Restoring the worst plane on Ebay!

so spotted this thing on ebay earlier this year and what a piece of junk spend ninety nine cents on it overpaid by about ninety nine cents because this thing is just an expensive piece of firewood but I thought well what a challenge see if I can make this thing into something better and you want a sneak peek Shh this is what I got it looking like and even it's even pretty functional too so hang up the next 30 minutes or so and I'll show you how I did it this is working wooden planes I'm Abraham I take antique planes and get him back into work and conditioned so yeah like I said eBay purchase like to spend some time on eBay now and again looking at looking for possible deals looking for possible projects saw this thing and not surprisingly I was the only bidder for it got it in the mail and man if it's even possible is worse condition than I thought it was in super dried out just completely desiccated yeah a real a real piece of junk so let's let's take it apart and and and get a good idea of what exactly is wrong with it first off the wood is just completely dried out and it's split in multiple places got huge cracks through it the biggest one obviously is in the toe you can't totally tell but that crack actually goes all the way down to the base of the throat this toe is almost completely split in half it's just the only place that that's holding together is right down there towards the bottom tip and yeah major major problem that's the first thing that we're gonna have to address with this next bit is that the cheek at the top has split out and will need to be repaired the cheek itself is is popped out both at the back of it in the front of it on the right side left side looks a little bit better but this would I mean you can just take your fingernail and just scrape it off it's so dried out so when I sand this thing down you know one of my main concerns is if I just start sanding I'm just gonna keep sanding until there's nothing left surprisingly the sole is totally flat somehow I don't know how that's even possible but yeah completely flat we won't need to do much - laughs the sole so that's one one less thing that needs to be done with it so I'm going to use epoxy resin to try and stabilize the cracks in the toe one of the things I want to avoid hopefully having to do is to put a some kind of reinforcement through the toe itself side to side to stabilize it and there's a there's a precedent for that you can find plenty of old smoothing planes like this that have something stuck through the through the toe to prevent splitting because it's a pretty common problem so this is like a DIY or somebody used it somebody did something to keep the toe from from the crack in that from spreading you can even you can even buy them new with the reinforcements in it this is a plane from a earlier restoration video and it came from the from the manufacturer that way it came from the from the factory that way so I really don't want to have to do that I'm hoping that the the resin will will will make it strong enough where we don't have to but the proof is gonna be the minute I I smack it with a mallet when I am resetting the iron and the whole thing it's you know it's gonna split apart so let's look at the wedge real quick wedge happens to be in fairly decent condition it's got some cracks in it but surprisingly much better condition than the plane itself the iron is gonna have to try and pop that pop that open luckily wasn't completely frozen as you can see serious serious rust all over the iron so yeah deep deep heavy heavy rust expect some real serious pitting in there I ended up leaving this in a vapor rust for five five full days to get all the rust off I take it out once a day and scrub it and then throw it back in the vapor rust surprisingly the the edge of the iron is in pretty pretty decent shape no no huge chunks out of it nothing major missing so ended up being fairly easy to put a new a new bevel on that I clean up the bevel and put a new bevel on it so normally I would never sand a plane I was restoring you never want to take off the original finish or the finish that's built up over time Tina if you wanna call it that but this you know that this is just dead rotten wood on the outside and I was rotten but it's completely dried out so I thought to get it back into at least a better looking shape I would sand it and just sand the surface roughness off because this thing was so dried out that like I said you can just start sanding and keep sanding and keep sanding and then that with nothing but a pile of dust so first one side and as you can see I'm using 100 grit on this after I was done with 100 grit I used I believe it was 220 as a final sanding but the bulk of the work was done with this hundred grit really this was the bulk of the work that was you know done on the body aside from eventually we're gonna use some epoxy resin and fill in some of those cracks but it was just sanding it sanding it down that took probably a good 30 minutes or so trying to get it off try to get it to to something that looked a little bit better the didn't I'm not sanding the soul right now because I'll lap that later on so right now I'm just focusing on the top and the sides and then inside the throat as well so once I was finished you know this is kind of what I expected it to look like kind of a big you know we're gonna have to wait and see what it looks like once we put some some some wax on it and and hopefully make it look a little a little more finished but yeah a lot of that you could still still just take your thumbnail and and grind out more wood so the first thing I want to do here is we're going to try and fix the cheek and fix right behind the eye so take some a little bit of epoxy and a syringe mix it on up and then we're just gonna try and inject that down kind of as deep as we can into the throat or into the cheek and clamp that try not to squeeze too much of the epoxy out and then I'm going to try and do the same thing with the cheeks themselves where they've split out the there's a lot of outward force that occurs when the iron is in place and has been wedged in