When sharpening, here’s the best method I know of to see what’s going on with the tool. It’s a jeweler’s loupe, with a built-in LED. These are ridiculously inexpensive. If you go to eBay, and do a search for “20x led loupe”, a ton of search results will come up. Today (6 May 2024), I found one for $7.99, shipped to my door. There’s often chatter about woodworkers looking at their edges with a magnifying glass, as if it was a bad thing, a sign of OCD, or a waste of time. I think it’s the most direct way of seeing what happens to your edge as you sharpen, and a faster way of seeing if you have ..read more

There’s one other aspect of sharpening that is in play here. Besides getting the edge to a zero-radius, the surfaces that come to that zero-radius should be as smooth as possible. The good thing here is that any woodworker should be comfortable with that idea for tools, because any woodworker understands using sandpaper to smooth a wood surface by going up through the grits. The same principle applies with sharpening. At this point, I’m going to stay away from the actual method of sharpening (waterstones, diamond plates, oilstones, Scary Sharp, etc.) because the principles are the same. So for ..read more

As we noted before, sharpening the plane blade is the first step in setting up a Japanese plane, as sharpening changes the geometry of the blade, which in turn affects the fit of the blade in the plane. Sharpening gets a bad rap among woodworkers. It’s often thought of as a task that is not a great use of time. “I want to do woodworking, not sharpening,” is a common saying adopted by woodworkers. I think that’s a mistaken concept. Sharpening is woodworking. It makes your tool easier and safer to use. With a sharp tool, you’ll use less effort and have more control over the results you’re trying ..read more

The weirdness you’ve been seeing on the desktop version of Giant Cypress is me mucking around with a new theme. With the new post format that Tumblr implemented, new posts have sometimes been displaying in unexpected ways. In addition, the old theme had become less well-behaved on mobile devices. So I thought it was time to redesign the blog. The new theme has all the things that the old one did. I’ve carried over many of the elements of the old theme, which I think is nice. It’s a more responsive theme, with an improved look on a wider array of different screen sizes. I think it scans better ..read more

Here’s a short video of how I use the plane tapping out tool. Hopefully this will give a better sense of how hard I’m hitting the blade with the hammer part of the tool. This corresponds to about how hard I hit the blade with a hammer if I’m tapping out that way. if it looks like the tapping out tool is placed at an awkward angle, it is. This was so I could get a good camera angle. Normally it would be sitting directly in front of me on the bench. At 27 seconds long, this video is worth 810,000 words ..read more

[Note: this step should not be needed with a new Japanese plane, but you never know. And It is an important part of sharpening and maintenance as you use your plane.] Now that the plane blade is in better shape, we can turn to sharpening. The first thing to check with sharpening a Japanese plane blade is the hollow on the back. The back of the blade is where the hard steel layer is. When sharpening, if we were to work the entire back, that would be a real chore because of the hardness of the steel. The hollow is there to make this much easier, as only the flat part behind the cutting edge nee ..read more

cosmonautroger: Godzilla, Columbo ..read more

Back in 2010 I put together a series of posts on how to set up a Japanese plane. I’ve been told that these posts were good, but there are aspects of Japanese plane set up that I didn’t cover back then, and other aspects that have changed a bit over time. I figured if Taylor Swift can rerecord her catalog, I could revisit Japanese plane set up. This time, I’m starting with a used plane instead of a new one. The set up process will be the same with the exception of one step that may or may not be needed for a used plane. I’ll be sure to point that out when we get there. Here’s our plane. I found ..read more

One of the things that resulted from the COVID pandemic was that I wound up teaching the OCIA course for our church (long story). The students got their sacraments at the Easter Vigil Mass, and I decided to make crucifixes for them as a gift. This should be a pretty straightforward project — mill out pieces of wood for the upright and crosspiece portions of the cross, cut a lap joint, glue, finish, and attach the corpus and INRI plaque. But it is a truism in woodworking that the smaller projects are the hardest to do, because you see every detail. And for this crucifix, there was a detail that ..read more

Happy Easter from the King of the Monsters and Giant Cypress ..read more