Plane Grand Finale

Time to get this project wrapped up.  Now it's time to start working on the wood.  The bit in the front is aptly named the knob, and the bit in the back is the tote.  Long ago I stripped the old finish off.  I could have just started with a finish from there, but I didn't think that I had done enough sanding in this project.  So, starting at 220 and working my way up to 400.

 

Cameo of the chef's knife I've been working on for far too long now.

The sanding dust made the wood appear much lighter than it really was.  Before we add any finish to it, I needed to clean off both the dust and any dirt or oils or junk that could be on there.  So I wiped them down with acetone.  I haven't really done much in terms of fine finishes.  I usually use cheap white board pine and do what I can to make it look like some other kind of wood. In this case, rosewood doesn't need any stain, but I want the grain of the wood to really pop.  So I experimented a bit.  After I cleaned, I applied a layer of boiled linseed oil, let it soak real good, wipe it off, then one more time. 

 

After cleaning

 

Just applied BLO

That's looking pretty nice!  I could have just left the finish with BLO (it dries to a dull, no gloss finish), but I wanted to be true to the original finish, so I went with shellac.  Shellac is like honey, similar color, made from bug spit.  Shellac is the secretions of the lac bug.  I'm not sure I want to know how it's collected...  Shellac was used for many many years as the main method of protecting and adding shine to wood.  It's purchased as bags of dried plastic flakes.  It's then dissolved into denatured alcohol. (I've read that the canned stuff has come along way and a fresh can is just as good as flakes, but what's the fun of that!) This happens to be one of the biggest issues with shellac but also it's super power.  If you spill solvents on it, it will soften up quickly.  But if you wipe solvent with a bit more shellac on it, you soften the previous layer and smooth it over, making it shiner.  This is called a french polish.  It can also be polished by sanding finer and finer grit until you get the sheen you want.  This is called rubbed out.

 

Blonde dewaxed shellac flakes, mason jar, scale on the ready.

 

I went with a '2 lb cut', which really means 2lbs of flakes to 1 gallon of denatured alcohol (DNA).  I didn't really need a full gallon, so I made 1 pint.  2oz of flakes, 2 cups DNA.

 

It takes a while for the flakes to dissolve.  I let it sit for 24 hours, shaking it violently every now and again.

 

24 hours later, ready to roll.

 I didn't want to go the full effort of a true french polish, but I kinda wanted that look.  So improvising, I decided to do the following.  First coat was brushed on to fill the pores.  Then sand with 220, 320, 400.

 

Dried BLO, big pores, they need to be filled or it wont be really shiny. 

 

Brushed on shellac

 

After sanding.  It's really hard to tell, but the pores are only kinda filled.  

 

If I wanted, I could have left it at this point. Sanded to 400 gives it a nice satin finish, but I want that shine!

 

Loaded up the gun, filtered first.

 

Strung up in the garage, after the first coat

 

 First coat

After 2-3 more sand/spray cycles (I lost track), the knob was looking great, so I called it done.  But the tote just wasn't what I wanted.  So I decided to try to finish it off using the french polish method.

 

The pores just weren't filling up right and it was tricky to spray on a string, so I couldn't get a good even coat.

 

So, get an old t-shirt and cotton balls.  Make a big wad of cotton balls and wrap in the t-shirt.  It would be best if I put DNA and shellac in squeezy bottles, but I didn't.  So I soaked 2-3 balls in DNA and 1 in shellac.  Wrap the t-shirt around it kinda tight and wring out most of the liquid.  Add 1 drop of oil to the pad and rub the surface.  It gets a bit tacky and sticky the first layer, but let that sit and dry for 10-20min.  If you want to learn more about french polish, go search Clickspring on youtube.com, he has a really fantastic video showing how it's really done.

 

Repeat that 4-5 times, and wammo, smooth as silk. 

 

Looking great!

 

Polish up the screw heads.  Chuck them up in a drill, use 120, 220, 300, 400, 600, 1000, 2000, then polishing compound on wood, and you're left with some sparkle!

