Restoring A Stanley No.4 Hand Plane

that's along the wall I picked up a few boxes of planes after fella up in North Cork and this is one of them he reckons it was only ever used once but at some point throated life some fella decided to paint blue so these things never work quite as well as they should after they've been left idle for a couple of decades so in this video we're gonna take the whole thing apart and it'll come apart for me and I'm gonna get it going as if it was brand new once again now before I take the whole thing entirely apart I'm going to give it a quick test so I locked a piece of pine into the vice there now and I didn't do any adjusting or anything like that and it just about took a shaving not a very good one mind you but it always surprises me when these things actually work having been left idle for so long and when you're taking hand planes apart it's always good to have a WD-40 by your side just to make sure everything is moving loose so we'll pop off the liver cap there and I'll remove the iron and the chip breaker and just set that down to the side for now now the frog is attached to the main body of the plane to these little frog screws here so we're just gonna loosen them up they're already fairly loose to begin with and just screw them out and lift that fill up there now and also put him to the side and that leaves us with just the body with the two handles still attached to us now at some point some fella decided they'd paint this plain blue for whatever reason I don't think it looks good at all so I'm gonna come along here now with an exceptionally sharp chisel and see if I can just scrape that paint off ever so slowly one bit at a time what's up if we just come along with the Chisel there now serious shaving it's also a big fight so I have all the paint removed from the outside of the body now and now I'm going to do a process known as lapping now lapping is basically where you get a big slab of granite like this fella here bring them away in home with chip get a towel then and just wipe it down so it's nice and clean and then get an equally long piece of sandpaper and just fold it away under and now we're ready to go so all that entails is just moving our playing backwards and forwards on the piece of sandpaper now I know for a fact that this slab of granite is perfectly flat and I'm not too sure the soil is perfectly flat it's probably not so if we keep on just running the plane over the Sandpaper that's on the granite eventually we should be able to translate the flat surface and have the soil of our plane dead flat now we're at a point now where you can see the parts that are being sanded away those would be known as the high spots whereas the parts that are still kind of dirty here those will be the lower spots and basically we need to keep on laughing until all the law spots have disappeared so as well as the soul I also have to lap the science so it's pretty straightforward just turn it over and repeat the same process right so here it is now we've decided to look nice and shiny once more but now a problem that I'm faced with is inside the plane it's still blue and I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to get that out I tried scraping it but there's a layer of the proper black paint underneath the blue paint and if I scrape away the blue paint it just takes the black paint with it so I think I'm just gonna have to remove all the paint which is unfortunate but we'll see anyway now once I remove the handles what I can do update I don't think there's any hope for the paint left inside this plane I just have a sanding pad here and I'm just scraping it down but I'm trying to only go down to the layer of black paint but it's not really working but you know what's what harm This Plane will still work fine the paint is only cosmetic and we can live without that so I'm pretty happy with the state the body is in now obviously there is patches of blue but this is a plane I'm going to use it doesn't need to look great it'll still work perfectly Grand so now that the body is done I want to move on to the handles and I'm faced with a bit of a problem so you can see there now we have the toes and it still has the varnish that it came out of the factory with and it's kind of started to crack and peel off in places now I really don't like handles with varnish on them I prefer just to have the raw wood with maybe a bit of linseed oil and then over time the constant rubbing of your hand against the tool gives it a really nice shiny polished finish I love that I think that's far superior than any kind of finish you guess from varnish so what I'm gonna do is Chuck it into the Vise here see if I can find one of my card scrapers here I'll just use them and figure out which one is sharpest but basically what I'm going to do is just come along lock her in place and scrape off all that varnish leaving just the bare wood behind so I have the wood without any of the varnish harness and now I'm just going to sand it all smooth once again have it all sanded now and here is one of my favorite tricks when restoring hand planes see this little screw board thing that attaches the handle onto the plane itself it's developed kind of like a patina basically it's not shiny anymore and in order to fix that I'm just going to throw it into the Chuck of my drill here foreign there we go I have a piece of steel wool here and I'm just gonna do that for like two seconds keep on going out apply a bit of pressure and just like this we have it looking better than it's ever looked before with that done then we can just screw the handle right back onto the plane now I very much need to bite the bullets and buy myself a new bottle of linseed oil but for now this axile is kind of getting me over the line and we can see there now it's kind of can be the grain making this a lot nicer and that should seal us to some extent a bit of hand playing terminology for you the rear handle is