Bevel Up or Bevel Down Handplanes

we're gonna talk about the difference between bevel down and bevel up Han claims one of them is a blade is upside down the wood doesn't care what I expected more okay 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 going to 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 bevel 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 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 that 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 and that kind of counteracts 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 a 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 and 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 repair to 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 fall is 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 Curley and Kroy or 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 oh 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 Stan Lee they were targeted unlike these which were made for joiners and woodworkers and bench workers they were kind of targeted for people that made butcher blocks in grain cutting getting this low angle is really phenomenal for cutting but you brought and what I see me 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 flat 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 oil in there and adjusting 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 look 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 COG com 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 or 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 have want to remove that back though well 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 a 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 diet 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 who gives you a good crisp edge if you got a clean sharp blade but this is easier for cutting end grain but those guys didn't cut and grain that often with a hand plane that's what the saws were for they were mainly straightening stock smoothing stocked and flattening stock and they preferred this style why I want you to look at a few things I'm lining up the mouth openings on both of these so that the distance between the mouth and the tote is comparable now the base of both totes are about in line pretty close within a half inch but look at the top that is quite a bit different where you the top of the curve of the thing that's quite a bit different on each one okay why is that well this kind of plane was meant to be used on a bench so the angle that the person's hand is generally wanting to press down on their work so it's standing up and claiming a board my feet are in the right position this bench is right around knuckle height so it's a typical hand playing bench and you've got a board right here my pores of my hand is going down through the board into the pitch and about the same angle as the Frog so I can get some downward force and this makes it using the blade in this position quite comfortable I mean look at my wrist it's fairly straight fingers pointed everything's just kind of nice and balanced let's now look at the bevel up point in order to get my risk from I'm cranking down this way I actually have to get down lower okay I lower my body I lower my shoulder and then I push forward okay that's because this bench is kind of low and remember these were designed for shooting in Grain so you want you would have to get more force going forward it would take a more muscle to get through those end grains okay but I want you to think about this most of us are not poor squaring our boards with a hand plane anymore I mean me personally I'm going to use my bandsaw and jointer so this this kind of cutting is more of a finished cutting action for me so I'm not going to be doing this all day long it's just taking as few swipes off maybe making an edge to 90 degrees or flattening a board before I threw it put it through the planer so my thinking is to a modern woodworker maybe that doesn't make the angle of the wrist the orientation of your body in use doesn't make that big a difference because you're not pushing this thing eight hours in a day and along those same lines that one of the brilliant things about these bailey style frogs is how you can adjust them left and right and progress them up and down these tools were designed in a time where the head plane was all you had there was no option to go to a thickness planer or a jointer your table saw or anything like that this was your main tool along with your saws and chisels as such people got used to them they could adjust these things without even touching or thinking about it and just react as they were going and if you've ever seen videos from like the 30s and 40s of the guys that were retiring at that point in time before machinery really came into existence if you saw them they were just working along they weren't thinking about it but if you look at the shavings coming off they might be jointing a board and then all sudden they're thick shavings coming up and without any stopping there'd be thinner shaving us coming off they could actually adjust it from left to right and they just got into motion they're just planning along but you look at their fingers these things were designed so that you could adjust them on the fly I mean just look at the adjustment controls the reason I mean the reason why they bent it over to this side was because most people were right-handed and even if you are left-handed back in that day you were trained to use these tools right right-handed so that this is closer to your thumb so I could actually adjust it left and right very easily it's just my thumb I could progress it down there's a lot of slop in these and back with just a finger so you could actually be using it you're squeezing it with your bottom three fingers and your adjusted the controls here without even thinking it so they might be adjusting it in between cuts that's how much control they had and those guys would use these things so much that they were making those adjustments just like we shift cars if you're in the manual transmission yeah you realize you're shifting it but it's almost second nature this I mean it's just so convenient and these things were designed for the people that were using a day in day out to be comfortable and effective now let's look at the adjustments on the hand plate yes I can still grab the rip but notice my wrist is kind of cranked up I had to come down a little bit more gets more power going forward as we mentioned the other day but look at my adjustment how am I good just at left and right you know maybe my pinky can reach it but my thumb definitely isn't gonna reach it the other way and I can't really push out that way so my hand has to leave the tote in order to not only progress it up and down but left and right now this is what they call Northstar adjuster and you can see that you'll adjust the blade left and right like that I would tell you I don't like this adjustment for left and right what I would do is I would basically stick my fingers and it wedge them in either side and I can kind of get a little bit more of a micro