Can Pitted Stanley #4 Plane be Saved?

[Steve H Graham]

I came across a Stanley #4 plane. Probably came from Home Depot in the 1980s. I thought I might fix it up. I put sandpaper on a flat cast iron table and started sanding, and the photo shows what came out. There are pits that are probably 0.020" deep in one side of the sole.

I have a mill, and I can fly-cut this thing, but I am wondering if it's worth it. The sole isn't that thick to begin with, and I will have to take off 10% of it.

If it's a waste of time, I can pitch it and get one off Ebay.

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[Jim Koepke]

Steve,

Sharpen the blade and see how it does as is. This will tell you if it is worth anything.

The sole doesn't need to be perfect to be a good user. If it won't cut true the way it is, it likely won't be a good user even if the sole is perfect.

jtk

[Terry Beadle]

I agree with Jim but.... That #4 can be sharpened and the sole left alone. Put a more pronounced crown on the blade when you sharpen it and use that #4 like a scrub plane only it won't be as roudy or leave as many ridges. It's just about the perfect weight for a scrub. Usually scrubs cost around a $100 so this #4 will be a bargain I'm guessing.

A sharp blade is more important to the success of a plane than the flatness of the sole IMO.

Enjoy the shavings !

[ken hatch]

Another agreeing with Jim with just a thought or two to add. If the toe of the sole and the area just in front of the iron are co-planar the plane should work well and from the photo the pits are not in that area. One more vote for sharpen that sucker and see what happens but I would not spend a lot of effort on a 1980's Stanley, type 9 through type 13 Stanley's are too cheap and plentiful to spend a lot of time re-furbishing other types.

[Ralph Boumenot]

convert it to a scrub plane, they don't care if they are pitted. Paul Sellers posted a youtube on how to do that.

[Doug McKay]

Try DevCon or JB Weld., it's already broke, can't hurt!

[Jim Koepke]

Good advice on making it into a scrub plane if it doesn't pass muster as a smoother.

There is almost always a way to turn lemons to lemonade.

jtk

[Steve H Graham]

Thanks. I know virtually nothing about planes, so it will take me a fair amount of Googling just to comprehend your answers. The planer and jointer are more my style. I found this thing lying around and felt like trying to fix it was better than putting it in the trash.

I took Jim's advice and sharpened it. Most of my tool activities are in machining, so I used what I use for metal lathe tools: an 8" grinder at 3450 RPM with a white aluminum oxide wheel. Apparently this is not the best choice. The steel turns blue almost instantly when it gets close to sharp, even if you're very careful and dunk it in water a lot. I managed to get a good edge and quit immediately.

I just restored a Rockwell 1 x 42 belt grinder and put a reversing DC motor on it. I am wondering if it would be a better tool for sharpening plane blades. I know a belt grinder can put a convex edge on a blade, which is bad, but I am thinking I could overcome that by backing the belt with the flat platen.

The edge was horrendous before I started. I don't know if someone bumped it into nails or tried to remove gum with it or what, but there were some dents in the steel that made it necessary to grind quite a bit off before there was even a possibility of getting a straight edge.

It makes shavings. That's all I can say at the moment.

How important is it to get a surgical edge with water stones and black magic and whatever? I used a jig and an 80-grit stone on the bench grinder and then used some worn-out 320 sandpaper to get the burrs off. I was going to see if I could improve it with a super-fine diamond stone (best stone I have), but then I noticed it shaved hairs off my arm pretty effortlessly, and I figured it was good enough for a test run. It's kind of hard for me to believe that the hair-splitting edges guys in DVDs get stay that sharp for than a few passes, but that's just me guessing.

[Richard Verwoest]

How would the pitting on the sole effect how it cuts? In theory, are these "pits" not the same as a grooved sole plane? And, if you wax the sole with paraffin wax, these pits would be filled and act as wax reservoirs.

[Allen Jordan]

Usually you don't bench grind right to the thin cutting edge, as it will burn easily. It's better to bench grind (using a slow grinder, ideally) a hollow on the bevel, but don't touch the last 1/32" or 1/16" or so, then hand hone on oil/water/diamond stones to get the edge (using the hollow as a flat reference on the stones). And yes, finer sharpening will make a significant difference when using the plane... you want to get to a few thousand grit at least. I use a 1k waterstone for raising the initial burr, then 15k waterstone for polishing. You could get away with less in a scrub-only usage.

