Stanley No.5½ Jack Plane Revitalised [video #373]

hi there I'm Peter Millard and in the workshop this week well I'm gonna see if I can revitalize this old hand plane wish me luck it's coming up next so me and hand tools don't really have a great deal of affinity it's not that I have any sort of version to them it's just that doing what I do or doing will certainly do what I did have done for the last 20 years basically fitted furniture built ins from painted or veneered MDF the occasional and very hard wood trimming that's just no real need for hand tools in that sort of environments all very much parcels or very much production based in fact the only three hand tools other than a set of chisels that I have is I've got a an old sort of Stanley Bailey English made number four smoothing plane with the obligatory wobbly handle I've got a Stanley little cheap stanley 25 pound block plane which are a little bit hit-and-miss in terms of quality that was quite good and I've got a crane Shang low angle block plane they were all used for the usual sort of trimming tasks trimming doors maybe in fills that sort of thing but I've never had any great need for any more hand tools than that but it was when I was doing my recent birch ply and wangi side table and also the little bathroom shelf that you may have seen if you're a patron supporter and if you I think very much it brought home that the little smoothing plane whilst it's a perfectly decent plane wasn't really the right tool for the job so I looked into getting something else something a little bit bigger something with a little bit more heft and settled on something like a five and a half Jack plane there's there's plenty of these around on eBay they're not expensive and I picked up this one for about thirty quid off eBay and basically I'm going to try and get this functioning nicely it's sort of planes at the moment the blade needs a lot of work it's more of a sharpening quadrant than a sharpening bevel on it the minute and obviously will give it all a general cleanup but the purpose of the exercise is not to do a full restoration on this I'm not doing the full Paul sellers thing where we make you know this look like new like something your grandfather had in the loft wrapped in oiled paper and handed down to you as a family heirloom the purpose of this is to get a working tool out of it and that's what we're going to do today we're going to give this a give this a whirl give it a bit of a cleanup get that blade sharpened and we'll see if we can get it to cutting nicely okay so what are we going it's a it's a Stanley Bailey five-and-a-half Jack plane made in the USA so left and right and as far as I can tell far as I've been able to ascertain it's a type 15 from 1931 or 32 we'll just pause to ruminate on how a plane the hand plane made in the US during the Depression winds up in my hands in here in London almost 90 years later yeah there's a story there somewhere not too sure what it is but overall it's not in great shape it's not terrible it's it's not great cosmetically the lever cap has a piece taken out of it a nice little chunk nibbled through there common practice as to when you take that the cap I and the chip breaker off the blade is to use the believer cap and we were always shouted at in school in woodworking classes for doing that and that's perhaps the reason why it's got a big chunk taken out of it I don't know if that's going to cause me any problems later on but we'll see overall the whole thing is just kind of brown with rust it hasn't seen a drop of oil or a clean in a long long time so liebe caps got a bit of damage fingers crossed it'll be okay I'm not convinced its original to this plane to be honest because when it's on it screw its locating screw it's not centered across the across the blade so maybe that's a later edition from somewhere else as I said blade in the cap iron chip breaker I seem to be okay rusty blade desperately needs a good sharpened but it does seem to be reasonable general condition and ago the played itself you know there's not a whole lot to go wrong with these we'll have it taken apart to give it a good clean but really the main thing I want to do whilst it's all assembled with the handles on and everything is to get the bottom of it cleaned up and properly flattened and get the sides tidied up as well so it starts to look a little bit shinier and then we can worry about taking this center piece off called the Frog and then we can dismantle all the screws and things give those a good cleanup get rid of all the sawdust and the caked in muck and rubbish in there and then we'll see if we can reassemble it and get it working I'm wrapping a length of p120 abrasive round a piece of MDF and clamping it down to the bench then with a firm even pressure sanding down the base of the plane checking now and then four peaks and troughs when I'm happy with the flatness I move on to the sides pausing to take a breather occasionally and to check progress will stop happy with the results I can move on to very gently rounding over the edges of the plane where the size of your tube base and the same with the heel-and-toe just enough to take off the sharp edges and then finish off with some hand sanding on the other edges of the plane body again just enough to take off any sharpness and to make it a little more comfortable to hold and yes I probably should have worn gloves