Hand Plane Tune-Up - Amazing Results from Your Plane

scrubbing true in shooting and smoothing the number-5 will do it all if you know how to tune and set it up probably my favorite planes over the last couple of years I tuned it up about two years ago into a super smoother and it really is the business but one of the stars of this series but they are these two both number Five's come from different castings you might be able to see a few differences there you may notice on the bottom of this some permanent marker and a few is all of them sandpaper marks I did use this to demonstrate the theory of flattening the sole once but it's really had very little work done on it and the other plane some surface rust on it nothing really bad no deep pitting I don't think now to be honest if you're going to tune up a plane avoid anything that's got a cracked soul or soul that's being welded and you know there are so many on the market why not try and get one that's in reasonable condition like this to start with you won't pay a lot more than one that's all rusty now if you've inherited a plane so it's got some sentimental value and it's very rusty well you can still go through the process and hopefully we'll get one that works pretty well the first step would be the soak it for a few days in white vinegar it will help the rust come off you get a lot of the rust off you probably end up with a plane that's in a similar condition to this one so what's my plan for these two number Five's and why do I need three well like I said this is my go-to plane at the moment the super smoothing number five so I'm not going to change that's the function of that one out of these two well number five is good for lots of different tasks and one of those is preparing rough boards so I'm going to turn one of these into a number five scrub I've not seen it done before I know it's just the case if you can open up the Frog things get a bigger mouth but on the blade and you can use it as a scrub plane I want to try and take that a little step further the other one well I'm going to turn that into a proper Jack so flat sole squared sides and we'll probably prepare a couple of blades for this one slightly cambered one perfectly straight so a lot of work to do on these first thing to do will be to tear them apart and clean up all the components now the next stage to strip it down would be to remove the yoke which will mean pushing out this little hinge pin and removing the lateral adjuster lever which will mean filing off the top of this really whether I go ahead and remove the lateral adjuster will depend on how free is to move I'm giving it a quick squirt of wd-40 and a trivet is a snug fit but it's easy enough to move so I'm happy that I can stay as long as it doesn't get in my way too much the other thing that can get in the way is the blade adjustment yoke that will leave that comes up through the Frog always no matter what position you put it in is above the level that the blade sits on consequently when you're trying to level this off later on it's always going to be in the way or potentially in the way now I prefer to leave them in so we'll check for frighteners here first of all it has an awful lot of work to do and it will be worth removing this little guy I'm going to use a stiff brush first of all to get rid of most of the muck I once open with scotch right on the sole and sides it's also a good idea as for the small components the screws etc I'm going to use some paraffin which I find extremely good for this we now need to make decision how much further do we go with this one playing we've got bits of paint and glue still on there and I'm going to take a scraper and get off most of that after that we've got the handles they're in pretty poor condition and I think probably the best thing for those would be to remove all the varnish that's on them and give them a coat of oil so let's take a quick look and plane which I thought was in the the worst condition to begin with is actually looking the better of the two the other one has some rusted on there bit of rust pitting if you started with the rusty pine it was still going to look worse than this at this stage it's when we get onto the hard abrasives that you'll start to see some improvement the next step we're going to look at is fitting the Frog nicely to the plain the frog itself has two small pads and one long pad these smaller pads contact either one or two pads on either side at the front of the body and this larger one contacts either 2 or 4 smaller pads further back on the body of the plane what we try and achieve when we fit the Frog is for it not to rock at all when it's against the body of the plane and for it not to flex when we tighten it down and I'll do that on my flat reference plate I'll set my reference up off the bench so that I can sit the Frog with its large flat surface down on there these pads don't touch the bench I can hold it well and work it along an abrasive I'm going to work on a piece of 180 paper I'm not changing the paper at all keeping it exactly where it is and I'm gauging the amount of time I'm spending wearing this away and I'm just wearing it until the mill marks disappear that should hopefully allow me to do something the same we need two front heads for remove those mill marked in the gap between the two frames should remain the same and you can see here I've removed virtually all the mill marks and that's as far as I believe I need to go just work on these two pads now because they're smaller just take a little bit of care to make sure you're working evenly on that surface and that's taking it to the same sort of degree as the large pad so these two planes should now still be the same distance they were apart before we started to check the fit of the Frog I like to install the blade this allows me then to put the frog in position and check exactly how forwards it could ever possibly go check then at the back how far the two pieces are offset from each other and then when you're doing your fitting you need not go any further than that so with the Frog installed at the most forward position it could ever be used in you want to check for any rock I grabbed hold the