Will a premium plane really cut "out of the box"?

a couple of weeks ago i got a very interesting email from a viewer named russell he writes to me and says rex i just dropped 350 on a lee nielsen number four smoothing plane in bronze with the higher angle 50 degree frog and it will not cut and i thought that does not make a lot of sense lee nielsen planes are renowned for coming ready to go right out of the box they're an extremely high quality company they pride themselves on quality control you're supposed to be able to pull the plane out of the box put it on wood and go and i've used lee nielsen planes and i think they're really great so this was kind of surprising but i thought maybe he doesn't have planes before well we had a lot of email exchanges back and forth and it turns out that you know russell's done some woodworking he owns a low angle jack plane that he has no problems with he knows how to sharpen he can shave hair off his arm with blades so it's not a sharpening issue so i said okay what exactly are the problems with this plane and he wrote back and he says that he cannot refine the shavings to be thin and wispy like he's seen even low quality planes produce that the plane is leaving ugly scratches in the wood that he never has with his low angle plane says the adjuster feels very stiff the lever cap is very difficult to use he's just having problems with it all over the place and here's a guy who's got a plane and knows how to sharpen so it's not like he's completely new at this and finally he says to me listen this is what i want to do i want to send you the plane i would like you to diagnose it and set it up on camera and let's see what's going on and i thought that would make a really good video so russell pack that thing up very carefully and send it to me and i have to give him credit because when i told him to pack it carefully he really really took me seriously [Applause] okay so we're gonna do this video vlog style no scripting and very minimal editing we're gonna do everything live on camera and then later on we'll just cut out the boring parts so it might end up being kind of a short video but let's get this box open and see what's going on i have not checked this plane out yet so it's going to be a surprise to me as much as it is to you here's the actual package wow there's two boxes who double boxed it russell nice job man ladies and gentlemen the ark of the covenant all right let's have a look here okay here's the plane and so this is a bedrock pattern number four smoothing plane very similar to the bedrock i just reviewed a couple weeks ago i did an in-depth comparison between a bedrock and a generic bailey pattern stanley so here's the bedrock the lee nielsen is made in the same way but it's hardly the same tool this thing is made out of solid bronze with a higher angle frog and just really amazing crisp machining all over the place some of the touches on this are really wow this this is amazing so right here the lateral that's just a disc on the stanley's there's actually a bearing there that is a moving part and then just this little nib on the back of the lateral here that's actually tapped and there's a pair of machine screws in there that holds that on the stanley just has a little part that's press fit on there so the attention to detail on this is really it's very impressive here's the iron and chip breaker they are really really thick i'm a little skeptical personally about whether super thick irons and chip breakers do anything but the guys at lee nielsen they know what they're doing it's really good so you can see here the chip breaker has a machined surface instead of just being a bent piece of sheet metal like it is in a stanley the fit between the two of them is extremely precise it's very impressive the quality of the edge is good even the screw that holds it on is really great it has a chamfer around the top it's very nice so just to see just to kind of diagnose what's going on one thing i can see right away is that the chip breaker which is also called the cap iron is set too far back i've got probably a second of an inch between the edge of the blade and the edge of the chip breaker at that distance it's really not doing anything so that could explain a lot of the tear out problems we're having let me get this plane assembled and we'll see how it performs so right off the jump russell said he was having trouble with the lever cap this part right here he said it felt very stiff to him now the way these are supposed to work hold on pull this one off here the actual fit between this cam lever here and the lever cap is supposed to be quite loose all the tension is provided by a flat sheet metal spring underneath and that allows these to snap shut and pop open really easily there shouldn't be a lot of friction between the main body and the lever now here i see what we might have is possibly a small manufacturing defect the fit is extremely tight i don't think this spring is actually doing too much because there's so much friction in here but that could also be a really easy fix let's just go with a little bit of my trusty three-in-one oil try to work it back and forth a bit get some in there so i can see that the walls of the mechanism are well coated with oil and it's made only a very small difference oh yeah there's no question i've got oil in there but it's not doing much so i think there's a small small manufacturing problem here but i would call this a trivial detail i would not be upset with lee nielsen for it um this thing is made of bronze which means these parts are going to wear in and this is going to loosen up naturally on its own we've already talked about the iron and chip breaker i don't see any problems there i do see a good edge it looks to me like russell knows exactly how to sharpen we'll check that out in more detail in a second let's look at the plane itself there are no obvious problems with it the frog appears to be set correctly everything is