Stanley plane and scraper modifications

hello Paul handler here welcome back to my youtube channel what you're just sawing it short opening clip was I pinned the planes and stripers behind me on the workbench that I have modified and made some type of modification to in some cases some of the tubes were completely built from scratch I started collecting Stanley planes back in the 80s and young guy Believe It or Not had small kids and like any other collection once you get it to a certain level you start going after some of the exotic harder to find tubes more expensive - well I was fascinated at the time I was building a lot of Queen Anne Chippendale chairs and got involved with scrapers and was fascinated with what the two could do and there was some scrapers that were at the high end of the Stanley collecting rate and I just couldn't afford and so I started taking some old clunker planes and modifying them and converting them into scrapers and beaters etc and what we're going to do today is we're going to just cycle through I think I've picked out ten out of the archives and you'll know they're from the archives when you see the close-up shots of all the dust on them but what I'm gonna do is just tell a little story and give an overview of how this modification came about what his purpose is in a lot of cases we had some failures they didn't perform as I expected but in some cases they exceed expectations and we'll look at a transition of a scraper insert a little overview a little more in depth of how it evolved and came about so with that we'll get out way and start showing you some planes Stanley planes that were modified as I needed a special function here's a stanley number three that i made a modification to by just taking a piece of sheet brass I think it's a little over H when it's thick and drilling and tapping some holes in the body of the stanley number three one of the reasons i chose to do this the plane was tracked and it not only did it serve as mending the plane it gave me a fence and a guide in you know in coordination with using the lateral adjustment to give me a good 90-degree edge when planing boards what I did is on the inside I put a piece of lignum vitae and give it a smooth rubbing surface as I was joining you know edges of boards really quick easy fix it's it's a good it's a good go-to plane when you want something to be perfectly straight the first time around now one of the things I'd like to point out here in this video is if you've never worked metal if you're primarily a wood worker don't shy away from experimenting and working on some of these planes and modifications that you'll see cast iron is extremely easy to machine and most of these tools here up and through about halfway through the only tool honed in the shop at the time was a radial arm saw in a drill press so it doesn't take a lot of machinery but I encourage you to experiment with the with the cast iron on some of these modifications this is one of my favorites one of the tools and collecting stanley tubes that i used to lust for was a stanley 85 or 87 and what I did here is I took a stanley 80 it was a broken stanley 80 scraper plane i just set it in the background here and with the hacksaw I cut out a center section of it and inserted it in to the bed of this modified striper and one of the things that was said arresting and reading is Stanley catalogs on this the waitest plane was intended to be used it has had a extremely thin blade when you think of a blade as a stretcher blade somewhere around 25 or 30 thousands was a stock blade that came with the still 85 and what you would do is it would be adjusted so that the front of the blade was closed and touching the front of the mouth so that when it started scraping its thin blade would flex and create a fine throat opening for the shavings to come out of extremely effective to because I had used to 80 as an insert I had one little advantage that to still 85 87 didn't have is I had the center thumb adjusting screws to go in and bow and flex the bite blade to give me a little bit of a fine adjustment is required they share work and share legs occasionally I would you see the bees are playing in the background here as a beater and it's it's a very effective very fish it too however would you have some beating it needs to be done down a edge of a board or a straight chair leg or something like that well you need a fence or straight edge to keep the the beating to in constant alignment with the edge of the board I had this idea and I took a piece of aluminum cut it and bent it maybe you can better view of it here I bet the aluminum drilled a few holes in it attach it to the bed of the plane and across the front of the aluminum just tapped a couple of couple of holes and put a brass retainer in there to hold the blade and as a added features to keep it straight I took a discarded fence off of my fingers Stanley 78 and drill a tapped a hole in the side of the plane for the rod for the for the fence and very very efficient tool this probably in conjunction with the one you just saw before this was two of the most successful conversions minutes that I did over the years as I said earlier all the ideas didn't turn out perfect this was I guess what I've turned out halfway it was not a Stanley plane but it was some low-end cheap smoothing plane and because it had the vertical post was cast into the body it was there I utilized that to put an adjusting screw for the the Frog mechanism and one of the things that keep out of this project as you see this it's the spring-loaded it's pulling the Frog against the center adjustment lever or screw and one of the things that I learned on this is the smartest extremely small amount of tilt or taper or forward backward tilt of the Frog mechanism it's just such a small amount of motion in an arc that's required to change the depth of current and from this prototype or from this experiment it led to my next modification but this guy was done shortly after I got into casting I did cast the lever camp and the Frog on this piece here's one of the first castings did all in all it's a pretty effective really lightweight scraper very much like to the 85 I converted so the the previous play we looked at turned