Thread: Two “Restored” Planes

The 5C was a rustbucket that on first glance looked irretrievable. J1.jpg

It's a Canadian model (Stanley made planes in Canada from about 19111 to about 1984, finishing about the same time they quit making planes here). From the type of frog and other details, I’d guestimate it’s of around the 60s vintage.

A light rub over flat paper made a few bright spots on the sole, but it looked like it might be twisted - maybe a terminal disease. J2.jpg

The woodwork is interesting. The knob is Rosewood, with a chip re-glued glued (& tacked) into the top, and two goodly chips on the base. J3.jpg

That’s not supposed to happen – according to his Gory Lordship, the ring cast on the sole after WW1 prevents that. And it’s not a knob off a ring-less plane, in case you want to suggest that, because it has the coved edge of all knobs meant for ringed planes, the ringless knobs are dead flat on their bottoms. The tote was a mess of thick, peeling lacquer, and I first thought it was Rosewood too, but it was far too light, & when I cleaned the lacquer off, I concluded it is stained Birch (the Canucks have lots of that!). I suspect he rosewood knob is a ring-in.

Again, I didn’t do any shots of the dirty work (it was very dirty!). The frog mounting screws and the adjuster screw at the back were frozen solid & would not yield to sharp raps like those on the #3. I am leery of hitting a cast-iron frog & cast-iron body too lustily, so I got out the “hot spanner”, in this case just a gentle butane torch, and warmed it to around 80-100 degrees, then squirted them with WD40, the idea being that the quick-cooling would break some of the rust bond & maybe suck a bit of the WD in as well. It did the trick, and after a couple of tries of the heating/cooling cycle, I had them all out.

I used 120 & 240 paper on a hard block to clean the rust off the sides – there was still about 70% japanning left inside, so I just scrubbed the bare patches with a (brass) wire brush. I did resort to a bit of chemical warfare on the sole, there was some serious rust in the grooves in some places, & no simple way to get at them with sandpaper, so I sponged in some rust-remover, wiping it out every few minutes and applying more until I had the grooves passably clean.

I cleaned the mounting surfaces on the frog (they were pretty good) & lightly draw-filed the blade bed. It could do with being lapped, which would mean knocking out the cam pin & removing the lateral adjuster, which wasn’t in the contract, so I settled for the light filing, which got the lower ¾ of the bed clean & co-planar.

I left the blade & cap-iron ‘til last. After a quick go at the cap-iron I declared it beyond resuscitation & went rummaging in my spares drawer & found an un-named cap-iron that matched. It isn’t pristine by any means but at least it was useable. It had a bit of a kink that needed straightening, but the leading edge was clean & straight & it cleaned up pretty well. I had trouble when I tried to screw it onto the blade, it kept slewing the blade when I tightened the screw down. Investigation revealed the screw was not threading in straight, so one side of the screw head was contacting the blade, while the other was .5mm above it. My solution was to clamp it flat & firm in the drill press vise, chuck a tap & hand-turn it through to straighten the thread. That worked like a charm & fixed the slewing problem.

I tried working out the pits on the blade on my very coarse diamond stone, but it soon became clear an awful lot of metal would have to come off to remove them. I tried the “ruler trick”, i.e., putting a small back-bevel on it, but all that did was create a very fine, irregular toothing blade. So I cut about 5mm off it to get back to clean territory:J7.jpg

Time to reassemble – the frog went in nicely & the fore-aft adjuster worked smoothly. J5.jpg

The blade assembly slipped in as it should & the lever cap snapped down firmly. J6.jpg

I started lapping the sole expecting it to take some time, but it came up quite quickly – no twist after all, and just a bit of a low spot in the centre of the sole immediately in front of the mouth. J4.jpg

And it made nice shavings after a bit of fiddling with the lateral adjuster. J8.jpg

I had noticed the frog wasn’t sitting perfectly square to the back of the mouth when I was reassembling, that’s not unusual, the back of the mouth is often a bit off-square, but it can also indicate that the frog isn’t square to the axis of the plane. In this case I think it’s the latter, because I went to some pains to get the blade square, so it should sit straight. I’ll sort the frog out in the morning.

That’s pretty much end of story as far as I’m concerned. The plane works well enough that my friend will think it’s just great, though if it were mine I would be fettling it more – a new blade & cap-iron would certainly be a priority. It could be cleaned & polished up more, but apart from a bit more lapping of the sole, that’s not going to improve function much.

I’m amazed it scrubbed up as well as it did, when I first pulled it apart I was tempted to tell my friend to just bin it (after I scavenged a few parts). I know if I'd seen anything that looked half as bad as this at a flea market, I wouldn’t have stopped to take a second look! Just shows that if it’s got sound bones, you can make a working tool out of it…..

Cheers,

Wondering, with the blade and body sides/sole, would it be possible to take it to a machinist shop (say, a cylinder head restoration place!) and have them machine them flat/square?

I liked these posts. Shame we didn't get a before shot

Originally Posted by woodPixel

Wondering, with the blade and body sides/sole, would it be possible to take it to a machinist shop (say, a cylinder head restoration place!) and have them machine them flat/square?

