Preparing a Wooden Jack Plane | Paul Sellers

good day I sometimes get asked periodically often enough for me to think it's worth doing a video for about these wooden planes I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that these worked for three or four hundred years and they've worked for centuries in actuality and so much longer than we appreciate I think they go back way into previous millennia and I think we tend to dismiss them and think they're old-fashioned they didn't work that well they're not as good as modern metal planes when in actuality they work really well and they never stopped working well they just didn't keep pace with the industrializing of our modern world we needed more products to sell engineers came up with new models Stanley Leonard barely came out with the number four plane the bench plane series and before we knew it these were being abandoned and left alone but in actuality they work really well much better than you would expect so I'm wondering if we shouldn't just introduce these because even if everybody on the woodworking site went out and bought these planes on eBay from flea markets secondhand stores or whatever we could never exhaust the supply of these planes they are out there they're resting on shelves in cellars and places like that and they're always going to be cycled through just like the number four plane there are enough number four planes made by stanley and record out there to last us for another 100 200 years they'll just keep being cycled through cycle through and this is the same thing so here I've got a couple of planes restoration for this one is basically the same as this one what you have on these these planes is a wedge that holds the blade in the plane and you've got a cap iron and a an iron a wedge and the main body and then what I'm looking for when I'm looking a secondhand plane of this type where it's a wooden bodied plane I'm looking for a cap iron and I'm looking for a main iron and I don't want just the iron alone which does work but not as well as it does with this cap iron sometimes called a chip breaker and this really is a diverter it diverts to shaving up and separates it from the main body of what is your planing and up through the throat of the plane so that's what I'm looking for in either of these planes is you can get longer planes you can get shorter planes you can get them a quarter of their or a third this size for violin making the principles of adjusting them setting them and restoring them is basically the same so we're going to work on this one here and what I'm going to do is separate the plane iron from the body of the plane because we're basically dealing with two key areas to this plane functioning well the dirt on here doesn't really matter the patina doesn't really matter it makes no difference so we're going to separate the iron out again there are a couple of places that you hit you can see there's some indents in here and we'll usually use steel hammers not rubber hammers or nylon hammers and then you'll usually see some hammer marks in the end here there are two places that shock the wedge from it's wedged position holding the iron solidly in place so we either hit here or we hit here and both of those shock the plane in the same direction so this wedge is shocked out in this direction because this is about 44 degrees bedded in the plane anywhere up to 50 degrees so if we hit here or here it's going to jerk that iron out from there so first of all I'm going to hit here with the soft face of my hammer because I've got the weight I strike here and that should loosen it but sometimes it won't if it won't I'll go to the fore part here and I hit here and that's starting to loosen the wedge this hasn't been out in a long time you can see it's coming loose here can you see I've already moved this wedge this wedge has been in for a long time but it's already coming out it's about quarter of an inch so just keep persevering strike and keep striking you can see it's coming loose now it is it is loose but it's not loose enough for me to pull there you go so there I've got my iron cap iron and my wedge you can see the clear wood here is where it's never seen sunlight in 50 years this has gone dark just through the sunlight hitting it oxidation so you can see inside here you can see all the detailed work of the craftsmen that made it and then the main area I'm concerned with now is this sole the handle seems to be solid here's a couple of handles that came off a couple of other planes that I worked on and you can see here there's a nail through here so this came loose this one had a screw through here so this one came loose and they do turn loose sometimes what the craftsman should have done was was boiled up some animal hide glue and reseated this back in the opening left it overnight and came about the next day instead of using the screw or worse still just a nail but you can see on the side here I think can you see here there's a big mass of glue on each side a good millimeter of glue on each side here which means this didn't really fit into the recess too well but there's something about planes that fascinate me and one of them is this can you see how this heel of the plane isn't Square to the salt to the underside of it it's actually angled up here and this is also angled here so that means when this went into the plane the heel went in first and this drop down and it gave a nice tight fit and then that was glued in place and it stayed there we're not talking about restoration but you can see here this has been damaged probably dropped I would take a piece of wood like this cut a commensurate angle to it plane this off glue this on and reshape it with the rest of the handle so that's that just to give you a little bit of background to these handles this has got these two were closed handles what we call closed handles you can see these are two different makers probably making planes at a similar time but when you see these lines in this arc on here and this pot head is really very little difference between them that's very typical looking side through the hole and you can see the holes aligned too so these were custom fit to the hand they fit beautifully in my hand this one is a little small for my hand