adjustment using the FATA my fingers but what does that mean my hands leave the taupe to make adjustment it's not something I can do on the fly for based on that adjustment ability plus that's designed more for comfort clearly the old 1700 1800 design is the better than design that's the way you should go once again hold your horses there remember these were designed for a time with this was all people are using a lot of us are the hybrid woodworker you're welcome Marc Spagnuolo and this minor here might make a better overall plan for somebody because how many of us use shooting boards we might dimension all our lumber with power tools but we'll refine it with our hand claims this kind of design is I was very much more comfortable very much more comfortable when you're using it as a bench plane what about as a shooting plane in fact there's just really no way to hold these comfortably and shoot them on a shooting board moving them back and forth like I mean you just it's not a comfortable grip you can do it and I know a lot of people that do they'll use their number 5 6 or even 7 s jointers as a shooting plane works wonderfully you put a sharp blade on it it'll cut anything but that blade is at 45 degrees there's no way to lower it unless you replace a frog and I don't even think they make frogs they go too much as lower than 45 and that plane right there was designed to cut in grain so not only did they do it but the newer incarnations they've actually designed them with hand holes little thumb spot design the grip so that you can grip it here so it's comfortable to shoot with throw your shooting board in there hold it up and just push it through you know do that all day long plus of that fact that they kind of machine these they focus more than machining to make these square these can be squared enough where it might be 14 you know 88 87 degrees and then you can can't the blade left the right to make it perfectly square with that really easy adjuster but once again how are you gonna hold it it's kind of shove your hand in here it binds it I mean yeah okay so our Gunawan a woodworker that's doing a lot of shooting this might be the way to go plus effect we talked about this bench being designed for hand clang it's right about my knuckle level so it is very comfortable to use the hand plane like that but a lot of people nowadays will make their work benches a little bit higher cuz they're mainly using power tools like routers and crosscut circular saws and all that kind of stuff with a higher work bench this angle right here kind of comes a little bit more neutral a little bit more comfortable another aspect is these modern jointers notice how flat they are in the front this allows you to be to better do proper jointing techniques because if you're jointing a board meaning getting the edge perfectly ninety degrees or matching two boards up and then getting them both of the same angle so that when they flip up they're a flat board well the idea is you want to put your thumb on the base cuz it gets you closer to the wood it gives you more control you can use your finger as a fancy you can put more pressure on one side or the other you don't hold the knob because a knob makes you kind of go too far forward and it's just hard to control that left and right pressure action you can also bring it down closer to the blade if you're doing shorter boards but with a traditional style that's a lot more difficult the riches are a lot higher you have ridges up close to the blade it's it's just not designed for that to do that one with a jack-of-all-trades you basically have to invest in another plane like this number seven right here and notice how much wider it is you can use your proper techniques and the jointers are typically a little bit wider more like the jacks so there is really no one answer which is best and which is worse they have different functions I personally do think that the bevel ups have a little bit more flexibility and if you're just getting back into woodworking or this is a weekend hobby think about how much is that comfort speed of adjustment advantage going to be and don't let me dismiss that aspect any the traditional styles are more comfortable if you're using them a lot and even today the guys that are dedicated hand tool woodworkers a lot of them will have either this version or the Lee Neilson version I think the Lee Nielson version even offers what he calls a hot dog which is a little handle that you can attach to the side to make it even more comfortable for shooting but their main go twos are traditional Bailey styles whether they're the Lee Nielsen Veritas old stanley's or the premiere Miller falls they they just prefer them because they're using them a lot they're using them more in the style of those original craftsmen from 1718 and early 1900s so it really comes down to what you plan on doing or I hate to say there's a little bit of more of a image aspect to this one these are the true woodworkers you know a lot of times you come out with but I will tell you this you see these sitting on my bench over here I keep two number Five's a Miller Falls and a Stanley I have a number seven up there and I have a number three and I think I have number three's put up an item number for out there I keep those mainly for demonstration purposes if I'm looking for a metal body plane this is what I reach for this is it fits more in line with how I use stuff even though I know some situations that these kind of gonna be better my preference has always been for these and I hope that's the first time you got the idea of what I actually prefer I try to give you an unbiased opinion unbiased description here for my smoothing aspects you know I like the wooden body style ones because you get so much closer to the blade and I can push all the way down here not just like that feel better so with that bit of knowledge and maybe some experience you have out there which one do you prefer tell us in the comments below but if you tell us give us a reason why that way people will be able to learn off of your opinion Nevo up level down if you've gotten out something out of this video and enjoyed it please consider liking favoriting subscribing doing all those social medias because that really does help promote this channel anything if you've gotten something out of this daily series or any one of the longer form videos that i'm more well known for please consider visiting worth effort com not only do I have a lot of articles there five ways that you can patronize a school either yet swag purchases or products or even on some of my wood crafts is all there lots of different ways to patronize us because as you know it's always worth the effort to learn create and share with others

Channel: wortheffort

Views: 8,954

Rating: 4.9586205 out of 5

Keywords: wortheffort, woodworking, wood working, hand tools, hand, tool, plane, bench plane, shavings, bailey, stanley, Miller Falls, jack, smooth, jointer, diy, craft, setup, tip, tricks, hack, use, lee valley, veritas, lie-nielsen, bevel, up, down

Id: WWuFbM2a_Mc

Length: 26min 6sec (1566 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2019