How I Do Hand Plane Rehabs

HokieKen said:

Fixin' and Fittin' my Frog

Well, we're done with the cosmetic stuff. Time to get down to the real nitty-gritty. Woo Hoo!

If you have an old plane that's in decent enough shape that you don't care to polish it up and there isn't any significant rust, you can skip all of the previous work and start here. From here on is what really gets our plane in good working shape and takes a mediocre plane and makes it work better than new.

We're going to focus on the frog mainly in this entry but you have to tune the fit with the sole so we'll see the main body a bit too. I want to preface this by saying that this frog required more work than any other I have encountered. Its issues aren't due to abuse by a previous owner but, and I DESPISE saying this about Millers Falls (and I've never had to before), just plain sorry machining and quality at the time of manufacture. In truth, this plane needs to be put on a mill and machined on both the frog and the base but, since most people don't have that option and I'm not putting that kind of effort into a plane I don't really have a specific purpose for, we'll work with what we have.

The frog is arguably the most important part of the plane. It has to hold the iron firmly and with good support while still allowing it to be adjusted for depth and lateral alignment. In other words, it has to hold tight but not too tight. So, the first thing we'll attend to is the bed where the iron seats.

The first thing I do is to make sure there isn't a raised area around the threads for the lever cap. Usually at a minimum the lead thread is slightly raised. I take a small mill file and flatten that area. I pass the file over the entire face to make sure there aren't any other raised areas as well. Then I lay the iron bed flat on my granite surface plate (table saw, float glass, jointer bed, granite/marble tile - use the flattest surface you have) and see if it rocks. Make sure the lateral lever and/or depth adjustment fork aren't the culprit. No rock? Good. Now make sure you can't see any light underneath and can't slide feeler gauges under it. Just because the 4 corners are coplanar doesn't mean there isn't a hollow in the center and we want to whole surface flat.

This frog has a hollow in the middle. So, now we have a decision to make. We need to flatten this face. How? Well we can file it. However, that's not the best way to flatten a surface. It can be done but usually requires removing more surface than necessary. It can be done to a frog with the lever and fork in place though.

Another option is to machine it. Not practical for most so we'll not go that route either.

The best option for most of us is to lap it on a flat surface using some kind of abrasive. We'll see how that's done. However in order to do so, I need to get the lateral lever and depth fork out of the way because they stick up above the plane of the surface.

The lateral lever on this plane is different than most. Most have a peened brass or mild steel pin. This has basically that but instead of peening, it was deformed by some sort of punch. See the "X" mark in the end of the pin and the lever? I've never seen this method before but, it is quite effective evidently because this lever is not at all sloppy.

Now, I normally don't remove the lever unless absolutely necessary but I will for this one. In fact it turns out to be quite easy. I just "wiggled" the lever side to side while pulling and it came off. Normally, you'll have to take a small needle file and file the peened part back to the pin diameter to get the lever off. Keep in mind though, eventually you're going to have to get the lever back on and retained so have a plan!

Now for the adjustment fork. Normally this isn't a big problem. It's just a pin through the casting with one side peened or mushroomed to give a press fit when driven in. Just use a punch and drive the pin out. Drive the small side though. If you use the punch on the wrong end, you risk cracking the casting. If it won't drive easily, flip it over and try the other side.

This pin comes out easily but is a good, tight fit in the hole. Rather than driving it all the way out, I just move it far enough to get the fork off and leave it. It's out of the way.

You'll find that I use machinist layout fluid a lot. You can do without it but it's not expensive and a bottle will last a LONG time. I'd recommend grabbing a bottle. It's good for a lot of things. Here, I've painted a thin coat onto the iron bedding surface of the frog.

Now I'm going to lay the surface on a piece of 240 grit wet/dry paper on my granite plate, apply even pressure and stroke it back and forth 3 or 4 times.

This shows me clearly where the high spots are and where there is no contact. See the bright spots on the 4 corners and part of the left side? That's where my iron would bed now.

I want the bed to be one big flat surface though. At a minimum, I want all 4 corners, and down both sides planar. I could live with a slight hollow in the center. But I'd prefer not to.

So now I'm going to take a piece of 320 grit wet/dry paper and my granite surface plate and work the surface until I clean all of my red dye up. I have to be sure I apply even pressure and don't allow the frog to rock while I'm lapping it, particularly when you don't have all 4 corners planar. I use good old WD-40 as lubricant when I use wet/dry paper.

It only took 10-15 strokes to get a good, continuous, flat surface. Note that this could be done on lapping plates, diamond plates, water stones or oil stones. Use what you have. Just make sure it's flat. See how all my dye is gone? That's good stuff ;-)

You can also see there are still tool marks from the machining on this face. I don't mind. I have a solid surface for the iron to bed on and I have a little bit of friction. Like we said, needs to hold tight but not too tight. A little texture on the bed gives a little grip without deforming the iron.

One note about the iron bedding surface on frogs: Some frogs don't have a flat surface for the iron but have a "web" cast in for this feature. The process is the same, just flatten the machined surfaces.

Now let's turn our attention to the other side of the frog and where it mates to the body. What's important here is that the frog sits solidly on the machined pads in the base. A frog that doesn't can cause all kinds of problems that are hard to diagnose. It can cause the frog to shift a little in use giving the impression that the lateral alignment has been knocked off. It can cause chatter in the cut leading you to think the iron isn't bedded well. It can also cause the iron bedding surface to be skewed in relation to the sole which can make alignment hard and leave one side of the cutter with less support than the other. Long-story-short, get this part right ;-)

The first thing I do is to lightly run a fine mill file over the machined pads to remove any burrs or raised areas. I also check with a straight edge to make sure the lower pads are aligned and the larger pad doesn't have a hump in it. A slight hollow in the large pad is ok, it will allow for a little hump in the mating surface in the body which is harder to detect and correct while still giving solid contact.

Now the next thing to do is to check the fit with the base. Sit the frog in place and put pressure down with your fingers over the screw holes. Now apply some pressure to the back corners then the front corners, one at a time. The frog should set solidly no matter where you apply pressure. No? Well here comes the PITA part…

This frog doesn't sit solidly at all. It has a very significant rocking action. Normally, I have to do little, if any, work on this fit. This is by far the worst I've seen. The hard part is that it's very hard to gauge or work on the pads in the base because they're not very accessible. The best solution is to take both the base and the frog and clean up all the pads on a mill. But that's not practical for most, so let's do it the hard way…

Remember my red layout dye? Well here she is again. I paint a thin coat on the machined pads of the base. And I mean THIN. If I put it on too thick, it won't tell me what I need to know. It's worth noting that Prussian Blue is a better option if you do this often. It's thinner and non-drying. Layout dye works for me though and I have it on hand so I use it. I have to work fairly quickly though. It's slow-drying, but it does dry. That's fine for work like we did with the frog face but you can't "print" mating parts if it's dry.

