HNT Gordon Newsletter - October 2016

Hello Fellow Wood workers,

Our apologies for the last newsletter regards the alert that our links were a possible scam. All the links we send through newsletters are fine to open, however if you have any worries that the newsletters are a scam, please email us directly and we will confirm if the email was from us.

At a recent wood show at Melbourne a long time customer bought in 3 of the earliest planes that HNT Gordon ever made - a Palm smoother , smoother, and trying plane made in matching ironwood. They are about 20 years old. Looks like the fellow's son is getting into woodwork and he wanted me to give them a check up and service to get them back to tip top performance. The significance of these planes are that they were the first set of planes we ever made, and it was whilst making these planes that I realised we needed to kiln dry our wood - which forced us to learn how to dry and stabilise seriously dense Australian hardwoods like ironwood and gidgee. This was very important to the success of our tool making business.

The brass insert in the smoother needed re-gluing and the soles needed flattening but essentially they are in really good shape. One thing I did notice which is worthy of putting in a newsletter for educational purposes, is the bevel angle on the smoothing plane blade. In essence, through repeated sharpening the bevel angle at the tip of the blade was approaching 50 degrees. I have seen this a few times in ours and other planes and it is problematic when using the plane.

If you have watched the recent YouTube video we did on scrutinising bevel and clearance angles in BU and BD planes, you would recall that when a bevel gets to 50 degrees (whether it is a micro bevel purposely put there to change the blade pitch in a BU plane, or if it is from this scenario in a BD plane) the results when planning wood are the same. In that the bevel angle (50 degrees) is at a point where you have lost about 50% of your usable sharp blade and your clearance angle is quite small, creating problems associated with loss of clearance after only a short amount of planing - particularly when planing hardwoods. This can be a common problem in any plane when your bevel angle increases to a point where its starts to reduce your clearance angle, or when your clearance angle is already low like in a BU LA plane. If you haven't already done so, watching part one of our video explains this very clearly.

To keep this simple, if you keep your plane blade bevels at about 30 degrees - which is the angle most planes are designed to have - then you will minimise or eliminate the problems explained above and in the videos we made.

A reminder that Canberra wood show is on the 4th, 5th & 6th of November 2016 from 10 - 4pm each day. We will demonstrating and selling our full range of tools, as well as a selection of Colen Clenton tools. Hope you can make it!

Keep enjoying your woodwork, and if you have any questions relating to your planes or woodworking projects feel free to contact us.

Regards,
Terry Gordon
Plane maker.