Thread: freebie jointer plane tuneup

You're running into a larger and larger surface area in contact with the paper, which cuts down its cutting efficiency. Think about how it would cut if you made the surface ten times as large. The only way you could continue at the same rate is if you increased the downforce by a factor of ten.

You're not going to be able to do that, so this is what you should do next (I have done this many times, it's not hypothetical - it'll cut the flattening time down to about 1/4th or so):
* marker the bottom of the plane.
* run the plane over your sandpaper lap and find the spots that are still high (low if the plane is upright)
* cut a block of wood about 2x3 inches and thick enough to get a grasp on
* take a small section of 80 grit paper (you may need to purchase a belt intended for a machine to get paper durable enough, and then tear it up) and use it with your block on the spots that are high (or low if the plane is upright). Put your plane upside down in the bench vise to do this
* periodically stop, marker the bottom again and run it over your sandpaper lap to make sure that you're working the right spots

A plane like yours may take many hours to finish lapping by hand, and it will end up being proud of the surface at the toe and heel. The more spot removal you do to the very end, the flatter the plane will end up, and the less work you'll do.

Filing a plane like this is also possible, but let's set that aside for now. I think you have about an hour's worth of work to get that bottom in shape if you have good strong (well adhered grit) 60 or 80 grit paper. You'll be glad that you didn't keep replacing paper on your lap and having a go at it.

thanks, so it wasn't a lost effort after all :]

I tryed something in the meenwhile.
Since i brushed off all the dust from my sanding belt while i was going along, i might not see how much the belt itself has worn off, it looks like new.
I had a piece extra, half the length so i riped it along the middle and taped into narrower stripe long enough, still somewhat wider than the plane. And it actually did the job to some point.
But i expecred for the front and back to take faster to sandpaper , but opposite might be true and this seems like it is flattening sideways while the hollow soehow expand to the front and back ?

so i kind of worked it out into a bow . not much, around a printer paper thicknessunder a 40cm/16 inch straight metal ruller length.and it check out along the whole plane length. it feels very strange because i have one poorly flaten no 4 that rock about this much on a flat surface but it stays perfectly "flat" on that jointer

and i know about a marker but i used red one and it hardly been visable on the photo

well i go buy new sanding belt tomorow and we'll see
thaks for the reply before i ruined everything :P

Even if you made the plane a little banana shaped, a user who has some experience can use a plane with a hundredth of an inch of banana with no problems at all. If it's the other way around (with the toe and heel touching wood but not the mouth), the plane will be endless frustration.

spot removal will be both faster and more accurate. Once you've got the spot work done to your spec, then a couple of minutes of lapping the whole bottom and all will look nice. If the very last part before and after the mouth is still high (like a quarter inch, etc), I'd just leave it alone. It would be fine as it is on long work, but with the hollow in the center, it will frustrate you a little on the ends of boards and on shorter work, so it's better to take care of it.

you should be able to get the whole thing flat to within a couple of thousandths with this method. You can do finer with filing, but there's no real point unless you're going to take the plane to a contest to see who can take the thinnest shaving (I have gotten infill planes flat to less than 1 1/2 thousandths with files - but I wouldn't bother for a stanley plane. It's not necessary on an infill, either, just a challenge to see if I could do it).

so, to be on the same page
right now my plane is touching on both ends, not a banana, but i chased the hollow down to less than a printer paper thickness and basically it only exist behind the mouth, 1/4 of an inch or so behind
it looks like i got to factory grinding level there but still not to the bottom.(and my marker seems to sink inside the metal there) i say hollow, because i look on the sole,with plane upside down. that hollow,rough area is about 1 inch wide and 5 inch long now.
other than this, the only thing that isn't flat are the mouth edges , they start to roll inside the plane about 1/10 of an inch away from the mouth opening, little bit more on the front side.
all my sanding paper is done for , so i get some more tomorow and finish it
i still feel like i want to take off more from the back than from the front, because casting might be little less than 1/16 of an inch thinner in front than it is on the very end, and the hollow i am trying to catch is also behind the mouth