Now this is critical… You have to be methodical and consistent in how you do this to get good results. I sit the frog straight down onto the pads with no pressure and pick it straight back up. I don't want to rock it or press it down at all. If I do, I won't be able to see the true contact areas. Here is where the dye transfers onto the frog:

We have dye transfer on both pads on the left side and a little bit on the right side right at the screw hole. Not even a hint of contact on the lower pad on the right side. Also, see the tool marks from machining on these pads? It's horrible. You can't really tell from pics but they are deep. I probably could have machined these surfaces just as well with an angle grinder. It's not really a big problem in and of itself. But, the lack of contact on the lower right pad (which indicates the top pad and lower pads weren't machined parallel to one another) coupled with the terrible finish is an indication of some very sloppy work by a machinist.

(Hops off of soapbox)

Now we have dye transfer showing us where our high spots are on the frog pads. I'm going to use a shopmade carbide scraper and just lightly scrape only the dyed spots to remove a little bit of material. You can do this with a small file as well. The key is only to remove the high spots - nothing else.

Now we're going to dye the base pads again, re-print the frog and scrape away the high points. I didn't take pics of the whole process but, I repeated about 7 or 8 times. I know I'm done when I print the frog and get this:

I then clean up all the dye off both pieces and do one final print just to be sure dye build-up wasn't affecting my results. All's good

If we look closely after we finish the fitting process, we can see that I had to scrap far enough on the left side that I removed the machine tool marks. That's a lot more work than you should have to do on most planes and more than I've ever had to do on any other one.

The frog fit still isn't perfect. If I was starting over, I would have taken this body and frog and machined the mating surface. While I have solid contact with the body, the machining limits the amount of adjustability I have for the frog position.

When I set up a plane the first time, I usually try to start with the frog lined up with the back of the mouth. Then I can leave it there or move it further forward if I want to close the mouth up. But, when I set this frog, I can't move it far enough back to align it with the back of the mouth because the machined faces in the base aren't wide enough to accommodate the pads on the bottom of the frog. Not a deal-breaker by any means. But just another indication of some cost-cutting manufacturing on this plane.

This is the only later model Millers Falls plane I've had. It was made sometime in the 60's or 70's most likely. They left the red paint off, replaced all the brass with steel, switched from Cocobolo to Goncalo and replaced the trademark 3-point lever cap with a single piece. None of these things really affect the usability of the tool. However, after digging in a bit, it seems they also skimped on the quality of machining and fitting the tool at assembly. Fortunately, the castings seem to be same quality as their older planes and the iron and chip breaker seem to be unchanged.

I guess the point is, don't seek out newer models of these vintage planes. Most people know that pre-war Stanleys are the better vintage for consistent quality. Apparently the same holds true with Millers Falls. Just a little nugget I thought I'd share ;-)

Wow, we can see the finish line! Now we just need to finish up with the main body and get our iron and chipbreaker in shape. Then we can re-assemble, fettle and make some shavings. I'll try to wrap all that up next week. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Thanks for reading, comments welcome as always!

Click to expand...

Your attention to detail is top notch. Going to have to order myself some prussian blue.

- maxhall

Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification. I ve restored (some of them quite minimally) maybe fifteen cast iron planes and have seen a lot of things that can be wrong with them, but one thing I haven t run across is a frog that wouldn t sit flat. I m now working through your earlier posts in this series and enjoying learning new things and also enjoying the flashes of recognition when you mention something that exactly represents my experience.

- ClutteredShop

Click to expand...

HokieKen said:

Fixin' and Fittin' my Frog

Well, we're done with the cosmetic stuff. Time to get down to the real nitty-gritty. Woo Hoo!

If you have an old plane that's in decent enough shape that you don't care to polish it up and there isn't any significant rust, you can skip all of the previous work and start here. From here on is what really gets our plane in good working shape and takes a mediocre plane and makes it work better than new.

We're going to focus on the frog mainly in this entry but you have to tune the fit with the sole so we'll see the main body a bit too. I want to preface this by saying that this frog required more work than any other I have encountered. Its issues aren't due to abuse by a previous owner but, and I DESPISE saying this about Millers Falls (and I've never had to before), just plain sorry machining and quality at the time of manufacture. In truth, this plane needs to be put on a mill and machined on both the frog and the base but, since most people don't have that option and I'm not putting that kind of effort into a plane I don't really have a specific purpose for, we'll work with what we have.

The frog is arguably the most important part of the plane. It has to hold the iron firmly and with good support while still allowing it to be adjusted for depth and lateral alignment. In other words, it has to hold tight but not too tight. So, the first thing we'll attend to is the bed where the iron seats.

The first thing I do is to make sure there isn't a raised area around the threads for the lever cap. Usually at a minimum the lead thread is slightly raised. I take a small mill file and flatten that area. I pass the file over the entire face to make sure there aren't any other raised areas as well. Then I lay the iron bed flat on my granite surface plate (table saw, float glass, jointer bed, granite/marble tile - use the flattest surface you have) and see if it rocks. Make sure the lateral lever and/or depth adjustment fork aren't the culprit. No rock? Good. Now make sure you can't see any light underneath and can't slide feeler gauges under it. Just because the 4 corners are coplanar doesn't mean there isn't a hollow in the center and we want to whole surface flat.

This frog has a hollow in the middle. So, now we have a decision to make. We need to flatten this face. How? Well we can file it. However, that's not the best way to flatten a surface. It can be done but usually requires removing more surface than necessary. It can be done to a frog with the lever and fork in place though.

Another option is to machine it. Not practical for most so we'll not go that route either.

The best option for most of us is to lap it on a flat surface using some kind of abrasive. We'll see how that's done. However in order to do so, I need to get the lateral lever and depth fork out of the way because they stick up above the plane of the surface.

The lateral lever on this plane is different than most. Most have a peened brass or mild steel pin. This has basically that but instead of peening, it was deformed by some sort of punch. See the "X" mark in the end of the pin and the lever? I've never seen this method before but, it is quite effective evidently because this lever is not at all sloppy.

