paraffin on the sole of the tool. This actually reduces t he depth of cut just enough togct the furry.dusty stuff. Beware: Takinga shaving that small will force you into a lot of work Lots of passes.

But when you need it. you need it.

No. 4: Perfect Pitch After taking a recent course in handwork. Rkk Gayle, a reader and professional painter, visited our shop at the magazine and looked ever some of the planes in my wall-hung toolbox. He reached upand pulled outthe Veritas Bevel-Up Smoother Plane.

"This plane has made all other planes obsolete," Rick said. "Well, that's what my instructor said."

It's a st rong statement to say that hundreds of years of handplane manufacturing have been eclipsed by one tool, but 1 know what

No. 3: Think Small

Most handplane geeks know that across the Pacific Ocean there is a culture that is even more obsessed than we are with the mechanics of cutting wxxxl with a plane.

I'm speaking, of course, about the Japa-nese, who hold handplaning contests where competitors see who can make the longest and thinnest full-width shaving.

They measure the thicknesscf these champion shavingsm microns. And the resultsare often affected by the weather. A wet day will swell the shavings by a few microns.

Sadly. Western woodworkers have become obsessed by creating ultra-thin shavings, which requires planes to be tuned to a very-high note. What's wrong with t his philosophy is that it focuses on the garbage instead of the good stuff. The shavings get thrown away, remember? It's the resulting work surface that wc keep.

You want to be able to take the thickest shaving you can without tear-out. chatter or requiring you to bulk up like Conan the Barbarian. A thick shaving will get you done with fewer passes of the smoothing plane over your work piccc.

So how thick should your shaving be? Good question. Most people talk about getting shavings that are lessthan .002" thick. Orthey talk about "sub-thou" shavings. Yes, it's all very empirical, except for the fact that few woodworkers really know hew to measure

I

Thither h faster. A subst.imi.il sh.r>ing such as thh one reduces the number of p.isses you take, but a can Increase your chances of getting tear-out.

A hit thinner. This shasing is about half the thickness of the thick one. Use this size shasing if you stan to see tearing on the surface of your project.

Tissue stops tearing. Before I bre.tk out the sander I try cutting a shaving such as this one. It takes more passes than I like, but His less bkefy to tear the grain.

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