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19 September 2018 at 1:31 am #551780
@harryawheeler, I hate to disagree … – just kidding 🙂
What @howardinwales means is that the chip breaker doesn’t have to be sharp like a blade but must be seated flat against the iron and to ensure you get that fit you rub the chip breaker on some fine grit to ensure there are no gaps that allow wood between the chip breaker and the iron. If you get any wood between the breaker and the iron the plane will skip and tear – the chip breaker seating is critical. The position of the breaker from the end of the iron is also critical – too much distance and the iron will skip or dig in or tear or chatter – all sorts of bad stuff. You’ve both made some really good points and I reckon we’ll get to the bottom of it in the end. A few more photos will help our diagnosis I think 🙂
18 September 2018 at 12:13 am #551683Well, I’ve restored a great many planes over the years and I always initially use the Veritas honing guide to get the angle on the bevel correct; it also ensures the plane edge is perpendicular to the side of the plane. So many of the blades I sharpen have obviously been done (badly) by hand so for an inexperienced woodworker I would highly recommend a honing guide. Once you get it all set then for a quick sharpen you can do it by hand – but I will still go back to a honing guide periodically to get that angle back to perfection.
Don’t worry about the capping iron being a bit skewed and the frog looks OK; as howardinwales says above check that the chip breaker seats tightly to the iron and there should only be about 1 to 2mm of distance from the end of the chip breaker to the plane iron.
5 September 2017 at 4:20 am #315521Yep, looks like a swan neck mortise chisel; there’s one here:
http://www.oldschooltools.co.uk/product/c-nurse-swan-neck-mortise-chisel/
20 July 2017 at 12:13 am #313880Hey Steven, the plane is certainly a Stanley No 4 and looks fine. I have restored about a dozen Stanley planes over the last 18 months so I can address a few of your concerns.
1. No frog adjustment screw is no big deal. To be honest I don’t use them anyway as I line the frog up with the mouth by eye and feel then tighten the frog holding screws and I have to say it is very rare that I then need to adjust the frog again. I’ve never felt the need to move the frog back and forth; once set and once I’m happy with the way it works I leave it as is.
2. Pitting on the frog face doesn’t look nice but so long as the blade sits flat on the frog it won’t make a scrap of difference. I have a nice wide, flat file that I use to lightly run across the face to remove any high points – they are the problem. You’ll see where the file ‘hits’ the surface – you should get a nice sheen across the entire face (except the pits but don’t worry about them).
3. The pitting on the side and sole, once again, don’t look great but won’t affect how the plane performs. As Edmund points out, deep pitting will weaken the wings but so long as you avoid the temptation of throwing the plane across the room when you do something wrong it should be fine 🙂
I have a plane (Stanley No 6) that is in far worse condition than yours and is my second favourite behind the No 4. I use it as a ‘jack’ plane; I do a lot of hand planing of stock so I pile up the timber and have the No 4 and the No 6 beside me and off I go – couple of hours of that and I don’t need to go to the gym for a month 🙂
Welcome to the community and I hope you enjoy your woodworking as much as the rest of us.
2 May 2017 at 1:39 pm #311598Good on you mate. I’m a bit the same – I like a challenge and working with wood is sure that. Also a pretty good workout – I was planing a heap of old pallet timber the other day, just pine but even so I was sweating a treat after a half hour or so. Then after an hour I had a pile of pretty flat, usable timber – so I went and had a nice cup of tea 🙂
5 April 2017 at 12:14 am #310895Yeah, can be confusing; when I started getting into hand saws I found information really conflicting so I went back in time (so to speak) and researched hand saws from a time before electricity – there was no choice – everything you wanted to do had to be done with a hand saw.
The four basic types of back saws are the carcase, sash, tenon and dovetail plus you can throw in a mitre saw as well although they were not that common and not widely used. The other four were all common and had specific purposes. There is a good article on back saws in Popular Woodworking from many years ago that is a good read:
http://www.popularwoodworking.com/article/understanding_western_backsaws
I have ended up with a few now and I use all of them:a little dovetail saw which is rip; small carcase saw which is crosscut, two deep sash saws (one rip and one crosscut), larger sash saw that is rip and a big tenon saw that is crosscut. They are all Disston or Spear and Jackson; I bought them all cheap and did them up and I just love using them all. I used Paul’s idea of hanging the most used ones next to the vice so they are ready at hand and any excuse to grab one and cut something 🙂
29 March 2017 at 3:38 am #310690Here’s my list of tools that I use all the time; once you have the basics then you can choose tools on an ‘as needs’ basis:
Rule and Square (must be accurate – especially the square)
Stanley Number 4 Plane (or equivalent brand)
Set of bevel edge chisels
Hammer and some sort of soft face hammer or wooden mallet
Hand saw (like a 26″ blade for course and fast work)
Tenon saw (sometimes called a backsaw – for fine work)
Drill and drill bits
Set of screwdrivers
Marking gauge
Range of clamps (F clamps are especially useful)Then a heap of sandpaper, PVA glue and other consumables. That should get you started pretty well I reckon – check out Ebay and other places to get some of this stuff secondhand – most of my tools I have bought this way and just done them up as best I can.
