Thread: Stanley Australia No4 plastic handle slight movement

Your on a slippery slope and starting with that . You have a lot of slipping and sliding to do

Nothing wrong with them. I have one. Works fine. Sort of thing I give to new guys to work with . I don't have to worry so much about it getting dropped onto concrete.

And . You had it since new .

So ! We finally get to meet a #@#@ing Hole Driller!! ha ha .

Rob

Hi Lyle - welcome to the Luddite section!

My first thought would be that the barrel nut is bottoming out on the stud before it tightens down, due either to wear in the bottom of the counter-sink, or because the plastic has shrunk (I believe this is a common aliment for plastic handles of that era). Easiest fix is to either take a few threads off the bottom of the stud or find/make some washers to put under the barrel nut at the top. Or better still, make a new tote out of WOOD (nasty stuff plastic, it shouldn't be allowed to despoil decent or even half-decent hand tools! )

Stanley Aus. didn't make planes for very long and quit in the mid to late 80s iirc, but someone will know the exact dates So your plane could come from a period that went from mid 60s to early 80s. I think the plastic handles narrows it down a bit as the earlier ones had wood - I had an early Australian-made #5 (~1964) that had wooden handles. It was was a good one, and with some fettling, became an excellent plane, so on the strength of that I bought a #5 in 1981. It was an absolute lemon - never could get it to work properly. I gave it to my son some years later - he left it out in the rain, which didn't improve it any - I think it now rests peacefully in landfill.....

Cheers,

Very common problem just shorten the bolt easiest fix or as said above new handle from timber.

An alternate for fixing the wobbly handle. I restored a Nr 4 and also had a couple of older planes in goodish condition. All with original but wobbly wooden handles. I didn't want to do something that was irreversible, so I cut packing pieces from 1.5mm ply for the bases of the handles. They worked quite fine just with the pressure of the handle bearing down on them. With a plastic handle I might consider finding a piece of black plastic to match the colour and gluing it on with araldite. Or maybe insertion rubber might work too.

Regards
SWK

Hi Lyle,

You've had good advice but I'd add that you might want to plan to be able to replace the rear tote at least.

When I've screwed mine down hard... I've had a section simply snap apart into pieces. No fixing.