Rejuvenating a #4 (type 11) Stanley

**IanW** · 18th March 2021, 09:41 AM

My general-workhorse smoother is an English Stanley #4 picked up at a fleamarket somewhere. It was in good physical condition & had wooden handles, which suggested it comes from the 50s-60s era, and although no paradigm of the planemaker’s art, a bit of fettling (including putting my own woodwork on it), made it a decent user: 1 Eng 4.jpg

I tend to use one of my infills for final polishing because it can do a slightly better job (& to justify all the effort that went into making them), but the 4 still does the bulk of preparation work because adjusting my infills means stopping & spending at least a half-minute getting it right instead of just twirling the dial on the go. So the #4 & I would probably have remained a happy couple to the end of (my) days, but I was recently presented with an old type 11 #4 (thanks Andy!), which has upset the status quo. For starters, it happens to match the type 11 5 ½ I inherited from my father a dozen years or so ago. I also like the lighter body castings of that era, which seems like a contradiction for someone who also likes the heft of infills. I’m just an extreme sort of bloke, I guess.

The “new” #4 was in pretty rough condition, due to neglect & someone’s attempts at “restoration” some time in the past, which included hitting sole & sides with a belt sander, by the looks! But it appeared to have good bones and for no rational reason, I just love those old flat-faced frogs which didn’t survive much past this model, so I set about cleaning it up & figuring out what it would take to bring it back to former glory. The body still had about 80% of its japanning under layers of crud, but the bare patches sported a goodly crop of rust. Once I dug out all the concreted sawdust that had accumulated in every corner & crevice of the body & wire-brushed as much rust off the bare patches as I could, it looked a bit more presentable. Here it is showing its 3 patent dates, which along with a couple of other features date it to between 1911 & 1918: 2 Pat dates x 3.jpg

The frog screws were seized, but a couple of sharp raps on my solid-steel driver loosed them up, and a bit of wire-brushing & oil got all the screw threads operating smoothly again. At some point, the adjuster thumbwheel must have seized & someone freed it up with multi-grips, almost completely stripping the knurling in the process. Fortunately, I have a set of straight knurls that matched the original fairly closely, so I was able to jury-rig it on the mini lathe & lightly re-do the knurling. I didn’t try to make it look new, just enough to give a good grip, & I couldn’t make it too flash anyway, because someone has beaten up the edges quite severely at some stage so I just tidied up the rim as best I could. It scrubbed-up tolerably: 3 Adjuster wheel damage.jpg

Now for the ironmongery. The blade was deeply pitted, and though it might be resurrected by a week of hard work, I could not be bothered fussing with it, and I happened to have a spare Lee Valley blade, so that problem was solved in under 20 seconds. The cap-iron was also a mess, deeply pock-marked with rust pits, and the business-end looks like it’s been gnawed by some steel-munching termites. It too might clean up with a lot of effort, but both corners have been worn/filed back & it needs at least a mm ground back to straighten the contact surface. A check in the plane showed it’s already just barely long enough for a close setting, so by the time I get it fitting properly on the blade, I fear it will be too short & I’ll run out of adjustment before the cutting edge engages. I decided to make a new stainless-steel cap-iron, which took far less time than fooling with the original. 4 Irons.jpg

The cam slot in the old cap-iron was very worn, causing a lot of backlash, but worse, it results in the adjuster wheel having to be wound way back to get the blade to protrude enough to cut. That creates another problem - compared with the later #4, the tote stud is about 4- 5mm closer to the frog on this old casting. If you line up the frogs, you can see that the stud of the older plane is just in front of the wood of the newer one. 5 Rear space cf.jpg

This puts one’s knuckles in a good spot to get lacerated, so I went to a good deal of effort to get the cam-slot in exactly the right spot on my new cap-iron, so the thumb wheel would be well forward during normal use. I cut he slot under-sized & filed it out to get a nice fit for the cam. However, due to one of my all-too-frequent brain-fades, instead of attaching the cap-iron to the blade & testing the fit with the cap-iron in the right relative position, I just sat the bare cap-iron on the frog to see if the cam came through. I got it wide enough alright – too damn wide! I don’t know if this is typical of the older adjuster yokes (something I need to investigate), but there is a very pronounced, taper of the cam on this plane, and with the blade in place, it lifts the cap-iron up & the cam is now a very loose fit in its slot!

