Welded Record Plane
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Tagged: plane weld repair
- This topic has 5 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 8 months ago by martijn.
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Hi all,
I did a quick search across the forums, but couldn’t find an answer to this sort of question.
I can get my hands on a secondhand Record No. 4, which I maybe want to convert to a scrub plane.
The plane has apparently been broken, and fixed by welding, as can be seen in the attached picture.
[attachment file=314707]
Will this be a problem for general smoothing and/or scrubbing work?
I could flatten the weld on some sandpaper/diamond stones, and as far as I can see there shouldn’t be any problem with using this one.I’d like your opinions on this matter!
Kind regards,
Martijn
the NetherlandsAttachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.28 August 2017 at 2:49 pm #314713I suppose a great deal depends upon the quality of the weld. If it was done correctly using the right welding wire and the area being welded was prepared to a high standard there is no reason why it would not be sound. However that is a lot of ‘ifs’. I tend to agree with the other posters and wait until something at least intact comes along. There are plenty out there. All one needs is patience.
Yikes, that is quite a scar. Anyone else think it looks more like epoxy than a weld? And is that a big rust bloom on the sole?
Anyways, for scrub use it’s probably not an issue. I do hope it’s
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inexpensive….like a parts plane.
For smoothing it’s probably a no-go, and I’ll try to explain why I think so.
So unless it’s sufficiently tuned up for smoothing work right now, it might not be possible to make the adaptation. First, it won’t work very well if you’ve adapted the blade for scrubbing, so it would likely require the purchase of an additional blade, and some luck. Sometimes when you weld (if that is a weld) you stress out the metal nearby due to the extreme heat. This extreme heat can cause distortion, especially so in thin-walled metal like a #4, so not only might the sole be insufficiently flat for smoothing, the warping of the sole and body (if it has happened, not saying it has!) might make the sole impossible to flatten and the body impossible to square to a reasonable extent, because it would require the removal of too much metal, much like removing a lot of twist from a relatively thin wooden board — you might not have enough thickness left after removing the twist to use the board for certain applications.
So you’d want to ensure that you can flatten the sole to smoothing plane specs before investing in another blade, and then you’d want to ensure you haven’t removed so much metal that the plane is flexing too much under normal loads.
The problem is that once you go down that path, you can’t be sure how it will end (at least, I can’t see how you could have such knowledge, perhaps someone extremely experienced in rehabilitating damaged planes might?), so you might ruin the plane for any purpose whatsoever. Perhaps someone else can chime in on a method to ensure you can remove warpage from the plane body & sole while guaranteeing you don’t remove too much metal and weaken the tool to too great an extent.
Are you after a smoother or a scrub plane or both or? Context might be important…if you already have the planes you need, and this is just a flyer, hey, go have fun. If money is extremely tight, I understand the need to find bargain tools, but this is a risky investment that might blow up in your face, leaving you with nothing for your money, so I’d probably recommend you save until you can afford a better example of what you need.
Thank you all for your answers and opinions.
I have asked the vendor for a price, since there is no asking price stated. Haven’t started bartering yet, since I wanted to know what the effect of the weld could be first.
@Edmund
Thank you for your extensive answer, it has clarified a lot to me.I already have all the planes that I want, except for a scrub #4, which isn’t all to important for me anyway at the moment. I was just looking for a bargain, and to see if such damage/repair on a plane would have a lot of influence on performance and usability. Depending on the price, I will see if I want to experiment with it or not.
Should I buy it, I’ll keep you updated with my experiences!
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