Plane Refurbishing

As Purchased

After Refurbishing

I love hand-planes.  The way they can turn rough lumber into wood with a silky smooth surface seems nearly miraculous to me.  I was introduced to the basic use and care of them by my grade eight wood-working teacher, Mr. Charlie Mitchell.  He was greatly appreciated by his students and showed great patience with his shop full of unruly fourteen year-olds.  

This plane is one that I bought recently on eBay.  It came to me from Florida, but it could have come from almost anywhere, as it is a very common one, a Stanley Number 5, often called a jack-plane.  This is a Series 18, which means it was manufactured in 1946 or '47.  It is a Bailey design.  Leonard Bailey lived from 1825 to 1905.  He was a tool and cabinet man from Massachusetts.  His design for the hand-plane was adopted by Stanley tool-works.  Stanley and other companies, including Record, Millers Falls and others manufactured Bailey style planes for years.  Some companies, including Stanley, continue to do so.  

The two pictures of this plane are, as you can see, before and after pictures as I did some restoration work on this one.  Stanley purchased the right to call them Bailey planes, and this one says "Bailey" right on the very front of the body.

This particular plane was in pretty good shape, especially when you consider it is about 74 years old, with just a little rust and wear and tear.  I didn't want try to restore it to brand-new condition to put it in some display case.  I just wanted to put it back in good working order.  

One can still buy very good quality hand-planes.  Canadian-made Veritas (from Lee Valley Tools) and Lie-Nielsen Toolworks in Maine, USA both make excellent planes; good, but expensive.  Good planes are also now being made in China and India but your local hardware store will probably not have anything much to offer.  Some even have handles made of (you guessed it) - plastic.  Aarrgghh!!  With so many thousands upon thousands in existence from years ago when the quality was very high, better to buy and old one and fix it up, unless you wish to shell out for a new, high-quality and expensive one.  With either of those options, your purchase will be working as good as new, if it is cared for at all, long after you are gone from this life.  There are not a lot of things that you can purchase after they've had a working life of 74 years that you can then pass on to another generation working as well as the day it was purchased before you were born.

Fully Disassembled

Here it is, all apart.  A hand-plane is simple enough that even I can remember what goes where at reassembly time.  

First thing to do was clean the rust and flaked paint off of the cast iron body, which was fairly straight forward, although I did use some paint remover along with a wire brush, some steel wool and a putty knife.

Here is the cleaned-up version.  My dad spent many years as a molder in an iron foundry and I think he would agree that this is a pretty good casting.  I couldn't see any flaws and there was no damage after all those years of use.
 

Cleaned

Freshly painted, looks brand new

After the war, Stanley stopped using rosewood for the wooden handles and used native hard-woods instead, Maple, etc.  I think they were embarrassed at this because they painted them black.  Actually, they "japanned" them, which means they hid them under thick, black varnish.  It was difficult to remove and I couldn't get is out of all of the end-grain but did what I could.

I couldn't bring myself to repaint them black.  Who really cares about authenticity when it's not a museum piece?  So, I finished them with shellac and they are much improved from before.  Stanley should have done that to begin with.

Orange shellac on maple

Then, it was just a matter of cleaning up the other metal parts, grinding and honing the blade which was badly out-of-square, and reassembling.  This really didn't take long to do.

Then, it was just a matter of trying it out.  It works exactly as it should.  You can slice off thick shavings or ones so thin that you can see through them. 

The hand-plane; near perfection!

Complete!

Perfect Shavings

Waiting

My love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them, 
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
without stopping to bang the taxi door
she’ll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love’s happiness, 
she’ll run dripping upstairs, she won’t knock, 
will take my head in her hands, 
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair, 
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap. 

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Summer Storm Coming

The white underside 
of alder leaves
dance upright
in the 
gales of summer

Update from Egypt.....

