Low Angle Jack Plane Vs High Angle Bailey Pattern Hand Plane Hand Tool Woodworking

a long time ago in a galaxy far far away Stanley made a bevel up plane if you want to get into hand tools you may have seen a lot of people saying well one thing you have to get is you have to get a bevel up low angle Jack plane and then other people are like no no no stick with the traditional a bevel down playing with a chip breaker that's what you want go with Bailey pattern plane and you kind of wonder which one is better you really can't find a whole lot of the old Stanley bevel ups that are great and the new ones like these can cost a pretty penny whereas you can buy one of these like five ten bucks at a garage sale if you're in the US and so which ones actually better which one will do the work you want it to do first let's actually talk about what is the difference between a bevel up and a bevel down plane now a lot of people are going to call this a low-angle plane and this a high angle plane and if you're talking about the bed angle that is true but there are other things that go into it that this manned up being a higher angle than this and so I will refer to them as bevel up and bevel down now what do I mean by bevel up and bevel down now the iron inside the actual iron that's cutting the wood has a bevel on it so just like a knife edge the question is whether or not that goes into the wood with the bevel facing up or does it go into the wood with the bevel facing down and there's a lot of differences between the two and what they can do so with a bevel up plane what you can end up doing is you lower the bed angle so this is all the way down low and you slide down through it now the nice thing about this is your force of push is more in line with the iron so that it pushes easier through the wood there is less chance of it chattering where it is if you turn the bevel up your angle is much higher on the bed and so when it slides to the wood there's a tendency for it to chatter as it goes through the wood because the blade angle is at about 45 degrees but the force angle is in line with the board so there's a little bit of discrepancy another thing that comes up is on a beveled down plane the traditional Bailey pattern you also have a chip breaker that can go on there if it's on a bevel up plane you can't put a chip breaker on there because you have this angle and so that can cause a little bit of difference I'll go into that in a bit in a minute so let's actually talk about the angles on the two planes number one you may have heard me talking about the bed angle that is the angle at which the actual iron piece is resting so if this is resting at 12 degrees as it is about on this low angle plane so it's about 12 degrees of lift up from the iron then you have to add in the angle of the actual iron so what did you grind this - what did you sharpen this - and in most cases that's going to be 25 degrees and when you buy most of these they come standard with a 25 degree iron so if you have 12 degrees plus the 25 degrees that's going to give you 37 degrees so in actuality this has a cutting angle of 37 degrees so let's move on to this now this one the bevel flips down like that and the nice thing about that is whatever your bed angle is that's going to be your cutting angle because your bevels on the other side so if your bed angle is 45 degrees your cutting angle is going to be 45 degrees now this particular one has a 45 degree Frog on it so it's a 45 degree cutting angle some of the Bailey's came as low as 40 degrees some of them as high as 55 degrees and you can get other frogs that have different done for angles on them I've seen them as low as 30 degrees so you can get other angles on it so if this one is at 45 degrees and this one is at 37 degrees there isn't a huge amount of difference between the two eight degrees can cause a bit of a difference eight degrees is lower now one of the things I've come across a good bit is kind of a mental process difference between a power to a person and a hand tool person a power tool person when they pick up a chisel or an iron has the bevel up and they do their work whether it's with a chisel they want to keep it in line or they want to keep it at a slight angle and whether it's on a plane they want the bevel up or whether working with a chisel almost all applications keep the bevel up and that makes sense because you want to keep the force in line with the iron itself so your force is going in the same direction as the iron but most hand tool people immediately flip it over and they want to have the bevel down and the reason they want to do that is because it gives you more control it allows you to come and do a rounded cut into your surface it allows you to put a chip breaker on it it's the most the way most traditional Plains are at it makes it a little bit simpler to think about the angle that you're working on and you can get down into things a little bit better with the bevel down but those are a lot more options there are other things to think about and they're more problems that can come about come about because it's set up incorrectly and for that sake most power tool people don't want to go into all of that and so having the bevel up is very useful having the bevel down gives you far more options but it's more chances for things to go wrong so that's another mindset thing that might come into play between a bevel up and a bevel down plane so next up I want to talk about three different uses for it so different types of woods you may end up using if you're planning on straight grain like this coming along with the plane at this angle is perfectly fine because all the grains are rising and your plane is going to cut through it but then you start getting into places like this where the grain might rise and fall and so you might be playing in the correct direction here but on this side you want to be pointing in this direction and they may switch up on you so you have your your figured woods that would be this and then you have your end grain so what happens when you want to cut across the end grain you want to actually plane off the board and I want to kind of go through some of the different variances and where these different planes will shine with a bevel up plane you basically have two different options you can get an iron that goes in here that is at 25 degrees or you put an iron in here that's at 50 degrees and for the most part that's all the setup that's going to be on this you sharpen it you set it in you make sure it's balanced upright you put at the right depth and it cuts it's very simple it's very straight forward and between those two blades most of your cutting will go okay with this whereas you talk about a traditional plane not only do have different angles of iron you can put in there you have different setups for your chipbreaker you have different mouth different distances you have different settings in there for a depth of cut and movement and the movement of the mouth is different because you have to move the Frog whereas on this it's a very simple thing with the knob so there's a lot more intricacies that go into this that make it a little bit more difficult to set up in order to do different types of wood so where does that come to play in the wood if you're working with straight grained wood any of these planes will do perfectly fine they will all shine they will cut exactly what you want as long as the blade is on there correctly and they're set