Getting to the cutting edge

I took a chance and bid on a job lot of woodworking planes (and chisels) on e-bay, and got them for £65. As there were eight steel planes and three wooden ones, I thought there would be a chance of salvaging something useful - it's difficult to really wreck a plane. But in this case someone had had a good go at it.

Mostly they looked like this:



Or like this:

 

But after a bit of work, I was able to clean up the one above into a nice Record 4 1/2 plane, with just a bit of pitting on the sole and some parts of the cutter - luckily not the sharp end of it:



I glued the broken handle (the one at the right hand end - known in the US as the "tote"), and gave it a coat of varnish. It's an early post-war model - 1950s or 1960s - and the wooden handles are made of rosewood. The original varnish was quite thick and I didn't succeed in sanding it all off.

This one, which is the smaller Stanley No 4, was in very poor condition, and now I think it will be a very useful plane.



It is a later model, from the 1970s or after, and the handles are made of a dyed wood, stained and heavily varnished to look like rosewood. I cleaned them up and didn't try to re-stain them, and the look and feel is pretty good. I also bought a new Veritas sharpening guide, which has helped me get some good sharp cutters. Here is the one from this small plane:



I didn't quite remove all the parallel scratches created in the sharpening process, but despite those small blemishes this one has a mirror surface that quite surprised me. The little patches of rust near the sharpened edge I will hope to polish out eventually, but there was a lot of rust all over this plane and it took a couple of hours to get rid of most of it. What's left goes a little deeper than the surface. It is very sharp.

The Veritas guide has a detachable stop that lets you set the same angle each time, and which helps you get the edge at a good right-angle to the side of the cutter. It grips the blades much better, and has a large roller to ensure that you don't tip the cutter and grind of its edges. It is far, far better than the little gadget sold in B and Q. I've been using it on a thick sheet of glass, with progressively finer abrasive papers - the finest is a 5 micron one, which has put this polish on the edge.

The chisels that came with the planes were largely scrap, but the one or two that had good metal and handles in solid (unchipped) wood I have kept and I have sharpened those too with the new Veritas guide.

I have still a couple more planes to do, but they will all be waiting a while before they get any attention. There were two useful wooden planes, one of which i have cleaned and sharpened, and old "coffin" plane. But this metal one I shall be giving the treatment to:



It is a Stanley 5 1/2: this is a long plane with a wide blade - the biggest metal plane I have, in fact. I also have a number 5, the same length but with a narrower blade, and noticeably lighter. The extra weight of the 5 1/2 can help in getting a nice finish.