Thread: Siegley transitional smoothing plane

Ok, here are some more pictures, now that the sun is shining in sunny Adelaide.

You can see the splits and gouges in these, as well as the attempt to open the mouth.

What do you think? Fixable?

Cheers,
Chris.

Hi Chris,
I have done a couple of Wooden Based Planes in the past.
I use Loctite 401 exclusively, & with a bit of dust, from my sandings, you can easily fill those cracks.
I have a Stuffed 6in. 320G. Belt for my Sander, & I've found it just the thing to do the bottom. It is not to harsh, & would be hard to change the Angle of the Bottom.
It is worth a try, but someone else may have a different idea.

First warning - there are wiser heads here than mine, so - pinch of salt

Being wood, you could plane or sand back the base to minimise some of that ... if you wanted to. As Iss wrote, you can fill also. Depending on the regard you want to give to it you could envisage using epoxy or even auto bog

The front area inside the plane just needs not to capture and hold shavings, so a smoothing out and some reshaping should see that pretty right. Also, see next point ...

Have you read up on re-mouthing? That will be your most important job unless you want to use it as a scrub-like plan or on green wood, and it will probably solve a good deal of your inside throat issue. I have attached a couple of pics of a lazy job that I did quite nervously, going back a year or so. This was discussed previously and there are pics in that thread of a couple of jobs done much better than mine, by replacing only a section in the base instead of blasting straight across like I did.

Have fun with it.
Paul McGee

Hi issatree and pmcgee, thanks for your replies.

I did wonder if I could concoct some sort of matching filler using sawdust. I don't have a belt sander, so any flattening will be done with sandpaper on the tablesaw top. I'll have a look at both loctite 401 and epoxy. The crack is in the base only, and I don't think I can glue and clamp the crack closed successfully, so filling is my only option, I think.

As to the throat, I did wonder if the rough interior would be a trap for shavings, so Paul's suggestion of smoothing the interior of the throat is a good one, thanks. I also think I've read your previous posts on closing the mouth, and am quite nervous of the required surgery. I'll have to brush up on my chisel or router work. As you say, I could always use it as a scrub plane.

In pulling apart and cleaning everything I've noticed a couple of other problems, and am starting to think the plane is a bit of a hybrid. For example, the screw that holds the tote down is clearly not the original, as it has a different thread to that in the metal part of the body. That has been fixed, as usual, by using a bigger screwdriver and forcing the threads to match. Not entirely successfully, but not too bad.

The head on this same screw does not match the countersunk hole in the top of the tote, so when it's tightened it forces the tote out of alignment and it does not sit flat on the base. Either I need to find an original screw (unlikely) or I widen the countersink on the top of the tote. Any slop in the mismatched threads I can fix with loctite, I guess.

Thanks again,
Chris.

I've got a transitional union plane. And I got chatter problems.

Wasn't clear to me at first what the problem was, but it turned out to be that the wooden bed angle didn't line up well with the metal bed angle. eg. the wooden bed was 46 degs (say, don't remember) and the metal bed was 44, so the heal of the bevel wasn't hard on the wooden bed.

I fixed mine with shims of folded paper under the fog so that when I sat a ruler on it I got a nice little gap of bout 1mm under the ruler. Which told me that when the blade was clamped down hard all the pressure would be on the heal of the blade.

The screws didn't bind hard as well, so I filling all old wooden screw holes with epoxy then redrilled them with a pilot hole slightly undersize what I'd normally use for the particular screw so the fog and body bound up strongly.

and then after all that I dropped the thing on the floor, the casting broke and I threw it in the bin. ...so I bought another one and turned it into a rocker bottom plane.