straight and clean and square so let's assemble the tool [Music] okay iron goes in like that and let's retract it up into the body it fits really well and then we'll drop in the [Music] left cap boy that is that is a problem okay so russell said he thought one of the problems that he was having was just setting it up he hasn't had a bevel down plane with a chip breaker before and he probably doesn't fully understand how to set it up he knows this um i know just from reading on the internet that lee nielsen ships their planes with this screw here tightened down quite a bit to keep everything together in shipping now i see two marks in here somebody's been in here with a screwdriver so russell probably backed it off maybe he didn't back it off enough let me get a screwdriver and let me back off this screw now in case now you see how the lever cap is just sliding right into place in case you don't have one of these you don't understand there's a cam here that provides tension that's what this lever is for but the amount of tension that it applies is determined by this screw so the tighter you put this the more tension you get from this cam now the way this slides on and off that's probably about right slides off a little too easily now i'm gonna tighten it down that's still a lot there we go okay that's pretty good okay the lateral adjustment lever moves pretty well let's make another little adjustment here it's often very helpful now this surface the surface of the frog here is very well prepared but a little bit of oil on there never hurt anyone tends to make lateral adjustments that much smoother there we go the the iron and the chip breaker looks so much alike i got confused and put it in upside down i'm so used to stanley's there we go that's much better wait let's take this to a piece of wood and see how it performs now i was all set to plane a piece of wood but before i can even get to that i see what part of the problem is the mouth of this plane is set very wide now lee nielsen might do this from the factory i don't know but let's just compare it to my vintage bedrock you can see that mouth is quite small and this mouth over here is so big by comparison it's huge um that's something that you can just change the setting of so we're gonna do that for sure let's do a little test planning first just to see what experience russell was having right now i'm not taking any shaving and i think one thing some people don't understand about bevel down planes is the adjuster is right here where your finger is so you can put it on the wood start moving it back and forth and then slowly advance that adjuster until you're getting a shaving so no trouble here advancing that cutter very very slowly until it just starts to cut that's a great way to take a very thin shaving now i'm not adjusted laterally yet so let's and i the the the controls do perform they're a bit stiff the lever cap there is there are problems here let's see yeah so i'm getting good shavings here these are fine but i'm experienced with planes i've been using them for a long time and i own a lot of them let's try the board on the flat side so these are these are really good shavings i don't i don't see any problem with these at all um they're wispy just like we like they fade away to nothing at the edges so there's clearly a bit of camber on that iron so that's good and if we look at our board surface that's a quality finish so i'm gonna say that there are some problems with the way the plane is set up but i'm gonna say another problem might be russell is not familiar with bevel down planes and he might have been trying to take too heavy a cut a lot of people don't know to put the plane on the wood start planing and then slowly advance it until it just begins cutting that's really an essential part of using this style of plane let's see what we can do to tune this thing up and make it work better so russell did a fine job sharpening this but i like to sharpen everything that i have just so that i know i'm starting at ground zero this iron is so thick i usually just use the irons that come in my stanley plains and this thing's like triple that thickness it's really something so this is the sharpening rig that i made for my woodwork for human series a couple weeks ago costs about 50 bucks and it'll let us sharpen this i don't even need to know which steel this is made out of because this rig will handle most steels i actually come in contact with another quick note here i see the back of the iron might not be perfectly flat i think they're lapped at the factory and it looks like russell did some additional lapping to it i'm gonna go ahead and work the back of that iron on my fine stone make sure it's really well polished and then i'll sharpen there's a much more consistent flat right all the way up to the edge so i know that's good to go now we'll work the bevel okay that is a perfectly sharp iron hair shaving sharp now i know that's not going to be the source of our problems now that i know that my iron is perfectly flat across the back and well honed across the bevel the next thing to do is to make sure the chip breaker is perfectly fitted now folks at lee nielsen did a great job with this chip breaker this is the newer machined design instead of the bent metal design that you see on the old stanleys veritas does this too it's an excellent design they've just taken a big piece of metal they've machined a knife edge across it here and then there's a lip with relief underneath it so it makes contact along this very narrow strip right here and then there's a little bit of space so i have my iron here the chip breaker with the chip breaker screw drops in to that keyhole right there then you rotate it back and over like this that keeps the edge of the chip breaker well away from that edge that i just sharpened up this would be a terrible time to mess up that edge now what i'm going to do is sneak that chip breaker so close to the edge how close you ask as close