Judi and I have been here for more a little more than two years now, from five months before the revolution until now.  We have a team of 10 workers here from North America plus three Egyptian staff people.  We work exclusively with Egyptian church partners, the Coptic Orthodox, Coptic Evangelicals and the Episcopal Church.  They all have very impressive service programs serving Egyptians in a vast variety of ways - and serving both Muslims and Christians without any discrimination.  The government, however, often restricts the churches from serving in communities that do not have a strong Christian presence in that particular area.  

Especially outside of the major centres, there is often tension between Muslims and Christians, although some communities enjoy good relationships between religious groups.  In an earlier period, in the 1950's, Cairo was a cosmopolitan centre with large Jewish, Greek and Italian communities.  All has changed, first with Nassar's expulsion of many of these people, then with Sadat's policy of promoting Egypt as a Mulsim country, then with Mubarak's corrupt regime and now with the Muslim Brotherhood presidency and the growing salafi power.  Once a land of mini-skirts, Egypt is now a land of nicobs (burhkas).

Egypt continues to be a very unstable place politically, with more demonstrations happening every few weeks.  While we have a new president, there are serious battles over the writing of a new constitution and no new parliament yet.  All of this is ultimately because there is no real social or political tradition of power sharing, no national identity that makes Egyptian citizenship the primary political reality, no educational basis for critical thinking skills for the vast majority of people and not even literacy skills for nearly half of the population.  This country is a long way and many years from forming a functioning democracy.  The Islamization of the country continues, even as increased westernization also occurs.  Liberal, educated Muslims, Christians and other moderates who favour a "secular" state are very fearful of the future.  Conservatives think that a "secular" state means an atheistic state.  Gobs of money go to the military, a largely independent country within a country, while education languishes.  Of course, Egypt was invaded by Israel in 1957, 1967 and fought the 1973 Yom Kippur war with Israel to gain back the Sinai, so the military also enjoys respect here, although that was greatly compromised by the behaviour of the military following the revolution.  

There is a lack of national, political identity here.  I think of myself as a Christian first but, politically, I am a Canadian.  Many people here, especially conservative Muslims, but others as well, do not have those distinctions and loyalties and this greatly hampers political progress towards a democratic state.

Part of the fall-out from all the military money and the mismanagement and corruption of the previous regime is that public education is in terrible condition with underpaid teachers who often barely teach at all, opting for private tutoring after hours to try to make enough money to live on.  Many students are functionally illiterate, even after going to school for eight years or more.  Private education abounds but is inaccessible to the majority.  This low level of literacy and education also hampers the political process, as so many people have not been trained in the critical thinking skills needed to evaluate policies and people. 

The economy is in very rough shape.  Tourism, one of the economic mainstays, has almost completely disappeared since the revolution.  There has been high inflation, prices doubling over the past 8 years, and the unemployment rate has increased greatly since the revolution.  Egypt fell to #113 on the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) in 2011.  Nearly half of the country lives on under two USD per day and about the same percentage are illiterate.

Crime, especially theft, is much more common.  Judi had her purse snatched in broad daylight a few weeks ago here in Cairo and that was disturbing.  Two men on a motorcycle raced past her and grabbed it off her shoulder.  It has become a common occurrence.  Our office was broken into last spring, with considerable loss, and my travel case was stolen off a train last winter (a man grabbed it and jumped off the moving train!)    General violence is also higher and the harassment of women, always a problem, is also greater than ever.  The deep-rooted decency of society has been eroded by years of political neglect and corruption and now by desperation.  Western embassies issue warnings to their citizens on a regular basis, to the point that we wonder whether or not to pay attention.  We continue to move about Cairo and some parts of the country with relative freedom but with lots of caution as well.

It seems that almost all young people want to leave Egypt.  At the same time, almost all Egyptians are fiercely loyal to their Egyptian identity, especially Christians, who see themselves as the original people of the ancient, culture of the Pharoahs.  However, lack of economic activity, political instability within Egypt and in the region, increasing knowledge of life elsewhere and the growth of large Egyptian communities in Australia, Canada, the U.S. and Europe are all factors leading many to emigrate.  

