In most of my planes I actually find that the cap iron is a bit of a hindrance and that's
because in most of my planes it's not actually doing anything other than adding an extra
process to the sharpening. You see with a, with a wooden plane like this where it's just
got the single iron, it's got no cap iron, a cap iron's also known as a chip breaker,
just to keep the terminology similar there but this is just a single iron plane, it can
also be called a double iron plane, you know it's a back iron, that's another name for
it. Nut yea, that's a single iron plane, just the wedge and then the stock. So to sharpen
that all I have to do is clunk it on the back of the bench the iron and the wedge come out,
I can rub it about a bit on the stone and put it back together, it's moments of time
to get that going. It's like a chisel, sharpening a chisel there's nothing easier. Something
like this, this here has the double iron, the cap iron, I have to take it to bits, I
have to rummage in my pocket for a copper to unscrew the cap iron and then, then I do
my sharpening I've got to set it all up I'm trying not to nick the iron, it's a pain in
the arse, that's why they annoy me, and if I could have it my way I would have all of
my roughing to medium planes with just a single iron because it's quicker it's easier. Now
not everybody is always going to agree with what I say, I'm well aware of the infinite
ways and different approaches that pretty much every job in woodworking seems to have,
but any advice that I give, whether it's in these videos, or our blog, it comes from my
experience of what puts food on my table I suppose. It's from my training what I was
shown and that's really what I do it for, I like to do my blog and these videos to just
pass on a little bit of what I know and hope that it can help others. So what I'm showing
here is not the be all and end all, you may have your own approach, stand by it stick
to it if it works, don't change if you're happy. But with that said I want to move on
to the positive of the cap iron, it really to me makes a smoothing plane, particularly
a cheap plane, it turns a cheap plane like this in to a super smoother. You don't need
to worry about high angles, we don't have to worry about tight mouths we can see how
open that mouth is, very open. Bloody hell for smoothing I should be shot for having
a mouth that wide, but still you'll see in a minute. So I've got this plane, this is
just a number three, and I've got this other Stanley I think that's a four. Both of these
planes work tremendously well they're both set up the same, they've both got flat soles
I use them both daily, they're lovely planes. I have set both of them up with one little
difference, and that is that I've set the cap iron marginally further back on this number
four. On this plane, on the number three I've got it set to how I'd want it if I looked
at a piece of wood and thought oh no, that's gonna be a sod. That's how I would set it.
And I wanted to just show the difference on what a cap iron can make, and well you'll
see for yourself. I'm not going in to bloody high angled tight mouthed bloody super smoothers
here this is just on the cap iron. So I've got this bit now I just dug this out the firewood
pile, it's not the worst piece of wood in the world I know but I know full well if I
touched this with a normal plane set up normally it's gonna tear. We can see there's a great
big knot there, there's a tremendous amount of reversing grain there, and it's kiln dried
ash, and kiln dried ash is a pain in the arse at the best of times. It is approaching us
as well back here. So we'll plane them with both and see what happens, to be honest I
know what's going to happen because I've already tested it with this plane and it works a treat,
you'll see. We'll wax it up, now remember this is the one with the cap iron set with
a bit more time. So you can hear the difference when we approach that nasty stuff. So it sounds
horrible but wait until you see it. Now I'm looking at that as close as I bloody can and
there is not a speck of tear, and this is where I just, I always say it I know I wish
I could somehow make the cameras see what I'm seeing because you just can't get it,
but I'll get a close up later. I'll do it again and get a nice close up but you can
see hopefully there is nothing there, no tear. You can see all the barker and lighter colours
as you're going against the grain. I mean some of that that darker stuff is because
we're almost on end grain, that's how hard it's coming up at us. Get rid of that bugger.
Now this has been sharpened to the same standard like I say the only difference is that cap
iron is set back just a smidge more. So far so good, just let it level out. Sometimes
with a plane you've got to take a few shavings just to get it beyond the previous plane,
oh yea, did you hear that? ohh, that's going to plague me. Ohh. It doesn't matter even
though you plan to do this it still hurts, we've even tore up here, I wasn't expecting
it actually to tear that far up, that is terrible, oh it's chipped completely out there. That,
when that happens it's bugging because you've really got to lower that area to remove it,
I bet you can't see it. There it's terrible, you can see it's actually chipped a chunk
off, you can hear that, that's the step it's created. So, I mean that kind of says it to
me. I bet we can get that out with this. You can see with that shaving how it's gone over
the tear, can you see and it's made it all straggly that's because it couldn't take a
full shaving because there was a load, there was nothing to take. Lets just get this down.
