Restoring A Hand Plane - Stanley Bailey #5 - 254

hey folks this is a Stanley Bailey number five hand plane it doesn't belong to me it belongs to a friend of mine but it's definitely seen better days every bit of its here and it's just there's something wrong with everything it's all beat up and just old and dingy so today I'm going to get it back into working order and also try and make it look good while I'm at it let's do a quick glance over of the original the before the handle is beat-up right here some of the finish is missing a couple Nicks here and there this front knob is all beat up and destroyed all the way around and it wasn't even really tighten which that's part of the screw no big deal this side doesn't look much better and the bottom is in pretty good shape there's no major pitting at all I don't think there is any way the blade is I think quite rusty just from the looks of it so let's start taking this apart this front handle already make another one of these there's some surface rust here this is the lever cap screw this is the lever cap it's in pretty good shape the blade is attached to the chip breaker with this screw and it's all surface rusted not crazy bad but there are definitely some dings in the blade and this piece right here this assembly is called the Frog I'll remove it as well all of this looks pretty good there's just a little bit of surface rust and nothing crazy and of course the rear handle or tote whatever you want to call it there's many different ways to remove rust off of metal and there's pros and cons to each one I'm going to use just regular cleaning vinegar household vinegar and to submerge everything this is a four inch piece of sewer and drain PVC pipe and it'll be probably the most efficient use of space for all of this metal to sit in while the vinegar does it's magic the vinegar does a really good job at removing all of the surface rust and breaking up all of the the deeper the larger pieces of rust that are on there so we still need to gently wipe all the pieces nice and clean and all of the crap that's on them should come right off for the spots that are a little bit more stubborn where the paper towel won't wipe off I'll dip them back in the vinegar and use a brush on an angle dip it again and now every bit of that should be going I'll repeat this with all of the pieces that I have left once all of the pieces are nice and clean it's important to get all of the vinegar off of the metal that way it doesn't continue to eat away at it and to do so I rinsed everything off underneath warm water and made sure everything was absolutely dry that way the warm water doesn't add to more rust in the future I taped off a couple areas inside the plane that need to have bare metal exposed such as where the plane body meets the Frog and for the rest of it I'm just top coating everything with another coat of black paint next up are the handles and they should be extremely simple to do the first one the front handle is just a simple turning and I've created a blank that is nice and square on all six faces and the top and bottom face are exactly parallel and the center points line up with one another that's important for me because once I get this turned on the lathe then I'm going to take it to the drill press and drill the top and bottom counter bore and I want their center points to line up in the middle and that should be pretty easy to do for the rear handle I could use the old handle and trace it out and then just go from there however someone sent me a perfect template that you can also find online for this exact same plane this stanley bailey number five and I can just attach this to my blank and cut it out following the instructions on the template should be extremely simple to do all of the dimensions and holes and placements and such are included in the template so before I can start cutting everything out I do need to get my material down to a four and a half by four and three-quarter inch square and I'll use the crosscut sled on my table saw to do this each one of the handles is mounted onto a piece of threaded rod and the rod goes right through the handle and to secure the handle to the plane there is a piece of brass that is screwed on to the top of it and to check the depth of my counter bore on the new handle I can use this piece of brass onto the threaded rod upside down and push it through the handle to make sure I am at the appropriate depth before drilling my through hole all the way through the handle before leaving the drill press I'll switch back and forth between the front and back handle drilling all of the necessary holes and after not mistaken there was five different drill bits that I needed to use it was a lot of switching back and forth and back and forth depending on the process of what hole I was trying to drill I made the bottom cut on the back handle with the table saw and crosscut sled to make sure that that cut is absolutely perfectly straight and the rest of the cuts can be made on any bandsaw before final shaping with some hand tools I used a pencil on my finger to trace a little bit of an offset line on both of these faces that need to be rounded over and this is just a guideline to guide me with the rasps to make sure I try and make things symmetrical and a little bit more even as I go throughout the rest of this