but it does work I've got gloves on here just because I'm going to clean off a little bit of the dirt from this and this is what I would recommend just take some boiled linseed oil and some steel wool and just go over the dirty areas if it is a buildup of grease and just clean out some of this like this until you've got down to some decent wood surface just take that off and then wipe this excess oil off and that's all I would do to this handle and this main body of the plane just clean up it'll just clean out the dirty grunge that's been building up in there one thing I want to say if you're doing it using the boil linseed oil just clean off the excess and then soak it in water in a tub of water make sure you do that don't leave it around the shop for more than a very short time but already I can see the wood back through the surface without taking any of the patina out or ruining the value of the plane and this plane is now ready for me to work on but doing the whole body I'm not this is not what I'm about today the main body the main part I want to talk about is getting the sole flat and then sharpening the iron and setting it up to work so I just have a glass jar here I'm going to stick my linseed oil in here I'm gonna stick my steel wool in there set that aside for now so we've not got any danger points because that spontaneous combustion is very real and I've seen it happen and you don't want it to happen in your shop so first off we're going to take a look at this sole and what I'm going to do is just take a straightedge I've got my steel rule here it's a rebel and chest and a start one would work well but you do want a straight one offer it up to the light and I can see light on the very fore part of the of the nose of the plane so I've got a little belly here right behind the mouth can you see this rocking so you can hear it rocking if you can't see it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just take a plane I can't really tell right now which way the grain is running that means the grain could be coming up this direction or it could be coming up this way so I'm going to set up just a plain Jane stanley a very very plain stanley here and I'm just going to offer it to the surface of the wood and I can feel a little bit of resistance there so I'm going to back the iron off till I'm barely taking now so you can see here you see how that plane rocks so that means I've got a high point right and that's where it was taking the shaving up I was getting no shaving here and I was getting a shaving right here behind the mouth so I'm showing you here that you can actually flatten this sole to a tolerable level just by using a number four stanley plane it feels like I'm going with the grain so I'm going to go here just take off you see that one shaving went right there the shaving went in here and out here so let me put some lines on here for me as much as for you right along here which we're aiming at getting this somewhere flat so we're retching the flame the main body of the plane register here now you could use a longer plane so I've got hollow here just a slight hollow so I have a window over there and I can see that this is hollow right in the very middle on the other side of here I can see hollow in there too so now it's hollow along the length too take a bit more I'm trying not to take too big of a bite at this stage because I'm trying to use the sole of the plane to register against now you can see definitely clearly can you see what I did here I've got this big horseshoe in here I've got this wide area of the mouth in front of the mouth that's coming down and here it's all the way up here so there's a little bit of twist in there which I want to make sure I don't have so I know the plane this soul plane is already flat because I flattened it so I'm still going to stay with this registration on here so I'm taking down the high spots taking off very thin thousands of an inch these are very thin shavings I could take a little bit more or even more and I keep going on the high spots working all across the width of the plane like this because I want this close to dead flat the last thing I want you to do is the same as I would with a bench plane as you the last thing I want you to do is to get obsessive about flattening your plane it's an obsession and that I don't really find too useful so I keep going with these micro shavings very thin shavings like this now let me see if I can show you a little bit more clearly you can see we're extending on either side of the mouth and there's my straight edge so it's taking me nice and flat on either side of the mouth and all the way back to here now I have a good flat but I've got a hollow in here less problematic but I'm going to go all the way down so you keep taking it down now what about using a longer plane if you've got one you could use it I'm not saying you should use it I'm backing the iron off so I don't take too big of a shaving or even any shaving in this case take up the slack turn it quarter of a turn keep keep turning just till you see I'm getting a very thin shaving right in the middle so you can use the longer plane as long as you're sure it's flat fairly close to flat how flat is flat well now what I'm getting very close to a total length I'm taking the twister obviously there was a twist in this sole which wasn't very bad I'm eyeballing down here it's amazing how accurate your eyes are going to be back in the vise and I can already feel this plane is near to where I want it to be lots of planes are going to be a bit like this one can you see on here you can certainly flatten a wooden plane much more easily than you can a metal one so you can see shine here shine here and then you can see this slight hollow in the middle here that's because this was used on the edges of boards very much for a long time so that was used for edging boards this plane was too a little bit so I'm close to that finish level and I'm going to stop there because I'm convinced that I am now dead flat along this edge that's going to be close enough for 99% of any woodworking that you care to do with a jack plane that's all you need coat of oil linseed oil on here and you're ready to go that's all I would do maybe some just some furniture polish