Should i care about sides squarness to the sole? I dont think i will be using that monster in any shooting boards, if anything i have jack no6 for that

Originally Posted by kokodin

so, to be on the same page
right now my plane is touching on both ends, not a banana, but i chased the hollow down to less than a printer paper thickness and basically it only exist behind the mouth, 1/4 of an inch or so behind
it looks like i got to factory grinding level there but still not to the bottom.(and my marker seems to sink inside the metal there) i say hollow, because i look on the sole,with plane upside down. that hollow,rough area is about 1 inch wide and 5 inch long now.
other than this, the only thing that isn't flat are the mouth edges , they start to roll inside the plane about 1/10 of an inch away from the mouth opening, little bit more on the front side.
all my sanding paper is done for , so i get some more tomorow and finish it
i still feel like i want to take off more from the back than from the front, because casting might be little less than 1/16 of an inch thinner in front than it is on the very end, and the hollow i am trying to catch is also behind the mouth

Should i care about sides squarness to the sole? I dont think i will be using that monster in any shooting boards, if anything i have jack no6 for that

I wouldn't worry about the squareness.

Sounds like you've made good progress. I'd disregard the squareness of the side unless you want to shoot with the plane. If you decide later that you want to, and it's not square (probably never was), then you'll want to file the side of the plane into squareness. You can use a plane that's not square, but if the error is too large, it becomes a pain to fiddle with lateral adjustment. That said, before squaring anything, I'd find the applicable shooting board you'd use, shoot the end of something and check the result. What looks like a problem in checking the plane may be only a subtle small amount on a shot end.

well i basically already have a sure square one, but it is that soviet russian bailey knokof i restored in march.
the only difference is basically the length 15 vs 21 inches and i know that the shorter one is sturdier , thicker casting, and it is square on both side already. I bought that one in rough casting form so it was fun to dimension it myself, little bit more pain to fit the frog.

Rough casting probably equates to a rough go! Especially if you're working without machine tools - sounds like a sweaty job, but the separate frog design allows for a lot of inaccuracy in parts and still a good plane in the end. It's by far the most genius of plane designs in terms of putting a good working plane in the hands of woodworkers and making it so that it doesn't take perfection in production to do it.

If your chinese plane ends up straight and the bits and pieces are decent, it should be as good as any other bailey type plane when you're done. If the casting moves a little more over time, you'll know how to fix it. The knock-off planes I've used have been a bit coarse in some parts, and sometimes something like the cap iron doesn't get a good tight grip, but it's all fixable. No plane that I've bought has had an iron softer than a 1970s stanley plane, but even those are good planes aside from the gross irons (and they may have been purposely soft so that site carpenters would be able to sharpen them easily - nobody else would've bought a bailey plane at that time, anyway - and planing pine 2x4s wouldn't have been a problem with a soft iron - I tend to think those types of changes are intentional to chase a market, even though they're not considered the mark of poor quality control. When they're all the same, it's not a quality control issue)

I have to assume some of the stanley castings have moved over time, too, as I've had a couple of jointers from the 1930s and 40s that got a significant amount of twist in the sole, or a low toe and low heel (significantly, like over a hundredth) without much wear on the soles. I don't think you could manufacture them that inaccurately, but a factory cutting corners could make castings with significant tension in them.

by rough casting i ment that russian plane had only the frog fitted and other than this and cutting open the mouth no other machining was done to it. it may or may not fly over belt sander at some point, it was very hard to tell
it was painted inside with an ugly blue paint with a lot of spots with poor coverage, dumped into some kind of light brown grease and wraped in a plastic bag
But cast iron on that thing was soft so it wasn't much work to level it down and then flatten. it was fun actually, mostly because i only removed the high spots, it was fairly straight to begin with

