How to Sharpen a Moulding Plane | Paul Sellers

from time to time you've written and asked me about moulding planes about how to sharpen them they've got these moulding players they've gone rusty they're dull they're misshapen and things like that so I'm just going to go through a couple of methods that I use to reestablish the shape of the profile of a moulding plane here's a moulding plane that I've got I've just pulled it out of the rack earlier and I want to show you how it should look and then you can see for yourself exactly what I'm looking at if you look on the end of there you can hopefully see how the blade is protruding slightly past the profile of the sole of the plane so here you can see right in here hopefully you can see a little bit of the profile following the contour of the sole and that's what we want to establish maintain throughout the life of the plane so this is a plane that's already done I don't have to do anything to this one here's a plane that I would use for for shaping and then I want to look at the sole this has got two Nick's in it I don't know if we can get that close in but there is one Nick here and there's another Nick right at the side so every time I use this plane it's leaving these two long lines in this in the piece of wood that I'm planing so I'll try and show you that on this piece here you can see this plane is is working fine but when I take this and let's see if I can get this to show you those lines there you can just see the traces in the surface that are not very smooth and this plane is quite dull so we're going to sharpen this but we're also going to get rid of those two lines that are come along here and I'll show you how we do that so first of all I need something that's going to give me the hollow here and I've already shaped this piece but just to show you how useful it is to have molding planes first of all I'm gonna take this plane here and I'm going to use this it's not intended for this for this plane has given me a profile that I can use now almost like a file I can wrap my abrasive paper around this and that gives me a dead-on profile for this particular plane so we've had to redo this plane that's what I would do I would drop this in here with the abrasive arm and what's the sole of the plan I don't want to abrade the sole of the plane and how I do that is very simple with this is the plane we want to repair we want to restore this plane iron and marry it let me see can we go this way yeah so I think you can see into the soul here the surface of the soul and this is my profile piece of wood this is marrying this one it matches this one so this it gives me a round that will fit into the sole of the plane and it matches the profile near enough it doesn't have to be exact the radius needs to be slightly less than the radius of the plane to protect the wooden plane soul I don't want to abrade us at all I just take a piece of masking tape in here and let that protect the sole a little bit take off the excess here I don't need to worry too much here just keep that they're a little bit more here and usually what I do is I'll tap the plane iron which are so that it is protruding through the sole a little bit more than normal like that just send that blade up and it's wedged in so it's not going to move then take the abrasive paper I'm starting with some 240 grit here I probably wouldn't go any coarser than that anything else unless it was really really bad so here I wrap this tight around here and I'm going to pull this along here like this using this just like I might use a file until I see those two little indents the necks in the blade disappear so already they have gone so now I have this round to do on here and I would take just a very small flat file like this one here and I would run this on the profile of the sole again so you can hear this is cutting and I just follow that profile around and this is getting me close to the surface that I want I've got one little bit inside that I can get here at the edge of my file and that I think you'll see have a little bit more on this side to do here I'm not taking very much often so can you see right inside that profile you can see a white line following the profile and that's what I want now that that's taken the steel down into the body of the plane so if I take this off now because I won't need the again now I remove the iron from the body of the plane and how we do that is we're just going to tap there's two places you tap on this plane you can tap here which is where you'll often find hammer marks in here most of the old Jonah's just used a hammer like this it gives it a very positive hit so you can hit there I tend to use this one I like the nylon hair to have the weight that shocks this back now in this case it hasn't sometimes if it won't shock there you can strike here and that will work and the nice thing about a warrington hammer like this is you can come right under here just give a little tap there and that's why that shape the way it is it just removes the wedge without any damage to it if you're careful so now I think more clearly you might be able to see that white edge that I've got that I've reestablish the profile with and now I'm going to go in the vise here like this now you can put something under here you could put anything under here just to chalk it here give it a little extra support now then I would go in here and I'm going to go on the back of this iron like this work on the inside of the profile rotate your paper just to get some fresh cutting surface and follow the profile there's best you can't it's not complicated and on this part here I would take the flat file go on the whole of the back edge of this like this just to get you down to the very cutting edge here's another very useful tool these are wonderfully these are easy like and these are just diamond files these are wonderful tools for this I would take the course the course one first this is the fine this is a media I take the medium the equivalent this is the coarsest should I say and go on this area here take the whole of the bevel and again take that bevel down till you get to the cutting edge so wherever it's a convex service surface you can go with any type of file at its diamonds or whether it's abrasive paper works just fine if you don't have this you can just make a puddle out of a flat piece of wood and just take some abrasive