09 February 2011

Relegation

A small and relatively heavy parcel awaited my inspection when I got in from work last night. With a little eager anticipation but trying to be fairly cool about it at the same time (a somewhat difficult balancing act) I ripped off the wrapping to find nestled within a couple of O1 carbon steel plane blades.

These form the first part of an ongoing process to replace most of my A2 blades, where feasable. The two blades in question are going into my LV BU smoother together with the BU jack planes and I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were lapped on the back so that the dreaded 'back flattening' of yore will be somewhat relegated...

I ordered these two initially with an ground angle of 25deg and intend to hone them at 30deg, which will give and effective pitch (the angle that the wood sees) of 42deg (12deg being the bed angle on each plane)

I only need to order another for the LV try plane which will then mean that all my Veritas blades are O1 steel, so the original A2 offerings supplied with the planes will be kept for those nasty, abrasive timbers like teak that I'm prone to use occaisionaly.

So far, the plan is going well, but the hitch that I can see at the moment is that there's no O1 blade currently available for the LN block...bugger!

2 comments:

R Francis said...

Ray Iles

Olly Parry-Jones said...

Hi Rob,

Box is coming along really well. I must say, I prefer this to Robert Ingham's version, simply because you've got a really nice bit of burr on the sides and you're using larger 'squares' that show the full character and grain continuity much better.

For Ray Iles' O1 blades, you can buy these through Workshop Heaven. Matthew stocks several so, there's bound to be one that'll fit the L-N block plane:

http://tinyurl.com/6jbughl

Failing that, Matt also stocks the Quangsheng irons, which are made from T10 steel... I think he's often said that T10 is more comparable to O1, rather than A2.

You bought a rebating block plane the other week, didn't you? You probably know the answer yourself. ;-)

http://tinyurl.com/63qrvgb

Olly.