#schropphobel

I finished fixing up my すてドイツかんな (o^-^o)

I feel happy that I adopted it :) The blade didn’t have too much rust and it seems like it has been stored somewhere dry for the past few years :) The blade was ground on a bench grinder and the curve was not entered so I marked out the right curvature and used a rough diamond file to reshape the cutting edge :)

Also it might look like theres little life left in the blade but this is just because it is quite long :D There are about 40 mm of bald left before I reach the soft iron part ;) And yes this is a laminated blade :D I think what people often get wrong about Japanese blades is that they think others didn’t do it but they did and they were not bad at it (especially the British and French :) but they never managed to forge weld such thin pieces of hard steel to the iron backing or to tune the steel to such a high degree or to make it curve in a defined way over the sides of a chisel ;) Mainly because wood shops were mechanised much earlier than they were in Japan and because it was cheaper to make a blade from tool steel than to go through the troubles of making the perfect steel (^-^;) Also there is not that determination to perfect a skill as there is in Japan (^-^;) Anyway this is a very nice example of a well made European (German :) blade which makes me very happy (o^-^o) It is on par in sharpness with my sharpest European plane so far which is a British laminated cast steel blade from sheffield :) Japanese baldes stay sharper for a longer time though and are a ver tiny bit sharper :) <=That is unless you hit any rough particles because in this case the Japanese planes edge will feel insulted and repay you by chipping its edge more than the European or American blade will (^-^;) Which is why I use European/American planes for rough and intermediate work because I won’t feel as bad for nicking chipping the blade as I will if that would happen to any of my Japanese planes (^-^;)

Anyway I didn’t need to do much to the blade and the body considering I got it from a take it away or we’ll throw it away pile :D All I did to the body was glue the horn back on (using hide glue :) and flatten the sole :) The blade was made by the company that later on became two cherries or Kirschen in German :)  I feel happy they are still around but the chip carving knife I got from them is quite bad at being a knife (^-^;) I mean it is okay to use but it doesn’t hold an edge (at least not to my standards which were formed by using Opinel knifes and Japanese carving knifes (^-^;)

I never felt the need to have a scrub plane (since it is a Deutscher Hobel I will call it by its proper name Schropphobel :D but now that I got one I had to think of a lot of situations in the past where it would have been a big help on getting things done :D Also I had the idea to use it to give surfaces a wavy texture :3

As you can see the horn is asymmetrical :) This is one of those details I like about German planes even though I never really use them :D I just think they are like an elephants trunk :D They look like an elephant spraying water on their back ヽ(=^･ω･^=)丿 I find them kind of silly because they are too small for my hands so I need to wear a glove to not tire out my left hand (^-^;) Also the high handle makes it kind of wobbly and not so nice to fine tune pieces but since this is a Schropphobel (scrub plane :) it doesn’t really matter anyway :D <=I don’t like using German smoothers (Putzhobel) on edges though :| I would prefer a coffin smoother or one of my transitional planes if I had to use a western style plane do smooth an edge or surface :)

Sorry for writing so many incoherent thoughts down but I’m feeling very happy I gave this plane a chance and that it rewarded me with so much (o^-^o) It is over 100 years old so I like to think that a tool spirit (like the tree spirits in Mononoke Hime :) is smiling at me now :)

I’m still applying Urushi coats to my Chashaku :) I think they could be done next weekend but this depends on whether or not I can manage to apply a coat of Urushi per day (^-^;)  I really like Urushi so far even though it is a mean finish :D Basically it enhances everything so if you have a spot left that you didn’t prepare like you did the surrounding surfaces the difference between it and the other parts of the workpiece will get amplified with each coat and gloves will leave traces on the surface :| I learned this the hard way...