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.

Did I say I was done sanding? And a bit of Japanning

Well, I ended up taking a picture of the final sanded surface.  This is where we left off last time.  I mixed up a batch of the Japanning per the recipe on the website listed in the previous post. 

First step, mise en place.  Everything in its place, ready to roll.  First use acetone to clean off the surfaces to be painted.  After I got done sanding I hosed it all down with WD-40.  Remember folks, the WD means Water Displacement.  Great for keeping fresh steel from rusting, not a great lubricant.  Wipe it all down real good with acetone to remove all the oils and other WD-40 junks from the surface.

Ready for first coat of japanning.

The first coat goes on really thin... reallllly thin...

A bit blobby, but this shouldn't be perfection.

Done with the first coat.  By the way, this stuff is really smelly, must do outside.  Yuck.

First coat on the frog as well.  These are the only two parts that get coated.  Not all surfaces are coated as some of them are sliding surfaces.  Everything on the web said to let it sit for several hours, then add a second coat.  So I did that.

Looking better with the second coat.  The interwebs said to let it sit for a while then bake it at 400F for 1 hour.  So I did that.

mmmmm... toasty... the smell of off gassing turpentine and asphaltum is divine.

Ding!  All done.   Not too shabby.... but still not quite good enough for me.  Still looks a tad brown and it's not built up enough around the cast markings.  Time to add another coat and do a bit of experimenting.  This time I tossed it in the oven at 160F for 1 hour to burn off the solvent, then turned it up to 425ish-F for 1 more hour. 

May not be so easy to tell in the pictures, but this looks much better.  My experimenting worked as planned, the coating didn't have time to slump since I burned off most of the turpentine, so by the time I turned up the heat to melt the asphaltum, nothing ran and it looks pretty good.  It feels like a pretty hard coating, so I think this will do the job.  It's also difficult to see in the pictures but the freshly polished cheeks and sole turned a bit brown from the cooking process, which I expected.  Any trace amount of oil on the metal will dry and start to polymerize.  This is the process of seasoning cast iron cooking pans.  But since I don't plan on needing a good non-stick cooking surface, I sanded the exposed metal with 320 grit.

Ahhh.. look at I shine!  (ignore nasty finger prints).  Put the frog back onto the base, gave all the exposed metal a light coat of oil, and we are done with these parts!  Now lets move on to the iron.