I liked these posts. Shame we didn't get a before shot

WP, there is a 'before' shot of the 5C, opened up so you can get a good eyeful of the rust! A 'before' of the little one would have just shown you a very dirty little plane, covered with the obligatory paint splatters..

Had the sole of the 5C been twisted, as I first feared, it would have needed more heroic treatment, but unless a twist is slight, the most common advice I see is to terminate its career as a plane & convert it to a door-stop. Machining something like this is easy enough, but the amount of grinding a sole can take is very limited, you don't have much to play with. You also need to hope the twisting has relieved the original stresses in the metal, or things could rapidly go from bad to worse! Then there's the cost - it would almost certainly be cheaper to buy another plane, so unless it had some immense sentimental value, getting a new plane would be the better option.

As far as the sides go, I have never bothered about how square sides are on a bench plane, I couldn't tell you if any of my Baileys are square or not (I've never checked), but I know a couple of the coffin infills and one of my panel planes are off a bit - it's a real challenge to get sides to come out absolutely square after peening! None of these is used on a shooting board, or ever likely to be, so it's not an issue with me.

TBH, I don't think I have ever really checked the plane I do use occasionally as a shooter (a Luban version of the 62). Making things precise with imprecise hand tools is what the art of fitting is all about. The way I was taught to shoot was to apply pressure on the plane where it needs to cut more rather than rely on passively pushing a perfectly square, perfectly set-up plane past the work. You can easily create as big or bigger error on a shooting plane by having the blade not square, or by the way you hold it, than having the side half a degree off-square.

As it turned out, neither sole needs any further attention for this next stage of their lives. They are both performing more than adequately for anything my friend is likely to use them for. If the next owner is one of "us", they will undoubtedly want to take them up a notch or two, but I don't want to rob them of the pleasure of doing that.....

Cheers,

Thanks Ian. There is something about getting a tool back into good order, especially when they get to 100 years old. It still amazes me that things were made to last. I dont expect many of the tools that I now rely on daily will be around for half that time

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

....... I dont expect many of the tools that I now rely on daily will be around for half that time....

No indeed, MA, any tool with a tail is highly unlikely to survive as long as that little Bailey plane has! I've been through half a dozen 'lectric routers & lost count of the number of hand drills I've sent to landfill, & I'm only an amateur. However, powered tools are helpful enough to me, & you'd no doubt be very hard pressed to put bread on the table without them, let alone indulge your hand-tool interests!

Looking at it a diffeent way, a motorised router probably removes as much wood in its (short) life as any hand router has yet achieved, and a decent battery drill probably makes more revolutions in its working life than any brace or eggbeater drill still in existence, so if we make fair comparisons, the divide isn't so stark.

If only they were quiet & induced the same calm & happy feelings that a good hand-tool does.....

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

Well, am I sorry I missed the opportunity to own a very nice old #3? Nope, I couldn’t help but pull out my own #3-sized infill and do a head to head comparison. Two things were immediately apparent, one was that my solid-soled & slightly heavier infill (1.8 vs 1.4Kg) slid over the wood equally freely (both had soles waxed), but more revealing was that the #3 is not a comfortable little number to use – the tote is very cramped & too close to the adjuster thumbwheel so that my knuckles kept grazing it. I suppose I’d get used to it, but my own plane was made expressly for my hand and there are no hard surfaces to irritate knuckles.

My plane is also performing a bit better, but I think the Stanley could equal it with a new & thicker blade. C4.jpg

Ian

That is an interesting observation and as well as being very rewarding for you that your shop made planes are more comfortable and arguably better performers answers a question that I imagine many viewers of the "Plane Challenge" have asked themselves. Namely, "why are these blokes bothering?"

Well there are multiple answers including, because we can, relief of boredom during the Covid-19 troubles, an anti-insanity treatment (Covid-19 again) and now from you that, just like clothing off the peg, a plane off the shelf is never going to be quite as tailor made as a bespoke plane of your own design.

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by IanW

No indeed, MA, any tool with a tail is highly unlikely to survive as long as that little Bailey plane has! I've been through half a dozen 'lectric routers & lost count of the number of hand drills I've sent to landfill, & I'm only an amateur. However, powered tools are helpful enough to me, & you'd no doubt be very hard pressed to put bread on the table without them, let alone indulge your hand-tool interests!

Looking at it a diffeent way, a motorised router probably removes as much wood in its (short) life as any hand router has yet achieved, and a decent battery drill probably makes more revolutions in its working life than any brace or eggbeater drill still in existence, so if we make fair comparisons, the divide isn't so stark.

If only they were quiet & induced the same calm & happy feelings that a good hand-tool does.....

Cheers,

Spot on Ian. I wouldn't like to earn my living from hand tools but sometimes it's fun to wonder what it would've been like. My sawing/hammering arm would be twice the size of what it is now! Still there are lots of ways to introduce effective hand tool use in my working life.

Originally Posted by IanW

Looking at it a diffeent way, a motorised router probably removes as much wood in its (short) life as any hand router has yet achieved, and a decent battery drill probably makes more revolutions in its working life than any brace or eggbeater drill still in existence, so if we make fair comparisons, the divide isn't so stark.

