Wow, a tremendous response from some of you who are following my restoration articles! Thank you all for your kind words and support!

For those of you just joining us, we’ve been discussing how to refurbish an old Stanley #4 hand plane that I inherited as a family heirloom. If you have missed part 1, part 2, or part 3, feel free to go back and read them. I’ll wait…..

Some of you may have noticed in part 3 that the plane iron was cutting really rough, despite having trued all of the surfaces of the plane so far. The reason is that not only was the iron not all that sharp (like yours truly at times), but the angle of the cut was not optimal. As if that weren’t bad enough, the angle was not homogeneous all the way across, and there was a small knick in the edge.

We’re gonna wanna take care of that I think……
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For those following along, welcome back! For those of you just joining us, we’ve been talking about how to restore an old Stanley #4 hand plane. If you’d like to catch up, feel free to check out part 1 and part 2 beforehand.

We’ve got our sole flattened and our frog is true, and now it’s a good time to address tweaking a few of the components that deal with chip removal: the plane throat, and the chip breaker.

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Welcome back! If you’re still with us after reading part 1, you are a most curious soul. I mean, how could you not be to withstand so much of my boring writing in the name of woodworking?!

So now the sole of the plane is flat.  I would have to say that 80 percent of your grunt work here is done…..but there are a few other crucial things left to accomplish.  If the bottom of our plane is flat, we need to ensure that the rest of that translates all the way up to the plane iron, because what have we really accomplished if we stop here?  Flattening and truing the Frog isn’t JUST to make it parallel to the sole, it also ensures we have a mating surface for the blade to rest on the whole time the plane is in operation.  When this surface is not flat, we get that ever so annoying movement named “chatter”.  As the plane iron skims across the wood substrate, it will unseat itself and bounce around on the surface of the frog, causing an inconsistent cut.

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A couple of weeks ago, I decided on a whim to refurbish a couple of the tools I inherited from my father-in-law: A Block Plane and a Stanley #4 hand plane.  Both had really bad surface rust, and were REALLY cupped from years of heavy use.  To give you an idea of what I dealt with before, I used that #4 on a scrap piece of pine stock and got nothing but crooked, toothpick sized shavings with every pass, and small chunks of sawdust.  I didn’t chronicle the restoration of the block plane (it was a spur of the moment thing), but have documented the restoration of the Stanley #4 pretty thoroughly.

Join me in this journey in the next couple of articles.

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