handle to preserve the natural color of the wood and also give the handles a little bit more protection long term I'm using a film finish and I'll just spray on a couple coats of satin lacquer I forgot to mask off the top edge of both of these sides so I do have some paint on them that needs to be removed and I'll just using regular sandpaper for it and then after that I can put some self-adhesive sandpaper onto my table saw which is a known flat surface and use that to make sure that the bottom surface is nice and flat after sandpaper you could polish the plane up to as high of a Polish as you really want but I think I'm at the point of diminishing returns this is a side-by-side comparison of the plane I'm working on next to a low angle Jack plane that is relatively new less than a year old it hasn't seen a lot of abuse and they look pretty much the same not much difference so I think right here's where I'll stop with polishing and now I can focus my attention on the blade before assembly the cutting edge of the blade has a couple deep dings in it so first I'll use my grinder to remove all of the major defects and while I am using the grinder I am making sure to check my progress with a square occasionally to make sure that the edge that I'm left with after the grinder is perpendicular to the sides of the plane blade right before sharpening I do want to polish the blade chip breaker and lever cap and to do so I'm going to use a polishing wheel with a little bit of buffing compound on my lathe I'm not going to go into a full-blown demonstration on how to sharpen an edge because there's so many different techniques and videos out there on how to obtain a obtain a sharp edge but I will say I am using Paul Sellars recommended diamond plates and I'm using Rob Kosmas method for sharpening and once the front edge is just absolutely razor sharp you should be able to feel a burr on the back side and you can remove this burr and sometimes it comes off in a nice long piece like this one right here and I'm not exactly sure if it's going to show up or not but this is a nice full length burr that was on the entire back side of the cutting edge and this tells me after this is removed that this is razor sharp and ready to go the final step before assembly is to go back to the buffing wheel and polish all of the brass pieces all right I do believe I'm ready for assembly so really quick I went ahead and put some just a couple drops of regular three in one oil on all the threads for everything here and the first thing to be installed is this screw that will be below the Frog now the point of this screw is to adjust the Frog forward and backward and therefore adjust the plane blade forward and backward and there is a slot right there on the screw and it interacts with this clip so it goes in place like so and like I said as the screw is advanced so is this back and forth and this gets secured to the bottom side of the Frog and it may not be able to show this as I'm putting in place because this screw is pretty small so this gets screw down and it will sit like so before we do install it though I want to put the adjustment screw on the backside here it is reverse threaded and I need to make sure that as it gets installed as it gets screwed on that it captures this horseshoe shaped piece that on the other side adjusts the plane blade depth so now this is ready to be installed and making sure that this bottom piece lines up now I can determine how far forward and backward I want the Frog to be and I can see that this reference surface that the plane blade will be on is too far back compared to the reference face on the mouth of the opening down here so I will advance this screw down on the bottom and I may have to adjust this back out a little bit once I get it all installed but we're trying to get it a little bit closer and when it's all said and done the closer this is to closer this is forward the the more closed this mouth position will be down here and the smaller the opening the less size of a plain chay-ara wood shaving can come through it so if you want to take very very thin smoothing type passes then it's ideal to have this thing closed forward for just general use it's not that big of a deal so now we need to secure this down and two screws and two washers just eyeballing this to make sure it's not twisted one way or the other this looks pretty straight to me so I'll tighten these up to lock the position of the Frog and of course you can always take the blade off and readjust the Frog as needed I'll spin this around and install the rear handle next and this requires this long threaded rod and a brass screw on one side our brass nut or cap what are you want to call it on one side to go all the way through here and this will go into this screw hole here there's a small one over on this side that I can get started over here on the front of the handle the front handle is installed the same way we've got another brass cap with threaded inside and we'll put a threaded rod inside it put it through the handle and onto here the blade is attached to the back side of the chip breaker with this short and wide screw so on the backside of the chip breaker this screw is threaded on just barely and then the back side of the blade gets attached to it and they swing into place so that the chip breaker does not