Hand Planes #9: Plane fun

I caught the hand tool bug back in July. Since then I have been adopting promising candidates for the garage shop. Most have required restoration to some extent. Some were just scrubbing, lubing, and honing of blades. Along the way I picked up bits of information on how to deal with rust, corrosion, tote refinishing and repair. With each plane I gained some confidence in just how much I could do to restore these tools. I just finished restoration of my most ill cared for planes. Two no6 planes made it into my shop, one Sweetheart era and the other a type6. Both were badly rusted and would require full restore.

Here is some detail on the sweetheart from a previous blog:
http://lumberjocks.com/jocks/dsb1829/blog/6473

I started both planes at the same time, but stalled on the type6. It was a family heirloom, if you can call a rusty and dilapidated plane such a thing. It had belonged to one of my great grandfathers. It was missing a knob and the tote was obviously in disrepair under the tape holding it together. So I found a no5 of the same vintage with a damaged sole, but good wood and hardware, as a donor.

Here we are about a month later. I finally have finished stripping and painting the sole. Tuning the frog to the sole was fairly short work. All that is left is a lapping of the sole and this plane will be ready for active duty. I am looking forward using it. With it nearing completion I decided it was time for a family portrait.

edit 12/15/08
I had wanted to discuss a few more items here, but had to run off yesterday. So I am going to pick back up here. I don’t want this post to be a blatant tool gloat. I was trying to think of a good way to pull all of this together. At this point I have put up a fair amount of information as I have stumbled down the slippery slope. So I have pulled these posts into a series. Hopefully it will come in handy for other users here. Maybe it will inspire a few.

Here is a link to the series:
http://lumberjocks.com/jocks/dsb1829/blog/series/1144
You can also find a link at the top of any of the blogs in the series.

The other topic I wanted to touch on was that of those shiny gold bits in the family portrait. There were a couple of planes that I needed to fill the roles of block and shoulder. I wanted these tools to be of little concern to me, to just work, and not to require hours of tuning. With good condition vintage samples of these tools climbing I turned toward the modern makers of quality hand tools. In this department and my limited budget that left Lee Valley and Lie-Nielsen as the contenders. The adoption of the new Lie-Nielsen tools is right inline with my reasoning for hunting out old Stanley planes. Patriotism. Maybe it is a bit foolish to think that buying American made tools will help our economy, but that is just it. In our global economy it is becoming increasingly rare to find products produced solely in the United States. LN tools satisfy my desire to keep money state-side and to get a high quality tool. Hats off to Robin Lee, he backs some fantastic tools. But until our American economy starts looking a bit brighter LN gets the nod of approval.

-- Doug, woodworking in Alabama