RWW 108 Bevel Up Vs Bevel Down Hand Planes

welcome to the Renaissance woodworker and welcome back into my shop so there has been an ongoing we'll just call it discussion on the internet forums on wealth print anywhere anywhere people talk about woodworking the topic of the bevel up versus the bevel down plane comes up there are many people that are diametrically opposed on this and you know staunchly for their particular model and then there are a lot of us that are kind of right smack in the middle what I have almost been a little disappointed to see has no one has really come out and given an opinion now that's probably because the real answer the truth you ready for this is that both are acceptable I know I'm straddling the fence here but I think you're going to find as with everything there are certain instances where bevel up works best in certain instances where bevel down works best so the real question is for somebody just getting into hand tools somebody who's just recently discovered the beauty of hand planing what is the best option for them to start so let's examine them the bevel up plane and I don't know this for certain but probably the first bevel up planes were the block planes the idea behind a block plane being that it tackled in grain really well and the lower your blade angle the easier you are to come in and slice away the end grain got to block planes here this is a low angle Lee Neilson block plane and a standard angle Veritas block plane the Lee Nelson block plane course has the typical 12 degree bed angle meaning that the blade comes in at 12 degrees and the cutting action is dependent upon the angle of the bevel that's on the blade so this blade is sharpened at 25 degrees 25 plus 12 equals what is that 30 37 degrees so my 37 degree is my total cutting angle that angle excels at things like in green like this piece of sappy Li you can get a nice clean cut and then ingrain shaving and beautiful beautiful polished in grain surfaces the same cut with the Veritas block plane with a higher angle is you can see not as smooth it doesn't want to cut as easily and I'm really skewing my blade because essentially when you skew the blade you are dropping that angle that cutting angle because just like the theory of switchbacks of a mountain instead of trying to go straight up the mountain if you switch back your way up it's not nearly steep a climb and that's what you end up with when you skew the blade angle skew the plane angle you get a lower cut so the block planes were really the first low angle planes and they were designed for cutting in green what is it that has inspired this growth of bevel up planes in the larger planes well the first thing is probably the ability to alter that bevel up blade angle and totally change the way of plane cuts and the perfect example for that is in the smoothing plane got a Lee Neilson number four and a Veritas bevel up smoother now my Veritas blade plane currently has again a 12 degree bed angle but the blade that's in here has a 50 degree bevel angle on it that gives me 62 degrees I can do my math now 62 degrees is an extraordinarily high angle the higher the angle the easier it is to cut without tear out if you've got particularly wavy grain crazy grain with a really really high angle it hits the wood and the wood immediately curls and begins to break that's why we call that little piece that goes in the back of the blade a chip breaker because it kind of accelerates the curvature and the breakage of that fiber as soon as the fiber breaks it can no longer kind of Telegraph down the board and lift out a chip the same principle behind having a really tight mouth on the blade means that you can press down on the wood ahead of the cut and hold down those fibers and prevent them from chipping out down the length of the board the high angle again breaks that chip much much faster so we've always known that high angle planes can do a good job of really figured in difficult grain woods and we ended up with bevel down blade planes with higher angle frogs the York pitch or the 50 degree pitch cancer blade up a little bit and the angle is now made higher and more conducive to figured in difficult grained woods and the instance of this this is a typical 45 degree bedded angle that's typical for a bevel down plane the blade itself is sharpened at 25 degrees just an arbitrary good good mix between edge strength and edge life 25 degrees is really really good but that bevel has nothing to do with the angle of attack the angle of attack is determined by the Frog itself hence that York pitch frog to make a smoother or easier cut and figured woods now easier should really be in quotes because the higher the angle on the blade a more work that's got to go into muscle this through this plane does a phenomenal job on difficult grain woods but it's a lot harder to push then this guy at the 45 degree angle let me just say in the bevel down blade defense you can do the same type of deal you can't increase your cutting angle without changing your frog angle and that's by adding a back bevel onto your blade itself that back bevel is essentially increasing the angle of cut I've messed with this a little bit and frankly I've never been a really big fan of it because it feels like such a major I mean it's it's a permanent switchover when you do this if you grind a bevel on the back of your blade the only way you're going to get a flat back of that blade again is to grow the whole thing back down so if you're going to do this get a separate blade and commit to it frankly you know I've got a bevel up plane so I've never needed to do that so I think the area where the bevel up bevel down playing debate has really been the hottest is in the the jack plane realm the low angle Jack really has been made popular because the Jack plane you know the expression jack-of-all-trades the jack plane is used kind of as a utility player and for many many different applications so you can use it to take a really really