[Ray Selinger]

I consider pits as random corrugations, so long as none are around the mouth. Sole flatness and finish can play an important roles. I was asking about a English Footprint chisel so I tried a UK forum and there an engineer discussed sole finish, it seems the math says the thinnest shaving that can be taken is measured in grit size of the finish. P360 was the magic number. That would also mean flatness. This pure heresy , but it's how good is the machining is, not the type. Is it flat, are the sides square, does the frog bear equally on it's bed, is frog top flat and at the same angle both sides ? If it is, it's golden. Nice to have is a frog adjuster screw. The brass and rosewood are pretty, though.

[Steve H Graham]

I dug out a 6000-grit diamond stone, lapped the back of the blade, and did my best to hone the beveled side without a jig. The plane seems to work okay, but I'm not qualified to judge. I have never actually planed the side of a board flat. Anyway, I think the tool is saved. Maybe I can improve the sole with a little more sanding.

It would be nice to be a little less dependent on machines that make noise and dust.

[Nicholas Lawrence]

My first plane was a Bailey #3 that came out of my grandfather's basement. It has a plastic or rubber adjustment knob, and the sole and blade are both pitted. I have never measured the pits in the sole, but I would call them worse then the ones in your photo. The blade pits are not as bad, but you can see them under magnification. If I knew then what I have read since I would have considered myself lucky if I could have found someone I could pay to throw it away for me. In my ignorance I sharpened it and it works fine.

I would agree with the advice to sharpen yours and try it. I would not think the grinding wheel will get you a suitable edge to know if it is useable or not. Try fine sandpaper on a flat surface if you don't have any stones. Stones are cheaper in the long run in my opinion, but sandpaper will let you get a good edge fairly cheaply.

[Bill Houghton]

How would the pitting on the sole effect how it cuts? In theory, are these "pits" not the same as a grooved sole plane? And, if you wax the sole with paraffin wax, these pits would be filled and act as wax reservoirs.

I prefer to think of pits in a plane sole, unless they're right at the mouth, as field-applied random corrugations. Use the plane.

[Steve H Graham]

Here it is, working. I had no reference, so I dug out the #6 I got from a forum member a few years back and tried it for comparison. The difference was pretty obvious. Now that I've improved the blade a little, the 4 seems to work about as well as the 6, so I am surprised. I guess I won't have to Ebay another one right away.

Unless a knowledgeable woodworker drops by the house unexpectedly, I guess this is going to be the best test I can do today.


314573

Pardon the expensive high-tech woodworking clamp. I used what I had handy.

Thanks for the help. Maybe some of you don't know what it's like to be hopelessly ignorant and depend on books, DVDs, and the web. That is my life. From the material I had seen, I had started to believe a plane had to be a spectacular and pristine piece of precision machining. I didn't realize a junker like this could come back to life.

I still want an old Millers Falls though. They're just cool.

[Bruce Haugen]

I took Jim's advice and sharpened it. Most of my tool activities are in machining, so I used what I use for metal lathe tools: an 8" grinder at 3450 RPM with a white aluminum oxide wheel. Apparently this is not the best choice. The steel turns blue almost instantly when it gets close to sharp, even if you're very careful and dunk it in water a lot. I managed to get a good edge and quit immediately.

I grind all the time with a grinder like yours, 100 grit white wheel at 3450 rpm with a veerrrrrry light touch. I almost never blue the iron or chisel. The idea is not to sharpen on the grindstone. You sharpen on your oil stone or water stone.

And all you really need to get a good scrub out of that Jack plane is a good camber or crown on the blade.

[Jim Koepke]

Maybe some of you don't know what it's like to be hopelessly ignorant and depend on books, DVDs, and the web. That is my life.

That is how most of my knowledge came about. It helped in building a foundation for trying things and learning.

jtk

[Ray Selinger]

Steve I think we all want a Buck Rodgers Millers Fall.

[Steve Voigt]

Thanks for the help. Maybe some of you don't know what it's like to be hopelessly ignorant and depend on books, DVDs, and the web. That is my life.

I think that description has fit, at least at some point most of the participants here. You have to start somewhere. I was a machinist once too. I went from programming a Fadal 6030 to using mostly tools designed in the 18th century. Go figure.

