Chip Breaker

you know cap irons they just suck but I seem to be the integral part of pretty much all modern hand planes so let's see if we can make them a little bit better the second most common problem people have with our hand planes after them just not being sharp deals with this chipbreaker the shavings get caught up underneath them which causes it to stop cutting it's just a royal nightmare getting everything adjusted just perfectly and I've come to the opinion that they really don't do anything unless you get them perfectly set up and there's no reason to get them perfectly set up because a solid blade will cut just as well if you know what you're doing and you pick proper wood but most of these kind of Bailey style hand planes and all it seems like all modern bevel down hand planes deal with a chip breaker so let's see what we can do to improve this thing now the whole idea behind the chip breaker is actually compresses the wood fibres in front of the cut so that it won't tear out as a you play basically the fibers come in here and they crumple up and then you get that Curly's coming off right there that's the way it's supposed to work but I've seen videos and I'll show that to you in the bonus today where that really isn't the case unless you get it perfectly set up and then there are a lot of other variables that come into effect what normally happens is because you've gotten an old hand plane as highly worn down or something like that wood shavings bind up underneath the cap at certain spots causing it to kind of bump up to the point where the blade actually never gets a chance to touch the wood and it just all comes up and gets very very frustrated so assuming you've already flat in the back of your blade at least that bottom inch what we need to do is create a situation where the front of your chip laker and ideally the back of the chip leg-breaker completely rest flush on the blade good luck to getting that to happen I've come up with another way and that we could an edge on it so it's down at an angle like that so at least you know the front is touching so less likely the shavings come up it's not as solid a contact but it solves the problem of shavings coming up underneath now in the ideal situation you know the chip breaker sits like that and when you squeeze it down it compresses it and it adds a lot of mass to your blade it makes it a little bit more stable and this was important back when steel was really expensive I think that might be one of the original reasons why they came up with it in addition to it housing all your controls but it's this edge right here as I said earlier that's a problem and as things wear out you hit a notch or something like that it gets all nicked up over time or it just wears and rounds over you have problems there and if you notice how they make them it's just another piece of flat steel with this curve on the end that creates the lift up and creates a space underneath now once again in the ideal situation you would have that blade sitting completely flat and supposedly theoretically you could sit here and press down right here and it would match that bevel but if you remember this thing flexes in the middle and that can raise that lip up and that's why a lot of beginners when they go through restorations and they do it this technique eventually they get shavings coming up underneath my solution is to hang it off the side so that the angle is down so this angle comes up that way when you bring it up the edge is lower than the back of this section right here and then just take a few passes trying to stay as vertical as possible and you only need a net take off enough until you get a shine all the way across now if you notice and this one right here how its duller right there that tells me that this had a concave and that's why shaving for coming up in the middle so if I keep coming until I get that nice shiny spot all across the front edge I'm not pressing down here I want to kind of flatten it out as I go around and once I had that shiny spot a little bit more I am all set this is a rock and roll now I've got another trick research has shown me that having this angle coming back right here it doesn't push forward against the fibers kind of like well we showed in that diagram you actually want a bit of a straight line right there a straight front so I will come over I'll lay it flat right here and I'll just take a few swipes once again this is on the microscopic level so you don't have to do too much vertically until I get a nice shiny coming up front now I have a ledge hitting the wood and not a curve so now we're gonna put the chick breaker back on and remember you never want to bring the chip breaker down from the top always load it up way far back and sneak up on a tight finish and if you go to my bonus today you'll understand that you got to get really close or then just don't worry about it I personally don't really worry about it because I'm so used to straight blades without chip breakers and if you set it back a millimeter from the edge it's just as much as you're not using a chip breaker at all as far as the finish so tight me up put it in the plane and let's see if it makes a shaving so for today's video I want to talk about one of the most fascinating videos I've seen on woodworking will repent of the giant site first blog he has a Vimeo channel and a few years ago he got permission to republish a kind of research project that to Japanese professors did now this video is in Japanese but they do have subtitles and it's all about the influence of a cap iron in a plane and they basically took microscopic photos video of a plane in action as it was engaging the wood and this is the video that convinced me that chip breakers are really unnecessary and my now preference for just single irons go check it out it is just I mean it's one of those videos that if you're not a woodworker it's gonna be boring as hell but man if your woodworker analyze what's happening just fractions of a millimeter in front of the blade it's just mind-boggling to me you can actually see fibers compressing splitting get in shape I mean go check it out

Channel: wortheffort

Views: 18,965

Keywords: wortheffort, woodworking, wood working, hand plane, handplane, chipbreaker, chip breaker, sharpening, Lie-Nielsen, Lee Valley, Veritas, hand tool, handtool, technique, tip, trick

Id: vEv_eXTOWwc

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2018