Читать книгу Sew-It-Yourself Home Accessories - Scott Wynn - Страница 10

Woodworkers throughout the world had for millennia worked with the same somewhat narrow selection of indigenous woods, often a single species, or no more than two or three, within a trade. They knew how the wood reacted, which tools and their setup worked best for those species, and they had a good selection of material and better control of their sources. New Worlds, new prosperity, greater travel and print exposure, brought a higher level of sophistication to their customers, which brought a demand for new designs and a higher degree of finish in the work. Additionally, new and imported woods often brought new challenges to providing this higher degree of finish than the indigenous woods they had worked with for centuries. The use of a chipbreaker helped solve some of these problems. It made planing these new woods more reliable, so the work went faster and with better results (see Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-2. If you look closely at this blade in the area of the chipbreaker screw, you can see the semicircular edges of the impressions left by the forging hammer.

CHIPBREAKER VARIATIONS

British and American chipbreakers have a slight difference (which has no effect on performance): British chipbreakers often have a “nut” of which there are a number of variations, that is proud of the top surface of the chipbreaker into which the screw is threaded; with an American chipbreaker the screw flushes out with top surface of the chipbreaker. This sometimes results in very little thread for that screw, depending of the thickness of the chipbreaker, but I haven’t had one strip out yet. (More about chipbreakers in Chapter 3 here.)

The chipbreaker is almost always screwed to the blade, unlike Japanese planes and some Chinese planes. I say almost always because I have a French smoother (smoothing plane) by Goldenberg that has a chipbreaker that is not screwed to the blade, but is adjusted independent of it. This is the only time I have ever seen this in a Western plane. This setup does increase the versatility of the plane because it makes it easier to adjust the chipbreaker up and down without having to disassemble the plane to unscrew the chipbreaker from the blade.