touch the cutting edge you don't want to damage the cutting edge but you do want it to be like 1/16 or 1/32 of an inch away from the cutting edge and this can be changed depending on how you want the plane to perform as well and making sure it's nice and square I can tighten it down so now this assembly is ready for the plane with the blade back side of the blade up making sure not to ding the front edge of the plane or the blade can be set into place and there is an adjustment lever back here that rides inside this slot of the blade so making sure it is properly in place before the lever cap is installed and the lever cap this is pretty loose holds everything together it's still really loose so with this tightened down or this lever down tighten the screw and this needs to be tight enough so that you can still adjust this with one finger as you're working I think it can be a little bit tighter and that's good so there you go the assembled completed plane all right this is really hard to show on camera so hopefully you follow along with me the plane is upside down and the front handle is facing the camera or facing my eyes and you can see that the plane blade is not sticking through so I'll advance the blade sorry for the shaky hands so the blade is sticking through and from here this is where you can set where you can set the angle so if the blade is skewed to one side when you first start you'll be able to see like right here you'll see that the left side is quite a bit higher than the right side so you have this handle back here that you would just left or right to adjust the blade so if we are let's go back to where we're left left side high then you could pinch the blade towards the high side and it will bring it down a little bit which results in the right side coming up and all you have to do is eyeball this to be visually parallel with this bottom surface and kind of hard to see through the camera here once you have it close just back off the depth of the blade so that the blade goes back into the plane and it's not sticking out as I was just testing this out the mouth of the plane kept getting clogged up causing me to have to remove the blade in order to clear it and that's not what you want so this tells me that the Frog is too far forward in the body so to fix that the lever cap can be removed the blade can be removed and the two screws holding the frog in place can be lightly loosened and then the screw down at the bottom to adjust the frog depth can be backed out just a little bit and I'll back this out by about a sixteenth of an inch and that looks good tighten these back down there are different plane styles out there that allow you to do this without removing the blade but this one is not one of them so now we can go through the process again of setting the blade in the appropriate or having the appropriate angle on the cutting edge of the blade all right that's good you can very easily dial in the angle of the blade with a scrap piece of wood and to do so just advance the blade so that the middle is getting just a little bit of shavings there you go and then put the whole plane to the left or to the right and only try and use that side of the blade in this case the left side over here is not making any cuts and the right side isn't making any either I'll advance it just a little bit the right side is making just a little bit of cut and the left side about the same amount so from here if one side was cutting more and the other side wasn't cutting hardly at all then you'll know that that side is further down and you can adjust it back here but this is cutting just as it should in the end the plane works fantastically and it doesn't look that bad as well this is the second plane that I've gone through this entire I guess restoration process on the original wasn't incredibly bad but the outcome definitely does look a whole lot better in my opinion and if you'd like to have some more information on this entire process and links to other sources then be sure be sure to check out the website article linked in the description of this video and I'll go into further detail explaining everything that I personally know and in pointing in the right direction for stuff that may be a better source of information thanks for watching you guys take care and have a great day you

Channel: Jay Bates

Views: 484,598

Rating: 4.9042377 out of 5

Keywords: jayscustomcreations, jay bates, easy woodworking project, woodworking, woodshop, woodworking projects, make, build

Id: 6EWXg9Y6_TU

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 14 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/screwikea]

1. Unnecessary new handles.
2. No need to flatten the sole on that plane like that.
3. If you're going to flatten the sole, the plane needs to be put together and under tension.

[u/abmorse1]

I haven't seen Jay's video yet, but I really like this in-depth Paul Sellers plane restoration video. http://youtu.be/RYyV6IUpsYk

[u/88bcdev]

If you don't mind me asking, how did you 'ruin' your first plane? These things aren't really that fragile.

[u/Clock_Man]

I like Jay and his stuff, but that tote is terrible. He basically put a 1/4" roundover on it instead of fully shaping it to full half round like you should have. Looks like it would get mighty uncomfortable after a few minutes of use.