Thread: Old Marples Wooden Jointer Plane

I haven't had any real experience with wooden planes before, and I never really trusted that they would be as nice as the modern metal planes. However, I found this old W Marples and Sons plane in my father in law's workshop. He uses it once a year at Christmas as a prop in a carpenter's stall in Bethlehem. He tried to set it up to actually be useful this year, but couldn't get it working nicely. The blade was blunt and quite rusted up. I offered to set it up for him. Several hours work later, with rust converter, wet-dry sandpaper, WD-40, steel wool, water stones, and paste wax, the end result came up quite nicely. I actually feel a little guilty, because the nice shiny wood may not look so authentic in Bethlehem anymore. I deliberately didn't clean up the wood - just a little paste wax to help protect the dried out wood - but it shined it up so much.

Anyway, I have set the blade to take a nice fine cut, and wow is this thing smooooooth! It glides so nicely along the wood, and is taking really fine shavings. I'm surprised that the big hefty shape is not as cumbersome as I thought it would be, and with such a long sole, it just glides.

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