Thread: Planes back to bare cast and chromed cap iron

They look fine to me Bodge!
You should see mine at the moment. Look like chinese scrap metal yard..
Make something with them. That'll motivate you.
Cheers

Bodgy,
Eclectic. Thats the word for the collection, and the doubters and knockers be damn'ed!

Heres a question for you: Is there a great deal of difference between the surface finish on the unpolished parts of the castings between the different makers? I.e. does the Stanley have a finer grained finish?

Bodgy, they all look a lot better that mine and so long as they work well....
Who Cares???

BTW. The No 4 I just got had the entire plane spray painted black and it seems like the real cheap paint too. Going to take me a while to clean that one up.

PLANE !!! I Love it!!!

Bodgy,

They look fine to me, mate!!

Thanks all for your positive comments. I like matched sets and continuity and was hoping to achieve this with the planes. Unfortunately they've gone from licquorice allsorts to (thanks Clint) an eclectic range. Still they all work fine.

Clint, I checked out the surface of the raw cast on the body top surface but can discern no difference in the texture, differences shades, from sorta bronze, thru grey to dull silver, but all same surface.

Excepting this #2 delow. This is noticeably rougher and you can see some marks where the cast mould was detached.

WB

The plane below was also fairly rough and painted onm the cheeks. It took me half an hour to achieve the below. 20 minutes with paint stripper on cheeks, wire brush off, wash, dry. 2 minutes on bench linisher. The 90 degree angle between sole and cheeks was so sharp I actually got a small cut from it. (I lap all my planes soles when first purchased).

This plane, whilst of real cheapo construction, ie pressed steel frog, coke bottle cap adjusting screw etc, is surprisingly nice to use. The iron is fine and holds an edge and the cast body is heavy and true, although a little rough finish. The only marking it shows is a stamped 'made in USA' immediately forward of the tote. Nothing else. It appears to be relatively old, I'd guess 1950/60's.

CAN ANYONE IDENTIFY?????

[quote=Shedhand]They look fine to me Bodge!
You should see mine at the moment. Look like chinese scrap metal yard..

Lived and worked in China for a few years, there's no such thing as a Chinese scrap metal yard! Some are called hardware stores, some are local government equipment depots ... but none are scrap metal yards!
Lovely people and place though, Fletty

Bodgy

I entirely agree with Wood Butcher. Unless you're building a collection for its own sake, the only things that matter are

- does it work well?

- do you like the plane?

Apart from that - they're your tools. Look after them in whatever way you think is appropriate.

I can understand that you might want to know more about the manufacturer and the history of that unusual-looking smoother (can't help you, by the way, but I'd be surprised if someone on this BB didn't have some info for you).

I agree with Driver. If it works well enough and you like it, it doesn't matter.

I do like the look of the bare metal. I did that once, with a new plane, cause I didn't like the glary blue colour. So I stripped it all off.

Can't help you with the smoother either.

There's only one thing I'd do to your collection, if I owned it. I'd put thicker blades in all of them. A thicker blades often compensating for other errors in the plane IMO.

Yeah, I like them all (even the previously useless Curry #5 now serves as an effective scrub plane) and they all work fine. I get a lot of pleasure looking at my tools too, so a matched set would have been icing on the cake.

Re thicker blades, I'm sure you're right Jake but I'm a bit chary of having to widen the mouths and the new thicker baldes cost more than I paid for the original plane.

I'd still like to know what the #2 is, so I'll make a new post specifically on that.

Thanks all.

Bodge -

I think Jake's prob talking about this:

http://www.woodworkforums.ubeaut.com...ad.php?t=23991

Cheers,
GW