with my chinese plane it would be another story
Out of the box it had one corner twisted down or the other one grinded too much. Cast iron is not hard but also not the softest, but blade is probably one of the hardest i have.
i went trough a couple of meters of sanding belt yesterday and i was focussing mostly on the back, because as i said casting is thicker there, i rather have consistant thickness than thinned down front , and it is already thin for my taste 5 mm at the front reinforcment and 7 at the back (sorry for the metric but i am a metric guy and i don't really know how to convert it to fraction of imperial system)
so i sanded it down some more to the point my arms start to fall off :] and it seems like i got almost everything flat to my metal ruler with some scratches-like pitting behind the mouth in the initial hollow area and those mouth edges roling up inwards.
When i checked it with finer sandpaper and marker i found out, it now fully contact on front, and under back handle. I made an picture of that. In contact areas marker disapear first , i marked them green on my picture ,red things are the hollow spots and on the bottom i have drawn exadurated profile the actual diviation might be somewhere in the ball park of 0,1mm, 0,3 for deep factory grinding scratches and mouth rolling up
i did try your suggestion with the sanding block, but i was too tired at that point to make a difference

that being said it does not plane very well right now so i probably should do some more work on it or just adjust the frog to close the mouth. well i never had such a big plane in my hands so i don't know how it should feel. russian one is heavy for its size and go down to buisness pretty quick, but it is also considerably shorter and already flat

kokodin; lightly file a 45 degree chamfer to the outside edges of the sole (include the toe and heel of the sole) and see if that makes a substantial change the current abrade pattern your seeing from flattening the sole.

regards Stewie.

Originally Posted by kokodin

by rough casting i ment that russian plane had only the frog fitted and other than this and cutting open the mouth no other machining was done to it. it may or may not fly over belt sander at some point, it was very hard to tell
it was painted inside with an ugly blue paint with a lot of spots with poor coverage, dumped into some kind of light brown grease and wraped in a plastic bag
But cast iron on that thing was soft so it wasn't much work to level it down and then flatten. it was fun actually, mostly because i only removed the high spots, it was fairly straight to begin with

with my chinese plane it would be another story
Out of the box it had one corner twisted down or the other one grinded too much. Cast iron is not hard but also not the softest, but blade is probably one of the hardest i have.
i went trough a couple of meters of sanding belt yesterday and i was focussing mostly on the back, because as i said casting is thicker there, i rather have consistant thickness than thinned down front , and it is already thin for my taste 5 mm at the front reinforcment and 7 at the back (sorry for the metric but i am a metric guy and i don't really know how to convert it to fraction of imperial system)
so i sanded it down some more to the point my arms start to fall off :] and it seems like i got almost everything flat to my metal ruler with some scratches-like pitting behind the mouth in the initial hollow area and those mouth edges roling up inwards.
When i checked it with finer sandpaper and marker i found out, it now fully contact on front, and under back handle. I made an picture of that. In contact areas marker disapear first , i marked them green on my picture ,red things are the hollow spots and on the bottom i have drawn exadurated profile the actual diviation might be somewhere in the ball park of 0,1mm, 0,3 for deep factory grinding scratches and mouth rolling up
i did try your suggestion with the sanding block, but i was too tired at that point to make a difference

that being said it does not plane very well right now so i probably should do some more work on it or just adjust the frog to close the mouth. well i never had such a big plane in my hands so i don't know how it should feel. russian one is heavy for its size and go down to buisness pretty quick, but it is also considerably shorter and already flat

You should be able to ignore flattening with that plane at this point and diagnose what else may be causing problems.
* check the handle post and make sure that it's tight by taking the front screw out of the rear handle and seeing if you can move the handle at all. It should still remain tight. Sometimes there is space due to the handle shrinking and you can't feel it because the front screw makes it feel as though the handle is still tight. It springs up from the sole when you're using the plane, and it's impossible to get a decent cut that way, even though you can't feel why.
* Check the frog and make sure everything is tight with no movement (other than the adjuster). Make sure that there is contact at all three points on the frog.
* Set the cap iron somewhere around 0.2mm from the edge of the iron
* assemble the plane and make sure everything is tight (lever cap, etc). Not absurdly tight, but firm
* try to plane various thicknesses from almost nothing to 0.1mm or so

