Low Angle Vs High Angle The Best Plane For You

hey y'all I'm James right and welcome back to the shop a while ago I did a video about using a chisel bevel up or bevel down and I started a bunch of arguments of that which I really enjoy so today I thought I'd take that one step farther and do a video about bevel up versus bevel down hand planes now there are a whole bunch of arguments that will start with this but I hope to dispel some of those because I'm actually going to show them and use today and explain some of the differences between them so let's dive in and take a look at this one so first let's talk a little bit about history where did these come from and where did the idea of a bevel up and bevel down plane come from now throughout most of history almost all planes have been beveled down that's with a higher angle bed angle and so most of them are about 45 degrees seems about right and this is the way it was for hundreds of years now people did make bevel up low angle planes for one reason or another but 99.9% of all planes were beveled down high angle planes and so when metal body planes started coming around with the Bailee and others they kept with that same bevel down high angle plane it's what people are used to it was the understanding and it was the plane that pretty much every person had and that's why pretty much all the hand planes are beveled down high angle planes that's just what people had well then stanley introduced as the stanley number 62 which is a bevel up low angle plane and the angle of the plane rather than being at 45 degrees is dropped all the way down to about 12 degrees and that allows the plane iron itself to be more in line with the cutting which cuts down on vibration and makes it a little bit smoother and so this really seems like a a step up but one of the interesting things is when they came out with the 62 it was advertised for cleaning up butcher blocks and butcher blocks mostly have n reins sticking up and their largest surfaces was in green and one of the downsides with that is if you have a bevel down high angle plane as it goes across all that ingrain sticking up it's going to eventually want to chatter if it's not really sharp and really well set up the blade will want to wiggle across the work and that makes them a little bit less functional whereas with a low angle LevelUp plane the blade isn't going to wiggle across the work because it is at such a low angle it's going to slice through the work ooh that's kind of cool so these were intended for butcher blocks or other ingrained applications now they did make other planes that were low angle bevel up a lot of the block planes are low angle bevel up a lot of these shooting port planes the weird ones that are shaped odd and has a handle on the side and they look weird a lot of those have a bevel up low angle plane and that's because when you're working on a shooting board you're awesome doing a lot of end grain work so fast-forward through the years and hand tools tend to disappear and power tools become the dominant way of doing things and contrary to popular belief I really don't have a problem with that I have spent more time with power tools than I have with hand tools but over the last 10 to 15 years we've seen people trying to slow down and enjoy the sport a little bit more and that's where the hand tools have started to come back in to vote but because of that people were coming out of this power tool mindset we talked about that earlier with the bevel up versus bevel down it makes far more sense to keep the bevel up keeps the iron low and slice the fibers whereas if you turn it bevel down you go at a weird angle it just feels weird to push the chisel through the works this way and that's one of the big differences between the power tool mindset and the hand tool mindset or I think I wish I changed that to the hybrid mindset because there really isn't a hand tool word worker anymore everyone has a bit of power tool in their background now and so because of that the power tool woodworkers coming into the hand tool world really liked the low angle bevel up plane and these started to take off with more people wanting them the problem was Stanley only made a few number 62s they weren't at that common elite especially in comparison to all of the other bevel down high angle planes there weren't a lot of these and the price went from 50 60 bucks apiece up to 200 300 and now I've seen some of these going for up to four hundred dollars for the antique number 62 low angle planes and there been several other companies that have made it this is the new Stanley sweetheart which is the one that I use it's actually a rather nice plane and for the money you can't beat that all that to be said there is a lot of history that goes into this and there is a lot of person choice that comes back and forth but now I actually want to take a look at the plans themselves and see what are the specific differences between them and what can we learn from that so first let's look at the traditional high angle bevel down plane let me take this out the first big difference is that there's a chip breaker on here it's a piece of steel on the back and this does two things number one it thickens the steel and and supports it but number two it actually breaks the curl as it comes up it hits the chip breaker and wants to curl up and crush into itself this compresses the fibres ahead of the cut and in doing so it