some beeswax whatever you want to use just to get this shiny and smooth reduce the friction but this is going to glide across the surface of any wood now and it's ready for that I might take a quick shaving off the two corners here just to ease the edge so it's not fractured we're ready to work on the plane iron so let's go ahead and take a look at that the wedge was fitting nicely to the back of the plane iron and so the cap iron so let's take a look inside here now I love the way these are made can you see they make a brass dome usually goes through the plate so we're going to look at a couple of areas here going to focus on this one this is how it came to me I haven't done anything to this very typical this has a convex camber this is what hit me many years ago is that most plane irons that came in to me did not have a concave they had a convex camber and that was how most planes were sharpened through the centuries so didn't mean they didn't grind them on a sandstone grind wheel two feet in diameter they did but it didn't mean they were aiming for a hollow grind necessarily just aiming to get off this part where it tends to get thick is right here so they wanted to keep this around 30 degrees and then take the heel off a little bit more so we're going to focus on this but the other face we're going to focus on I'm surprised look at this this face is really pretty good and that's about as far as most craftsmen when I would say that's probably somewhere around 400 grit probably not much more than that and that a 400 grit sharpening to a 400 grit will take off very nice shavings you don't really have to go more but we're going to look at that inside here I'm looking at this eye and I'm looking I have to get this edge to make to this edge as tightly as I can otherwise the shaving goes under the fore part of the cap iron and wedges in the plane and that's what causes a lot of planes to jam sometimes the wedge on top of this if these wings here go slightly above that 4-part they will cause a wedging of the shavings in there too so we have to look at those different areas but we're going to get this plane iron working now so we're going to go to a couple of things first I'm going to go to a coarse grit of 250 first of all using diamonds like this so I'm just using diamond plates these are dead flat but I'm not worried about dead flat on this because I'm just working on the bevel I've got a couple of nicks in this edge that I need to get out and also need to establish the bevel at around 30 degrees why do I say around 30 degrees because you could be 35 and the plane will work just fine as long as you're well above the 45 degree bed angle so when you're in the plane the bevel isn't riding the the wood as you plane if it was somewhere around here you can see the iron would be riding the bed of the wood and it wouldn't work very well so somewhere around 45 is what the bed angle in as long as we're around 30 to 35 or 28 it doesn't matter 25 27 35 somewhere in there is plenty good enough for what we're doing so we're going to hold this in my usual method which means free hand so I'm getting my bevel down and I'm working on the heel of this so I have actually got a gap here I got a pretty good size gap probably two three mil gap in there so I'm working on the heel to keep the heel out of the way now I'm working towards the fore part where the bevel meets the back I'm keeping it flat along the edge I'm not trying to crown this I don't need a crown on here sometimes I might put a crown on I've actually got a burr on the back here across the whole of it which means that I have got down right to the very edge of the bevel on these outside wings here these are the left square for some reason that's unusual most of the crafts when I've dealt with want to take these outside corners off if you're planning a wide board you don't want to leave a step there you want to move into it so I'm lifting up here like this take 20-30 strokes and then while I'm still raised up after 30 strokes I start to drop down drop down drop down to the surface and then I lift up the other side can you see where I am there that's the train going we've got trains outside wait till the train moves out the station drop drop drop drop drop drop drop and we've got a wing on each side just like that can you see there so that's what I want so I've got burr all the way along this edge now so I'm going to go to a different series of plates now like this these are just a series you could use abrasive paper if you if you're stuck for diamonds go to abrasive paper squirt this is just window cleaner this is an auto glass cleaner it works perfectly on these plates lifting lifting dropping down and going to this plate here this is around six to eight hundred grit and you could stop there and this plane will cut if you want to you could just stop there and you'll be perfectly happy with the shaving you get so I'm dropping all the way to the heel rather than just doing the bevel I keep in this maintenance mode to make sure I'm not making the cutting edge too thick can you see in there now so it's starting to polish out how long it doesn't it doesn't have to look pretty going on the last grit here this is 1200 and it's a well-worn 1200 there so it could be a lot finer than that drop your heel make sure you take at least as many strokes on the heel as you do on the main body now I've got a burr on this so I'm going to flip over I'm going to go on this plate here which is fairly coarse and I'm just going to make a couple of passes on here to help me determine where 10 passes what I've got can you see right in the middle here is the belly so I've got a slight belly it's not really slice it's going to take some working out so I'm going to go to that course of stone now to take out some of that belly because if I don't take that out I don't have a flat surface and once you've done this you never have to do it again it's a one-shot deal so you may as well do it now drop it on the plate back and forth and if this takes half an hour you'll have the exercise on your upper body done you don't need to go to the gym and if it takes an ally it's worth it once you've done it you've got it it's done for life so you can see this is not going to take very long can you see