View attachment 284587View attachment 284588View attachment 284589View attachment 284590Hi all. Have any of you dabbled in wood working (hand.)
Always wanted to play around with it and found a Stanley #4 bench plane. Got it for a great price ($35.)
My concern is on refurbing it. I know the goal is to make the bottom (sole) flat. This appears to have some gouges in it. Like they hit nails or something.
Anyone ever dealt with one of these?
I have a refurbished Stanley Bailey no. 7 jointer plane and a no. 5 in the works.
There are two ways to flatten the sole of a plane and have used both. Both are equally effective, one of them is a lot easier…
The first is a quality diamond stone. For a number four joiner, I would get the longer 11 inch stone. Diamond stones are guaranteed to be flat and as long as you keep them wet, they are very effective at cutting through. Not cheap though. Something like this one:
https://www.bestsharpeningstones.com/product_details.php?category_name=DMT Diamond Sharpeners&product_id=173
The second method is wet/dry sandpaper stuck to the surface of something you know to be flat, like a joiner bed, or table saw. This is less expensive, but you’ve got to have the joiner or tablesaw in the first place. I recommend a saw with cast-iron top, not some flimsy contractor saw.
Getting the sole flat is critical to the plane’s effectiveness.
When I say flat, it has to be absolutely flat, so that if you laid it on a piece of glass, you could not slip even the thinnest bit of paper anywhere between the sole and the glass. If you have a machine shop do it, then don’t do anything afterwards. Any kind of handheld grinder is simply gonna introduce unevenness that would have to be redone.
There are some great articles in fine woodworking on how to go about doing all this. You might try the fine woodworking forums. I’m not a member, but I’ve been a subscriber to the magazine for 32 years.
You’re going to want to get the blade sharp. As well as square. If you don’t already have a set of water stones, that’s the method I would use. Flatten the back first. Sharpen using your most course stone until you get a nice flat, even bevel. You can get rid of all of those nail gouges and things that I see in the .
Work your way up your 6000 grit. Get a sharpening guide work your way up in grit, and finally, put a micro bevel with the 6000 grit stone at the end so that it’s razor sharp.
If you have doubts about the blade, get a new Hock blade.
Check the adjuster mechanism for play, check the entire plane, especially the frog, for Burrs, bits of corrosion, excess paint, whatever that would interfere with a flat tight fit of the blade to the body. Then make sure that the chip breaker has a nice tight fit to the blade itself. You will need to hone the leading edge of the chipbreaker to get that fit. The one in the photo looks pretty dinged up.