can really help you with tear out and going through difficult brains so you have a chip breaker on one of these planes number two you have a frog this is the bed that the iron sits on and one of the nice things about that is you can move the Frog backward and forward to change the orientation and change the size of the cut you can also change the angle of the Frog by getting a different frog but having a separate frog makes the bed adjustable there are a bunch of other things that are slightly different with the levers and depth adjuster and that type of thing but for the most part from that point on they're kind of the same they both have a cutting edge and they slice through the work so then we come over here to the low angle plane now in the low angle plane we don't have a chip breaker we just have an iron and the reason we don't have a chip breaker is that the bevel is on top so you can't actually have a chip breaker that comes up over the bevel and then will create that breaking edge right there also because of this the bed is so low that the bed is integrated into the plane it's all one unit so most the time what happens is that with the low angles you actually have an adjustable mouth so you can open and close the mouth as opposed to moving on frog backward and forward some of the newer high angle bevel down planes actually also have that adjustable mouth like this Veritas custom plane which is one of my favorite planes but one of the really nice things about a low angle bevel up plane is that there is no chip breaker and everything goes together much easier there aren't a lot of adjustments on here it's just a simple thing you drop in the blade you adjust its depth in its angle and it's all done with this one little lever back here doing the norsu gesture that it goes really quickly there's there's less to figure out on this then there isn't one of these so this brings us back to the age-old question of should I make something that is more complicated but is more adjustable confine a ball or should I make something as simple or easier to set up has less problems but it's a little bit more locked in to what it does and in all honesty that's really a personal question because that kind of comes down to all the other things do you prefer Apple or do you prefer Windows there there are a lot of things along that line that you happen in life that you have to kind of decide do you want something more customizable or do you want something a little bit more reliable one of the other things you can do with a low-angle plane is you can quickly change out the iron so in this right now I have a 25-degree iron so 25 plus the 12 degree this has a 27 and 1/2 degree angle of cut or I could put in a 50 degree iron in here and that would be 62 so it would be the cutting angle plus the bed angle it brings me to is 62 and so we talking about what the use for that is but one of the customizable things with this is you can actually change out the iron to change the angle of attack with the traditional plane you really can't change the angle attack now you can get different frogs and switch those out and for my various customisable plane I actually have a few different frogs it takes a good bit more work you have to take a bunch of screws out you take the plane apart you switch out the Frog and you can change the angle but for most of the time you really can't change the angle on these without doing a lot of work to them where that really comes into great use is something like this where I have reversing and swirling grain there's a lot of twists in here and there's actually a little bit of curl in the white oak this is an incredibly difficult wood to work with but with this low angle bevel up plane it's leaving a good bit of tear-out on here and you can actually hear it kind of crunching is it work cuts through the wood there's just a lot of tear out being left in here and that's because the blade is actually getting underneath the fibers lifting up the fibers and the fibers are breaking ahead of the cutting action and without a chip raker on there to compress it those fibers will then break off now you can close the size of your mouth so the fibers won't lift up too far ahead but not having a chip breaker on there is really detrimental whereas if I bring in my high angle bevel up plane that has been tuned within an inch of its life I can get a really nice clean cut and you hear the difference it's kind of nice zip II sound it even through this rough rains take at it for a little bit I can take this back down with something it's nice and smooth right off of the plan and you see after a few quick passes here I've gotten rid of most all of the tear out being able to use this even with the high angle cutter in here I'm not gonna be getting as good work as I am going to be getting with this one because I can really customize this and shape it to get a glass smooth surface on even the most difficult woods but that being said let's look at one more thing where this really makes a big difference here I have white oak standing up in grain and so this is actually one of the most difficult ways to cut and so with a with a high angle plane you have basically a chisel coming through here and it's at a high angle like this and so it has more of a chance to jitter it takes a lot of setting up to make it actually work well on here whereas if I were to flip it down like this and put the chisel at an angle this way