finger and thumb around this area here on both sides and try and Rock either backs and forwards or side to side and would you believe it this is the first plane where it's being absolutely flat with no rock and actually I check the other one and it's exactly the same so I've been incredibly lucky chances are yours won't be so I'll show you what you need to do to correct for that now to correct that fault I find the easiest way is to scrape material away for that I've taken an old file of ground the tip off nice and flat and I've ground away the teeth on one side for about a sixteenth of an inch that gives me a nice sharp corner that I can use to scrape away material to figure out where you need to remove material I use a permanent marker cover the pads which I've done here already to let that dry and install the frog and move it around you'll notice a couple of things first of all the permanent marker begins to get worn away in the areas that touch first now bearing in mind that we've flattened all the pads off those shiny areas here must be slightly high so we tackle those high points with our scraper now I don't know if I said just now but I've also created a scraping point on the narrow edge to get to the smaller areas that you start off with in this process so all the bright areas now would just take a little scraping you should find that your file will remove the cast iron very easily you can of course use a commercial scraper they probably notice that I had to scrape a little area here here here and here all four corners and the reason is of course my frog wasn't rocking those four points were holding it nice and level we can rub again just continue with that process until the amount of marker that gets removed every time is it's quite large in previous videos I've said work away until you've got a fit that's a contact area of about I think 80% of says you probably don't need quite that much but it's a very easy process to do if you've got the time you can continue until you've got a perfect fit an alternative method is to cut some sticky backs and paper cut to the right size for the pads onto the Frog and place it in the body and then grind backwards and forwards until your removing an equal amount of the permanent marker from each pad that's what I've done in the past but I think this scraper version is is a quicker way to go and I find it quite easy now I like to tackle the face of the Frog which for good blade support and travel should be nice and flat the lateral adjuster and the end of the yoke protrude out of the plane that we're trying to flatten I think you can see they're a little bit higher so we can't work that on the surface however we can work round them without too much bother I'll put as much of the Frog surface area on as I can there's a fashion forwards a few times take a quick look and see where I'm touching then I'll take as much surface area to one side of the attachments as I can work that and on the opposite side of the attachments I'll just work a little bit away until I've got a nice consistent scratch pattern and we'll just check it with a straightedge perfect the next assessment I can make of the plane is for the squareness of the wings to the sole so I've got a an accurate engineers try square I'm just going to check up against the light source but if you can see but actually that side is perfect as is that one so hey that's a stroke of luck I hope one of them's a little bit out so I can at least show you what to do all right we've actually got one that's very slightly out of square it's not very much and I don't know if you can see it there's a little bit proud along the base thanks I want to check for flat across the width so I use the blade of the tri square very slightly low through the middle of the plane the check the sulfur for flatness I've got my reference straightedge I've set up a light behind it and basically want to track look between the the soul and the straightedge and see if you can see any light coming through I'm seeing light coming through around about here so one and a half thousand feet legate will fit in between the very front and about a third of the way towards the mouth of the plane now one and a half thousand town'd like very much and factory isn't very much but when it comes to flattening the soul it will actually take quite a while to do that but first of all we want to check the rest of it so I want to check down the middle and once again a one and a half out this time it's coming much closer to the mouth about two-thirds of the way towards the mouth I also want to check for twisting that just like a check-in board when you're planing a board so I'll grab my winding sticks that's actually looking perfect you can check my would preparation videos for how you check the twists we're going to need to remove a bit of material through here and there whilst leaving a little bit in this area to bring the whole thing down flat now they may well be a lot of different ways of making something flat the way I do my planes is I have flat piece of granite roller sandpaper with the paper secured it's then just a case of pushing the playing backwards and forwards it may be a bit early but if we look at our markings we'll start to see that they're beginning to wear away I've been working for about half an hour and most of the permanent markers disappear become very faint and I can see that I'm starting to touch the area where we were a little bit low but it means that we're getting close to where we're going to want to stop so at this point what I'm going to do is reestablish permanent marker right way across up the plane I know I'm very nearly where I want to be if I just keep going the way I am until all of that permanent marker is being touched then I know I'm flat you can try different grips as well on the plane but get tired if you're going to keep that pressure nice and even front to back and side to side if you've got a very musty plane don't go crazy about it as long as about my scent of the soul he's nice and flash without pitting then you should be okay and that's it every single line of permanent marker has got a lot of scratches across it right the way along it right the