on a few light bulbs in the adjustment mechanism and this is kind of a homemade Stanley 212 at the time and I guess even today the - Stanley 212 is a very desirable very collectible play and also very expensive at the time I think they were a thousand eleven hundred twelve hundred dollars for us Stanley - twelve so I had an old stanley number two body that I picked up at the flea market that was all it was was a body so I took the body and cast the lever kept pieces in the center portion that the wrought digesting rod goes through was fabricated from like a piece of angle iron it was laying already shop very quick you know a few cuts to drill two holes for the holding screws because I didn't have the embossing on the back of the the plane to hold the knob what we did is took a piece of round brass and cut it off of the angle and we screwed it in from the back to get that angle for the knob and no I thought I had a so long there but this one is just the cast iron so anyway this guy was very very effective and it allowed me to believe that their saw there was a lot of comments and people interested in buying this thing so that led me to the next project and that was to manufacture some Hammel or two to twelve scraper plays here's a picture of two of the production of two twelves on a deal over the years and I wanted to be sensitive to collectors that didn't want to think I was trying to reproduce a copy Stanley so purposely I had cast into the bodies the ht4 handler tools so these I don't remember how many of these I did but they're pretty rare and one day they're going to be collectible now you see two versions of this of this - what on the right was traditionally the way - Stanley did the adjusting mechanism on the on the Frog for adjusting your depth of cut the one on the left was taken from the idea that we looked at earlier where I had spring-loaded these frog mechanism so I realized that the mechanics of this is such that when the blade is going forward you're pushing a striper forward the pivot point be it nice to bottom it has a tendency to pull the the rod into the stop and the way you would adjust these traditionally would you would loosen the front nut nut and loosen the back nut and tilt your scraper tighten the two nuts back and forth it was a very tedious of Lavoie job to do that so by replacing the front nut with a spring and then all you could do all you had to do is just turn the rear nut either clockwise or counterclockwise to change your depth to cut and it's so so simple and so easy to do you can actually do it on the fly on your return stroke if you decide you want a deeper cut you just loosen the screw that gives you more bite if you want a line of cuts you tighten the screw and it brings the Frog up a little higher and actually I probably got that backwards but either way you could you could change it on the fly this spring-loaded adjusted adjustment mechanism was so effective I think I would grab I grabbed every scraper in the house and modified it here's an example of a 2:12 that I had taken the front and I out and put a spring in it and back when I was doing the prototype 212 like I said the only tool I had if they're still at the time was a radial arm saw it a drill didn't have any mental working machinery but what I did is I was getting the drill press set up to drill the the hole through the bottom of the plane I made a boot boot and ended up drilling a hole all the way through the sole of the casting so I said well let's just don't look too good so I decided to cover it up with a piece of thick Brazilian rosewood I remember I put this on with some Constantine's veneer glue it's been on there I know 25 27 years and it's worn very well occasionally I'll just just real lightly true it up with the total scraper but it makes a really smooth frictionless sweep going across the board particularly if you want to just put a little wax on there which is I have found it's not really necessary with natural also said mr. Brazilian rosewood so this this kind of came about as a boo-boo I was up visiting with John Walters when the early Stanley to dealers and aficionados and right across it a shop a copy of a from the Stanley archives a patent paper that Stanley had applied and it was basically what you see here it was an insert that you would take your frog or your blade in you your lubbock blade and chipbreaker and drop just brass what you see here is the brass insert and yeah I mean when I saw it was like an aha moment I said I got to make one of these so I came back this was a prototype in the mechanism that touching up against the lever cap screw and is attached to the back of the the vertical post that holds the vertical section that it holds the stripper blade by tightening this you get the necessary movement and tilt of the Frog to change and fine-tune your depth of cut very effective so I sold this patent or turned it over to Lee Valley Leonard Lee inverse costumes and they manufactured it for several years I'm not sure if if they're still manufacturing them but this was what Veritas came up with is from the preceding prototype the the insert was made out of some type of space-age carbon fiber and it was pretty close copy of the prototype and not only in the prototype but in the veritas one that they manufactured in marketing it you really had to magic touch and understand how scrapers worked it wasn't a real easy to for the knowledge to drop in as plain and start scraping so as a result of the complexity and the tedious mechanism that you had to go through to get it set up it was not a you know it didn't burn the marketplace up like this is what I'm trying to say anyway that's it as my woodworking hobby progressed over the years I started making some custom work niches and out of maple block tabletops so forth and I needed a larger longer scraper for truing up these work and longer pieces and for whatever reason I don't know why Stanley never made a scraper plain larger than the 112 so I had this old craftsman number seven I think it was made by sergeant but it's a craft but laying around and it wasn't a highly collectible piece so what I did is I said well let's see if we could make a long striper plane again this was long before it got into metalworking