Now, I normally don't remove the lever unless absolutely necessary but I will for this one. In fact it turns out to be quite easy. I just "wiggled" the lever side to side while pulling and it came off. Normally, you'll have to take a small needle file and file the peened part back to the pin diameter to get the lever off. Keep in mind though, eventually you're going to have to get the lever back on and retained so have a plan!

Now for the adjustment fork. Normally this isn't a big problem. It's just a pin through the casting with one side peened or mushroomed to give a press fit when driven in. Just use a punch and drive the pin out. Drive the small side though. If you use the punch on the wrong end, you risk cracking the casting. If it won't drive easily, flip it over and try the other side.

This pin comes out easily but is a good, tight fit in the hole. Rather than driving it all the way out, I just move it far enough to get the fork off and leave it. It's out of the way.

You'll find that I use machinist layout fluid a lot. You can do without it but it's not expensive and a bottle will last a LONG time. I'd recommend grabbing a bottle. It's good for a lot of things. Here, I've painted a thin coat onto the iron bedding surface of the frog.

Now I'm going to lay the surface on a piece of 240 grit wet/dry paper on my granite plate, apply even pressure and stroke it back and forth 3 or 4 times.

This shows me clearly where the high spots are and where there is no contact. See the bright spots on the 4 corners and part of the left side? That's where my iron would bed now.

I want the bed to be one big flat surface though. At a minimum, I want all 4 corners, and down both sides planar. I could live with a slight hollow in the center. But I'd prefer not to.

So now I'm going to take a piece of 320 grit wet/dry paper and my granite surface plate and work the surface until I clean all of my red dye up. I have to be sure I apply even pressure and don't allow the frog to rock while I'm lapping it, particularly when you don't have all 4 corners planar. I use good old WD-40 as lubricant when I use wet/dry paper.

It only took 10-15 strokes to get a good, continuous, flat surface. Note that this could be done on lapping plates, diamond plates, water stones or oil stones. Use what you have. Just make sure it's flat. See how all my dye is gone? That's good stuff ;-)

You can also see there are still tool marks from the machining on this face. I don't mind. I have a solid surface for the iron to bed on and I have a little bit of friction. Like we said, needs to hold tight but not too tight. A little texture on the bed gives a little grip without deforming the iron.

One note about the iron bedding surface on frogs: Some frogs don't have a flat surface for the iron but have a "web" cast in for this feature. The process is the same, just flatten the machined surfaces.

Now let's turn our attention to the other side of the frog and where it mates to the body. What's important here is that the frog sits solidly on the machined pads in the base. A frog that doesn't can cause all kinds of problems that are hard to diagnose. It can cause the frog to shift a little in use giving the impression that the lateral alignment has been knocked off. It can cause chatter in the cut leading you to think the iron isn't bedded well. It can also cause the iron bedding surface to be skewed in relation to the sole which can make alignment hard and leave one side of the cutter with less support than the other. Long-story-short, get this part right ;-)

The first thing I do is to lightly run a fine mill file over the machined pads to remove any burrs or raised areas. I also check with a straight edge to make sure the lower pads are aligned and the larger pad doesn't have a hump in it. A slight hollow in the large pad is ok, it will allow for a little hump in the mating surface in the body which is harder to detect and correct while still giving solid contact.

Now the next thing to do is to check the fit with the base. Sit the frog in place and put pressure down with your fingers over the screw holes. Now apply some pressure to the back corners then the front corners, one at a time. The frog should set solidly no matter where you apply pressure. No? Well here comes the PITA part…

This frog doesn't sit solidly at all. It has a very significant rocking action. Normally, I have to do little, if any, work on this fit. This is by far the worst I've seen. The hard part is that it's very hard to gauge or work on the pads in the base because they're not very accessible. The best solution is to take both the base and the frog and clean up all the pads on a mill. But that's not practical for most, so let's do it the hard way…

Remember my red layout dye? Well here she is again. I paint a thin coat on the machined pads of the base. And I mean THIN. If I put it on too thick, it won't tell me what I need to know. It's worth noting that Prussian Blue is a better option if you do this often. It's thinner and non-drying. Layout dye works for me though and I have it on hand so I use it. I have to work fairly quickly though. It's slow-drying, but it does dry. That's fine for work like we did with the frog face but you can't "print" mating parts if it's dry.

Now this is critical… You have to be methodical and consistent in how you do this to get good results. I sit the frog straight down onto the pads with no pressure and pick it straight back up. I don't want to rock it or press it down at all. If I do, I won't be able to see the true contact areas. Here is where the dye transfers onto the frog:

We have dye transfer on both pads on the left side and a little bit on the right side right at the screw hole. Not even a hint of contact on the lower pad on the right side. Also, see the tool marks from machining on these pads? It's horrible. You can't really tell from pics but they are deep. I probably could have machined these surfaces just as well with an angle grinder. It's not really a big problem in and of itself. But, the lack of contact on the lower right pad (which indicates the top pad and lower pads weren't machined parallel to one another) coupled with the terrible finish is an indication of some very sloppy work by a machinist.

(Hops off of soapbox)

Now we have dye transfer showing us where our high spots are on the frog pads. I'm going to use a shopmade carbide scraper and just lightly scrape only the dyed spots to remove a little bit of material. You can do this with a small file as well. The key is only to remove the high spots - nothing else.

Now we're going to dye the base pads again, re-print the frog and scrape away the high points. I didn't take pics of the whole process but, I repeated about 7 or 8 times. I know I'm done when I print the frog and get this:

I then clean up all the dye off both pieces and do one final print just to be sure dye build-up wasn't affecting my results. All's good

If we look closely after we finish the fitting process, we can see that I had to scrap far enough on the left side that I removed the machine tool marks. That's a lot more work than you should have to do on most planes and more than I've ever had to do on any other one.

The frog fit still isn't perfect. If I was starting over, I would have taken this body and frog and machined the mating surface. While I have solid contact with the body, the machining limits the amount of adjustability I have for the frog position.

When I set up a plane the first time, I usually try to start with the frog lined up with the back of the mouth. Then I can leave it there or move it further forward if I want to close the mouth up. But, when I set this frog, I can't move it far enough back to align it with the back of the mouth because the machined faces in the base aren't wide enough to accommodate the pads on the bottom of the frog. Not a deal-breaker by any means. But just another indication of some cost-cutting manufacturing on this plane.

This is the only later model Millers Falls plane I've had. It was made sometime in the 60's or 70's most likely. They left the red paint off, replaced all the brass with steel, switched from Cocobolo to Goncalo and replaced the trademark 3-point lever cap with a single piece. None of these things really affect the usability of the tool. However, after digging in a bit, it seems they also skimped on the quality of machining and fitting the tool at assembly. Fortunately, the castings seem to be same quality as their older planes and the iron and chip breaker seem to be unchanged.