now we've increased about three times what we had a few minutes ago so we're going to keep going on that keeping it flat keep working back and forth across the surface of the plate spread your fingers I've got my thumb my two fingers either side of the middle spread your fingers this feels pretty good steel I must say if you can feel the hardness of steel which I think I can now after these long years of working with wood so I'm going to finish this out and then I'll show you where I am when I've got this down to depth so well now I've got this down across the full width of the blade on the course 250 so I'm happy you know a scratch mark do you see some scratch marks where in the middle there they don't matter they don't matter one drop and actually it wouldn't need to be this wide either you only have to have it maybe if sometimes the plane blade is hollow you'd end up with a horseshoe in here that shape and ellipse or something like that but this works perfectly so I've got down you can see I've not quite got to this outside edge well I don't actually need to because I could lift up on that or I could is this is where it's critical along this edge here between the two wings is critical what is that one is that training leaf so I'm going to my finer grits here so I've got this well 1 250 here so I'm going to use that across here again so I'm taking out the striations of left with that very coarse grit that 50 newer grit and I'm going on here take a look at the other side and I'm starting to see a shine in there it's coming where I want it to be I'm going to this one here there's a bit more awkward because I'm restricted here but I can go in here and work this as well take advantage of this stone stick to the surface there and now I'm going to can you see I've get I'm starting to get a shine right around the edge there very happy so on this one my final great this is 1200 but it's a worn 1200 and first this type of plane I don't need anything finer than this but I will be taking it to a final level so we did the bevel up to this level as well so it's good to get the to equal rather than doing the other side at 250 and this one to 1200 the bevel to 1200 I would only really have a compromise between the two grit levels of sharpness so here this is really polishing this I can feel it's not taking too much off so it's polishing it's turning black so I know I am removing some and there you start to see the shine you can all see your face it's got a slight hollow right in the midsection there I don't think I would worry too much about that just go back on press hard on the surface keep it flat yeah so I've got flight back bevel on there but I'm perfectly happy that this edge is actually now sharp of the burr is on this side so I have to get rid of those pull out a strop and I can work on the bevel here with this drop just charge this with some chromium oxide like this charge it this is just a piece of leather glue to a block of wood it's just any kind of leather with the rough side up a Mollison and now I'm going to pull on here the very very least 30 times so the burr that was there is now gone to this other side so it's already moving that steel I'm getting down to the cutting edge so golf about 30 to 40 times keeping all my upper body above right down to the cutting edge both hangs the heel of my hand is pressing down my right hand is purely guiding it really then I lift up the wings to get those a little bit not too much look what we got in the very short space of time we've got a polish on the edge here now so I just have this interface now I don't know you can get in this close you can just see the burr is starting to peel away here and that means that we've got right down to the very very cutting edge when I come on this other face on the flat face here I'm not going to go on here I'm going to go to just a regular piece of wood that I've already flattened previously and it did this doesn't have to be dead flat just get it as flat as you can get it and charge the wood itself with chromium oxide like this and this is going to conclude the flattening of this face and you'll never have to do this again so Paul can you see it's turning black so he's getting this face nice and smooth and polished so I'm going to go 30 I'm keeping it dead flat I let it register and pull it that dead flat position pull see it's going black that's the steel coming off and that gets me where I want to be with this cutting edge here you see that no we've got a sharp edge and the flat face is full is certainly flat enough for everything I want now this is ready to go in the plane but one area I want to focus on a little bit make sure I register this with you when you're loading this blade you don't spin it around too soon like here because you'll catch the edge of your cutting edge go past the full part of the cap iron and bring it down to position this way and about two millimeters two and a half millimeters from the edge anywhere between 1/32 and even as much as an eighth will work for you cinch it tight and then take a look see if there's any visible gaps along this edge I can see a gap right on here right in this corner you may not be able to see but I can assure you it's there so I'm going to take this out I'm going to just go to coarse plate and I'm going to just move this out of the way I think I'm going to rub this along can you see this does have a little bit of shine on this edge here but I don't know if that's dead flat so when I rub it along the surface of this diamond plate here just one rub will tell me whether it's flat or not so I keep this down on the plate here and just push like that and you can see I hope right in the midsection there there's a hollow here yeah it's just slight you might know it's not as clear to you as it is to me so I just take another couple of quick rubs on here like that and now I've got the whole of this edge all the way from one side to the other you can see it's a broad band of light on there and that's what I'm looking for to make sure I've got to this edge here this edge is actually in pretty good shape so I could just take this onto the strop here just to polish this out a little bit it's going to be fairly smooth because it's had 200 years of shavings coming through that