 

Before

 

After! Mirror like finish.

I only mildly polished the iron cover, I didn't want to loose the faded out paint in the Stanley logo.  Oh, and I added 2 more coats of japanning to the cast pieces, that looked closer to the real thing and came out more black.  If I had to do the japanning all over, I would have super saturated the turpentine with gilsonite.  Start with some amount of powder in a jar, mix in just enough turpentine to cover the powder.  Heat it up and add more powder, then finally add BLO.  I think that would make a much thicker material which would give an even closer look the to the real thing.  The problem with this route is that it's sooo thin, it took many layers to build it up.  Turpentine is such a slow drying solvent that I don't think it all flashed off by the time I put it in the oven, which made lots of tiny bubbles which can been seen in the final product.  If I do this again, I'll try that method.  Time to put it all together.

 

Knob

 

Frog.  Wish I could have thought of a way to polish up the advance knob on the back of the frog.  I just left it as it was.  The lever could have used a bit of work too.

 

All bear metal got a wipe down with oil.  Iron, chip breaker, and cover.

 

Sooo shiny!

 

The money shots

 

 

Just a reminder of how it looked before:

It's been a fun project!  I now have a really great tool and know more about the man that owned it. 

One of many projects to follow:

This is a bookshelf/storage area that I'm going to build for the space by our room.  Got more planning to do, but here's the general layout.   I'd like to build a box for the plane too, but I'm guessing Laura wants the bookshelves first. 

Make the sanding madness stop!

Now for the business end of the plane.  The iron is the sharp bit that does all the cutting.  The base keeps everything nice and flat, the frog supports the iron.  A chip breaker sits on top of the iron to... well... break the chips and keep them from getting in the way of the cutting surface.  A good plane must have an extremely sharp iron.  This method of sharpening is called Scary Sharp.  It's very well documented on the interwebs, so if you want more details, just use altavista or your favorite search engine to find it.  But the basic is this:

1.  Keep the blade at a very specific angle
2.  Bond sandpaper to a very flat surface (in my case, the granite tile)
3.  Sand the angle until the surface is uniform
4.  Sand the back side of the iron until it's flat
5.  Start at 80 grit, work your way up until you can't get finer paper.  In today's post we go to 1500 (plan to do up to 4000).

Lets get started! (okay in reality, I started this quite a while ago....)

Side note: it's really difficult to get good pictures of the surface using a 13 year old camera, inside, at night... so just pretend that you can tell that things are happening.

First, put the iron in your sharpening tool.  There's a wheel on the bottom for it to roll on.  You set the angle by adjusting the position in the clamp.  I just matched the angle that it already had.  I don't really know what angle it is. Roll it back and forth over the paper until it feels like the paper has gone dull.  Then flip it over and knock off the burr that forms and sand the surface flat.  I should have done a better job of sanding the back flat, but it will get the job done.  You'll see later that it isn't perfectly flat.

 

This is where I left it a while ago and started to finish it up tonight.  I think this was maybe 320 grit.

 

 400 grit

 Sanding the back flat.

 This is after 1500 grit.  This is the back of the iron.  You will notice a couple things here.  First, I didn't flaten it well enough.  The outer sides of the blade seem to be a bit thinner than the rest and I didn't pay enough attention at the course grit and didn't really get the outer edges totally flat.  But that shouldn't hurt the performance too bad.  Next you'll see that there is kind of a s-curvy line at about the center of the picture.  I'm guessing that they only hardened this portion of the iron, I've seen marks like that when I harden my knife blades. 

 Shiny enough to get the reflection of my hands while taking pictures. 

 It's really hard to tell, but it's very polished at this point and it's easy to see reflections in it. 

Sharp enough to shave with at this point.  (sorry for the potato picture, maybe someday I'll get a new camera.... maybe.)

Next time, I'll polish a few more steps and we'll be good to go.  I think it's time to start working on the wood bits.  Last weekend was Jackson's baptism so we had lots of family over and had a really great time.  Laura's dad told me several more great stories about Leland, I'll have to get them written down for next time.