I guess the point is, don't seek out newer models of these vintage planes. Most people know that pre-war Stanleys are the better vintage for consistent quality. Apparently the same holds true with Millers Falls. Just a little nugget I thought I'd share ;-)

Wow, we can see the finish line! Now we just need to finish up with the main body and get our iron and chipbreaker in shape. Then we can re-assemble, fettle and make some shavings. I'll try to wrap all that up next week. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Thanks for reading, comments welcome as always!

Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification. I ve restored (some of them quite minimally) maybe fifteen cast iron planes and have seen a lot of things that can be wrong with them, but one thing I haven t run across is a frog that

You ve done more planes than me though, this will be 9 or 10 I ve done. Maybe you should be the one writing the blog!

- HokieKen

Click to expand...

HokieKen said:

Fixin' and Fittin' my Frog

Well, we're done with the cosmetic stuff. Time to get down to the real nitty-gritty. Woo Hoo!

If you have an old plane that's in decent enough shape that you don't care to polish it up and there isn't any significant rust, you can skip all of the previous work and start here. From here on is what really gets our plane in good working shape and takes a mediocre plane and makes it work better than new.

We're going to focus on the frog mainly in this entry but you have to tune the fit with the sole so we'll see the main body a bit too. I want to preface this by saying that this frog required more work than any other I have encountered. Its issues aren't due to abuse by a previous owner but, and I DESPISE saying this about Millers Falls (and I've never had to before), just plain sorry machining and quality at the time of manufacture. In truth, this plane needs to be put on a mill and machined on both the frog and the base but, since most people don't have that option and I'm not putting that kind of effort into a plane I don't really have a specific purpose for, we'll work with what we have.

The frog is arguably the most important part of the plane. It has to hold the iron firmly and with good support while still allowing it to be adjusted for depth and lateral alignment. In other words, it has to hold tight but not too tight. So, the first thing we'll attend to is the bed where the iron seats.

The first thing I do is to make sure there isn't a raised area around the threads for the lever cap. Usually at a minimum the lead thread is slightly raised. I take a small mill file and flatten that area. I pass the file over the entire face to make sure there aren't any other raised areas as well. Then I lay the iron bed flat on my granite surface plate (table saw, float glass, jointer bed, granite/marble tile - use the flattest surface you have) and see if it rocks. Make sure the lateral lever and/or depth adjustment fork aren't the culprit. No rock? Good. Now make sure you can't see any light underneath and can't slide feeler gauges under it. Just because the 4 corners are coplanar doesn't mean there isn't a hollow in the center and we want to whole surface flat.

This frog has a hollow in the middle. So, now we have a decision to make. We need to flatten this face. How? Well we can file it. However, that's not the best way to flatten a surface. It can be done but usually requires removing more surface than necessary. It can be done to a frog with the lever and fork in place though.

Another option is to machine it. Not practical for most so we'll not go that route either.

The best option for most of us is to lap it on a flat surface using some kind of abrasive. We'll see how that's done. However in order to do so, I need to get the lateral lever and depth fork out of the way because they stick up above the plane of the surface.

The lateral lever on this plane is different than most. Most have a peened brass or mild steel pin. This has basically that but instead of peening, it was deformed by some sort of punch. See the "X" mark in the end of the pin and the lever? I've never seen this method before but, it is quite effective evidently because this lever is not at all sloppy.

Now, I normally don't remove the lever unless absolutely necessary but I will for this one. In fact it turns out to be quite easy. I just "wiggled" the lever side to side while pulling and it came off. Normally, you'll have to take a small needle file and file the peened part back to the pin diameter to get the lever off. Keep in mind though, eventually you're going to have to get the lever back on and retained so have a plan!

Now for the adjustment fork. Normally this isn't a big problem. It's just a pin through the casting with one side peened or mushroomed to give a press fit when driven in. Just use a punch and drive the pin out. Drive the small side though. If you use the punch on the wrong end, you risk cracking the casting. If it won't drive easily, flip it over and try the other side.

This pin comes out easily but is a good, tight fit in the hole. Rather than driving it all the way out, I just move it far enough to get the fork off and leave it. It's out of the way.

You'll find that I use machinist layout fluid a lot. You can do without it but it's not expensive and a bottle will last a LONG time. I'd recommend grabbing a bottle. It's good for a lot of things. Here, I've painted a thin coat onto the iron bedding surface of the frog.

Now I'm going to lay the surface on a piece of 240 grit wet/dry paper on my granite plate, apply even pressure and stroke it back and forth 3 or 4 times.

This shows me clearly where the high spots are and where there is no contact. See the bright spots on the 4 corners and part of the left side? That's where my iron would bed now.

I want the bed to be one big flat surface though. At a minimum, I want all 4 corners, and down both sides planar. I could live with a slight hollow in the center. But I'd prefer not to.

So now I'm going to take a piece of 320 grit wet/dry paper and my granite surface plate and work the surface until I clean all of my red dye up. I have to be sure I apply even pressure and don't allow the frog to rock while I'm lapping it, particularly when you don't have all 4 corners planar. I use good old WD-40 as lubricant when I use wet/dry paper.

It only took 10-15 strokes to get a good, continuous, flat surface. Note that this could be done on lapping plates, diamond plates, water stones or oil stones. Use what you have. Just make sure it's flat. See how all my dye is gone? That's good stuff ;-)

You can also see there are still tool marks from the machining on this face. I don't mind. I have a solid surface for the iron to bed on and I have a little bit of friction. Like we said, needs to hold tight but not too tight. A little texture on the bed gives a little grip without deforming the iron.

One note about the iron bedding surface on frogs: Some frogs don't have a flat surface for the iron but have a "web" cast in for this feature. The process is the same, just flatten the machined surfaces.

Now let's turn our attention to the other side of the frog and where it mates to the body. What's important here is that the frog sits solidly on the machined pads in the base. A frog that doesn't can cause all kinds of problems that are hard to diagnose. It can cause the frog to shift a little in use giving the impression that the lateral alignment has been knocked off. It can cause chatter in the cut leading you to think the iron isn't bedded well. It can also cause the iron bedding surface to be skewed in relation to the sole which can make alignment hard and leave one side of the cutter with less support than the other. Long-story-short, get this part right ;-)

The first thing I do is to lightly run a fine mill file over the machined pads to remove any burrs or raised areas. I also check with a straight edge to make sure the lower pads are aligned and the larger pad doesn't have a hump in it. A slight hollow in the large pad is ok, it will allow for a little hump in the mating surface in the body which is harder to detect and correct while still giving solid contact.