mouth maybe so I'm just polishing this edge just to get it so there's no friction on that and I probably won't do any more to this I might want to expose the name of the maker this is just a brass brush here so you can see this is a nice Obi and I thought we had a very good reputation for making ions of all kinds long long-standing reputation for making ions on planes so we reload this I'm not going to clean up this rooster there's not much rust on it it's just very superficial and there's not much on here this is the same there's another I saw B logo on there nice clear name should be proud of their name it should be super proud I wish they were still here today they could be very proud of what their forefathers their forebears did in making ions for a population for so long a period so here can you see they're just about so you don't sweat this because it will vary from person to person lazily shoot for about a thirty second to a sixteenth but I vary it sometimes I'm working on really fine work I'll have it closer to the edge if I'm hogging off a lot I'll move it away from the edge just to make sure the throat has clearance and now we're going to load this in the plane get rid of some of this excess here and we're going to load this in the plane for the first time since it's been restored here we just drop this in like this now this hasn't been in and out of the plane for a long time so can you see inside this wedge is hitting in fact if I go onto this one maybe you can see even better this wedge has a gap at the top can you see the gap here but at the bottom it's already tight but that's because the wedge is flexing and the wedge is often flexed on the back of the cap iron because that has a little bulb in there so it's hitting that first so what I'm going to do is just turn this upside down I'm going to just check this plane iron is flush with the sole so I can tighten this with I'm going to use this nylon hammer so I keep going can you see it's closing in on where it was originally registered yeah solid ouch it's not going any further I can hit it all I want so I turn over now and I just use the fingertip test to see how much I'm patootie then I'm going to look down here and let me see if I can offer this so you can see the plane iron is actually protruding that's going to be a not to hog off with an initial stroke so I'm going to actually back the iron off a little bit and what how I do that is I strike either here or here and then I'm going to look down now I think you can see the iron is not protruding at all what you can see there is the gap so you're looking right along the very soul face is not protruding what you see is a black line between the fore part and the after part of the plain iron and that's the inside of the throat so I tighten this wedge up again because it loosened it there now it's tight I can tell by the sound and now I'm going to go to a metal hammer just a small metal hammer you don't need a big one and I'm going to take a piece of wood like this put it in the vise this is where test to make sure I've got no I I do have an iron coming through the brush so when I tighten the wedge it sent the iron out so I'm getting Zig shaving on this side and if then shaving on this side so what I'm going to do is I went you can see this is the hammer mark that sets the depth hitting on the side is going to set it parallel to the sole of the face I'm going to take a shaving again now I'm getting a thinner shaving and I'm getting still pretty close to thickness on that side I still have a slight gap can you see here I'm looking in here I have a slight gap in there so I've got a slight gap in there so I'm I've got plenty of room to tap this on the side again and that's why these angle these sides are angled slightly so I'm going to back the iron off a bit here because I'm still too thick that second tap was to tighten the wedge again so I'm going to slide shaving here shaving on the other side they sound the same so you can hear I'm getting no shaving here down there for now I've got shaving coming off this plane that are just stunning to set it a little bit less bit less still unless still tightening here that could reset your wedge a little so I'm perfectly happy with my plane now if I want to take less I tap tighten keep going you want to use this one it's going to be plain and last a lot longer I don't think they had an island at the time these planes were made so now I've got nothing so I go to the metal one I know I'm parallel to the surface so this is my superfine level now I'm getting these beautiful flaky whiskey shavings and this plane is ready to go see what we get on these wider surface now so I'm not getting any surface now why is that is it because this is slightly hollow in the middle it could be so I'm going to go a little deeper in the center I'm tapping the iron and this plane is giving me exactly what I want is full sized shavings the surface is pristine and this plane really works perfectly for me now good that's what I wanted some furs and green jumpers here keep going keep going keep going you can do round Elvis four ball houses I'm good to go jumper on the end grain now here this is what you want to do is get used to setting it so if I take a Shump around here but yes it's working but I want a deep chamfer get used to tapping now I'm getting a thick shaving so I've got shampoo on here perfect and now I go back to my shallow shaving if I want to round over on here just bring it bring it bring it all the way around on to the top there's your windowsill there's your nosing for your stairs this plane works well

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 372,716

Rating: 4.9424858 out of 5

Keywords: Woodwork, Paul Sellers, Wooden Jack Plane, Restoration, Woodworking plane

Id: I2lvF8-nc_Q

Length: 43min 21sec (2601 seconds)

Published: Sat May 17 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/RepostisRepostRepost]

I love listening to these videos while on the ride home from work. Not only am I learning a little bit about the practice itself, but I don't even need to watch the video because he's explaining things well enough for a layman to understand

[u/aeonblack]

The part where he planes the plane with another plane. Really great video though.