Restoring Hand Planes.. My methods #23: Stanley #34 completely restored. The longest jointer that Stanley made.

Its been a while since my last blog on plane restoration. Over the past year I have been trying to build up a collection of the Stanley wood bottom transitional planes. With each one that I have restored I get a little better at tuning them. Once you figure out how to get them all tuned and set right they are really fine working planes.

The #34 Jointer was one of the trans planes that was at the top of my want list. At 30” long it is the longest plane that Stanley ever produced. This plane is not really an easy one to find and I had been on the watch for one for a while. Thanks to a fellow LJ member I was finally able to get my hands on one.

Here is a before picture

The plane was in decent shape but it did have one big issue and that was the wooden body was cupped. If you look close at the photo you can see the cup. The only other issue was the top of the tote was missing but other then that everything was in good shape.

I started by taking it apart and I then ran the body through my power jointer to flatten the bottom. I set the jointer to take a very light cut and I just made a bunch of passes until I had taken the cup out. Once I had the bottom flat I then realized there was a big hump on the top. I figured it be best I run it through the planer, again taking really light cuts until I got the high spot out. I also squared up the edges/sides of the plane.

Here is the sole after it was jointed. Check out the grain.

Once I had the body square and flat I smoothed it out with a mix of hand planes and some sand paper. I finished the body with BLO and then put a top coat of clear Shellac on.

Once it was dry I put everything back together and discovered I had a new problem. Somehow (probably due to reducing the thickness of the body) the metal top did not line up right. With the frog adjusted as far forward as it would go it was not far enough to line up even with the iron bedding in the wood body. I decided the only solution to this issue was to plug all the existing mounting holes in the wood, move the metal frame up a little to where I could get the frog to line up and then re drill new mounting holes.

I just used a piece of scrap maple to cut the plugs. The metal top only had to be moved up a little so none of the plugs are visible when the plane is assembled.

I also re-painted the metal parts.

With the body done the next step was to repair the tote. To fix the tote I used a small block plane to flatten the break in the tote and then I glued on a piece of maple. I would have tried to match the beech better but I had a piece of maple that was the perfect size and thickness so thats what I used.

I glued the piece of maple on the tote and used nothing more then a couple pieces of masking tape to clamp it. The tape did a fine job as the glue joint is solid and held up through the shaping process.

Here are some pictures of the plane completed and in action (Note: the tote was not finished yet at the time of these pictures so I used a tote off one of my other planes)

-- Dan - "Collector of Hand Planes"