I've almost removed that nasty bit. Back gone again, see back up here it's fine, got rid
of all of that. So I'll show you now even I mean this is bloody risky, if you know much
about planing don't skew the plane on something coarse like that. You watch, so we're able
to gain ease of planning with not a single bit of tear out. You can do anything you like,
a kid could plane this. If I did that with this I mean it'd be hell to pay, but that
shows what the cap iron can do, it just doesn't care about the opening of that mouth. So what
on earth is that simple piece of steel doing? And that's all it is really it's just that
little bit of metal that sits un top of the iron. And what I was taught it was, what I
was shown when you do the Dad, Dad, what's this do? Is it, it's basically creasing the
shaving it is bending it and through that bending, obviously you think of, well think
of me finger if you bent it the wrong way, you'd compress the top of it wouldn't you
the bottom would stretch, the top would compress, it. Well I've got a good example here, we'll
pick a suitable one, I'd say that one. Lets say that's a fibre of wood, that's, it's just
one fibre running through the board, and as usual it normally looks like that you never
get one that's nice and straight do you? So lets bring our plane iron through, our plane
blade through, and for the sake of it lets just say we've got a relatively open mouth,
just to make it a but easier to explain. So my mouth is where my finger is, the iron's
going to come along, it's going to be cutting, cutting so nice. As it cuts is going to obviously
inevitably getting under a piece of grain or it's going to cut in to that piece of grain.
And you can see as it pulls, you know as we feed it's putting pressure it's bending and
I can feel the force in this finger it want's to break it, and if I keep pushing it it breaks.
So what we've done is we've ripped out that fibre and everything stuck to it and everything
above it and that's just going to be planed in to the shaving and we've left and awful
little divot we're going to have to repair. What the cap iron does is it adds this really
high angle to the mix and if that is, you've truly got to be a gnat's nadger back off the
cutting edge. You literally just want light to reflect on it. That's why it's useless
on anything for coarse cutting, anything with a camber on it because you're not going to
be able to get it close to the cutting edge. You've got to have, you know just such a microscopic
amount of camber in your smoothing plane and then it works tremendously well, get it right
up close. And it adds this edge and what it, this high angle and what it's basically doing
is it's bending the shaving right over itself and in to itself. I mean it's not breaking
like that, this is because it's a bloody twig. But it's, it's basically folding it , it's
putting tiny folds on it. It's taking all the integrity, the strength out of that fibre,
therefore it can't lift because it's being crumpled as it goes, so it can't lift and
break it out. And that's what it's doing, and that' why it's irrelevant to the mouth
opening because it doesn't need that. A very tight mouth can eradicate tear out, but the
trouble is with a tight mouth is it's a super hot wear spot and every time you shaving's
feeding through it's rounding that mouth over, and in a matter of a few shavings and you
already start moving it back out again, it's a hard upkeep a tight mouth. Now I'm gonna
wait for some questions to come in on this and we may do a detailed blog post on this
to try and detail it a bit more, maybe with some nice drawings. But we have got a video
coming out very soon, we're gonna try and push it out as fast as we can, and I'm gonna
take you through the steps of getting a new iron and a cap iron, basically it's just out
of a Stanley plane. Helen's got herself a little number and I'm going to tune that up
for her or show her how to do it And I want to show you the work and how I work a cap
iron and how I make it work basically, we're going to go through every step. So if you
subscribe as they say and if you wait for that I'll..... yeah that'll do. So I'm just
taking another few strokes just to try and get some clearer footage of that tear, so
I hope you can see it a bit better. And again, I'm just going to clean that back up now with
that number 3 with the cap iron set right. Now I'm going to be a complete wazzock and
set that depth right in, I want a nice deep cut here and you see nothing still happens,
even though the plane is fighting me, it just doesn't have the camber in it to take this
sort of depth of cut, see still no tear. An one more just to be a complete an utter idiot,
we'll use that same depth and now we'll skew the plane, and again no tear, you can make
it tear out it just won't. And I think that, with that knowledge, if you can take that
and apply it you can say goodbye to scrapers I never scrape, the planes are always the
last thing to touch my work.