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