No, down - the bedding angle on these is about the same as the bedding angle on a bench plane, on which the bevel is down.
I find these planes uncomfortable to hold - the cutting iron jabs into my hand no matter how I hold them. I added a palm rest on mine, which helped, see picture:
Hey hey
Way to go Bill!! I love custom and this is a superb improvement in grip for these tools.
I just love it.
Bevel up, bevel down. Its an old question.
A low angle for a plane means, you use the bevel up. People want to think this helps with reversed grain and hard to plane wood. In some rare cases it does, because with the bevel up your plane body can support the blade almost all the way to the edge.
People forget though, that in bevel up, you have to add the angle of the bevel to the angle of the plane bed to get the cutting angle.
So a standard Stanley #9 1/2 bock plane, most made, most sold, most copied plane in all of history,
once you add up the two bevels, it ends up with right around a 45 degree cutting angle, same as any regular bevel down bench plane.
The true low angle block and bench planes (which failed in the marketplace for the previous 200 years, but are selling like hotcakes now) end up 8 or 10 degrees less than this.
But there is a terrible cost.
Once you machine cast iron to the long angle that makes a 12 degree bed, you now have a ridiculously fragile piece of iron. (forget about a wooden plane bed)
You dare not EVER crank the blade out very much.
Hit a knot, hit a nail, merely hit some reversing grain with the blade extended just a tiny bit,.......... snap!!
Your tool now has a big ugly snaggletooth bed.
The reason the original low angle bench planes are rare and valuable is because nearly all of them broke!
Since originals in good shape are rare and valuable, modern idiots think they must have been so much better. So they literally force all modern plane manufacturers to make them.
But luckily they are willing to pay a lot extra.
And since 99% of them are sold to pretenders who never filled a single barrel with plane shavings of any kind in their whole life put together, they are relatively safe from breakage just sitting on a shelf.
Bevel down planes, the regular kind, tried and true a million times over, go back to at least the Phoenicians, before the Egyptians, and surely before that. But that is how early we can read about it.
They say the Chinese have 8000 years of language before that, but the translation is lacking.
I would bet 100 to 1 money they were using bevel down planes though.
If you find you can't get a regular bevel down plane to work?
The fault is your own.
Go back and figure out where you went wrong.
Sell the fiddly fragile bevel up planes to the other guy.
For a lot of money.
yours Scott