Now the next thing to do is to check the fit with the base. Sit the frog in place and put pressure down with your fingers over the screw holes. Now apply some pressure to the back corners then the front corners, one at a time. The frog should set solidly no matter where you apply pressure. No? Well here comes the PITA part…

This frog doesn't sit solidly at all. It has a very significant rocking action. Normally, I have to do little, if any, work on this fit. This is by far the worst I've seen. The hard part is that it's very hard to gauge or work on the pads in the base because they're not very accessible. The best solution is to take both the base and the frog and clean up all the pads on a mill. But that's not practical for most, so let's do it the hard way…

Remember my red layout dye? Well here she is again. I paint a thin coat on the machined pads of the base. And I mean THIN. If I put it on too thick, it won't tell me what I need to know. It's worth noting that Prussian Blue is a better option if you do this often. It's thinner and non-drying. Layout dye works for me though and I have it on hand so I use it. I have to work fairly quickly though. It's slow-drying, but it does dry. That's fine for work like we did with the frog face but you can't "print" mating parts if it's dry.

Now this is critical… You have to be methodical and consistent in how you do this to get good results. I sit the frog straight down onto the pads with no pressure and pick it straight back up. I don't want to rock it or press it down at all. If I do, I won't be able to see the true contact areas. Here is where the dye transfers onto the frog:

We have dye transfer on both pads on the left side and a little bit on the right side right at the screw hole. Not even a hint of contact on the lower pad on the right side. Also, see the tool marks from machining on these pads? It's horrible. You can't really tell from pics but they are deep. I probably could have machined these surfaces just as well with an angle grinder. It's not really a big problem in and of itself. But, the lack of contact on the lower right pad (which indicates the top pad and lower pads weren't machined parallel to one another) coupled with the terrible finish is an indication of some very sloppy work by a machinist.

(Hops off of soapbox)

Now we have dye transfer showing us where our high spots are on the frog pads. I'm going to use a shopmade carbide scraper and just lightly scrape only the dyed spots to remove a little bit of material. You can do this with a small file as well. The key is only to remove the high spots - nothing else.

Now we're going to dye the base pads again, re-print the frog and scrape away the high points. I didn't take pics of the whole process but, I repeated about 7 or 8 times. I know I'm done when I print the frog and get this:

I then clean up all the dye off both pieces and do one final print just to be sure dye build-up wasn't affecting my results. All's good

If we look closely after we finish the fitting process, we can see that I had to scrap far enough on the left side that I removed the machine tool marks. That's a lot more work than you should have to do on most planes and more than I've ever had to do on any other one.

The frog fit still isn't perfect. If I was starting over, I would have taken this body and frog and machined the mating surface. While I have solid contact with the body, the machining limits the amount of adjustability I have for the frog position.

When I set up a plane the first time, I usually try to start with the frog lined up with the back of the mouth. Then I can leave it there or move it further forward if I want to close the mouth up. But, when I set this frog, I can't move it far enough back to align it with the back of the mouth because the machined faces in the base aren't wide enough to accommodate the pads on the bottom of the frog. Not a deal-breaker by any means. But just another indication of some cost-cutting manufacturing on this plane.

This is the only later model Millers Falls plane I've had. It was made sometime in the 60's or 70's most likely. They left the red paint off, replaced all the brass with steel, switched from Cocobolo to Goncalo and replaced the trademark 3-point lever cap with a single piece. None of these things really affect the usability of the tool. However, after digging in a bit, it seems they also skimped on the quality of machining and fitting the tool at assembly. Fortunately, the castings seem to be same quality as their older planes and the iron and chip breaker seem to be unchanged.

I guess the point is, don't seek out newer models of these vintage planes. Most people know that pre-war Stanleys are the better vintage for consistent quality. Apparently the same holds true with Millers Falls. Just a little nugget I thought I'd share ;-)

Wow, we can see the finish line! Now we just need to finish up with the main body and get our iron and chipbreaker in shape. Then we can re-assemble, fettle and make some shavings. I'll try to wrap all that up next week. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Thanks for reading, comments welcome as always!

Click to expand...

HokieKen said:

Fixin' and Fittin' my Frog

Well, we're done with the cosmetic stuff. Time to get down to the real nitty-gritty. Woo Hoo!

If you have an old plane that's in decent enough shape that you don't care to polish it up and there isn't any significant rust, you can skip all of the previous work and start here. From here on is what really gets our plane in good working shape and takes a mediocre plane and makes it work better than new.

We're going to focus on the frog mainly in this entry but you have to tune the fit with the sole so we'll see the main body a bit too. I want to preface this by saying that this frog required more work than any other I have encountered. Its issues aren't due to abuse by a previous owner but, and I DESPISE saying this about Millers Falls (and I've never had to before), just plain sorry machining and quality at the time of manufacture. In truth, this plane needs to be put on a mill and machined on both the frog and the base but, since most people don't have that option and I'm not putting that kind of effort into a plane I don't really have a specific purpose for, we'll work with what we have.

The frog is arguably the most important part of the plane. It has to hold the iron firmly and with good support while still allowing it to be adjusted for depth and lateral alignment. In other words, it has to hold tight but not too tight. So, the first thing we'll attend to is the bed where the iron seats.

The first thing I do is to make sure there isn't a raised area around the threads for the lever cap. Usually at a minimum the lead thread is slightly raised. I take a small mill file and flatten that area. I pass the file over the entire face to make sure there aren't any other raised areas as well. Then I lay the iron bed flat on my granite surface plate (table saw, float glass, jointer bed, granite/marble tile - use the flattest surface you have) and see if it rocks. Make sure the lateral lever and/or depth adjustment fork aren't the culprit. No rock? Good. Now make sure you can't see any light underneath and can't slide feeler gauges under it. Just because the 4 corners are coplanar doesn't mean there isn't a hollow in the center and we want to whole surface flat.

This frog has a hollow in the middle. So, now we have a decision to make. We need to flatten this face. How? Well we can file it. However, that's not the best way to flatten a surface. It can be done but usually requires removing more surface than necessary. It can be done to a frog with the lever and fork in place though.

Another option is to machine it. Not practical for most so we'll not go that route either.

The best option for most of us is to lap it on a flat surface using some kind of abrasive. We'll see how that's done. However in order to do so, I need to get the lateral lever and depth fork out of the way because they stick up above the plane of the surface.