So I’m back to square one. With the blade just protruding, the thumbwheel is wound back almost as far as it was with the old worn cap-iron & the knuckle of my middle finger sits perilously close to it. 6 Thumbwheel clearance 1.jpg

Continued...

**IanW** · 18th March 2021, 09:51 AM

I spent a bit of time agonising over the knob & tote. The knob is in excellent shape with none of the damage often found on the pre-ring models, but the tote has that all-too-common break in the lower grip which, unfortunately, has been poorly repaired. (N.B. if you are faced with glueing a tote which has a clean break, the best tip I’ve come across is to get a bit of all-thread, and with a couple of nuts & washers, make a clamp to go through the stud-hole. This usually clamps the break very nicely & can result in a near-invisible repair.) However, our erstwhile repairer in this instance did not clamp the two bits very well, if at all, and it had also lost two goodly chunks either side of the break, so the result is far from pretty. This is the better side: 7a Broken tote.jpg

The glue used is almost certainly an epoxy type, so there is no way to get it apart without a high risk of adding to the damage, so I attempted a ‘fix’ to replace the missing bits & disguise the large gap as much as possible. This involved chiselling the edges of the gaps to get a clean, straight V: 7b Crack repair 1.jpg

-and fitting matching shaped pieces in the grooves (fortunately, I have some small srcaps of genuine rosewood kept for such occasions): 8 Crack repair 2.jpg

A bit of careful whittling & sanding and a quick buff-up & the repair is almost invisible from the sides, but a gap still shows at front & back: 7c Cracks filled.jpg

While the glue was curing on the repairs I made a new knob & tote from some left-over Solomon Island ebony I had. 9 SIE knob & tote.jpg

There are some drying-checks on one side, which I decided were acceptable because it makes it look a bit less new & perfect. SIE is not as nice as “real” ebony to work with but it does make exceptionally nice handles, it has a very fine grain & finishes like ebony. I still have to decide whether I keep the old wood or use the new, but I’m currently leaning to the new…

The sole looked pretty rough & I suspect someone has put it on a belt sander. It had even, deep, linear scratches & the toe is a couple of thou low for the first 15-20mm. There is also some chipping of the front of the mouth (I’ve never figured out how this happens!). I spent about a half-hour on initial lapping & got it to this stage: 10 Sole.jpg

It needs lots more work to get the whole sole flat, which it may get some time when I feel like another round of RSI, but the low toe isn’t detracting from performance too much, it’s already capable of taking full-width 1.5 thou shavings : 11 Type 11 No4.jpg

Now I just have to decide which #4 to keep as my daily user. It makes a happy pairing with my equally aged 5 ½, 13 Pair 2.jpg 12 Pair 1.jpg

- so I suspect it’ll end up getting the Guernsey…..

Cheers,

**Simplicity** · 18th March 2021, 07:26 PM

Ian,
Excellent right up, keep both the planes, you know you want too.

Cheers Matt.

**Chief Tiff** · 18th March 2021, 08:10 PM

I love my old Stanleys! My favourite bench plane is an early type 11 number 5 (early in that it still had the type 10 blade). All my users (bar 1) are either pre-WW2 Stanleys or pre-‘57 Records. I have a couple of later, post-war planes and they are chalk and cheese compared to the oldies. Yeah; they mostly have atrocious backlash on the adjusters but everything else is tight.

Regarding the japanning; if you brush a couple of coats of “Ferronite” rust converter on the bare sections the resulting black oxide layer blends in quite well.

I may have a spare period cap iron kicking around; when I get home the weekend after next I’ll have a look for you.

**IanW** · 18th March 2021, 09:55 PM

Originally Posted by Chief Tiff

....I may have a spare period cap iron kicking around; when I get home the weekend after next I’ll have a look for you.