If only they were quiet & induced the same calm & happy feelings that a good hand-tool does.....

I'd swear some of the cheaper tools I've had had a RPM counter in them... up comes 1 million... die...

Inbuilt self termination circuits

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Spot on Ian. I wouldn't like to earn my living from hand tools but sometimes it's fun to wonder what it would've been like. My sawing/hammering arm would be twice the size of what it is now! Still there are lots of ways to introduce effective hand tool use in my working life.

I wonder, using a powered tool may die faster (as per above observation of revolutions) but it saves the joints/bones a similar fate! Tranfer the pain of wear and tear onto the tool rather than the body

Originally Posted by woodPixel

I'd swear some of the cheaper tools I've had had a RPM counter in them... up comes 1 million... die...

Inbuilt self termination circuits ....

I reckon you ain't far from the truth there...

Originally Posted by woodPixel

......I wonder, using a powered tool may die faster (as per above observation of revolutions) but it saves the joints/bones a similar fate! Transfer the pain of wear and tear onto the tool rather than the body ...

Yes indeedy - I have a saying I picked up in my cane-cutting days - "a machine eventually gets crook & dies, but it feels no pain!"

In my "lost" years as a school dropout, I had a variety of jobs, including two seasons "on the knife". For a 19/20 yr old it was bone-crunching work, so I can only imagine what it must've felt like for the 50 yr olds I worked with (who could still beat me easily in the first year btw!). One was my old pot, who'd already done 11 seasons before & after WW2. He lived to 94, so dunno if it shortened or lengthened his life....

Cheers,

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Spot on Ian. I wouldn't like to earn my living from hand tools but sometimes it's fun to wonder what it would've been like. My sawing/hammering arm would be twice the size of what it is now! Still there are lots of ways to introduce effective hand tool use in my working life.

MA

I seem to recall that Sherlock Holmes, aka Conan Doyle (whose mentor was Prof Bell) stated that one of the characters in a novel was a ship's carpenter as he had a pronounced thickening of one wrist. If you ever saw Lew Hoad play tennis, his right arm was noticeably larger than his left as another example of physical exercise biased to one side of the body.

Regards
paul

Hi
Paul,
Roger Federer also has the bigger serving arm. He quite often jokes about it in interviews.

Whilst we were living in England I was fascinated by the story of the discovery, and raising of the Mary Rose, a Tudor warship which sank along with most of the crew. Amongst the crew were long bow archers.

What fascinated me was how they were able to identify the archers by their skeletal imbalance sure to a life of drawing those massive bows.

This is the best link I could find at short notice, but provides a starting point for anyone interested in going down that rabbit warren.

Mary Rose skeletons studied by Swansea sports scientists - BBC News

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

MA

I seem to recall that Sherlock Holmes, aka Conan Doyle (whose mentor was Prof Bell) stated that one of the characters in a novel was a ship's carpenter as he had a pronounced thickening of one wrist. If you ever saw Lew Hoad play tennis, his right arm was noticeably larger than his left as another example of physical exercise biased to one side of the body.

Regards
paul

I just have to think about all the millions of cuts I have done with a circular saw and imagine having to have done those with a handsaw (that's just the crosscuts, rips are even tougher). And then all the shavings made with the electric plane. Phew!! And all the nails I don't have to drive in by hand anymore.

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

I just have to think about all the millions of cuts I have done with a circular saw and imagine having to have done those with a handsaw (that's just the crosscuts, rips are even tougher). And then all the shavings made with the electric plane. Phew!! And all the nails I don't have to drive in by hand anymore.

There's a fine line between work that keeps your body toned up & work that ends up causing RSI and other stress-related injuries, that's for sure, MA.

But if you'd lived in the era before the use of power tools onsite, you wouldn't have sawn as many miles or made as many shavings as a man with power tools does - you wouldn't have made as many houses, either. You would also have developed muscle control that allowed you to saw & hammer with great economy of effort. Watching the chippies of my father's era drive nails with just a couple of hits, time after time, or deftly nailing ceiling boards swinging the hammer 'upside down' with never a miss was a masterclass in hammer use. Can you or any of your colleagues do that? But I'll bet even a second-year apprentice would beat the best of them easily with his "ka=choonka" in hand.

We could philosophise all day on the topic of hand-work vs machine work & if machine-assisted work is still hand work, etc. I guess the main thing is that the product is fit for purpose and of a standard acceptable to the times. Those of us who like to make things that are a bit "better" than the currently acceptable standard in some or other way do so mainly for our own satisfaction - only those with some knowledge of what's actually involved can fully appreciate the difference anyway - I've seen people point to obviously (to me) machine-cut dovetails on a drawer and extol the virtues of "hand-work"! There are still a few things (like dovetailed plane bodies ) that can only be done by hand, but oth, there are ways to achieve the same ends with equal quality & durability (casting, for e.g.) so I can't get too smug about it.

You seem to have been on a bit of a voyage of discovery with hand-tools, and gaining an appreciation & understanding of how things were done in days of yore. You're obviously no slouch when it comes to using them, either - I reckon you'd be the 'go to' man for any delicate restoration work....

Cheers,