way across its width and everyone along the length so I know that soul is very flat now I'll change this abrasive which is quite coarse so a finer one just to make the sole of the plane a little bit more polished when it comes to throwing up the side to 90 degrees to the soul it just determine whether you need to remove material from down at the soul or up towards the tip of the wing and that will determine where you put the pressure if you need to remove material from the wind ring that's down on the sand paper and put most of your pressure down on this side of the plane and just use the other side to move it backwards and forwards on this particular plane we need to remove material close to the soul and leave material up at the tip of the wing so I'm putting all my pressure down on the sole side and any handling that I've gone over the plane on this side this edge is purely for moving at bats and forwards I think you can see in the light that I'm just removing material up close to the soul leaving most of this alone and that's what we want to do and I just keep going back to my tri square checking the angle and gradually creep up to 90 degrees if you find there's a lot of material to remove you can always use the end of a mil file to scrape some of it away both of these souls are now lovely and flat they're not perfectly smooth there are a couple of rough areas which were originally low they're flat now but they do still have some deeper score marks in them they do feel lovely and smooth but with the light cast on them the way I've done it you can make out that there are some deeper grooves through these flattened areas once I've achieved a flat sole I can move on to a little bit of polishing it's not essential to take it to a glassy mirror finish and in fact I like to take it to a slightly hazy mirror finish I think you can see it does mirror quite well but it's not like glass and the thing is if you do spend all that extra effort to make it a glassy mirror finish it's going to get scratched up the very first time you use it because woods abrasive I've Chief flatness by working on my flat reference through grits of 80 120 180 and 240 and now that the plane is flat I can do the final polishing freehand because the amount of material I'm going to remove isn't going to make any difference to the flatness I'm going to be using this ultra fine foam back to brace 'iv which I got from torn up it doesn't have a grit specified on it but it feels about the same grit as a 400 wet and dry and I want to work in cause it's really just knocking off the tops of the rough surface left by the 240 paper and it won't affect the flatness of the song finally I'm going to use some fort steel wool with some Auto Sol metal polish and I'm going to work that again in circles just until I get the sort of reflective surface that I want just look at the Liebherr caps it's obvious that there's a slight difference between the two this one has actually had some attention and it's been polished up a bit now if we look underneath we can see that the leading edge which contacts the chip breaker has been either filed or ground nice and flat for a good contact whereas this one is as is straight from the factory pretty rough so that would be the next thing to tackle just make sure we got a nice flat area to contact the chip breaker try and think of the angle in which the the tip of the leader cap contacts the chip breaker and that's where you want to put the flat so hold the leaver cap at that sort of angle it won't take you very long to take away the roughness from the factory and create a nice flat area and that's lovely and I'll just polish that up on some finer sandpaper mostly the caps now have lovely smooth and flat areas for contacting the chip breaker the one is lovely and smooth and will help clear the shavings and dust out of the mouth of the plane the other one is a bit rough so I'll just knock that back with so for aught steel wool and maybe a little bit of the auto sole paste if the handles aren't sound like these then either repair or replace them I'm going to strip stain and shellac these and next time you see them they should look a lot better next thing to look at is the chip breaker and the iron if you have the money the best thing to do is to get a replacement blade set this blade set from Hot Tools is absolutely wonderful I've got replacements in a number of my planes and I have to say Ron Hawk really knows what he's doing when he makes these so if you can afford it get yourself one of those the part of the blade that's most important is down towards this end the chip breaker the important part is at the front here where it touches the back of the blade we need that to have nice good contact all the way along so that should also be flat and the other area of attention will be on the front rolled edge on this chip breaker some are just beveled and that wants to be as smooth and polished as possible to help the shavings fly off nice and easily I'm just using some steel wool to remove most of the fairly loose rubbish on the chip break in the blade now I'm going to use this abrasive impregnated rubber to get rid of most of this surface rust notice how I'm avoiding the area where we might be preparing an edge in the future there were a number of sharpening systems out there I've been trying diamond sharpening just recently so I'm going to use a diamond stone here I converted to this lapping fluid just recently rather than using water I believe that's a real advantage so we just put a little bit of that on the stone I'm starting with this is 400 grit I'm working on the back of the blade so that's totally flat side opposite to the bevel and we're trying to flatten the area from the end up towards the hole in the middle which is where attachment screw goes you can't sharpen the blade any further than there so there's no point doing too much work further back than there lay the laid flat on the stone and then lightly backwards and forwards and you'll see you take material away and create a scratch pattern across the blade now I want to flip the stone over because I've got a thousand grit on the other side and when you've taken away the deeper scratches