Reply To: Help Needed – Stanley #4 EBay Refurb and Setup
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Hi mate
We’ve all been there. It took me quite a while to set up my plane too.
First off, as you’ve been doing, you have to flatten the sole and round the edges slightly as Paul shows in his video.
Next, sharpening the iron. If you’re new to it, I suggest you buy a honing guide to use. They’re like £5 or £6 on eBay. I have one and I still use it when I have to take off a lot of material on say a chisel or something. They’re very good. Usually now I don’t use it though as I have sort of developed a feel for the angle. The angle doesn’t have to be perfect by any means. Remember to flatten the back of the blade too.
Burr is basically when you’re grinding away metal and then the waste metal sort of folds over to the other side of the edge. So you know you have a sharp iron when you’re grinding away and then when you pull your fingers along the flat side of the blade, right at the end you feel a raised bit all the way across. This is the metal you have ground off from the bevel. When you feel this, you take a few swipes on the flat side with some of the very fine abrasive. This will get rid of it and give you a sharp edge.
The cap iron should be quite close to the cutting edge. 2mm is really the most gap you should have, I aim for around 1 or even slightly under. This distance varies on your intended use. At this point just set it to around 1-1.5mm.
When you’ve done that, hold the iron-cap iron assembly to the light and look from the side of the cap iron. You should see no light coming through the join between the iron and the cap iron. If there is light, grind the end of the cap iron to make it flat. This is important to have no light coming through.
Once you have all of that established, test the plane. If it still doesn’t work well, most likely there is an issue with the frog location. If this is the case, you will to take shavings and see everything getting jammed in the mouth. If this is the case, move the frog back half a turn of the screwdriver each time and test again. Try to aim for the setting which is the most forward but still gets you good shavings.
Hope this helps.