Reply To: Restoring Nickel Plating
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It’s no trouble at all. I appreciate the thoughts, questions, and suggestions. Mr. Leach is wrong with his hamhanded comment. I tried several of the things you suggested before posting previously and will try some of the others. By the way, Chris Schwarz commented that the #48 gave rough results. I’ve played some more since the previous posting and had some better results. Probably the biggest change was to ignore the handle. (I was already ignoring the knob.) Instead, treat it like a wooden moulding plane by making a “U” of your thumb and fingers and placing that U as low as possible on the plane. This keeps the push down low and reduces wobbling. It is extremely uncomfortable because the handle is actually in the way and is the wrong shape, but it seemed to make a big difference.
It is also important to note that you must move your hand on the fence as you cut. You must be towards the rear of the fence at the exit of the cut, but must be towards the front of the fence at the entrance, otherwise you will mistrack.
The geometry of the blades is probably a bit different from what you have in your mind’s eye, but the basic idea of setting up with a 3/16″ gap is right and I agree that if one can get it right once, then keep the cutting as a template for setting in the future or use another plane to make the template. Note that Lie Nielson’s implementation of the #48 & #49 use a single, forked blade rather than two separate blades, and that will likely help a great deal.
Do you remember when I said the plane came with a wider blade to allow using the plane on wider wood? If I understand the setup, you would need to change blades when you switch from tongue to groove: Because of the way the fence flips, the blade that cuts the groove is also the blade that cuts to the far side for the tongue. So, I suspect this plane is really meant for a single thickness.