Welcome back! If you’re still with us after reading part 1, you are a most curious soul. I mean, how could you not be to withstand so much of my boring writing in the name of woodworking?!

So now the sole of the plane is flat.  I would have to say that 80 percent of your grunt work here is done…..but there are a few other crucial things left to accomplish.  If the bottom of our plane is flat, we need to ensure that the rest of that translates all the way up to the plane iron, because what have we really accomplished if we stop here?  Flattening and truing the Frog isn’t JUST to make it parallel to the sole, it also ensures we have a mating surface for the blade to rest on the whole time the plane is in operation.  When this surface is not flat, we get that ever so annoying movement named “chatter”.  As the plane iron skims across the wood substrate, it will unseat itself and bounce around on the surface of the frog, causing an inconsistent cut.

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Tonight I was watching videos of different lathe operations, thinking of when I would finally get to use my lathe. I happened upon two terms I had not heard in a long time: Curie point [temperature], and Austinizing. Not the usual drivel you find on Youtube, I know, but onward we go…..

Quickly, Curie point is the temperature at which magnetic material loses it’s magnetic properties.

Austenizing is merely a process where the metal is heated to a solid solution and cooled rapidly in either oil, water (or air, as it were). This makes the steel hard, but brittle. To overcome the brittle properties of the metal, it is then usually tempered at a very controlled (hot) temperature for a controlled time to make it a little more ductile (bendable, less likely to fracture). Usually, I just hear “heat treated“.

Anyway, the actual usage of the two terms was because of confusion between them. One commenter was using the terms interchangeably. This is often the case, because a lot of steel alloys have a very close Curie point and Austenite transformation. In some cases, this is not so. M2 tool grade steel, for instance, (the stuff they make wrenches out of) is one such example.

Not really a big to do about anything, but it brought up some interesting subjects that I used to know a lot more about (as you can see, I barely regurgitated the definitions), and must put on my to do list to relearn.

Good stuff!