The lateral lever on this plane is different than most. Most have a peened brass or mild steel pin. This has basically that but instead of peening, it was deformed by some sort of punch. See the "X" mark in the end of the pin and the lever? I've never seen this method before but, it is quite effective evidently because this lever is not at all sloppy.

Now, I normally don't remove the lever unless absolutely necessary but I will for this one. In fact it turns out to be quite easy. I just "wiggled" the lever side to side while pulling and it came off. Normally, you'll have to take a small needle file and file the peened part back to the pin diameter to get the lever off. Keep in mind though, eventually you're going to have to get the lever back on and retained so have a plan!

Now for the adjustment fork. Normally this isn't a big problem. It's just a pin through the casting with one side peened or mushroomed to give a press fit when driven in. Just use a punch and drive the pin out. Drive the small side though. If you use the punch on the wrong end, you risk cracking the casting. If it won't drive easily, flip it over and try the other side.

This pin comes out easily but is a good, tight fit in the hole. Rather than driving it all the way out, I just move it far enough to get the fork off and leave it. It's out of the way.

You'll find that I use machinist layout fluid a lot. You can do without it but it's not expensive and a bottle will last a LONG time. I'd recommend grabbing a bottle. It's good for a lot of things. Here, I've painted a thin coat onto the iron bedding surface of the frog.

Now I'm going to lay the surface on a piece of 240 grit wet/dry paper on my granite plate, apply even pressure and stroke it back and forth 3 or 4 times.

This shows me clearly where the high spots are and where there is no contact. See the bright spots on the 4 corners and part of the left side? That's where my iron would bed now.

I want the bed to be one big flat surface though. At a minimum, I want all 4 corners, and down both sides planar. I could live with a slight hollow in the center. But I'd prefer not to.

So now I'm going to take a piece of 320 grit wet/dry paper and my granite surface plate and work the surface until I clean all of my red dye up. I have to be sure I apply even pressure and don't allow the frog to rock while I'm lapping it, particularly when you don't have all 4 corners planar. I use good old WD-40 as lubricant when I use wet/dry paper.

It only took 10-15 strokes to get a good, continuous, flat surface. Note that this could be done on lapping plates, diamond plates, water stones or oil stones. Use what you have. Just make sure it's flat. See how all my dye is gone? That's good stuff ;-)

You can also see there are still tool marks from the machining on this face. I don't mind. I have a solid surface for the iron to bed on and I have a little bit of friction. Like we said, needs to hold tight but not too tight. A little texture on the bed gives a little grip without deforming the iron.

One note about the iron bedding surface on frogs: Some frogs don't have a flat surface for the iron but have a "web" cast in for this feature. The process is the same, just flatten the machined surfaces.

Now let's turn our attention to the other side of the frog and where it mates to the body. What's important here is that the frog sits solidly on the machined pads in the base. A frog that doesn't can cause all kinds of problems that are hard to diagnose. It can cause the frog to shift a little in use giving the impression that the lateral alignment has been knocked off. It can cause chatter in the cut leading you to think the iron isn't bedded well. It can also cause the iron bedding surface to be skewed in relation to the sole which can make alignment hard and leave one side of the cutter with less support than the other. Long-story-short, get this part right ;-)

The first thing I do is to lightly run a fine mill file over the machined pads to remove any burrs or raised areas. I also check with a straight edge to make sure the lower pads are aligned and the larger pad doesn't have a hump in it. A slight hollow in the large pad is ok, it will allow for a little hump in the mating surface in the body which is harder to detect and correct while still giving solid contact.

Now the next thing to do is to check the fit with the base. Sit the frog in place and put pressure down with your fingers over the screw holes. Now apply some pressure to the back corners then the front corners, one at a time. The frog should set solidly no matter where you apply pressure. No? Well here comes the PITA part…

This frog doesn't sit solidly at all. It has a very significant rocking action. Normally, I have to do little, if any, work on this fit. This is by far the worst I've seen. The hard part is that it's very hard to gauge or work on the pads in the base because they're not very accessible. The best solution is to take both the base and the frog and clean up all the pads on a mill. But that's not practical for most, so let's do it the hard way…

Remember my red layout dye? Well here she is again. I paint a thin coat on the machined pads of the base. And I mean THIN. If I put it on too thick, it won't tell me what I need to know. It's worth noting that Prussian Blue is a better option if you do this often. It's thinner and non-drying. Layout dye works for me though and I have it on hand so I use it. I have to work fairly quickly though. It's slow-drying, but it does dry. That's fine for work like we did with the frog face but you can't "print" mating parts if it's dry.

Now this is critical… You have to be methodical and consistent in how you do this to get good results. I sit the frog straight down onto the pads with no pressure and pick it straight back up. I don't want to rock it or press it down at all. If I do, I won't be able to see the true contact areas. Here is where the dye transfers onto the frog:

We have dye transfer on both pads on the left side and a little bit on the right side right at the screw hole. Not even a hint of contact on the lower pad on the right side. Also, see the tool marks from machining on these pads? It's horrible. You can't really tell from pics but they are deep. I probably could have machined these surfaces just as well with an angle grinder. It's not really a big problem in and of itself. But, the lack of contact on the lower right pad (which indicates the top pad and lower pads weren't machined parallel to one another) coupled with the terrible finish is an indication of some very sloppy work by a machinist.

(Hops off of soapbox)

Now we have dye transfer showing us where our high spots are on the frog pads. I'm going to use a shopmade carbide scraper and just lightly scrape only the dyed spots to remove a little bit of material. You can do this with a small file as well. The key is only to remove the high spots - nothing else.

Now we're going to dye the base pads again, re-print the frog and scrape away the high points. I didn't take pics of the whole process but, I repeated about 7 or 8 times. I know I'm done when I print the frog and get this:

I then clean up all the dye off both pieces and do one final print just to be sure dye build-up wasn't affecting my results. All's good

If we look closely after we finish the fitting process, we can see that I had to scrap far enough on the left side that I removed the machine tool marks. That's a lot more work than you should have to do on most planes and more than I've ever had to do on any other one.

The frog fit still isn't perfect. If I was starting over, I would have taken this body and frog and machined the mating surface. While I have solid contact with the body, the machining limits the amount of adjustability I have for the frog position.

When I set up a plane the first time, I usually try to start with the frog lined up with the back of the mouth. Then I can leave it there or move it further forward if I want to close the mouth up. But, when I set this frog, I can't move it far enough back to align it with the back of the mouth because the machined faces in the base aren't wide enough to accommodate the pads on the bottom of the frog. Not a deal-breaker by any means. But just another indication of some cost-cutting manufacturing on this plane.

