The Emperor's New Clothes

It's summer - Sun is shining, the temperatures are rising and the flea market season is at its peak.

A couple of used and/or vintage tools found their way into my shop.

I will report about a couple of them. 

Let me start with a small wooden plane.

Since I have made over the wooden jack plane, I found a while ago, I'm using this plane more and more and I'm starting to love it. It is so much nicer to plane softwood with this plane. With this experience in mind I'm looking now for a corresponding wooden smoother all the time. The luck won't be with you twice ;-) But who knows.

During a visit in the pas few weeks I found two other wooden planes. Another wooden jack from Ulmia and a small wooden plane from ECE.

I don't know if there is a right name in English for the ECE model. Due to the ECE catalog it is a small jack or boys plane.

Why is that? The plane system of German wooden planes is slightly different from the system of metal planes.

You will start to handle a board with a scrub plane. That's similar I think. Next is a so called "Schlichthobel" which will be translated with jack plane. The difference is that a "Schlichthobel" has got a single iron. It is the second one which will touch a board and just removes the tracks from the scrub plane.

The above mentioned small jack is only 200mm long and the iron is just 39mm wide. That makes it easy to move the plane over the wood and through the grain. That's the reason why it is called "boy plane". It is easy to use for the young and/or inexperienced woodworker.

Coming back to the plane system, the next one you will use is what is called the jack or the smoother. I will come back on this topic in one of the next posts.

I'm not sure why I have bought it. I did not need it and after a second deeper look it was not in good condition. Maybe I could have used the iron for something else.

But then it came to my mind to bring it back to nicer conditions. I had nothing to loose.

So I have dismantled the plane and cleaned the parts.

Body, back handle, wedge, iron

The body has got a lot of dents, paint residues, the sole was hollow and the whole thing was dirty and not nice to touch. The wedge has got some deep dents and looks pretty used. The iron finally has got some rust and seems to be heavily used.

Without further ado I clamped the body into the vise, grabbed a scraper and started to scrape off the coating.

Scraping off the coating

I could not completely remove all dents, but the idea was not to bring it to factory conditions but to make it nice to touch and to work with.

More scraping

After scraping I have switched to sanding, starting with 120 grit and switching to 180.

That done the question came up, which finishing I should use to refinish the plane body. I've started some investigations but didn't find a clear answer. I have asked ECE a while ago. They confirmed that their plane bodies are receiving a clear coat when they are new. So I have thought that it would be a nice idea to give it a shellac coating. But all hints I could find were saying that this is completely unusual for plane bodies.

Finally I decided to use wax varnish and a final coat of paste wax. For me it worked well and feels good.

Plane body after scraping and sanding

Plane body after the finishing

The sole was flattened with a hand plane and a scraper. This time I remembered early enough about it (Checklist for plane make over). 

Next was the wedge. The original wedge worked but it was just used, worn and ugly. So why not trying to make one. Unfortunately I was so engrossed in the work that I forgot to make some pics.

But here is the result. Not bad for the first one.

The new (left) and the old (right) wedge

Plane body with new wedge

The last step was to maintain the iron. I have derusted the iron with citron acid and some sand paper, ground a bevel at 25° as good as possible without a grinder and established a 30° micro bevel.

The original blade after derusting

Watch this, nice shavings straight from the beginning...

The very first shaving with the overhauled plane

Here you find my little jack in his new clothes.

Plane after make over

I find it looks and feels much nicer now and did not lost its used character.

This make over was made to make some experiences with this kind of work. I wouldn't do that with every plane I will get into my hands. Doing this means that the plane isn't in its original state.

But if I would find a cheapo which will be in heavy used conditions and it shall become a daily user, then I would do it again.

I've got some other interesting finds I'll report about within the next weeks.

Stay tuned!
Stefan