thick cut for roughing out an initial flattening or thickness thing of a board you can then dial it down to a really fine cut and use it for smoothing you can go somewhere in the middle and use it for jointing because it is a longer long ish plane especially as compared to something like a smoothing plane so with all those different operations you may run into different times where you need a different blade angle the beauty of the bevel up plane right now I have again 12 degree bed angle and I have a 38 degree bevel on my blade which makes 45 degrees in other words it's the same cutting angle as my Lea Neilson bevel down Jack plane the Frog itself is 45 degrees so these planes even though they look dramatically different provide the same cutting action for me but what's great is I can very quickly pop this blade out and I have another blade over here that's sharpened at a twenty five degree angle pop it right back into the plane and now suddenly this plane is set at 37 degrees similar to our block planes now why would I want a large plane like this setup to cut in grain it's not just in grain you will find that the lower angle sometimes it's going to be not easier to push and if you've got a very agreeable board with straight grain and the grain direction is very clearly obvious and it doesn't change on you save yourself some work and go to a lower angle for that matter soft woods also tend to like a lower angle a little bit soft where they'll cleave a little bit easier and this can save you a lot of a lot of effort and a lot of work if you are taking a much much thicker heavier cut a lot of times a lower angle can be useful too again it's easier to push but you're it may be harder to push because you're taking you know a thicker cut this can save you a lot changes this blade is not quite as easy if I were to put a back bevel on another blade and try to change it out I have to you know pop off the lever cap just like I did with the bevel up but now I have this whole other issue of this chip breaker that's attached to the blade I'm going to come in with a screwdriver loosen this up slide the chip breaker array put a new blade in tighten it up slide it back into place and go back to work now I know that doesn't sound like a whole lot of work but you know if you're switching a cut you know for a couple of passes over one board and maybe you have to switch back and forth we've all done it we've just made do with a different blade angle and not switched out because of the difficulty associated with it the other thing is the chip breaker on these bevel down planes the how close that chip breaker is to the blade really has a lot to do with how well controls tear out if the chip breaker set back real far it won't break the chip as quickly and you'd end up with more tear out on difficult woods so the setting and adjustment of this needs to be precise in order for the planing you're doing it's one more thing you have to take time to adjust bevel up planes do not have a chip breaker so you can see it makes things just a little bit easier to play with so what is this all this mean these are kind of the various elements of them let's kind of look at the pros and cons the pro the big one of the bevel up lanes is that flexibility with a bevel angle very easy to adjust even if you don't have multiple blades you can quickly come in and just add a tiny little micro bevel at a higher angle do the work you need and if necessary come back and sharpen it to that lower angle I do recommend having multiple blades and most of the manufacturers offer spare blades this is Veritas spare blade you can get it from Ron Hawk Lee Nielson sell spare blades as well so it is a good thing to have around it really makes for a utility plane if you have a bevel up jack it can really handle just about everything you tackle you throw at it the bevel up planes I think are better suited for the entry-level hand planer because there's no chip breaker on it there's fewer moving parts there's less things to adjust and less things really to screw up less things to get in the way of getting down to the work so really the bevel ups are probably going to be a lot easier as an entry-level for that matter the bevel up Veritas planes have little set screws on the side that guide where the blade goes in the hole so popping it out popping it back in is really very very easy to do because you don't have to worry about that lateral adjustment the bevel down plane however you have to come back and mess with this little adjustment lever to make sure that the blade is projecting square out of the mouth and if you're changing that blade a lot you have to tweak that adjustment every single time set screws not so much so again you're removing one more kind of flexible element from these planes making it just that much easier for the beginner and when I got started with hand planes I got started mostly with these bevel up planes and they served me very very well for probably five years or so I've discovered as I've become more as I do more and more handwork really almost exclusively hand work today I am gravitating more towards these bevel down planes now let's talk about why that is I find that having all of my blades with the bevel at the same angle make sharpening a heck of a lot easier I do most of my sharpening free hand these days and your body begins to kind of develop a feel for that angle I know that all my plane blades at least my bevel down plane blades are sharpened at 25 degrees I'll add micro bevels and things like that on to them but I start at that 25 degree angle and it really just makes things a heck of a lot easier with the bevel ups I have 38 degree blades I've got 50 degree blades I've got 25 degree blades I've actually just gone and using some permanent marker on the back and marked them just so that I can get you know I can quickly identify what they are but moving back and forth and sharpening them by hand is a little bit more difficult if you're going to use bevel