This is the only later model Millers Falls plane I've had. It was made sometime in the 60's or 70's most likely. They left the red paint off, replaced all the brass with steel, switched from Cocobolo to Goncalo and replaced the trademark 3-point lever cap with a single piece. None of these things really affect the usability of the tool. However, after digging in a bit, it seems they also skimped on the quality of machining and fitting the tool at assembly. Fortunately, the castings seem to be same quality as their older planes and the iron and chip breaker seem to be unchanged.

I guess the point is, don't seek out newer models of these vintage planes. Most people know that pre-war Stanleys are the better vintage for consistent quality. Apparently the same holds true with Millers Falls. Just a little nugget I thought I'd share ;-)

Wow, we can see the finish line! Now we just need to finish up with the main body and get our iron and chipbreaker in shape. Then we can re-assemble, fettle and make some shavings. I'll try to wrap all that up next week. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Thanks for reading, comments welcome as always!

Click to expand...

HokieKen said:

Fixin' and Fittin' my Frog

Well, we're done with the cosmetic stuff. Time to get down to the real nitty-gritty. Woo Hoo!

If you have an old plane that's in decent enough shape that you don't care to polish it up and there isn't any significant rust, you can skip all of the previous work and start here. From here on is what really gets our plane in good working shape and takes a mediocre plane and makes it work better than new.

We're going to focus on the frog mainly in this entry but you have to tune the fit with the sole so we'll see the main body a bit too. I want to preface this by saying that this frog required more work than any other I have encountered. Its issues aren't due to abuse by a previous owner but, and I DESPISE saying this about Millers Falls (and I've never had to before), just plain sorry machining and quality at the time of manufacture. In truth, this plane needs to be put on a mill and machined on both the frog and the base but, since most people don't have that option and I'm not putting that kind of effort into a plane I don't really have a specific purpose for, we'll work with what we have.

The frog is arguably the most important part of the plane. It has to hold the iron firmly and with good support while still allowing it to be adjusted for depth and lateral alignment. In other words, it has to hold tight but not too tight. So, the first thing we'll attend to is the bed where the iron seats.

The first thing I do is to make sure there isn't a raised area around the threads for the lever cap. Usually at a minimum the lead thread is slightly raised. I take a small mill file and flatten that area. I pass the file over the entire face to make sure there aren't any other raised areas as well. Then I lay the iron bed flat on my granite surface plate (table saw, float glass, jointer bed, granite/marble tile - use the flattest surface you have) and see if it rocks. Make sure the lateral lever and/or depth adjustment fork aren't the culprit. No rock? Good. Now make sure you can't see any light underneath and can't slide feeler gauges under it. Just because the 4 corners are coplanar doesn't mean there isn't a hollow in the center and we want to whole surface flat.

This frog has a hollow in the middle. So, now we have a decision to make. We need to flatten this face. How? Well we can file it. However, that's not the best way to flatten a surface. It can be done but usually requires removing more surface than necessary. It can be done to a frog with the lever and fork in place though.

Another option is to machine it. Not practical for most so we'll not go that route either.

The best option for most of us is to lap it on a flat surface using some kind of abrasive. We'll see how that's done. However in order to do so, I need to get the lateral lever and depth fork out of the way because they stick up above the plane of the surface.

The lateral lever on this plane is different than most. Most have a peened brass or mild steel pin. This has basically that but instead of peening, it was deformed by some sort of punch. See the "X" mark in the end of the pin and the lever? I've never seen this method before but, it is quite effective evidently because this lever is not at all sloppy.

Now, I normally don't remove the lever unless absolutely necessary but I will for this one. In fact it turns out to be quite easy. I just "wiggled" the lever side to side while pulling and it came off. Normally, you'll have to take a small needle file and file the peened part back to the pin diameter to get the lever off. Keep in mind though, eventually you're going to have to get the lever back on and retained so have a plan!

Now for the adjustment fork. Normally this isn't a big problem. It's just a pin through the casting with one side peened or mushroomed to give a press fit when driven in. Just use a punch and drive the pin out. Drive the small side though. If you use the punch on the wrong end, you risk cracking the casting. If it won't drive easily, flip it over and try the other side.

This pin comes out easily but is a good, tight fit in the hole. Rather than driving it all the way out, I just move it far enough to get the fork off and leave it. It's out of the way.

You'll find that I use machinist layout fluid a lot. You can do without it but it's not expensive and a bottle will last a LONG time. I'd recommend grabbing a bottle. It's good for a lot of things. Here, I've painted a thin coat onto the iron bedding surface of the frog.

Now I'm going to lay the surface on a piece of 240 grit wet/dry paper on my granite plate, apply even pressure and stroke it back and forth 3 or 4 times.

This shows me clearly where the high spots are and where there is no contact. See the bright spots on the 4 corners and part of the left side? That's where my iron would bed now.

I want the bed to be one big flat surface though. At a minimum, I want all 4 corners, and down both sides planar. I could live with a slight hollow in the center. But I'd prefer not to.

So now I'm going to take a piece of 320 grit wet/dry paper and my granite surface plate and work the surface until I clean all of my red dye up. I have to be sure I apply even pressure and don't allow the frog to rock while I'm lapping it, particularly when you don't have all 4 corners planar. I use good old WD-40 as lubricant when I use wet/dry paper.

It only took 10-15 strokes to get a good, continuous, flat surface. Note that this could be done on lapping plates, diamond plates, water stones or oil stones. Use what you have. Just make sure it's flat. See how all my dye is gone? That's good stuff ;-)

You can also see there are still tool marks from the machining on this face. I don't mind. I have a solid surface for the iron to bed on and I have a little bit of friction. Like we said, needs to hold tight but not too tight. A little texture on the bed gives a little grip without deforming the iron.

One note about the iron bedding surface on frogs: Some frogs don't have a flat surface for the iron but have a "web" cast in for this feature. The process is the same, just flatten the machined surfaces.

Now let's turn our attention to the other side of the frog and where it mates to the body. What's important here is that the frog sits solidly on the machined pads in the base. A frog that doesn't can cause all kinds of problems that are hard to diagnose. It can cause the frog to shift a little in use giving the impression that the lateral alignment has been knocked off. It can cause chatter in the cut leading you to think the iron isn't bedded well. It can also cause the iron bedding surface to be skewed in relation to the sole which can make alignment hard and leave one side of the cutter with less support than the other. Long-story-short, get this part right ;-)

The first thing I do is to lightly run a fine mill file over the machined pads to remove any burrs or raised areas. I also check with a straight edge to make sure the lower pads are aligned and the larger pad doesn't have a hump in it. A slight hollow in the large pad is ok, it will allow for a little hump in the mating surface in the body which is harder to detect and correct while still giving solid contact.