place with the wedge and a lot of forward force that occurs as well as the wedge is is jammed into place - so these two places that have cracked the likelihood of this splitting open again is pretty high the other thing that's that's going on here too is that the wood is so dry that the epoxy ends up just soaking into the wood it doesn't actually sit in between the in the open space between where the cracks are so after I had epoxy dis I went back again on the cheek and added a little bit more because this first time around it just like I said it just soaked in there wasn't any excess - that was even getting squeezed out when I put the when I put the clamps on so doesn't really bode well for how strong this this is going to be later on on to the resin so taping this thing up pretty good it really wanted to tape with the base because it just didn't know if all these cracks just went straight through to the bottom it's gonna end up dumping resin all out through the when I try to pour it in I wasn't really sure how deep I was gonna get the resin to go in those cracks as well and it being pretty successful but I knew that the issue like with the when I was a boxing the sides of the other cheek is that this resin was just gonna start soaking in and soaking in and I would never get the it to pool completely flat on the top of the toe because as it's slowly cured it would continue to soak in and I'd never be able to add enough to the top to get it to to sit completely flat if that makes any sense which ended up being a problem but for the first pour it was it worked out it worked out pretty well it got really deep inside those cracks so once I had it taped up I was pretty happy with with the with how it looked and I'm gonna skip forward to this pretty quick it's very self-explanatory if you've ever used it before equal parts hardener equal parts resin you mix it really really well I didn't have a decent container so I ended up using a Tupperware I also mixed it to go off pretty slow didn't wanted to to go off super hot and and not have enough time for this to just mess around with it so really debated over whether or not I wanted to just leave it clear and I thought that you just be able to see too many bubbles and it might look kind of funky so I decided to use dark grey I didn't have any brown I couldn't find any brown coloring so I went with grey and yeah here's what it is what happened though is that I ended up like I said I was worried about it it caring completely flat and it didn't it cured with a little dip in the toe which you'll see here in a minute so I mixed up a second batch and I mixed it up a lot hotter and poured it and because of the difference in the the curing temperature the second batch looked a little bit different than the first batch and so there's this like kind of it's not a discoloring it's just a sort of the epoxy ended up not looking quite as smooth or the resident end up not having set a really consistent color which is an aesthetic issue it's not the end of the world but I wish it could have looked a little bit better the final product this is what it looked like the first batch taking the tape off from it you can see that dip in there where as I cured it continued to soak into the wood it was pretty surprised though that I was able to get such deep penetration into the end of the cracks of the wood that that major crack ended up filling all the way down to the to the sole I was really I was very pleasantly surprised so this is still the first batch sanded it down [Music] and I didn't film any of the second batch and redundancy where he saw the first one this is what the final one looked like this is the final after the second resin poor I wasn't 100% sure what to do with the two to finish the wood I ended up deciding to use oil soap on it I thought that the oils would do would be helpful to the damaged wood this is what I would do with a normal plane to clean it up this one obviously all the dirt had already been rubbed off or shoes me sanded off but I thought that the oil from the oil soaked the Murphy's Oil Soap wood would help the wood and I think I was right I think that was the right call to make so once I had done all the sides put two coats of paste wax on it to finish it off and I think I ended up with it looking okay for how it started this is definitely a massive improvement you know that the that resin you know I mean there's no way around it it looks kind of funky it looks kind of weird but I don't really think there was a choice you had to stabilize that those cracks somehow and I think this was the only really the only option that was really available I can't I couldn't think of a better way to do it if you if you could think of a better way to do this let me know in the comments it's not yeah I'm totally open to suggestions for something like this if I ever decided to do it again in the future so the irons sat in a vaporous for five full days this is the final the final day still still getting rust off of them serious deep pitting not to be surprised considering the condition it was in but they cleaned up okay I mean they cleaned up as good as you can expect chipbreaker looked okay iron had a lot more a lot more rust still on it that needed to come off since I've finished scrubbing those down was time to flatten the back I can sure to keep that cooled off a little glass of water flat in the back two reasons one of them you want to make sure that the chip breaker and iron and I'm very flat contact between the two of them there's a real solid marriage between the two of them and second reason is is you're gonna put a little back bevel on this and you need to be flat for that as well then after that I just tried to clean up the existing bevel and at the same time start to put a tiny bit of a camber on it as well so rocking it back and forth and was able to clean up most of the pits and the chunky bits that were missing able to grind it down far enough so from there put it on the 300 again it's kind of hard to tell because it's sped up but putting a little bit of a camber on it rocking it back and forth in the sharpen and it's sharpened up pretty quick I I thought