up planes it's probably easier to go ahead and get a jig you know if you're good freehand sharpener doesn't really matter I don't consider myself to be an excellent freehand sharpener but I do find that sharpening these planes just are a heck of a lot easier in the long run can bring a blade that's the process of putting a curve on the blade in order to prevent those plane tracks where the corner digs in I find that with a bevel down plane the camber works a heck of a lot better you can still camber a bevel up plane but because the bevel is facing up the camera doesn't work quite as well it doesn't cut as easily or as freely as the bevel down will there's some physics behind that that I'm not sure even I understand quite correctly I just know that that's the case from experience the bevel downs will camber and cut a little bit easier so again as I do more and more handwork and find myself using a cambered blade to straighten out the edge of a board or a camber blade to finish up a surface I find myself reaching for my bevel down smoother or my bevel down Jack a lot more the bevel up planes certainly to have that that flexibility I do think that when you get started they're a little bit more comfortable you've got this very open section here it's very easy to see your blade doing the cutting it's very easy to quickly establish a feel for how it's working because it is so visible at the same time there's lots of space for your hand to move around the bevel down plane has this blade and everything in the way you quickly learn to adapt and point with your index finger and it's a lot more comfortable but I think when you're getting started out the bevel up is a little bit easier again strengthening the idea that a beginner maybe the bevel up will be easier in the long run however the bevel downs and this is why I think I've grown to like that a lot more as I've become a more experienced hand planer you can adjust these on the fly and again because I'm pointing my index finger and because of the way the blade is tensioned I can very quickly just pop my finger down here and adjust the blade in or out I've got a piece of African mahogany here African mahogany is notorious for interlocking grain and a board that that really doesn't like or respond well the hand planing so I'll come in here with my bevel up plane and I swapped the 38-degree blade back in here so both both of these planes are cutting at that 45-degree angle I can see that I'm definitely got a bow in this that's not cutting in the middle but I'm also getting a fair amount of tear-out at this point because of this interlocking grain now that could be because of my blade angle it also could be because I'm taking a relatively thick cut well in order for me to just this I can start to back it out but you always want you back a bleed out you always have to turn around and push it forward a little bit to pull up the slack I really can't do that here because this cap iron is locked it down and it won't move back and forth so I have to loosen this down come in here back the blade out scooch it forward to where I think I want it tighten the cap iron down again and then come back to work well in this instance you can see I pulled the blade out too far and now I'm not getting a cut at all so now I have to loosen the thing up inching forward the cap iron back down and do it again now I'm almost taking too light of a cut there especially because this board's not completely flat yet but you can see there's a different step there you've got a little bit of wiggle room to move this forward but if you've got this tightened down properly you really should be able to move the blade very much in the instance of this bevel down plane I can come in here and it's it's cutting but again I'm getting some tear out and I think because I've got too thick of a cut well what I can do I don't have to touch the cap iron I can just back the blade out using my index finger I'm going to go quite a ways move it forward just a little bit and now I'm not cutting but here's what I can do a little twist with my finger twist with my finger and I can keep doing that until the blade starts to grab and I can really hone in on the shaving that I want and I don't have to stop planning at all just little adjustments and I've removed my tear out by taking a lighter cut so certainly adjustability on the fly is a huge advantage of the bevel down plane the lateral adjuster that's this little lever up here and the bevel down planes at least on these Veritas models have I believe this is called a Bailey style adjuster the adjuster is actually built into the Frog and it can move it back and forth now with these Veritas planes and the set screws already set there's really very little reason to move that lateral adjuster around but there are times now that I'm a little bit more of experience planer where I want to mess with that level that lateral adjuster sometimes I want to take a heavier cut on one side of the other maybe I'm squaring out a board maybe I'm dealing with a thickness around is helpful also when I go through the exercise that just went through by slowly moving the plane forward especially if you've just sharpened and you're setting it up you can look down and you can see where the shaving is coming out and just with the tiniest little adjustment change that so you're getting center projection on it I find that for the same reason that you have to tighten this lever cap down I can't move this around without loosening up the leather the cap makes the lateral adjustment a little bit a little bit harder with tension on this I also feel I get much greater feedback from that lateral adjustment lever so I do find that while there's more of a learning curve of these planes the finer adjustment that's possible with the bevel down makes it a really really nice advantage when you have kind of overcome the initial learning curve and you kind of know what you're doing with hand now there is a debate about sharpening of