Bevel Up / Bevel Down

in today's tip we're going to talk about the difference between bevel down and bevel up hand claims one of them the blade is upside down the wood doesn't care okay on to the bonus what I expected more okay [Music] so for examples of a bevel up plane we're going to be using my Veritas Jack plane and for an example of a bevel down plane we're gonna be using my Miller Falls which is very similar to the Bailey's only better so let's look at the differences between the two the main one being in the blades as you can see when you pull it out the bevel on a double-up plane is on the upside and it's flat on bottom whereas a bevel on a bevel down plane is on bottom and it's flat onto the top let's first talk about the bevel down planes and notice the difference in thickness we'll get to that a little bit later this is the traditional style and this style of hand plane came about back when steel was really expensive and one of the ways you can tell you have a really old plane if it has the original blade on it if you look down towards the base of it you actually see a weld line right around there and that's because they used to put the good steel hard steel on bottom and then they use kind of the cheaper steel on top because steel was so expensive and then steel became to the point where it was cheap enough that you can make the whole blades out of them but it's still they made them very very thin so as to not use that much now if you were to cut with just this blade you would get a lot of chatter because the blade itself would vibrate you can flex it with your hand and as you're going through the wood if you've ever seen those chatter marks that's typically caused by a blade flexing so what they did not only to increase mass but to put the blade under tension is they created these chip breakers and the chip breakers have many other purposes I have another video on talking about chip back breakers from a few weeks ago I'll put a link down below to and they added mass but they also put the blade in tension because whenever you assemble this chip breaker to the blade it squeezes the spring down so acts like one big piece of metal that has a different thickness throughout so it's a little bit thicker down there than here in that kind of counteracts of a lot of vibration if you understand a little bit physics the other thing is you basically have three parts to a blade on a bevel down you have the screw and you have the chip breaker and then you have the blade the chip breaker controls not only how shavings come off the tip of the blade but also how you adjustable a left right and up and down because it has a little slot right here that engages in with a plane whereas most bevel up claims they use a fairly thick blade and that thickness detracts from any kind of vibration in all the adjustment mechanism the adjustment slots are in that blade I do find personally that this is an easier blade to sharpen because it has such a wide wide bevel I can actually find it here that very easily to sharpen it by hand you don't really need a jig with one of these it's very easy to learn sharpness whereas with this these they're actually such a small bevel that you can't really feel it that easy and there are a lot of people out there that just tell you don't worry about it just get it close and it's okay to add a kind of concave to this if you're sharpening it by hand which most of us nowadays I believe probably use the hollow grinding method and since that bevel just isn't that big it's a little bit more difficult to do it that way now there are a lot of rafter market companies if you want to get a thicker blade to make it perform even better but when you do that when you have to be considerate of the plain bodies if you look at these most all Bailey styles and this is Miller Falls very similar they have a frog and a lot of us make sure that the Frog is in line with this base section right here but the Frog is movable with these two screws you can move it forward in backwards that way if you want to increase the tightness to the mouth to make it take a finer and finer shaving and curlier and courier more difficult wood you can do that it's a simple process but you do need to take into account they hey you need to leave enough room for the shavings coming out but B if you put a thicker blade on it some planes might not have the adjustment room coming back so that you have to have enough of an opening in front and believe it or not is not uncommon for this front and metal piece right for the mouth to break off on these because the pressure of the shading coming up is so much it pinches it they just snap off these the older ones were not the nice ductile might or they have they're the kind of metal where you hit them with a hammer and they crack so if that's the case you might have to file the mouth open it's very I don't want quite difficult but kind of time consuming and finicky to adjust the mouth opening on a Bailey style or by traditional bevel down hand plane but that frog this piece right here does give you some advantages and we'll talk about that later whereas with a bevel up plane this being a example of pretty much all of them out there and the thing about these is these weren't that popular when they came out when they were made by Stanley they were targeted unlike these which were made for joiners and wood workers and bench workers they were kind of targeted for people that made butcher blocks in grain cutting getting this low angle really phenomenal for cutting but you brought ends and what I say mean by low angle is when you place this down the bed angle is quite a bit lower and then you put the bevel so the angle that the blade is actually interacting with the wood is a combination of the low bed angle and the bevel on the blade whereas the angle of a bevel down plane is just the angle of the Frog because the top of the blade is flattened now you can buy different angled frogs but don't waste your money now all the adjustment mechanism for this this these style planes it's basically two parts you have an adjustment lever that flies off back at left and right and you have two slots right here that way as you wear it down you can move it back to the next one and you can get more life out of the blade but turning it up is just dropping a little bit of oil in there and then just sing it left and right and you can see left and right adjustments are like that adjusting it in and out is just with a screw I will get to the left and right adjustments I think this is kind of a waste but that moving in and out with this screw is very effective but one nice advantage of pretty much every bevel up I've seen is that this section right here is what is adjustable you can loosen up this knob and this is a fine adjustment down here and adjust the mouth open or closed by adjusting this front section and that sure does make closing and opening the mouth a lot easier they call these Jack planes because they're the jack-of-all-trades and one of the key advantages of this style where the mouth is easily adjustable is that you can go from taking thick shavings to thin shavings fairly quickly so you can actually turn it into something like a scrub plane just by putting a different blade in it that might have a deep camber on it and if you need to take a really fine shaving and something like a coarse wood well just put a different blade on