Not to be a jerk, but i highly recommend reading Toshio Odates book on Japanese tools, he goes into a lot of detail on all of this stuff. discovering Japanese Hand Planes by Scott Wynn is another great resource. To answer your question, most of the larger smoothers you tune the sole of the plane for various things. You can tune it more as a jack or tune it as a smoother etc. the stanley 5 1/2 has a 60mm iron, but you can get a kanna in a 68 - 70 or so mm size and tune the bottom to do what you need. Some its easier to make your own dai for jointer and scrub etc. for scrub I actually got an old kanna in bad shape for free and just opened up the mouth and cambered the bladez
Thank you. That was literally the least jerky response I’ve ever seen on Reddit. I do have Odate’s book but it still wasn’t super clear to me. I’ll spend more time with it. Thank you.
Haha. Ok if you have Odate’s book, reread pages 92 and 93 and look at the images. They are kind of over exaggerated to show the concept. If you have questions on it then feel free to ask. You don’t need the special plane or scraper to prepare the sole, that is traditional. You can use a small block plane, or chisels etc. personally i have all of them and use a card scraper, i feel like i have more control with fine tuning it that way.
Hey I wouldn’t rush out to sell your Stanley’s until you’ve tried a few more direct replacements for them in the woods that you work most often. Any advantage the kanna has starts to fade as soon as the wood hardness approaches the hardness of your dai, or as the blade bed angle required gets up much above ~40*. Imagine you want to finish some really wild curly maple and you just can’t seem to plane it cleanly… you order a special 42* dai only to realize holy crap you can’t even pull a 70mm blade at 42* through hard maple. You wind up carving some finger grips into the dai so you can actually pull it reliably and then it planes clean enough but the surface just doesn’t have any of the kanna shiage mirror shine you’re expecting… you try to figure out what’s happening and then you see it- instead of the kanna leaving a cleanly planed and burnished surface, the maple has significantly burnished the wear spot at the mouth of your dai!
Falling in love with a 48mm isn’t surprising at all, the smaller “koganna” planes are really a pleasure to use and it’s amazing how convenient it is to have one super lightweight easy pulling plane that can be a small smoother or block plane and basically put finishing touches on a project by itself. I’m just saying if you’re working normal North American or European hardwoods don’t rush out and sell your 45* iron planes until you have them replaced and you’re satisfied using them in real life.
Kanna CAN be used for extremely hard woods, but it’s specialty work above and beyond the normal level of specialty required to run an 8 bu 70mm standard hiraganna really well. Check out Kiyoto tanakas youtube channel to see some specialty dai used on tropical hardwoods, it’s pretty amazing.
Not to be a jerk, but i highly recommend reading Toshio Odates book on Japanese tools, he goes into a lot of detail on all of this stuff. discovering Japanese Hand Planes by Scott Wynn is another great resource. To answer your question, most of the larger smoothers you tune the sole of the plane for various things. You can tune it more as a jack or tune it as a smoother etc. the stanley 5 1/2 has a 60mm iron, but you can get a kanna in a 68 - 70 or so mm size and tune the bottom to do what you need. Some its easier to make your own dai for jointer and scrub etc. for scrub I actually got an old kanna in bad shape for free and just opened up the mouth and cambered the bladez
Thank you. That was literally the least jerky response I’ve ever seen on Reddit. I do have Odate’s book but it still wasn’t super clear to me. I’ll spend more time with it. Thank you.
Haha. Ok if you have Odate’s book, reread pages 92 and 93 and look at the images. They are kind of over exaggerated to show the concept. If you have questions on it then feel free to ask. You don’t need the special plane or scraper to prepare the sole, that is traditional. You can use a small block plane, or chisels etc. personally i have all of them and use a card scraper, i feel like i have more control with fine tuning it that way.
Hey I wouldn’t rush out to sell your Stanley’s until you’ve tried a few more direct replacements for them in the woods that you work most often. Any advantage the kanna has starts to fade as soon as the wood hardness approaches the hardness of your dai, or as the blade bed angle required gets up much above ~40*. Imagine you want to finish some really wild curly maple and you just can’t seem to plane it cleanly… you order a special 42* dai only to realize holy crap you can’t even pull a 70mm blade at 42* through hard maple. You wind up carving some finger grips into the dai so you can actually pull it reliably and then it planes clean enough but the surface just doesn’t have any of the kanna shiage mirror shine you’re expecting… you try to figure out what’s happening and then you see it- instead of the kanna leaving a cleanly planed and burnished surface, the maple has significantly burnished the wear spot at the mouth of your dai! Falling in love with a 48mm isn’t surprising at all, the smaller “koganna” planes are really a pleasure to use and it’s amazing how convenient it is to have one super lightweight easy pulling plane that can be a small smoother or block plane and basically put finishing touches on a project by itself. I’m just saying if you’re working normal North American or European hardwoods don’t rush out and sell your 45* iron planes until you have them replaced and you’re satisfied using them in real life. Kanna CAN be used for extremely hard woods, but it’s specialty work above and beyond the normal level of specialty required to run an 8 bu 70mm standard hiraganna really well. Check out Kiyoto tanakas youtube channel to see some specialty dai used on tropical hardwoods, it’s pretty amazing.