I was gonna have to do a lot more work on this but it and I was able to put a new bevel on it very quickly took a file and filed off the corners what you want to do in smoothing point so you didn't get steps in your work surface gonna take the sharp edges off and from there it went to the 1000 grit probably he spent about five minutes on each side of the plate on the 300 and 1000 like I said it was pretty surprisingly quick stropped it and bligg Ettore shaving of the hair got a nice and sharp so now it comes to betting rivetting the that's broke we betting the iron and flattening the throat you want there to be consistent contact between iron at the top of this road and the bottom of the mouth don't want any high spots in between you can make the iron can make contact in between the top of the throat and mouth but it has to be consistent all the way across and all things like that it's very rarely good you don't get that completely flat you get chatter and it really screws up when you're trying to trying to use the plane they'll get really funky shavings which you'll which you will see in a minute would you get that flatten down and in theory if the cheeks the glue on the cheeks hold the epoxy on the cheeks holds then all of the components of the plane the wedge and the iron and the chip breaker and the plane itself should hold steady but the chip breaker on here gave it about 1/32 of an inch exposed that gap between the chip breaker and the iron is the thickness of your shaming and let's set the iron here needs to get set a little deeper and surprisingly at least I was surprised we've got it to work now what was happening as I was planing and I didn't watch it happen but it was occurring is that the cheek is splitting out again that the force on the cheek by the just from using it popped open every place there I tried to glue it which I'm not really surprised by that was that was a difficult difficult thing to glue up and not really certain what I could have done more outside of actually just screwing them down maybe but while this works really well on the edge of a board that's not how you use a smoothing plane in fact if you ever watched restoration videos and the person who's restoring them only planes on the edge of a board that's cheating this is not a it's not a joiner this is not a jack plane this is made to be used on the face of a board so let's use it on the face of the board see how it does so it's worth noting that the this plane was used 200 I laughed the soul and didn't film it so the soul has already been has already been left it's just noting worth noting real quick that the mouth here is very wide the only way to deal with that would be to chop out the sole in front of the mouth and put a new insert in there ideally you want the iron to be by the sixteenth of an inch away from the front of the mouth and there's no way that the way that is now that we would get so yeah there's you can see what that's all split open again anyways the mouth is so big we're never gonna get the super fluffy shavings that we would expect to get from a smoothing plane but I still think that we can I still think that we can get it to work yeah that's that's all separated oh well I tried so what you're gonna see is that as we use this normally there's gonna be some chatter and there's gonna be some of those weird they look like rigid potato chips and that's from the iron bouncing around as it as we planed but the thing that was surprising to me is that we only got a little bit of chatter that I was actually able to use this really it worked really well it worked surprisingly well that's a deeper those are thicker shavings and I would ideally want with a with a smoothing plane but we're not getting any steps I think a lot of the reason it's working well is because I'm a super shark and it's actually just not the iron is just not moving around as much as I thought that it would and we're getting it's doing a great job and we're talking you know icy slick there's one of those those ridge shavings from the iron moving around but it's not happening with every pass which is what I really thought yeah this is as smooth as you would ever get it with smooth and you would ever get it with sandpaper so now final test we need to release the iron so we got to hit it with a mallet got to pop that iron loose and surprisingly it stayed it stayed steady it didn't it didn't pop open which is really what I expected it to do the minute I the minute I smacked it I don't know how much more how much more it could take without without busting open but yeah it this was uh started off pretty bad and got to an okay place I think it's not something I'm gonna be using every day but it was a fun project and tell me what you think tell me if you think I should have done anything differently if the resin repair was really the only way to do this if there was a better option the like I said it was essentially an expensive piece of firewood and it was fun turning it back into something that was actually usable if you like these videos do the whole comment subscribe like thing it's really fun to see that other people have been enjoying these these videos and watching them and are digging the same kind of stuff yeah thanks for watching and good bye

Channel: Working Wooden Planes

Views: 1,972

Rating: 4.9402986 out of 5

Keywords: smoothing plane, wood plane, resin, epoxy, restoration, evaporust, how to restore, how to set up wood plane, hardwood, tutorial, plane iron, hand tools, hand tools restoration, antique tools, woodworking projects, wood plane setup, how to sharpen, sharpening, hand tool rescue, wood planes for beginners, woodworking, cabinetry, carpentry

Id: 6DlCXqWOF7A

Length: 27min 43sec (1663 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/oldtoolfool]

Frankly, some things are not worth the effort. This is one of them. Even as "restored," it will never do good work without a new sole, as the mouth is too big. Ok for rough work, but so are many things.

[u/Proteus617]

Nice work, but DIWhy. The cheeks are blown out and the throat is wide open. The big checks on the body are way ugly, but patching them wont help much.