Thread: A wooden plane restoration

I’ve recently written about restoring a Record 5 1/2 handplane, but I've also been restoring some old woodies that I got in that lot of planes I traded for, so thought I’d share what I’d been doing to get these back in working order.

Firstly, here’s what they looked like when I got them. Only three are shown, the last needs a handle remade so will get done later on. More detailed pics on the blog (Andrew's Woodwork Blog | A beginner's journey into woodwork) as usual, so I don't fill up my forum space with them.

The first step was to take them apart. In terms of the blade I dealt with it exactly the same way I do for a metal bodied plane blade - throw them into a citric acid bath, then sandpaper through the grits to bring it back to life.

With the bodies, they were quite dirty so got a wipe over and a light sand to clean then up, then a good coat of linseed oil. All I had was raw linseed, so it needed a good sand with 1200 grit afterwards to clean up the dust you get while it dries. I'll be buying boilied next time instead, this is still my first bottle so I made a beginners mistake getting the raw. I'm quite happy with the results though.