as i can get it is the answer it's like a slip of heavy paper like that distance less than a 64th of an inch and then snug it up by hand so it won't move bring it this screwdriver is too small i need to stop using it it's always important to size your screwdriver to the work it keeps from stripping things out nice big screwdriver for a nice big screw now i don't know if you can see it on camera but here's the chip breaker side and the iron is just poking up over the chip breaker and what i would typically do is hold this up to the light i have very bright filming lights on me right now and i would look through this gap in the side and make sure there's no light coming through in between the iron and the chip breaker the fit between these two parts must be perfect otherwise shavings are gonna get up in there and jam the plane and keep it from working it looks good but i gotta point out one i think shortcoming with this design everybody likes this machined chip breaker i like it too and on the old stanleys the chip breaker is literally a bent piece of mild steel that's just been rolled over into this hump shape right here it's very easy to say oh well that machine design that's obviously better well probably it's better but it's worth pointing out that this design does work stanley made them like this for like over a century and never felt the desire to change it so it's obviously effective the other thing about it is this rounded humped design on the chip breaker it actually lets me see inside there so when i take this one and hold it up to the light to check for light gap in between there it's really easy to tell there's nothing these two fit so closely together that i can't i can't really see what's happening inside the machining is so good in general i'm just gonna have to sort of trust them so now we're gonna do our final setup i'm going to put the iron chip breaker the cutter assembly in there then i'm gonna get my lever cap which is still very stiff the oil is soaked in and it's it's not doing much of anything so we'll put that cap on there and tighten it down nice positive action there now what we're gonna do is worry about that mouth that thing is open like a barn door and that is not helping but here's where the bedrock design is very handy i'm gonna loosen well hopefully let's go with a bigger screwdriver here i'm gonna loosen the pins that hold the frog in place there we go they were very tight which is fine and then i'm going to advance the frog here i'll try to do this up on camera so you can see there can you see now the mouth is much finer still not fine enough it's tough to get this in view while i'm doing it i'm doing my best here okay still not fine enough that can still be advanced further that is about right there now there's one small shortcoming to the bedrock design which is that the uh the bed of the frog is angled so when you move the frog forward it also advances the blade it's a tiny thing it's not a big deal but it's worth keeping in mind anytime you change the position of the frog on these bedrocks you also change how much iron is sticking out so now i've closed up the mouth but the iron is sticking out much too far i'm going to retract it back in the body where i can't feel anything just these few little things i've done should be enough to get this plane functioning perfectly it was good to begin with so it should work now let's get it on some wood and see what happens okay same piece of walnut face grain i have the plane not cutting at all it needs a little bit of lubrication on the sole i cannot find my oil can right now so we're just gonna put a little bit of three in one right on there no this will not interfere with finishes or cause any problems down the line oil is fine i'm gonna start planing not getting anything so i'll begin advancing that cutter there it is wow okay first first shaving that's really nice let's keep going wow yep those are really great i think i can actually back that iron off a little bit this shaving is so fine it's falling apart in my hand i can literally see through it this is a transparent shaving i think on camera you can even see the back of my arm through it so that's i think that's the best you could ask for [Music] of course shavings don't matter it's the surface that matters that's excellent now at this point i just wanted to test this plane out as much as possible on as many different species as i could so i just pointed the camera at the bench and started pulling scraps out of my wood pile i started off with a lot of just native north american species because these are what i work with 99 of the time this is a piece of cherry and you would expect any plane to do well with cherry i'm getting fantastic shavings they're very wide they're the full width of the blade the surface of the finish is excellent really good quality so there's nothing else to find out there now i switch to red oak this is a wood i use a ton of we have a lot of it in cleveland same thing very good shavings very clean surface everything's smooth and level let's make things a little bit more challenging i'm going to move on to white oak which is a bit denser and harder it's still usually not difficult to plane and this piece is like everything else i'm getting good shavings an excellent surface there's just not much to say when i'm using the species i use every day this plane just does exactly what you would expect it to there are no surprises here but if you have a plane that's at york pitch at 50 degrees is extra heavy has an adjustable mouth that plane should be more at home with exotic species and luckily my buddy d just gave me a bunch of scraps of exotics so i have some stuff i can try out i'm gonna start with this red heart and this was amazing it was so much fun it is a blood red color this is not the camera this is really what it looks like in real life and uh the contrast here at the end between the unplanned wood and the plain wood is like hilarious it's so bright