Let us know how you go and if you need advice on any bits and pieces – the combined knowledge of the people on this forum is phenomenal.
27 March 2017 at 11:06 pm #310612Well done mate – there is such a sense of satisfaction when you sharpen a saw or plane blade and see the difference it makes. I agree totally with your sentiments about Paul’s teaching – he’s a natural.
26 March 2017 at 10:21 am #310528Yeah, rip cut is easier when you first start sharpening saws; once you get the hang of it a cross-cut is not too bad either. Paul has a couple of videos on saw sharpening; this one is a good starter:
23 March 2017 at 10:55 pm #310449The teeth look fine to me; they appear sharp and the angle is also good (not too aggressive). The only thing I can’t judge is the set and if I was to take a guess it would be that the teeth need more set – that is, they should be angled out a little more. If that angle is too much the saw makes a wider kerf and becomes sloppy but if the angle is too little the saw will bind.
My advice would be to flatten the set completely, Paul shows how to do this in one of his videos but it is pretty simple. I use a large flatish hammer in a vice and gently tap with another hammer – the saw blade is sandwiched between the two. Then I would grab a cheap saw set (like the Eclipse) from Ebay and re-set the teeth.
I would persevere with it – when I first started restoring saws it took me ages to get everything right – but you learn as you go along and I can now sharpen and set a saw pretty quickly. Might pay to get some cheap secondhand saws to practice with – I grabbed a heap from the local tip shop for $2 each with the theory that if I really stuffed them up it’s no big deal. As it turned out one was a Disston panel saw and I use it a lot.
Experimenting is also good; I was having trouble cutting deep tenons in the local hardwood we have here. I picked up a Disston carcase saw with a very deep blade from a secondhand shop and sharpened as a rip cut. It worked OK in pine but not so well in really dense timber – so I left it as a rip but re-sharpened and put a slight edge to the teeth so it became a ‘hybrid’ cross-cut and rip saw. It’s way too aggressive to cross cut timber with but it does a beautiful job with the deep tenons – that extra edge allowed me to reduce the set slightly and produces a really smooth wall to the tenon. That experiment was a success but I’ve had heaps of failures too, but if you have the time it is actually great fun playing around with different combinations.
Hope it works out OK for you.
22 March 2017 at 10:18 pm #310405I agree that some photos would be good; couple of things though. If the teeth are really sharp they will bind when cross cutting if too much downward pressure is put on the saw. This is not such an issue with dovetails as most of the cutting is with the grain (rip cut) but a cross cut needs to ‘cut’ across the fibres. I keep a really loose grip on the saw handle and try not to bulldoze through it but more let it glide – hard to describe but you let the saw teeth do the cutting and like using a knife – several light cuts work better than one hard cut.
The other thing is the ‘set’ of the teeth; if the saw cuts nicely in the first few strokes and then starts to bind it is often that the teeth need a wider set to stop the blade (above the teeth) from jamming in too narrow a slot.
Also worth checking the angle of the teeth when it was sharpened; a rip cut has a very aggressive angle as the teeth act like little chisels; cross cut don’t have that aggressive angle because the edges of the teeth cut across the fibres like little knives.
Hope this helps a bit but feel free to upload some photos as it would give us a better look at how the teeth have been sharpened and set.
21 March 2017 at 9:32 pm #310366Nice bench Tobias – looks a bit too good to use:-)
- This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by Steve Brookes.
18 March 2017 at 9:32 am #310277Great info – I might actually give this a go as I’ve been putting off buying the stones previously due to the cost. Thanks heaps.
18 March 2017 at 9:11 am #310276I’d like to say that it looks like it has been sharpened previously as a cross-cut – this could explain the the angle (a bit). I’m afraid it just looks like it has been badly sharpened in the past and has not become any better with use. You could go with either a rip or cross-cut; the teeth are so bad it won’t matter one way or the other – beautiful looking saw though 🙂
14 March 2017 at 2:30 am #310143I was showing my 4 year old grandson how to file some scrap wood and I noticed after a while I’d said “like this” about twenty times – I’ve started talking like Paul, now all I have to do is master woodworking like Paul 🙂
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