The Christian church here is much stronger here than we could have imagined.  About 50% of all the Christians of the Middle East are in Egypt.  About 10% of Egyptians are Christian, 90% of those Coptic Orthodox.  Since Egypt's 83 million people are mostly jammed into the narrow Nile basin and delta, churches appear everywhere.  There are probably more than 2 million Christians in Cairo alone, a mega-city of 22 million.  Again, churches abound here and are over-flowing with worshipers for multiple masses on the weekend.  The last two Coptic Popes, whose reign spanned a combined 53 years,  were very committed to young people and the youth of the churches are usually well-informed and devout.  Monasteries and convents are strong and growing.  The five remaining candidates for the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox church are all well thought of and the selection procedure has been extremely exacting.  This will be completed soon.

The future?  People are very hesitant to predict anything very specific but political academics and social observers are quite pessimistic about the foreseeable future, given the lack of political cohesion, religious tension, biased leadership, lack of political alternatives and unhelpful outside interference in the region.

A prayer list for Egypt would include:

1- peace in the region

2- immediate action from the government to demonstrate that they understand that they must be fair and equitable for all citizens

3- peace for the country so that tourists would return (#s 1&2 probably necessary for this to happen)

4- a commitment on the part of the government toward education for all its people

5- leadership from the government and the Islamic majority to promote religious tolerance, understanding and a national, Egyptian political identity

Thank you for all your support, prayer and interest in what is happening here.

Egypt Perspective

Cairo, Egypt, on the ground, is a rollicking, noisy, smelly, living city.  Cars roar and honk their horns incessantly.  The Muslim call to prayer sounds out from hundreds of minarets and the incense of prayer rises up in hundreds of churches.  Streets are lined with people, shops, wares for sales, garbage, cats and dogs, all in a dance which seems anything but harmonious but never-the-less keeps going on, seemingly twenty-four-seven.  Life is hard-edged and hardworking. 

Beneath the searing Middle Eastern sun, this city, in this country, has lived on for centuries upon centuries, adding up into millennia now.  Here, the sweep of history is not known by looking things up in a book or on Google, but simply by looking up.  The pyramids, the temples, the blowing Sahara sand that swallows them, puts one’s little life in a different frame of reference.  This land runs deep and long, our lives run shallow and short by comparison.   In fact, comparisons of biblical proportions pop into one’s head, especially since the Red Sea, Mount Sinai and the River of Egypt are right here, where one seems to live in the books of Genesis and Exodus.  A dramatic example of this is seen in two pictures.  The Christ from whom we have set our calendars, in the two thousand and eleven years since his birth, is pictured here as a small child in the company of his parents, Mary and Joseph, the same pyramids in the background as appear behind us.  The holy family had come to Egypt in search of safety from the violent Herod.

“…An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, ‘Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word; for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him.’  When he arose, he took the young Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt, and was there until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, ‘Out of Egypt I called My Son.’”

            -St. Matthew 2:13-15

So, we stand and live here, where they walked and lived so long ago, when the pyramids were already old.  Perspective is different, standing here.

Pushkin

Thoughts


If I walk the noisy streets,
Or enter a many thronged church,
Or sit among the wild young generation,
I give way to my thoughts.


I say to myself: the years are fleeting,
And however many there seem to be,
We must all go under the eternal vault,
And someone's hour is already at hand.


When I look at a solitary oak
I think: the patriarch of the woods.
It will outlive my forgotten age
As it outlived that of my grandfathers'.


If I dandle a young infant,
Immediately I think: farewell!
I will yield my place to you,
For I must fade while your flower blooms.


Each day, and every hour
I habitually follow in my thoughts,
Trying to guess from their number
The year which brings my death.


And where will fate send death to me?
In battle, in my travels, or on the seas?
Or will the neighbouring valley
Receive my chilled ashes?


And although to the senseless body
It is indifferent wherever it rots,
Yet close to my beloved countryside
I still would prefer to rest.


And let it be, beside the grave's vault
That young life forever will be playing,
And impartial, indifferent nature
Eternally be shining in beauty.


- Alexander Pushkin, 1799-1837