there's less chance of vibration and more chance of just slicing through all the fibers that are standing up so yes I have taken the time and I can set up this plane and I can do it but you can see it's kind of bouncing I'm still getting really nice clean cuts and I'm working at it getting these beautiful end grain shavings but if I bring over this one which I really haven't spent much of any time on I can put it on here and go and you can hear the difference I'm taking a heavier cut so I'm actually taking off a lot more material I'm getting these stronger shavings of in grain all the way across and this is really really shining and this is just doing one strip of it if I had an entire butcher block that was wide as well as long this would just completely outstrip a high angle plane and that's why for me my shooting board is actually set up to fit my low angle plane and so for this I can trim off end grain really quickly and really easily because I really want to fiddle with setting this up to do in grain it just does it really well so let's draw a few conclusions here between the low angle the high-angle plane which one is better well neither one is better they both have things that they do well at and they both have things that they don't do well at if you are a new person to hand tools and you're trying to figure them out sometimes getting a low-angle bevel up plane is really smart because there isn't a lot on this you can mess up there quick and easy to set up you can switch out the blades and you can progress on these very quickly without having to learn a lot of the skills that go into some of the more fancy hand planes but if you've been working with hand tools for a while and you're looking for that next challenge and something is a little bit more difficult working with one of these can be an incredible pleasure because once you actually get them set up and fine-tuned they feel amazing and they can do some really cool things with figured woods that you just can't do with a low angle even with a high angle iron in there it's still limited in comparison to what it can do with a traditional plane now the correct answer to the argument is you need both of them because well you can't ever have enough tools so you might as well go ahead and get both but that being said you know if you only need one or the other either of these will do all of the tasks either of these will work as a standalone plane and do all of your planing work but if you're doing a lot of specialty in one direction or the other you may be better off with one or the other and in the end it really comes down to a personal preference which one do you find do you want something that takes less set-up time and is a little bit quicker and easier but may not be as customizable well then you might want to go with a low angle bevel up plane if you want something with all the bells and whistles and ways to customize it and shape it down and make it exactly what you want then you're probably going to want a high angle bevel down plane and for some reason this topic brings up a lot of arguments in the hand tool world and I don't want it to be that way because there really is no right answer when it comes to hand tools and it doesn't matter about what topic you're talking about there is no best way to do woodworking there's just the way that works for you and find something that works for you find something that fits your style and that's why I encourage people to experiment play with different things try different methods try different tools find something it works for you because every person out there is very different every person's gonna have different things that they like every person's gonna have different things that they enjoy so don't worry about what one personality another person on YouTube is saying because you are a different person and you might find that you like something a little bit different so I hope this has answered a few questions for you and put a little bit of this debate to bed now if you've been following me for a while you probably have realized this is the third time I've covered this topic and given an entire video over to it and that's because for some reason this keeps bringing up arguments so I wanted to do a little bit more detailed video today and show some of the differences in action I hope that works for you and I hope that helps you out so if you did enjoy the video please hit like comment share subscribe ring the bell those things really do help out the channel and they help us grow and reach more people thank you for that also if you have any particular thoughts or ideas or something you think I missed let me know those down below I'd love to read that so I think that's about it for now and until next time have a wonderful day so I've got a bevel up plane and I've got a bevel down plane now I need a bevel sideways plane Oh oh wait I've got one of those it's called a side rabbet planer

Channel: Wood By Wright

Views: 15,264

Rating: 4.9920712 out of 5

Keywords: Wood By Wright, woodworking, Handtools, Hand tool, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, low angle plane, high angle plane, bevel up plane, bevel down plane, Paul Sellers, Woodworking, Bevel, Planes, Veritas, bench plane, block plane, hand tool woodworking, tools, traditional woodworking, woodworking tools, jack plane, hand tools only

Id: OciC8LRYVmo

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019