It should work well like that - no need to narrow the mouth by advancing the frog. that's likely to cause more problems than it solves, and the planes weren't meant to be used like that, anyway - the frog is made separately first as a manufacturing concession (cheaper to make the plane that way) and the ability to close the mouth is only a byproduct. If they (stanley) were serious about closing the mouth down really tightly, they would've machined the top side of the mouth casting in front like norris did on the infill planes - falling away from the plane bed at an angle of about 20 degrees (which allows you to have a closed mouth and still not have clogging with a cap iron set close).

well i gave up on flattening more yesterday. I might scrub it dow some more under the handle later if it still do wierd stuff, or just leave it.
The thing that bothers me is the casting thickness, because even though i didn't remove much material from the mouth area , it is surprisingly thin down there in places, so i would like to get some ball park measurements from a working plane with similar casting design, i marked them with color arrows on 2nd picture, basically i have bailey styled bed, with 4 pads and this wierdly shaped bridge in between. i would like to know how high over the ground are those points i marked, front casting thicknes, back casting thickness, thickness under the front landing pads and on those landing pads.
if that makes any sense
Basically my casting was machined while it was altready twisted in foundry to some degree and if i knew it before i would replace this plane without doing any work on it, but now it might be too late. The front part , and the frog area are the thinnest parts , and i rather avoid any more sanding around there
but what i would like to know is how high should i put my frog, because left side is lower than the right and i either have to shimm the frog or level the pads to the lower in regards to the sole.

since i freshly moved my stuff to my new workshop and all my planes i collected over last 2 years were mostly non-tested before
so I decided to test my soviet union jack. And the subject of tortures was the workbeanch top you see on the photos.
it took me some time to figure out how i would like to adjist the mouth and stuff, but in the end at least the russian one works
it did not care much for how figured and random my construction 2x2 top really is, and the difference between trying to flatten the table with stanley sb3 knockof and this russian monster is visable from a first glimpse. and we get ot the agreement with the plane that i will use it as a smoother, or semi jointer with mouth closed to 1,5mm. moving frog forward really helped with the tearouts on knoty pine the table is made of, i hope i could set up my jointer like this or at least close to it but right now frog does not even sit patalell to the sole

I see what you're saying about controlling tearout by closing the mouth, but I urge you to learn to set the cap iron close to do it instead. Set the cap iron about twice as far away as your expected shaving thickness. If you're taking 0.1 mm, set the cap iron 0.2mm away from the edge and then take the thickest shaving you can until the plane becomes too hard to push.

You'll find that the cap iron is many times more effective than closing the mouth, and the action of the plane over the knots and through reversing grain will be much smoother, allowing you to do better work once you move to finer work.

The plane itself will be much more stable in the cut and capable even with a thin iron of the heaviest work you can physically do.

Setting a Cap Iron

oh i now see what people mean by setting it "colser to the edge" with my soviet jack i am at about 1,8 -2,4mm, and i didn't see the problem with that, it oryginaly came with 4 mm setback on the blade anyway, i will try that.

But that would not solve my jointer alone, because it has been machined by a very pooly set machines, plus casting itself wasn't straight. even though frog is square and flat, it sits on an angle to one of the sides. The angle is so great that i am almost unable to put it straight with lateral adjuster. i need to either shim up one of the sides by 0,5mm or file down the other sidelanding pad, or frog, but i would rather first know how thick are oryginal castings , beause i might be already past that thickness and the whole front might be too thin to last abuse. my soviet jack have almost the same weight and it is almost 2/3 of the no7 size, well the only bailey plane i have to compare it to is one old rusted no4 with craks around the mouth,(bailey, made in usa no 4 with casting number 457 under the handle) i bought it for parts way back. this bailey is around 3mm thick on casting all around, my no7 might be thinner than that in thinnest place under the frog already. So i am afraid to work on it any further before i decide what is the best.