and a mask very hot work the very dirty as well so that's one hands down let me start stripping a little mechanical bits off while I catch my breath I'm taking the easy option by sanding the rust off the outer faces of the removable parts with a little orbital sander starting with a lever cap moving on to the cation and then the cutting on note that I'm not going anywhere near the actual cutting edges this is purely cosmetic rest removal of the flat faces okay let's clean up reasonably well it is reasonably flat and I've softened off the edges and clean it as best as I can with it as it is I've tender blade and the other bits off obviously I need to be removed this middle piece is called the Frog for some reason I don't really know why let me do that that's just how long with two screws at the frontier and they'll just unscrew and at the back here there's a little yoke that fits over a screw that adjusts that backwards and forwards that's four on the block planes you can change the size of the mouth this is effectively doing the same thing you move the whole sort of blade assembly back and forth not the depth of cut just the whole things to make finer shavings or not so we'll just take this off it's held in with two screws one and two and there's just carefully take off assembly around that setting screw at the back we've got this screw in the center here this is just for retaining the leaver cap it's where those off we can give there's a bit of a cleanup and a bit of a flatten and get the sort of stuff everything on this one there doesn't seem to be a way to get the this screw off nor month on the other planes I've got this will actually come back far enough to remove that completely but it doesn't seem to be the case on this one and I don't want to force it so we'll clean it up as best we can with the institute like this and then do the same with all this muck and rubbish inside here so gloves on this time I think and we'll get on with that from cleaning up the Frog with a small wire brush then moving on to the plain body and then wrapped in a twist of paper to protect the newly clean threads I'm cleaning up the screw heads with a cordless drill and a bit of sandpaper and finally the smaller parts are cleaned up with a tiny wire brush on a dremel knockoff that I bought a decade ago finally I found a use for it and back at the sanding board I can clean up and flatten the face of the frog so just finish flattening off the Frog that's all come out nicely it was bugging me a little bit that I couldn't get rid of it couldn't get the the old nut off this the change of the depth of cut it's running really smoothly really freely but it should come off and I couldn't see any reason why not and it got to the point where I just couldn't turn it any more I didn't want to force it because I didn't want to risk damaging the the little yoke and lever that interacts with the blade to get to the depth of cut in fact as I took it to the point where it felt like it wouldn't turn anymore there was no pressure at all on this yoke on this little lever so I sort of powered through it if you like and it was just a slightly gummy thread right at the very top and that's all come up really nicely so I'll give there's a quick cleanup when I've got a second just go because I get a a wire brush on there the other thing I've done is I've got the cation or chip breaker you might call it cleaned up just a couple of strokes across the sandpaper but across the braces really really flat and that fits nicely on the back of the blade or the cutting iron and there's no no gap in there at all there's no you know couldn't get any shavings under there you can't even get a fingernail under there when you when you're holding it together so that's nice and flat so the next thing we're going to do is talk about sharpening now I'm the last person to try and teach anybody had a sharpened because as I said earlier on there are knees handle as much I put a little bit of an edge on my chisels occasionally when I need them but you know I'm not a sharpening guru wars have started over sharpening approaches so all I'm going to do I'm going to show you what I do for the moment as I get more involved in hand tools if I use hand planes more and that sort of thing then I will probably change my sharpening methods but for now let me show you what I use and what I do to get an edge on a blade like this to get a 25-degree grinding bevel I'm using a honing guide this one by Veritas and I'm using a simple little measuring Jake tell let me get the angle right there are many ways they're doing this one of my favorites is a little 25 degree wedge cut from scrap on the miter saw they can visually check against and where the blade nipped up in the homing guide I can check the blade for square and adjust it if necessary okay so just like before the hood special Jesus and paper wrapped around a board we've got a kind of guy in the honing guide and we're just going to run this back and forth dry until sandpaper just to get us that that grinding angle as I said everyone it's more about there's not so much as a bevel on there as a quadrant so it's going to take a little while so we'll do a little bit of this no come back to you whenever I'm using lapping film as a sharpening surface that's thin abrasive sheets these by 3m that a spray glued to a flat surface this one's an old kitchen cabinet door in coarse medium