up well they will do great now one of the nice things about the low angle is it's a little easier to push through the wood so when you're doing straight grains this is nice it is takes less force to put into it and that can be very useful where is this because it is a slightly higher bed angle and there's more chance of it chattering that can cause a little bit more force having to be put into the wood then you start getting into your figured wood and this is where things start to get tricky so you're going to want to switch this out you don't want the low angle you want to put a 50 degree blade in here now when you have a 50 degree blade in here that means your 50 degree plus your bed angle is going to give you 62 degrees so you have a 62 degree plane whereas on this one you have the exact same iron in here because it's still at whatever your bed angle is changing the degree of the the angle on the iron is not going to change the degree of the cutting angle so you start getting the figured wood and having that higher 62 degree iron will allow you to do a lot more work you're going to also want to close up your mouth very very tight on this and with those two things you can usually avoid most tear out but not all and if you start getting into really figured woods you can never make this really set up to do a glass smooth on figured woods whereas with this there's another added benefit of having a chip breaker on top of the iron and that chip breaker comes along and as the iron goes through the wood that chip breaker sets up here so the wood pops up and before it has a chance to split further so as if the iron is coming in without trigger it's just going to split out and you have this tear out in front of the iron having a closed mouth while you stop some of that air out but you're still going to get some tear out the chipbreaker actually forces the wood back into its place and will allow you to get a much cleaner cut so with this if you set your chip breaker up close and make your mouth small you can go through any figured wood and get a butter smooth surface with a plane it takes a while to set up and it is an artwork to learn to set up but once you do you can get an amazing surface with a bevel down plane so in you're talking about figured wood in my mind this wins because it can do more but it takes far more setup if you don't want to mess with the setup this may be your thing and when you get to some of that really figured stuff you just have to use a card scraper now let's talk about in grain so when I'm cutting across the grain all of this grain is coming out perfectly straight and I want to cut it all off with this the higher the angle the harder it is because the higher the angle the more your iron is just trying to catch it and push it out of the way whereas the lower you can make your angle the more chance you're actually going to cut through all those fibers and so a low angle plane is fantastic I have seen some planes like these they actually will lower the Frog down to like 28 degrees and so if you have a 25 degree iron on here you're actually cutting it 28 degrees was it just an extremely low angle and you can keep the chip breaker but that means you have to have a whole new frog in here whereas with one of these with a 25 degree blade you'll be making a 37 degree cut when the 37 degrees is lower than the 45 so this is going to be easier to push through in grain so if you're doing things like end grain cutting boards these are fantastic they're great to have them banned and in all honesty is the reason that Stanley made the original bevel up blowing jacks were for doing end grain cutting boards they are fantastic for resurfacing cutting boards and they really really shine at that whereas you're going to have more problems with this so where does that leave us which one is better well to be honest they both have their ups and downs you're never going to have one plane that can do it all you really need to have some that are better at other things and others that are better too so those few little things you want to use so which one should you if you are first getting into hand tools and you have the money to spend you might want to get a bevel up plane they're simpler to use there's less to set up they're kind of foolproof and they push easier and so that makes them a lot more friendly to someone who is new to hand tools if you really want to get into hand tools though and you want to learn a lot more of the intricacies the bevel down plane may be the way to go they're a lot harder to set up there's a lot more ins and outs and really an art to learn but once you learn it and master it they become a pleasure to use now if you're going to be doing a lot of ingrained cutting boards you're going to want to bevel up plane they're just fun your low angle can be very useful unless you end up getting a make ultra low angle frog which case you might be doing some things with that but then the chatter might get into the in green so if I'm doing in Grain it's the bevel up for me but for most things for me it's the bevel down so I like a traditional plane I like the learning to set things up I like fiddling with it and making exactly what I want and I do a lot with figure woods very very little of any of my wood is straight grained huh almost every board I have is just knots and twists and the grain goes everywhere and this just cannot handle that it runs into issues even with the 50-degree blade in there and a really tight mouth I'm still getting Terra and that just that doesn't fit for me whereas when I set this up extra smooth and just the way I want it I never get tear out with it I mean I can do the worst grain and still get a butter smooth surface and that's where this can shine so which one's better no they're not one's better than the other they just have different uses for different purposes so you got to ask yourself what are you going to use the plane for what do you want to learn and that might tell you which one is better for you so I hope you like this video I know it's a lot of information and I know that there are a lot of things that I left out and I could have added to this if you have questions please let me know in the comments below I'd love to answer them directly feel free to email me and contact me I would love to answer that I do have a lot of personal belief between the two and I love both they both have great uses but each one has a slightly different use in a slightly for need if you did like this video please hit like and think about subscribing I do want to say an incredible thank you to the patrons on patreon you guys are phenomenal and are actually one of the reasons why I've done this so thank you for that and keep up the great ideas if you did like this video you might find you like one of these others and until next time have a wonderful day

Channel: Wood By Wright

Views: 62,845

Rating: 4.9374623 out of 5

Keywords: Hand plane, handplane, plane (product category), woodworking, wood working, Wood By Wright, hand tool woodworking, woodwright's shop, workshop, roy underhill, blade, wood, shop, hand, tool, plane, tools, Hardwoods, Handtools, traditional woodworking, Hand tool, Hand Tools, woodshop, woodwork, hand planes, lie-nielsen, workbench, carpentry, hand tool (product line), handtool woodworking, samurai carpenter, low angle jack, low angle vs high angle plane, bevel up vs bevel down planes

Id: X65OLedIbyk

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2016