known as the torch I think I think the front one then is known as the knob so pretty much the same old story for fixing them I took all the varnish off and now what this fell is locked into place I'm gonna grab a sanding disc and just kind of give him a last bit of a bit of a clean before bringing the axile raining down upon us just to kind of seamless to be fair now I'm giving this axile A Hard Review than it deserves it's doing the trick and it's definitely you know getting you over the line that's what I wait until the shots reopen until I can get some linseed oil the World Cup design as I speak so no shops or anything like that is going to be open and now it's time to move on to the iron so I'm basically just gonna separate the chip breaker for now and worry about the blade itself so here's my Speedy guide to getting a play and iron fairly sharp now there's a bit of rust to worry about later for now I'm just going to worry about the edge so basically I'm going to start by flattening the back and for that I'm going to figure it out to 400 grit here I'm going to start by just flattening the back of this until it's completely clean God knows we're going to use some WD-40 to lube up the diamond Stone just so we can sharpen a bit more smooth right now that we have the backed on I'm just going to freehand a primary bevel so basically hold it like this and go like this for a while one of the best things you can save time as a woodworker is learn how to sharpen freehand now eventually you will have to go back and share the honing guide to get everything back to straight and square and all this but this plane is pretty good to begin with so I'm just going to sharpen her entirely with my hands so now it's time for us to flip the Stone from 400 grits all the way up to a thousand grits same process of just getting the back good and flat and then we can move on and work on our primary bevel now this means the edge that is actually at the tip of the iron so we want to very carefully match the angle and just pull like this and you should be able to see at the very tip that little Burr is starting to appear once we have that done I'm going to bring it onto the strap here and just pull it like that a few times before turning it around it looks like the strapping compound is running a bit low so I'm going to reach into my box here and just add another bit of s it's basically just very fine grisp paste that'll run along the plain iron and make it nice and shiny and smooth now although I haven't had exactly a whole pile of time to grow my arm hairs back this plain iron is having no problem shaving off whatever starts to grow right off so for the rest of the rust of the iron I'm just going to give it a quick splash of WD-40 and then grab a sanding disc this one here was pretty used but we'll manage we'll just basically give it a quick scrub as you can see there now it's coming off fairly easy well basically I rub it like this for just a few seconds before coming along with the towel every so often and every time we do us we pretty much get rid of slightly more rust now this part of the chip breaker is going to be sitting flush with the iron so it's probably already flat enough to begin with but just to be sure I'm going to match it along here with the diamond Stone and just lapis so that it's good and flash a few times and there we go just like that that's pretty much ready so same old treatment of just WD-40 and sandpaper to get rid of all that surface rust now for the Frog which is this part here I'm just going to remove this little screw fella and there's a quick bit of rust uh now ideally this should be dead flat so I'm going to bring the diamond Stone back out to use and basically just run the stone allowing us like this and then just swap it over to the other side ideally they should be perfectly flat coming out of the factory and if this plane didn't get a whole lot of use that shouldn't really be a problem it looks to me like we won't be at this for very long anyway it's already fairly flat so I'll just do this for a few more minutes and then we should be ready to put the whole plane back together so with that all done I don't think there's anything left to do really now only put the thing back together again so that's how we'll do next so I have the Frog set into place there now and I'm just using the Frog adjuster screw back here to move it slightly forward so we'll carefully placed the iron in that's enough rub the edge off any bits of metal and risk blunting it I think that's fairly good now now for the mom's truth we're gonna try to get this fella to just hop on so we just need to loosen this screw here then and this fella should pop into place nice and satisfying there we go now all that's left to do is take her for a test drive so here we have our now leads pretty much ready to go it's not the most attractive looking tool in the world but it doesn't have to be once it can be used as a smoothing plane I'll be perfectly happy now I already have about three or four of these so this fella will probably make his way up for sale in the coming days if anyone's looking for one but for now Etsy does a work price so I have a piece of pie in here this face is pretty much rough sand so it's pretty rough looking it's not in any way smooth and now to test out the plane we're just gonna bring it up to us and let it do its thing so I'm gonna zoom in the camera there so you guys have a better idea so we can see there are no leads smoothen out that surface like it was absolutely nothing so we can see there now the plane is doing exactly what it's supposed to do so it'll be ready now to move into a new home I'll throw it up for sale there tonight um thanks for watching I hope you learned something and I'll talk to you again in the next one good luck

Channel: Eoin Reardon

Views: 82,519

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Id: XPQYSbDDiCc

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2022