and fine grits and starting with the course we'll have to take my word for that I'm putting the primary bevel flat on the surface then raising the back of the cutting iron ever so slightly I can start making steady movements trying to keep a consistent pressure until I feel a slight burr on the back of the blade and then move on to the next grit repeating the process finally I'm taking off the burr on the back of the blade with the blade flat against the surface and yes in my excitement of having three new sheets of film to play with I forgot to use any lubricant still work pretty well that's what I tend to do anyway I was taught at school to strop against the palm of your hand heard a lot of kids walking around with cuts and hands works ok for planar irons not so good with chisels just you know word of warning I could probably strop against a piece of leather or use a cutting compound against a piece of MDF or Tcat or whatever many of the other many varied ways of doing it but that works for me let's pop this plane back together feels pretty good let's pop this plane back together so it cuts okay so first things first let's get the this little set screw in this is the one of the Frog as against it's got a little you could put there but halfway squeeze these screws in with their bushes take off turn you around so that you guys can see what I'm doing it's better isn't it yes oh he is just going and then just use them off a little bit so you can move the frog if you need to you know what I probably should have done before I did that was pop there's something man live on in there pop of this on I'm just going to make sure that that yolk falls into place bearing in mind it is a left hand thread that's an easy that's you can accept this set screw baloney there it's really assemble oh yes this goes my favour brother only cloth surfaces that air against each other you're just going to pop that here now that that around so there's a couple of mouths of plague show [Music] leave a cap snaps down nicely he's just starting to show through after sending the plane to cut evenly it's time to make some shavings first on some rough sawn oak and then the real test on a stack of glued up birch ply I said that was pretty much spot-on give me a second so then now that's a stanley bailey type fifteen number five and a half jack plane from 1931 or 32 as far as I can tell given an extended lease of life simply by basically sanding it sharpening it and oiling it amazing considering the condition arrived in I didn't hold out much hope but it's come together really well with the absolute minimum of tool kit it's going to be set so I'm really very pleased with how it's turned out I'm trying to avoid all those are words restoration renovation and refurbishment because that's not what I've done here if I wanted to do that then you could really do the whole number on it get the handles are free so to clean it up and make it pristine I just wanted a working hand plane ordered a five and a half Jack plane something with a bit of heft to it to do the cross grain cutting and that seems to do that extremely well and I'm really pleased with it so yeah if you happen upon one of these that say I can't even begin to imagine how many they made it must have been hundreds of thousands if you happen upon one at a knockdown price even whatever state it's in I'd say give it a try pull it apart send it sharpen it oil it put it back together again and you may well have something that's a fully working tool and gives you a bit more sense of satisfaction than just buying one from a shop anyway that's it for this week I hope you've enjoyed it and hope you've found it interesting and useful if you did give the video a thumbs up share it out amongst your friends and don't forget to subscribe for more weekly workshop videos I want to take a second just to thank all of my patreon supporters because without the patreon support well I really wouldn't be able to get the lights on here and obviously having the lights on when you're making videos is a big bonus so thank you very much to all of our patreon supporters you can join the patreon party at patreon.com forward slash 10-minute workshop and if you do don't forget you need a credit or debit card to pledge your support but those cards aren't charged until the first of the month so it gives you a couple of weeks if you sign up now almost three to have a rittle around the patreon channel and see what I'm doing over there for my patreon supporters I do a weekly video for my patreon supporters which is rapidly becoming my second channel and those videos seem to be going down quite well sometimes they're behind the scenes sometimes they're over the shoulders and sometimes they're just sort of loggia bits and pieces of me going about my daily business if that sounds like your kind of thing then head over to patreon comm forward slash 10-minute workshop to join the patreon party but that's it for this week thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time take care [Music]

Channel: Peter Millard

Views: 28,789

Rating: 4.9349594 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, workshop, DIY hack, how-to, carpentry, cabinets, festool, MDF, Vintage, hand plane, vintage Stanley, Stanley 51/2, Stanley Jack plane, Hand Plane restoration, vintage hand plane restoration

Id: l9PyuZMRsUU

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020