Hi,
This is my first thread on this forum so, Hello to everyone! And hope my boring issue would be interesting to someone :)
A few days ago I finished a project made of european beech and I decided to put some Alfie Shine Hard Wax on it, sold by Workshop Heaven in UK, great stuff, you should check it. I put it on a flat surface of the stand that I made and waited around 12 hours to cure, there is beeswax in it. Then I noticed that the surface wasn't perfectly flat and I decided to plane it again using the No.8 Jointer plane. The first shavings were a bit hard but not too much, I could feel them on my fingers not smooth as fresh wood of course but the handplane didn't struggle that much to remove some thousands of impregnated shavings.
I then decided to plane another couple of soft pine slates and on the second one, as I flipped around the plane to adjust the iron I noticed scratches on the sole's surface, I was sliding a shim of wood on the blade to see where it was cutting more, and it seemed like if pieces of blade metal would detach from it and scratch the iron under my hand pressure, quite scary. When I looked at the blade with a 5 diopter lens it was all ragged. Never saw that level of wear with that few planing.
My question is, could I have weakened the blade, planing a waxed and half-cured surface or maybe there was some grit embedded in the last wood that would have devastated the blade?
But the most important doubt is, if I have a wax finished surface, should I strip it off with some acetone first or can I plane it right away. What about other finishes like shellac?
Anyway even if the images look worse that is due to the light shining on the scratches, only a square inch behind the mouth is evident to the fingertip.
I decided not to do anything and plane another 32 by 12 inches beech board and it came nearly perfect. Maybe not smooth like before but... that's life.
Do you think it is bad what happened to me? I'm a novice and even though I process all my wood from raw stock to finished projects by hand, this scary thing never happened to me. If I find an acceptably flat float glass am I permitted to try to remove those scratches or shall I just try to remove the burrs?
What would you do in my condition, how would you feel? This is important to me. Maybe a professional doesn't give importance to this or maybe doesn't make this silly mistakes. Then, how would you address already finished surfaces? That was just one coat of wax and I didn't strip it off.
I posted an image of the sole
Thanks,
Bye from Italy, Rome :)
Haitham Jaber