so what I did is took a hinge off of old door heads and you see the pen running through the bottom of the casting that's go that's the hinge pin that goes through the Frog mechanism the lever cap we just made out of a piece of brass sculpted a little bit the insert in the center that the Majestic rod goes through was a cutout of a stanley I think it was a 112 either 112 or a handheld pushing straight I can't recall the number of it right now yeah it was just cut out bolted to the plate body where the Frog used to bolt in the only thing about this guy it's a permanent adaptation or a permanent modification there's no way to back it out primarily because of the pin that goes through and retains the Frog I guess I could have tapped it and put a slotted screw in it but at the time I just pinned it in there and painted over at both ends this was a very successful two guys would come in the shop they would try to which see it they would want to bar it with the pretense they were gonna go home and make one well they never did it it became a hassle to get to plating back and I just got tired of load it out so it occurred to me one day you know we could make one of these that was removable I think there's a market for it so what afternoon what I did is a barber but neighbor's mill he taught me how to run a mill and in an afternoon this prototype was machined there's three parts the base the lever cap and the Frog and the whole thing you know was just made out of scrap aluminum and what I was trying to do here it's kind of a proof of concept to see if it would work and as it turned out once I brought it home put it in the body of a stanley number seven put a blade in it it works extremely well so what we go do here is all this this whole project from the time the the aluminum prototype was machined until I had a dozen or so productions for sale was less than six days and I'll show you how I went about taking this prototype concept here and turn it into a product that we we're very successful selling you know you know in the woodworking market okay the first thing we did is tried to pretty the prototype model up a little bit so what I did is I made two versions of this the piece in the extreme rear is for a bedrock the one to the front and to the left of that is for a Bailey so I by changing the the base of the insert the Frog in the lever cap remain the same so you had all worlds covered you could either cover the bedrock to leave the essence or the stanley may leak planes it was primarily made to fit into a four and a half of six and a seven so the bottle was fabricated like it had about two days in making me model so after the model was made the next step in the process was to make a mole so we could make repetitive waxes for investment casting what you see here is the model for the Frog mechanism the mole is a two-part may have machine out of a block of aluminum matching plates that are pinned together in it it made the the mole for shooting and injecting the wax for the Frog mechanism in making the the permanent mole for injecting the waxes the black material is a steel fill epoxy extremely strong a lot of guys use aluminum filled epoxy I chose to go with a steel it makes a little more durable rugged mo it takes a little longer for the wax to qu but it's insignificant what you do is machine to blocks and mill out rough out the cavity that your your parts going to lay in and it's a two-step process you you mount your part of what they call a motherboard and you clay around in such a parting lines and that motherboard pattern boys has attached to one half of the bowl and it's locked out and the back part of the bowl that you see in the the bowl in the back is drilled full of holes and it subcases as a few large holes so once the epoxy is mixed up you pour the epoxy from the back side of the bowl to flow down and go in and surround the model or the master that's down inside of the cavity and after that 1/2 is done you repeat your second half for picking up the other the other half of the bowl the following day so what you end up with is a two-part Bowl that has pinned together can take an extremely amount of pressure and ejecting the wax the reason you don't want to do a part this large in silicon rubber or urethane rubber you need to get that wax in there and very quickly requires a lot of pressure and the other thing is you can have the ability to lower the temperature of your wax and shoot it in that a lot higher pressure therefore when the wax cools you don't get these shrinking as a sucking in effect that if you had to wax at a high temperature that you would have have to use a lot you know a rubber mold so after we finished the moles we spent a couple of days injecting waxes and getting enough waxes to do a couple hundred of these took him to a foundry at the time my investment casting operation would could not handle the quantity and the size of these castings so I formed it out to a local casting company they were casting aluminium bronze and the plate in the front is a there's a Stanley 607 with one insert said it played in a back receives the bailey insert shown in the front get a lot of questions you know when you go to make some more the only thing that I could say at this time is it's it's being evaluated you guys saw my last video I think you get an idea I've got a pretty full plate right now got a lot of neat stuff planned for next year so don't know if this is going to happen or not but stay tuned and we we might work it out with that we're going to we're going to wrap it up there looks like I'll say in closing is don't be afraid to go out there and experiment with some of these plays I mean you don't want to take a hot dollar plate and cut it up but there's a lot of clunkers out there and hopefully I've planted a few seeds a few ideas that give you some things to think about and it's really not that difficult with your machine and working with the cast iron course aluminum brass the same situation so with that said you guys have a nice night we'll catch you next time

Channel: Paul Hamler

Views: 6,745

Rating: 4.9595962 out of 5

Keywords: CyberLink, PowerDirector15

Id: fNw_SeH0JRk

Length: 27min 43sec (1663 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2017