u/excited_to_be_here

EDIT: SOLVED (tldr, loose chipbreaker). For posterity, the issue was not with the angle of the bevel at all, or the sharpening of the iron. I was not tightening the new chipbreaker screw enough and the chipbreaker was sliding down past the iron in use. I'm not sure how I missed this in use aside from the fact that I didn't have my glasses on. I actually noticed this when I was troubleshooting but I thought that I had just done something careless while setting up the blade and, after "fixing" it, I tried a few different frog angles, etc before trying again and apparently the same thing happened. After really cranking down on the screw I was able to set the plane up and take some nice shavings. Thanks for looking.

SECOND EDIT: Thanks for all of the feedback about my laziness on the chip-breaker positioning. I will do more to try different positions. I typically use my planes just for milling and not finishing so I've neglected things like this while struggling to get things flat. To that point I now have a #4 that I don't use very much.

Hello all,

I have an old Stanley Victor #5 which was my first plane and while it works great I was curious about new irons so I thought I'd give it a try. It seems like almost all of the ones that are sold nowadays are thicker than the oem irons (thought I'm probably not looking everywhere I could). I wasn't sure how well that would work with the Victor so I went for a cheap option: one of the Jorgensen O1 steel irons on Amazon.

I set up the iron as best as I could: flattened it, sharpened it on the primary bevel and then until I had a good burr, stropped it, etc (i didn't put a secondary bevel on it). I did the paper tearing test and had good results, cut the tip of my finger accidentally, all the usual stuff. BUT, I cannot get the iron to cut in the plane at all... even on the western red cedar I'm building a table from. I did move the frog all the way back to clear space in the mouth and have my chipbreaker about 2mm back from the edge of the iron.

• Does having a thicker iron cause the cutting angle of the blade to change?
• Could it be the way I sharpened it combined with the frog's angle is causing only the bevel to touch the wood rather than the tip of the blade?

edit: forgot to mentioned that I needed to get a longer chipbreaker screw to make the iron attach to the chipbreaker. I did do that in order to get this setup working.

Hello,

I recently purchased a used Record 778 combination plane off of eBay. I've used it a few times, for along grain rabbets and a few times to lightly trim wood to fit into a dado.

Recently I need to make a pretty deep cross-grain rabbet so I tried using the 778 with the knicker engaged for the first time. I must be doing something wrong because the knicker is so long it's lifting the whole plane off of the surface and the cut becomes really inconsistent depth-wise. I thought it might be the knicker itself so I swapped it for an aftermarket one I got on woodyah but had the same result. Should I be letting out the blade more when using the knicker? This seems like it would make it very unstable.

OR

Should I just not be using the 778 for cross-grain rabbets? I thought I read that it could do them. This is an outside planter project using red cedar so I don't think it's an issue with wood hardness. I understand that cedar will tear out pretty easily and I don't mind that too much since it's not a fine piece or anything but I was really hoping I could use the 778 to create accurate rabbets.

Apologies if I got terminology wrong, I am just starting out. I know dados are typically cross-grain and grooves are with grain but I wasn't sure what the cross-grain equivalent of a rabbet was.

I ended up brute forcing these rabbets with a saw and chisel until they were low enough I could dial it in with a router plane and that seemed to work.