bevel up and bevel down planes a lot of people will tell you that the bevel up plane has a different wear pattern and it will wear quicker than the bevel down plane for that matter the wear surface on a bevel up plane is on the back of the blade that's the part of the blade we always want to keep flat unless of course we're doing that back bevel I talked about earlier the minute the back starts to wear and it's not flat anymore it's very difficult to get a sharp edge now we are talking it does take time for this to happen but when it does happen there's a lot of flattening that needs to be done the idea behind flattening the back of a blade is you should really do it once and never have to do it again now we all know reality is a little different sometimes you drop it sometimes you put it on an unflattering you have to reflash it but really it's something that never gets done very often as I understand it and I'll say as I understand it because I have yet to really experience this in my time working with bevel up planes but I know a lot of people when working with them longer than I have that have seen that wear pattern make it harder and harder for them to get a sharp edge and essentially they're getting almost a back bevel but it's not even a bevel it's a rounding or a dubbing of the edge making it really really hard to get it sharp so that is a potential issue to think about now again in the life cycle the woodworker it is possible if you're like me as you become a little bit more advanced you may end up switching over to the bevel down plane and you avoid that all together because of the fact that we're tipped up and the cutting action is happening on the bevels and the bevels down and you're always sharpening that part when you sharpen the bevel up planes in most instances come with a much thicker blade because of the fact that there's no chip breaker and the chip breaker adds a lot of spring tension into a blade and helps hold it rigid you don't have that on the bevel up plane so you end up with a thicker blade I really like the thicker blades I find that they're a little bit easier to freehand sharpen but they also have a lot less vibration just more mask causes less vibration I in something that makes them easier for the beginning woodworker the other advantage I'll say of the bevel up plane is that ability to go to the low angle maybe there's a way I haven't figured out how it would work but you cannot drop the cutting action of a bevel down plane below 45 degrees unless you change the Frog and I don't think I know of anybody that makes a frog that's less than 45 degrees they need be having to switch out the Frog you're talking screwdrivers and multiple screws and multiple adjustments and that's just not practical while on the job the ability to swap to something lower than 45 degrees is invaluable with a lot of woods for easier cutting in grain beautiful straight grains softer woods that's one of the reasons this plane gets so much use is because of the ability to do that so there's a lot of I've brought up a lot of different pros and cons of these my pick if you probably haven't figured it out now in my life cycle as a woodworker I reach for my bevel down planes more than I do the bevel ups anymore but in those specialized instances when I need ingrain work or I'm just looking for easier plane to push because I've got beautiful straight grain wood or most importantly the highly figured stuff I reach for my bevel up smoother this thing can plane against the grain and do a really really good job now a finely-tuned bevel down smoother like this Lee Neilson will do a really really good job but it will get tear out much faster than this bevel up one it's sixty degrees so you know for me the bevel up planes now are much more of a specialty plane which is kind of ironic because one of the big things going for them is their flexibility and you know people say one plane can do the whole job because of the ability to change the blades now I find them to be much more specialty tools I can take my Jack plane and I can change angles based upon what I need specifically maybe for a few cuts on a board or I can swap on a two thing blade and I can do two thing work weather quick roughing of really highly figured stuff are majorly prepping for veneer work that flexibility makes them more of a specialty plane for my work horses that do all the work it's my bevel down planes the ability to adjust on the fly to have fine-tuned lateral adjustment far outweighs the flexibility of changing that bevel angle in my opinion and as I said if the wear pattern issue is is a problem I'm going to have a much longer light not longer life but easier sharpening from years to come I think with the bevel down planes so my choice for now for me is the bevel down plane those of you that have followed my podcast for a while that have listened to me on would talk on line might be a little shocked by that this is a realization that I've only come to in the past maybe six months as I've started to work more and more with bevel down planes I reach for them all the time now but if you're getting started you cannot beat Veritas bevel up planes the set screws the ease of adjustability the ability to change the blade angle like that it just makes the barrier to entry solo so if you're looking to get into it looking for that one playing bevel up Jack you really can't beat it you'll find yourself wanting more plane soon enough so I hope that kind of demystifies some of this bevel up bevel down stuff let me know if you have questions please put a comment in the blog let me know if your own experience - bevel up and bevel down and if I didn't address something ask away sing me an email drop me a comment find me on Twitter at Renaissance WW I'm happy to help you

Channel: RenaissanceWW

Views: 29,244

Rating: 4.9233227 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, hand tools, hand planes

Id: TnrOtbnUaVg

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2013