About your plane: The pitting on the sole will have absolutely zero effect on the plane's performance. If the sole is reasonably flat and everything else is in working order, there's no reason that it can't be as good a smoothing plane as any. I would give the rest of the plane some TLC; clean up the adjusters so they work smoothly, clean up the sides and handles a little.



I took Jim's advice and sharpened it. Most of my tool activities are in machining, so I used what I use for metal lathe tools: an 8" grinder at 3450 RPM with a white aluminum oxide wheel. Apparently this is not the best choice. The steel turns blue almost instantly when it gets close to sharp, even if you're very careful and dunk it in water a lot. I managed to get a good edge and quit immediately.


Sharpening woodworking tools is very different than machine shop sharpening. Fortunately there are plenty of sources of info out there. All the methods work, so choose the one that fits your budget and your skills. As others said, you can definitely use your dry grinder; you just need to lighten your touch. And you definitely want to hone afterwards. Maybe adding in your diamond stone, since you already have it, would be a good first step that wouldn't cost you anything.



How important is it to get a surgical edge with water stones and black magic and whatever? I used a jig and an 80-grit stone on the bench grinder and then used some worn-out 320 sandpaper to get the burrs off. I was going to see if I could improve it with a super-fine diamond stone (best stone I have), but then I noticed it shaved hairs off my arm pretty effortlessly, and I figured it was good enough for a test run. It's kind of hard for me to believe that the hair-splitting edges guys in DVDs get stay that sharp for than a few passes, but that's just me guessing.

It depends on the wood and your expectations. Planing a straight-grained, friendly piece of wood can be done with a pretty rough edge, but if you want to plane a piece of curly maple and finish it without sanding, you'll have to work a little harder. So start with the easy stuff and work your way up.
It's true that a "hair-splitting" edge will not stay that way for many passes, but that sort of misses the point. A roughly honed edge has micro-serrations that are where damage (tearing, chipping) starts, whereas a a finely honed edge is much harder to damage. So the rough edge will become unusable after relatively few passes. The finer edge will lose its ultimate sharpness fairly quickly, but overall the edge will remain usable for much longer.
Anyway, good luck and welcome to the dark side.

[Terry Beadle]

Great progress !!

From the looks of your shaving picture, you probably have the blade set a little too thick.
Try backing the blade out until you get no shavings. Then turn the wheel until the blade just barely makes any shaving. Then advance the wheel just a tiny bit more and try and get as thin a shaving as you can. You should be able to sneak up on a full width shaving depending on how much crown you put in the blade. If you are going to use it as a smoother, you just need the smallest camber at the corner tips of the blade. If you want to use it as a jack plane or general user, then a little more camber and a slightly bit more thicker shaving setting would be good. If you want to use it as a scrub plane, then put even more camber with the blade corner tips getting 1/16 th of an inch clearance from a known straight edge. Hold the straight edge with it balanced at the center of the blade on the camber and held up to a light. Sun light preferred but a good bright lite is fine.

If the sole is flat and you have the blade set square to the work piece, you should be able to get 0.002 thou shavings no problem. Practice at sharpening and setting the blade in the plane correctly is key. Paul Sellars has proven that you don't need more than a 200 grit ( yes, 200 grit ) to prepare a plane blade to suitable use. Going higher in grit will improve results and make keeping the blade sharp with lite honing easier.

[Steve H Graham]

I'm not sure the two-by-four was flat enough to produce a full-width (1 1/2") shaving, but I can go back and check. I need to get loosen up the knob that adjusts the depth. On the other plane, I can turn it with one finger. On this one, it takes considerable effort.

[Jim Koepke]

I need to get loosen up the knob that adjusts the depth.

If it doesn't turn easy without the blade in the plane it is difficult to get it to loosen much. If it is loose without the blade and lever cap, loosening the lever cap screw a little bit at a time should get it to where you can adjust with ease.

jtk

[Archie England]

There's only three points on the sole of a plane that must be coplaner: the toe, the area just before the blade, and the heel. The remainder of the sole's surface doesn't matter nearly so much. To find out what actually tracks, gently run the base (with the blade retracted but seated) over some 220 or 400 sandpaper. The goal is not flattening but only getting the sandpaper to reveal where the sole is touching at the same time (= coplaner). If you get some shiny scratches at the toe, blade, and heel, then you're more than likely ready to go. However, if the middle brightens but leave the edges untouched; then, you must flatten out the convex issue.

Hope this simple test can help you out.