paper on here I just follow this as well so you've got the same effect so when you've got that profile done can you see here you've got a burr on this other side now on this top side so here you can see I've got the profile and that works great I have a little bit of a nick on this side so I would just take that flat file probably just come on here these are not going to be super hard these these ions because they knew when they made them that you were going to be sharpening them and reprofiling with just either abrasive paper or with a file so most of that makes it very simple so I've got that done this inside face can you see there's been some pitting in there this is not like a regular plain iron or a chisel way you might have to take all up pitting out and this bevel on the back don't worry about this too much either because you can see when this is in the plane I have lots of back bevel on there so this could be any angle really this is going to be in the plane at this angle so this could be any angle on the bevel it can be any angle as long as it's less than this angle here so it would work just fine so I'm going to focus now on polishing and working on a more fine grit so I'm going to go to some 1200 grit for this next next fit on the inside of the concave just to get that right so here again right on the inside I'm polishing the inside of the Cove rotate your paper give you some fresh this is polishing really very quickly if I wanted to I could use this same paper with a puddle like this to get the outside edge of the flat there same on this other so I should go to a superfine on this one here this cuts the steel very fast so you have to be careful not to take too much off this one's 1200 which is about the same grid this is polishing very nicely we see that now so we've got that and we got this inside to do yet we're going to go to these sharpening stones again you could use one of these for this because I just happen to have this the sharpening stones here and these will work fine so just a little squirt of water on these because this has got the pitting and I'm going to go on the course there first and that's just a glass cleaner that I'm using on here so I'm going on this inside face so you can see it's not flat this can you see that this this face is not flat so this is the previous genre who had it probably used a slightly hollow stone so it took the high corners off first so don't worry about it you can lift up slightly on these molding planes not very much just a hair so instead of keeping it dead flat just lift it up just a hair and you'll get down to the very back of the cutting edge like I have now I don't I don't want to have any pitting in this edge so I'm just moving my fingers along this edge like that and I'm going onto this one I can't get into this and so I'm going this way I can't get sideways on see that black that's coming on the surface there that's the steel being abraded away and so now you can see I've got right up to that cutting edge behind the very cutting edge see it's slightly rounded up to the edge which is just fine on the molding plane got this top edge to get a little bit more here same on this one now long as this is quite polished for a moulding plane this would be far beyond anything that I think most cabinet makers would have got when they were developing this profile you don't really have to buff out this profile shape and the bird that's on there will will come off very quickly so those go out of the way and what I might do if I was concerned about the bird is I just take a piece of leather like this and some buffing compound piece of leather rub this on here wrap it around that profile like this and then just pull it like this just to polish out the marks then I can go also with the flat side I can do the same put it on the flat side of my stick to get the flat surfaces here this just takes a few seconds really you don't technically need to do this if this face but you can if you want to is not really necessary but you could just pull this this way and it'll just help to remove the burr if there is one and there is the profile for my molding plane looking very nice this one's ready to go so we'll see what it does now that it's been sharpened put this back in the plane and this is going to show you next is how to put this in and load it so you just sharpened your molding plan I on slide it in from the bottom like this pass it back into the sole of the plane so it's not sticking out there take your wedge slide it in like this and tap your ways now it's up to you whether you use a steel hammer or not I'm not putting can you hear that which did it and that's it that's as tight as I go I eyeball the underside of my soul so I don't have any protrusion pass this face of the soul yet so now I'm going to tap here that's going to loosen because the cutting iron is actually tapered so I tap a couple of times here then let's hop the wedge again just with one tap I ball down the sole until I see that cutting I am producer one two now I've got I'm slightly protruding here so I'm going to test it on the piece of wood like this that's that's taking a very thin shaving so again I tap and then tap just to tighten now I'm getting I'm getting a cut now all British planes have what we call a stick which is an angle on here where instead of that the plane being perpendicular like the European planes were we went slightly at an angle which enabled us to push into the corner when we were pushing the plane in the surface of the wood it was a development that came with planes from the 1700s so we angle over I'm not taking enough off yet remember when you're using a profile plane like this your first strokes are going to be very very small that feels better and I got rid of all those little tram lines in there so can you see in this this is super slick now I've got a beautiful profile this plane is actually too big for this piece of wood but it's exactly it's done I've got exactly what I wanted with this pristine surface which needs no sanding and I'm ready to start making my moles you

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 130,874

Rating: 4.9453206 out of 5

Keywords: Woodworking, Hand Tools, Sharpening, Paul Sellers (Person), Plane (Product Category), Moulding Plane, Moulding, Molding

Id: NcuahhR-Weo

Length: 19min 40sec (1180 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2015