Man, it's been a while! I've had so little shop time lately and none of it has been unspoken for, so rehabbing this plane hasn't been on the agenda. But, I had a couple of hours yesterday and I started to clean and straighten the shop up. The bench grinder that I use for wire brushing and buffing was sitting out and I was about to put it up. Then the little cup that was holding all the hardware for this plane caught my eye… So I figured it made sense to do a little cleanup and polishing before I put the grinder away
For the most part, nothing I did with this stuff is any different from the way I did back when I wrote this blog post. So I'm not going to rehash the basics. But a few things came up that I felt warranted an addendum in this blog
First I'll touch on the brass bits since in my original blog series there weren't any. I leave the cylindrical nuts from the knob and tote on the threaded rods and chuck them up in my drill press and use some fine scotchbrite to remove tarnish. Then I polish them on a cotton buffing wheel on my grinder. Sorry, didn't think to take pics… But there are pics in the blog post I linked of steel parts done in the same fashion.
I normally use a wire brush in the drill press to clean up the depth adjuster. But I saw how Sansoo22 does it a while back and thought I'd give that a go. So I chucked a brush up in the drill press and put a little Brasso inside the recess.
I gently cleaned up the inside this way and repeated as Sansoo suggested with a different brush on the outside. Then I polished up the outside on my buffing wheel. I wasn't happy with the swirl marks left in the recess (I probably need a finer brush with smaller wires) so I put the brush back on and put a blue paper towel over the end and repeated with a little more Brasso.
It didn't polish out as nicely as the outside but it is plenty good enough. If I want it shinier, I'll get out my dremel tool with a small cotton buffing bit and some compound. It's not highly visible when the plane's assembled though so I'm not worrying with it.
So then the brass bits were done.
I just realized those cylindrical nuts look horrible in that ^ picture :-( They're actually slicker than eel snot and super shiny. Which is why they're reflecting stuff in my shop and making ugly dark spots. We'll try to remember another picture of those when the plane is done and assembled ;-)
All of the little steel bits were pretty straightforward with a couple of little quirks. Apparently a previous owner of this plane only had one screwdriver and tried to use it on all of the screws. The slots were in horrible shape on most of them. I rectified that on the non-visible screws with a needle file not being overly concerned with appearance. But, on the little round head screw that secures the toe of the tote, I went a little further. It looked pretty bad from an improper screw camming out of the slot:
So, I used a really fine belt on my belt grinder to try to smooth the shape of the screw head back as much as possible without removing too much material.
I was still left with a remnant of the injury but didn't want to take any more material off.
The screw that holds the chipbreaker and iron together was inexplicably mangled.
Apparently a too-small screwdriver cammed out several times on this one. And pliers were maybe used to remove it a time or two? I hated to grind down far enough to remove all of that but this one's not visible and it made me feel better to have it smooth so I did it anyway ;-p
The slot ended up pretty shallow but I don't think it'll be any issue at all using a properly sized screwdriver. If it is though, I'll cut the slot a little deeper or make a replacement screw.
After all the steel bits are done, I put them back in a cup and soak them really good in some CRC-336 until it's time to reassemble the plane.
I figured I might as well go ahead and put the completed components back together though so there are less bits and pieces floating about
I didn't take pictures but I also polished up the lever cap yesterday. It's not as pretty as I'd like but the paint in the recess behind the name is complete and the nickel plating is well-preserved and nearly complete even if a little splotchy and dull. I've yet to find a good way to even out the appearance of the plating so I'm going to leave it as-is.
All that's left to do now is check and tune the fit between the chipbreaker and the iron and refinish the wood. The horn is broken off the tote so that's the biggest chore left to finish up this guy. Hopefully I'll get to that before 2022…
