So day 3 into this project and I had a couple of hick-ups there were some parts of the plane that I really need to work on especially the chip breaker and plane blade, the plane blade was so hard to get sharp so I had to switch from the sandpaper method and I went with the sharpening stones and with ALOT of elbow grease I finally got the plane sole flat and the planes cutting edge sharp as well.
WATER STONES
Although the sandpaper did an awesome job removing the rust and buffing the sides and the bottom of the plane to a decent luster unfortunately it did very little for sharpening the cutting edge of the plane blade even with a very good Veritas honing guide, so I went to Woodcraft and bought a course DMT diamond grit to use on the plane and also is very useful for flattening the water stones that I had which were a 1000&6000 grit combination stone.
DMT DIAMOND PLATE made quick work of sharpening the plane blade
Here is my combination water stone, this is great for polishing the bevel
FLATTENING THE SOLE
I tried various grits of sandpaper to flatten the sole of the plane (plane base) but I was getting no where fast and it would of taken me a week to get it flat, the middle of the plane was high which mean the bottom middle part of the plane was not cutting the wood, so I used a method where you put a grid on the plane base and used it on the the sharpening medium at this point it was my DMT diamond plate and all the grid disappeared on the left & right but not the middle, so I raised each side by placing a very thin ruler and that worked the middle and just did that until the entire grid was gone.
SHARPENING THE BLADE
I used my diamond plate to start flattening the back of the blade until I got a burr and again using the grid method to make sure the back of the plane blade was flat and eventually developed a burr, next was to hon the cutting edge, my blade had a 30 degree primary bevel and the beautiful thing about the Veritas honing guide is that it actually has a setting that you deploy to create the secondary bevel and I think that is a 25 degree bevel… I am very new to this whole plane blade sharpening but I did get a pretty good sharp edge and it passed all the testing I did to make sure it was working properly. I will only get better at this the more I practice.
BEFORE
BEFORE:
AFTER
AFTER: Stanley # 4 Bailey Hand plane all restored, as you can see by the shavings I got uniformed thickness and full length shavings
I hope you enjoyed this project because my next project is restoring a # 5
TAKE CARE
Ed