[Jamie Cowan]

You know, I've found the best way to learn about and understand planes is to pick up some dogs like yours and turn them into something useful. By taking a piece of "junk" and trying to make it work, you'll learn all sorts of things. Some new planes like Lie-Nielsen are perfect out of the box, so buying one and using it is super easy. But when that plane needs work, you are hooped, because you don't really know that much about the plane. Junk planes are an important resource. That's my opinion, anyway.

[David M Anderson]

There is some good advice going on.
The plane your working on is not a waste of time...your gaining knowledge.
Best to practice on a lesser quality plane or a bargain plane.
Learn how to sharpen the iron...that is so important.

Edit:
P.S. hand-planes can be very addictive, and they do seem to multiply..;)

[Archie England]

You know, I've found the best way to learn about and understand planes is to pick up some dogs like yours and turn them into something useful. By taking a piece of "junk" and trying to make it work, you'll learn all sorts of things. Some new planes like Lie-Nielsen are perfect out of the box, so buying one and using it is super easy. But when that plane needs work, you are hooped, because you don't really know that much about the plane. Junk planes are an important resource. That's my opinion, anyway.

This is fabulous advice! It's also the path that I followed. OTOH, I now have way too many rehabbed vintage planes :) and have spent more time acquiring the tools to fix the tools rather than using the tools to work the wood. So, do be careful. At some point, that LV or LN perfect-out-of-the-box tool is exactly what is needed to enjoy woodworking. Now, I enjoy tool tinkering and woodworking (occasionally). :)

[ian maybury]

Hi Steve. I've found that giving the mating faces of the iron and the chip breaker a light polish down to a fine grit and then waxing them does wonders for ease of adjustment. A good clean out and brushing on of wax on threads is a good move too. I use well flattened waterstones because they are to hand, but fine wet and dry (down to 2,000) or even finer using 3m honing film on a reliably flat surface (a bit of stone worktop or something) should work well. Just be careful not to do anything to mess up the seating of the chip breaker leading edge on the back of the iron. It might be worth a trawl through old posts and mag pieces on chip breaker set up to get a feel for how this edge is normally set up, and to check what you have anyway.

There's no such thing as ignorant, just different levels of experience and maybe more to the point levels of trust in one's own judgement/instincts in these things. It's like life. You can leave yourself dependent on others by devaluing what you feel (and be blown every which way), or you can be headstrong and a loose cannon that impusively does what comes into his mind without any serious thought. Both polarities tend to lead to pain and discouragement, and there's very few unless highly experienced that won't take a skim of the web or the mags pretty frequently. Since when is not having been doing 'it' for 50 years anything to feel bad about ('it' is inevitably only some narrow subsets of the field anyway), or for that matter a reason for hubris/airs and graces? Doing the homework doesn't necessarily mean slavishly following what we find anyway...

The option that works for me is radical independence of mind and ownership of my own sh1t (as best i can pull it off - that's not taking anybody's word for anything unless it stacks up/can be figured out as making sense - hard to do as it conflicts with our social conditioning which tends to be to look for an authority to defer to) combined with reading and thinking before diving into jobs not done before. The devil is always in the detail (we make a radical and toally unforgiving connection with physical realities in woodworking), so it's important to really think new stuff through step by step. It's about getting a grip on what's really happening between e.g. the tool and the wood, and not just following some hocus pocus 'magic' sequence of actions.

The reading is an important source of inspiration - of methods that i might not think of. Which don't get used though unless they make sense. It's a walking between the raindrops job. When in doubt as is often the case take it as far as possible in the head (maybe even run some trials where any loss is likely to be minimal) and then give it a go - knowing that screwing up the odd time is normal. It's often the case though that a bit of extra reading and thinking is a better use of time than doing stuff again...

It's most often possible for a relatively inexperienced but clear thinking and properly equipped person (lots try to do stuff with sub standard or badly sharpened tools, and blame themselves for poor results when in fact it's a case of finding/making a better method or tool) with good hands to deliver a very similar standard of work to the professional (specialised hand crafts that take years to develop the required body memory may be another matter) - the difference is mostly in the time taken. The critical perspective is arguably to be uncompromising in terms of standards. It doesn't with practice take much longer to do stuff right than to leave it rough at the edges - but the point is that the guy that starts out by deciding 'it's good enough' rarely goes back/is prepared to accept the re-learning required to up his game.

Time taken is in some ways the best measure of expertise.....