Reply To: No4 stanley iron won’t back off sufficiently
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Thanks Hans, Larry and Benoît!
Sorry, should have said, I’m in the Netherlands and both planes are “Made in England”. I had looked at those nice plane dating sites (ha!), but have not found such nice type chronologies for the English Stanleys, but I think both are probably newer than the type 20 which are the latest ones in the American listings as far as I have been able to find (the one definitely is younger, I bought it from a guy who said he got it new in the 90s). Do you get the plastic handles on the American planes too after type 20?
I had swapped all loose parts (except the forks, I was worried I would break something taking the pins out) on the two planes to check where the issue was, and the problem always stays with the one frog/fork combination.
To go through your suggestions, following Larry’s items:
1) cap iron is at 1 mm from the cutting edge. I can retract the cutter/cap iron assembly back a bit as you said, about 1.5 mm (and have indeed been using it that way – the annoying thing is when you want a shallower setting, as you have to take the lever cap off and reset the plane before continuing (as with the hammer adjustment on older/wooden planes..more aggressive is easy, but shallower hard – I tend to just stay on a shallower setting with such planes to avoid having to take it apart). The fork end could be a bit worn. It’s width is 0.5 mm less than the newer (unproblematic) fork. Isn’t there always some play though, as you can spin the depth adjusment nut if you go from extending to retracting and vice versa? I’ve only ever used these Stanleys as they came, so not sure if you don’t have the spinning/slight play with tighter hock cap irons.
2) the holes in the cap irons are the same size, and the cap irons are near identical, only the hole for the fork on the non-problematic plane’s cap iron is actually located half a mm up, so swapping makes the problem worse. Yes, the hump was what I was worried about in my plan to grind the cap iron back a bit, but perhaps I should just try as the cap irons aren’t expensive as you say. Good to know that worked for you Benoît!
3) Swapped the nuts, no change
4) Forks looks like cast iron. I worried it would indeed break if I started playing around with that… and in a visual check (without taking them out) the curves on both forks look very similar. The fork is very loose, but as said seems to be attached further down the frog than on the other plane (as in the pin is further down along the lenght of the cutting iron’s bed). Perhaps I should try swapping the forks (good to know the pins are one-way, thanks Larry!), that would give me half a mm, then grind a tiny bit off the end of the cap iron and perhaps use Benoît’s punch method. All together, that should probably get me there. Another thought I had was to look for a junker with a broken body or messed up sole and swap the frog, which might perhaps be easier…
Thanks again all! Very nice to be able to share thoughts about these things.
Cheers,
Sebastiaan