it that has a steeper angle so that the combination of the bed angle and the blade angle makes a little steeper in fact I typically keep three blades for this hand plane one with a much steeper angle for doing very curly grains and then one for like if I'm trying to really hog off a lot of wood on something like curly maple it's what they call a tooth blade and these are kind of unique to these bevel up Styles it allows you to take thick shavings without getting as much tear out now that isn't to say that you can't do a very similar thing with a bevel up plane you can buy a new chip raker and blade combination and just get it nice and con cave so that you can use it as a scrub plane and then file open the mouth a little bit more so those thicker shavings can come out I have heard of people turning these into tubing planes but one of the main complaints has always been this flexibility of having multiple angles on the bevel ups that are easily done with new blades you can do the same exact thing you can increase the Frog angle or the combined angle right here by simply putting a back bevel on your blade but if you do that one you're pretty much making the blade unique to that angle and what I mean by back Blanco the bevel is on this side if I were do instead of making this dead flat to sharpen it down a little bit then you get the same kind of effect where the angle of the blade going through the wood is a combination of the Frog and the blade itself so in effect you can raise it up a little bit to make it a little bit steeper for those very difficult grains but but once again if you ever want to remove that back double you have to grind off quite a bit of metal to do that so all this might be telling you hey maybe these bevel up claims are technological leap forward and that's what you should get hold your horses there's a reason why those guys that used to earn a living preferred this I'm gonna call it a Bailey style from now on a plane versus the bevel up plane because they had this as an option remember me telling you that this was kind of originally dying and designed to flatten butcher block to cut end grain and that makes it phenomenal for like shooting boards and stuff like that much better than this style both will get you a good crisp edge if you got clean sharp blade but this is easier for cutting end grain but those guys didn't cut end grain that often with a hand plane that's what the saws were for they were mainly straightening stock smoothing stock and flattening stock and they preferred this style why well to learn what those are you're gonna have to come back tomorrow ah come up here hey this video is getting a little too long for a daily tip so we'll continue it tomorrow since we're talking about metal body claims for today's bonus I thought I'd introduce you to my favorite metal body plane my blog plane but before that if you've enjoyed this video so far I like to ask you to please like favorite subscribe do all those social medias it really does help promote this channel and if you've gotten some long-term benefit from some of our long-form videos which I'm more known for in these little short firm excerpt please consider visiting our website worth effort calm I've got a lot of ways you can patronize us in addition to getting more information through articles and such once again it's worth effort calm because remember it's always worth the effort to learn create and share with others I think it is fair to say that the block plane is probably the most commonly sold hand plane out there I mean you can pick up nice used versions like this one right here for 20 bucks just all over the place and check prices in a long time but I want to say brand-new these Stanley's are 40 to 50 bucks I don't remember them being that expensive and with a little bit of laughing a little bit tuning you can make these work just as well as some of the premium ones out you know there's a lot of competition in the block playing market but for me this Veritas model just dominate it's quite a bit wider than most block planes it's a little bit bigger it's got a lot more metal in it it's heavier I've installed an axillary front knob they come with a little brass knob and the knob control is loosening and tightening this front plate so you can close up the mouth it has some really cool features these little set screws on either side there's something that you will tune and adjust maybe once or twice in the lifetime of the plane but the fact that when you sharpen up your blade and you can just kind of drop it back in and it centers it just perfectly every single time there's no left-right centering it before you adjust it in back makes it so much easier and more consistent when I'm setting my plane up drop it in and you have a screw adjuster in back it's quick and easy the adjustments in back it has a standard north's adjust before you twist it to progress it in and out and you go left and right but once again I really don't like the left and right I just shove my fingers in these corners to get this micro adjusting ability and then tighten it up a little bit you don't have to tighten it up too much after you get it set I love the fact that it's machined 90 degrees on either side and these are finger things right here work so well with jointing yes I keep one of my bench hooks with a slight cut out specifically to work with this blade because how many times are you actually jointing anything much more than that big for small boxes and stuff this is perfect it's light it's easy all that kind of stuff to work this block plane can't be a great jointer the rule of thumb is a jointer the the plane you want to be about a third of the link that you're jointing well how many times are you jointing anything more than 18 inches I mean that's a nicely sized box I also use this as my main smoother I had my wood one for covering big large things but most of the time I'm not smoothing out big stuff it's small box tops this is perfect for it the fact that I can close the mouth up really really tight add a slight camber to the blade and then use it as a wooden body plane where my hand goes on top to press down when I'm working in the kit that comes with this one you can't get a back knob to make it more the size of a number four I don't know why I bought this I've never really used it but it works so well and when I'm smoothing out something with like reversing grain maybe around a nod or something like that I will swap in a tuning blade you know when I first got this tuning blade I didn't think I would use it that much I don't use the one in my Jack that often but this comes out quite a bit because it allows me to rough up around those reversing grain sections and then I will use a card scraper to get those final smoothing passes it's a lot more flexible than I thought it would be now in my mind usually there's a lot of competition within different classes of products but every now and then you find one that just dominates for my uses this fat wide heavy bulbous block plane is wonderful it is my favorite metal body plane

Channel: wortheffort

Views: 16,918

Rating: 4.9499431 out of 5

Keywords: wortheffort, veritas, lie-nielsen, stanley, bailey, low angle, LA, bevel, up, down, plane, hand plane, handplane, hand tool, handtool, woodworking, joinery, bench, shavings, end grain, DIY

Id: VGQOKcZe9TM

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2018