of the 400 grit then you're good to go now for the chip breaker the important thing is that the very tip of the chip breaker contacts tightly against the blade so that no shavings can get up there now with the chip breaker held towards the edge of the stone we could lower this end down a little bit to ensure that the sharpest edge on the chip breaker is right at the front which is where we want it and then we just few strokes until we've got a nice flat straight edge now I've got a consistent scratch pattern right the way across the edge right to the tip whilst I've got the 400 grit diamond uppermost I'm going to just touch up the edge so raise up onto the bevel you might want to use a honing guide for this you should better feel the Bur come around back quickly onto the back of the blade now for general work I like to just like the camera the blade so put a bit more pressure alternately on each side of the blade so back up to the bevel a bit more pressure on this side so no pressure here a little bit of pressure there and similarly a little bit of pressure this side and none over here and that will actually form a slight camber now I've changed to the thousand grit side and I'm going to drag first putting a little bit of pressure on one side none on this side and gradually as I come down the stone transfer that pressure across to the other side this should smooth the slightly pointed camber into a lovely sweet curve and this time we're going to drop the back of the blade down onto the stone light pressure across the end of the blade blade flat on the stone and then just pull it away a few times should remove the birth a final strop will leave me with a super sharp edge then I polish the front of the chipbreaker on the thousand grit diamond now there is a bit of a flat spot on here I wonder if somebody's had a go at it in the past and not made a very good effort but I think that will polish reasonably okay on the strop now that's the sort of finish I'm looking for on the chip breaker with chip breaker and iron attached you shouldn't be able to see any light coming through and unhappy with that blade for the shooting plane can either be as we've just prepared it or perfectly straight but the eye for the scrub plane needs to be curved an awful lot more and I usually start that on coarse sandpaper if I wanted to get really quite vicious with a scrub and I'd probably notch out the corners of the blade and put even more radiused edge on it now to turn one of the planes into a scrubbing jack where you need to turn on attention to its mouth the mouth on this number five just isn't big enough to allow through enough of our heavily curved blade to use it as a scrubbing jack so I'm going to open up the mouth or removing material from the back now you can see it's angled at roughly 45 degrees we want to try and maintain that as we open up the mouth back this way with the Frog right back I've got roughly an eighth of an inch that I can remove at the back of the mouth I'm going to apply some permanent marker at the back of the mouth now I'm going to scribe a sixteenth of an inch back because I might find that that gives me enough clearance I'll use the back of a utility knife and you can see just how clear that is that'll be an easy reference to follow as we're filing with the plane clamped in my front vise I can file the mouth big enough to get my larger file in with that completed I can refit my frog and check my clearances now I've got quite an extensive blade penetration there I think you probably see it and I've still got plenty of room in the mouth to take those shavings at least I think I have I'll have to try it and find out now something that you still worry me is the amount of slack that you have on the spin wheel there are two reasons you get slack first problem you can sometimes find is that the little circular ends on the end of the yoke and not a close fit in the groove of the spin wheel so you'll turn this bin will one way unscrew it before actually hits the other end of the yoke if you've got one made of malleable iron then you can actually hammer it to make a bit wider the cast iron one like this you can possibly shim in the groove with something like a circlip but one of the areas that tends to cause a lot of slack is at the other end of that yoke where the pin comes through that engages with the chip breaker if I hold the blade here you can probably see I spin from that position to that position and nothing's happening to the blade a solution I came up with was a thin piece of sheet steel cut to the right width to fit in the slot bend a little ninety degree on the end that will go into the slot and then bend the other end just to go over the end of the cap on believer cap and go on top we just need to take a couple of turns off the screw because we've got an extra piece of material in there and then adjust the screw so you've got the right sort of tension and the blade won't move by judging the thickness the shim you should be able to reach a point where the only slack is about half a turn which is what I've got on there now if I'm going to be working with the mouth closed up nice and tight then I like to put a slight bevel on this front side of the mouth as well so not removing anything from the sole with just removing this top corner to allow a little bit more room once the shaving comes through if we want it nice and polished so work through some sandpaper grits and eventually polish it after just a few hours these two number Five's are ready to go and join my old one I hope you'll agree the results speak for themselves you you thank you so much for sticking it through to the end please do share like and the comments and questions happy woodworking cheerio

Channel: Aah Woodwork with Mitch Peacock

Views: 101,157

Rating: 4.9288464 out of 5

Keywords: tune a hand plane, hand plane tune up, hand plane, tuning a woodworking hand plane, tuning a plane, stanley hand plane, handplane, scrub plane, smoother, shooting plane, jack plane, no.5, furniture, wood, woodwork, furniture making, cabinetry, carpentry, tools, plane

Id: hV_APMEwU04

Length: 30min 59sec (1859 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2016