and vibrant colored i also have here this piece of it's either purple heart or ipe i think it's ipe it's tough to plane you can see me pushing a little bit here it's incredibly dense wood and then there are some milling marks on it in the back and with a smoothing plane with a fine set you're not going to take out milling marks they're too heavy so i'll concentrate on the flat part of the wood here but it's fine i get a really good surface the last thing i'm going to use i'm pretty sure this is lace wood i'm really not super familiar with exotic woods but it has a very heavy figure lots of reversing grain lots of opportunities to tear out and here i feel the very precise slicing action of the lee nielsen plane it is cutting through and the plane doesn't care whether it's going with the grain or against the grain i get a very high quality surface no matter what now all of that is very nice but as long as i have the plane in the shop it seems like i should do some head-to-head comparisons with some similar tools the best one i have is this vintage bedrock plane that you saw earlier in the video this is the pattern that the lineals and planes are based on and i think it's worth comparing them side to side now this is not an apples to apples comparison the lee nielsen is in the bedrock pattern but it has the benefit of really updated engineering cnc machining in the manufacturing it's made of bronze which is way heavier like astoundingly heavier and it has the 50 degree york pitch frog which is going to make it behave differently still though this is the best comparison i can make with tools that are closest to being equivalent and it's worth pointing out prices i bought my bedrock pattern plane from a tool dealer it was 150 shipped the lee nielsen is 350 shipped so we're talking about a big difference in price and i want to see how that stacks up in performance so i think i'm going to get started with this piece of cherry that's a good test piece because it planes easily and i'll begin with the lee nielsen which is outstanding let's move on to the bedrock quick adjustment of the lateral this i would say the two planes perform similarly but the lee nielsen is the clear winner and the surface that it produces and in the ease of use try some of these exotic woods here's the red heart again we'll begin with lee nielsen that is a heavy shaving let's back that off there we are very very fine shavings here this one is like it's literally like a ribbon it's excellent let's bring in the bedrock wow i mean i have to give the bedrock credit there is there is nothing the matter with that especially right here at the beginning of the stroke that is that's perfect let's do a little more yep yeah excellent performance out of that i think the most challenging piece of wood i could throw at it is this lace wood this stuff appears to have just crazy grain and it's a real opportunity for tear out this long skinny piece is awkward again the lee nielsen is excellent and produces a good surface this is where i expect the bedrock to not be as good [Music] it's very very difficult to see if there's a difference honestly the two planes perform pretty similarly i don't i don't have a strong preference on this lace wood now one thing the premium planes like the lee nielsen are really renowned for is their ability to cut against the grain this is an area where you're most likely to have tear out in normal planning so i've taken a piece of oak here and it has this rising grain right here at the end let me get a good shot of that now that is that's just a tear out factory right there that is guaranteed to be a problem for almost any tool so let's start with the nielsen i'm planing directly into opposing grain helps if you have the vice tight enough so you can see right here where the grain is reversing here's a good shot there's there's no trouble there i don't have any tear out this is still i have a tiny bit of tear out i don't have enough to worry about i would still use this in a piece of furniture now let's do the same thing same place with the bedrock so again going against the grain in an area where i should have lots of trouble i'm just not so the planes are definitely similar in the way they perform they're not they're not exactly the same but in the actual results of the planing that i'm doing i'm not getting a huge difference so russell you can rest easy you bought a good tool and there is nothing the matter with it i made a few very small tweaks to the setup of this and now it works flawlessly i think you can expect decades of perfect performance out of this plan but you know there's kind of a subtext to making a video like this which is that a lot of the people watching it are wondering should i buy this plane is it a good investment the answer is it's complicated because this thing costs a lot of money 350 is a lot of money for a hand tool it's a lot of money to me but the reason that it costs so much money is because lee nielsen has just created an incredible achievement in engineering and manufacturing here this plane is unbelievably well thought out the tolerances are incredibly tight i'm stunned by how good it is i really just think it's an amazing tool but that doesn't answer the question of whether or not you should buy one now this tool the way it is with the bronze body and the high angle frog i would consider this to be a specialty tool it's particularly good for somebody who works with exotic woods that tear out a lot like the mahogany and red heart and lace wood that i used in this video the features of this plane are going to help deal with those tricky grains for me as somebody who works with regular old north american hardwoods the extra features of this plane are a liability not a benefit because the extra weight and the high angle frog make this thing more tiring to use and more difficult to push and for the woods that i use they wouldn't give me a noticeable difference in output so my regular old bedrock or bailey