Chief, thanks for the offer, but I actually prefer the heavier SS caps I make, for a couple of reasons (one of which I don't have to worry about rust!). But mainly 'cos the 2.5mm plate I use (which is ~.75mm thicker than the originals), provides a bit more dampening. It's ok, I've put the original aside in case the next owner is a purist....

A bit of backlash doesn't bother me either, it's a necessary part of the design, and you soon learn to not notice it. My problem with the cap-iron I made is that I filed a bit too much off the 'front' of the cam slot- as I've said in other posts, just 0.5 of a mm can make a huge difference to the mid-point of the thumbwheel. I'll make another in due course, getting pretty slick at it now. The plane still needs a bit more work to bring it up to what I reckon it's capable of, so I'll attend to such details then. For now, I just wanted to get it working to see how it scrubbed up.

I will try your recipe for treating the rust spots...

Matt, nope, I started a policy some years ago that when a new tool comes in, one has to go out. "Course I don't always observe the rule, but I try. One of the 4s has to go, but don't fret, there are lots of good homes for such things around these parts, it won't be just dumped on a church doorstep....

Cheers,

**ac445ab** · 19th March 2021, 05:08 AM

Ciao,
Very good rehabbing job, I like the result with new handles too.

Planes are never too much. Keep them both! May be you could hone on one a back bevel for a stepper cutting angle for some “difficult” and/or harder wood.
I have several type 11 planes and I find they are between the best produced by Stanley.

**Mountain Ash** · 19th March 2021, 07:03 AM

Hi Ian. Love the thread and your honesty. CT put me on to the Ferronite stuff and it works well. Finish is a little less glossy than tbe jappaning but treats the rust and dries to a very similar black

**IanW** · 19th March 2021, 10:55 AM

Originally Posted by ac445ab

..... Planes are never too much. Keep them both! May be you could hone on one a back bevel for a stepper cutting angle for some “difficult” and/or harder wood.....

Thanks for the compliment, Guiliano, but I'm not sure I can unreservedly agree that you can't have too many planes.

There was a time when I could not resist even the rustiest Stanley or Record sitting forlornly on a flea-market table. I had to bring them home & give them the TLC they deserved. I learnt much about plane restoration, and became better able to pick a good plane from a dog, but the result was an ever-increasing jumble of planes that were rarely used and a major storage problem. Sometime around the mid to late 90s, I got fed-up & had a major cull. For both sentimental & practical reasons I kept 4 Bailey type bench-planes, a #7, a #5 1/2, a #5 and a #4. Their convenience & ease of use are hard to beat. I also have a few other planes like a 78 and a 62 clone and a (Veritas) scrub plane, and the obligatory block plane or two.

These planes are more than sufficient to make any piece of furniture or cabinetry I've made or ever likely to want to make; there are many ways to resolve woodworking problems & planes don't always have to be the solution....

However, about a dozen years ago, I started making metal planes, which quickly turned to an obsession, & all my good work in cleaning out my tool chest went to hell in a hand basket. These are my "keeper" infills in bench-plane style. One is a high-angle so I have no need to back-bevel any blades (which, incidentally, I don't advocate, careful preparation & use of the cap-iron does a better job than any back-bevel, imo): Infills.jpg

There are a few shoulder/rebate and block/chariot planes: Block & rebate planes.jpg

And a few specialist planes like my over-the-top dovetail plane and a (more modest) travisher: D-T & travisher.jpg

The Baileys still bear the brunt of my daily needs. The fancy-looking lot make a great display for anyone who looks in my tool cupboard; they do get regular workouts, but are hard to justify on purely pragmatic grounds. So in summary, I think one can have too many, but it would take a lot of self-debate & personal discipline to decide on the precise number.....

Cheers,

**ac445ab** · 19th March 2021, 11:49 AM

Thanks Ian,
I agree with your point of view👍
You are right and thinking to your words maybe my planes are too much numberous. But I couldn’t leave go them away, so I often use of changing them for utilize almost all at rotation.

How beautiful are yor infill planes, Wow!

Ciao
Giuliano

**Andy_B** · 20th March 2021, 01:20 PM

Looks great Ian, what a transformation! Good to see it's capable of taking fine shaving again.

Cheers,
Andy

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