pattern planes would work just as well on oak and ash and cherry i would be spending the money to not really get anything that you could see in the quality of my work and there's the question about premium planes in general should you get a premium plan well i think for a lot of people these planes as great as they are they might be more perfect than you need if i'm just being honest and i always try to be i am an okay woodworker i'm not great i'm always getting better i think i really will be good one day but today as i'm sitting here i'm all right i'm not working at the kind of level where i need the stradivarius of hand plans i don't need something incredible a run-of-the-mill good plane like a vintage stanley that's the level that i'm working at could very well be that 10 or 15 years down the road when my skills are much higher i might look at something like this and say well look i need this now i have left these tools behind my skills justify something like this and that might be a really reasonable thing to say another thing though is premium plane companies kind of make promise when they market their tools they promise you a tool that you can use out of the box you can take it out and put it on wood and it will plain they they even sharpen it for you and i think that's a hundred percent honest claim they mean it and they're doing everything they can to deliver that result but you'll notice that it didn't work out in this case my viewer russell bought this plane and he's you know he's done some woodwork and he owns at least one other plane he's no dummy but the plane did not work for him out of the box and he actually got so frustrated with it he sent the plane to some doofus on the internet to fix for him so it's really worth pointing out that you might get your plane and be able to use it out of the box and you might not it's possible let me tell you a really quick story as i'm wrapping up here when i first started woodworking over a decade ago my father gave me this little guy right here this is a sergeant number three size and it is my first plane i still have it i'll probably always have it even though i don't use it and my dad is very handy but he's mostly a mechanic so he couldn't show me the finer points of using a plane like this and it was not in great shape it had to be restored it had to be sharpened all of that and i'll be honest it was a huge struggle for me i spent about a year fiddling with this plane on and off this was before there was a lot of maker content on youtube so you couldn't just go on the internet and find everything you needed to know about tools and so it took me a long time to learn how to sharpen it learn how to set it up right learn how to get even even to know what the right kind of shaving was but it's interesting that what i've got out of that process was an unbelievable understanding of hand planes in general i own over 100 planes i've fixed up and restored more than that and i can tell you with complete honesty there's nothing that can go wrong with one of these that i can't diagnose and fix now maybe the casting is broken and i'm not set up to braise cast iron in this job but aside from that i can fix literally any issue with the plane i can even make some of the parts if i need to there's only one thing that got me that education was being forced to slowly restore and fine-tune an old plane and learn every single thing about it because it just didn't work until i did i think a lot of premium plane companies what they're trying to do is they're telling you well look if you spend enough money you can buy your way out of that struggle the problem is the struggle is built in to our craft woodwork used to have an apprenticeship system you would go usually at the age of 15 and learn the craft in someone's shop and obviously we don't have that anymore most of us are self-taught i am mostly self-taught especially in the beginning and that's just gonna be a struggle you are going to fight with tools and sharpening and learning what you need and wood grain and joinery and picking glue and design there's no getting around it and i don't think you can buy your way out of it i don't think even something like this is gonna let you buy your way out of that struggle you just have to go through it i'm still going through it right now so i think that premium planes are a great option for some people but i think for a lot of other people even if you had to pay 100 or 150 for something like this and still fix it up well people talk like oh that's just a distraction from the woodwork i don't think so i think that is the woodwork i think that fixing up your tools and understanding every last detail about them i think that is the craft and i personally wouldn't trade that experience for anything i also wouldn't trade the people who helped make these videos possible which is my way of transitioning to talking about my patrons on patreon they are the only reason i get to make these videos because they provide the direct financial support that makes this stuff possible if you enjoy content like this go on over to patreon.comkrueger and check out the rewards and benefits that i have for the people who make it possible for me to do this work and i'll be back next week with more woodworking madness something completely different i hope you'll join me thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 374,356

Rating: 4.8991008 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, handtool woodworking, hand planes, hand plane, hand tool woodworking, woodworking tools, woodworking planes for sale, block plane, woodworking planes for beginners, woodworking planes explained, hand plane shootout, woodworking plans, plane, smoothing plane, woodworking projects, woodworking videos, hand plane collection, hand plane setup, hand tools woodworking, handtools, wood plane, woodworking for mere mortals

Id: pnV27QVLmzA

Length: 36min 57sec (2217 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020