Now the next thing to do is to check the fit with the base. Sit the frog in place and put pressure down with your fingers over the screw holes. Now apply some pressure to the back corners then the front corners, one at a time. The frog should set solidly no matter where you apply pressure. No? Well here comes the PITA part…

This frog doesn't sit solidly at all. It has a very significant rocking action. Normally, I have to do little, if any, work on this fit. This is by far the worst I've seen. The hard part is that it's very hard to gauge or work on the pads in the base because they're not very accessible. The best solution is to take both the base and the frog and clean up all the pads on a mill. But that's not practical for most, so let's do it the hard way…

Remember my red layout dye? Well here she is again. I paint a thin coat on the machined pads of the base. And I mean THIN. If I put it on too thick, it won't tell me what I need to know. It's worth noting that Prussian Blue is a better option if you do this often. It's thinner and non-drying. Layout dye works for me though and I have it on hand so I use it. I have to work fairly quickly though. It's slow-drying, but it does dry. That's fine for work like we did with the frog face but you can't "print" mating parts if it's dry.

Now this is critical… You have to be methodical and consistent in how you do this to get good results. I sit the frog straight down onto the pads with no pressure and pick it straight back up. I don't want to rock it or press it down at all. If I do, I won't be able to see the true contact areas. Here is where the dye transfers onto the frog:

We have dye transfer on both pads on the left side and a little bit on the right side right at the screw hole. Not even a hint of contact on the lower pad on the right side. Also, see the tool marks from machining on these pads? It's horrible. You can't really tell from pics but they are deep. I probably could have machined these surfaces just as well with an angle grinder. It's not really a big problem in and of itself. But, the lack of contact on the lower right pad (which indicates the top pad and lower pads weren't machined parallel to one another) coupled with the terrible finish is an indication of some very sloppy work by a machinist.

(Hops off of soapbox)

Now we have dye transfer showing us where our high spots are on the frog pads. I'm going to use a shopmade carbide scraper and just lightly scrape only the dyed spots to remove a little bit of material. You can do this with a small file as well. The key is only to remove the high spots - nothing else.

Now we're going to dye the base pads again, re-print the frog and scrape away the high points. I didn't take pics of the whole process but, I repeated about 7 or 8 times. I know I'm done when I print the frog and get this:

I then clean up all the dye off both pieces and do one final print just to be sure dye build-up wasn't affecting my results. All's good

If we look closely after we finish the fitting process, we can see that I had to scrap far enough on the left side that I removed the machine tool marks. That's a lot more work than you should have to do on most planes and more than I've ever had to do on any other one.

The frog fit still isn't perfect. If I was starting over, I would have taken this body and frog and machined the mating surface. While I have solid contact with the body, the machining limits the amount of adjustability I have for the frog position.

When I set up a plane the first time, I usually try to start with the frog lined up with the back of the mouth. Then I can leave it there or move it further forward if I want to close the mouth up. But, when I set this frog, I can't move it far enough back to align it with the back of the mouth because the machined faces in the base aren't wide enough to accommodate the pads on the bottom of the frog. Not a deal-breaker by any means. But just another indication of some cost-cutting manufacturing on this plane.

This is the only later model Millers Falls plane I've had. It was made sometime in the 60's or 70's most likely. They left the red paint off, replaced all the brass with steel, switched from Cocobolo to Goncalo and replaced the trademark 3-point lever cap with a single piece. None of these things really affect the usability of the tool. However, after digging in a bit, it seems they also skimped on the quality of machining and fitting the tool at assembly. Fortunately, the castings seem to be same quality as their older planes and the iron and chip breaker seem to be unchanged.

I guess the point is, don't seek out newer models of these vintage planes. Most people know that pre-war Stanleys are the better vintage for consistent quality. Apparently the same holds true with Millers Falls. Just a little nugget I thought I'd share ;-)

Wow, we can see the finish line! Now we just need to finish up with the main body and get our iron and chipbreaker in shape. Then we can re-assemble, fettle and make some shavings. I'll try to wrap all that up next week. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Thanks for reading, comments welcome as always!

Click to expand...

HokieKen said:

Working up the Iron

Alright, let's see if we can wrap this up and have a new user in the plane till by the end of the week. Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving weekend. Mine was nice but no shop time so I'm trying to squeeze this plane in when I can. I found a couple of hours last night to work up the iron and chip breaker. Here's how I did it…

I start with the iron. Prior to this, all we did was rust conversion on the iron. If we recall, we had some pretty gnarly pitting at the business end of this guy:

We can't leave that! What is a cutting edge? Simply put, it's the intersection of 2 planes (surfaces) where the intersection has as small a radius as possible. Pitting will essentially give us localized areas of unacceptable radii if we just hone our edge "around" it. The result would be that no matter how sharp we hone the edge, it won't cut where there are voids.

So we have to get past the pitting on an iron that's already pretty darned short. But, we work with what we have! So I start by painting the iron with some layout dye and scribing a line across it square to the edge of the iron.

I mark my cutoff line as close to the edge as possible while ensuring I am past the pitting on both sides of the iron.

Then I use a Dremel tool with a cutoff wheel to cut off the unusable portion. Now, I'm not a "safety preacher", you're all big boys and girls, BUT WEAR SAFETY GLASSES when you do this. You only have 2 eyes and these wheels fracture and basically explode often. 'Nuff said…

I lightly score my scribed line with the wheel and repeat 5-6 times until I'm almost through. Then I clamped the waste section in a vise and just snapped it off. The tool steel the iron is made of is very hard and strong but also pretty brittle. I easily snap it cleanly with just my hand.

The next step is on the bench grinder for me. Let me say that if you don't have a grinder, it's not entirely necessary but, it will save you a TON of time when it comes time to hone your bevel. You can hone the bevel from a square edge but you won't catch me doing it.

I start by setting my grinder rest for a 25 degree bevel. There are all kinds of jigs and gauges you can use to do this. Experienced folks may just eyeball it and free-hand it, sometimes without even using the rest. I have all kinds of chisels and plane irons with 25 degree bevels in my shop. I just grab one of them and use it to set my rest. I clamp the iron in my guide and I'm ready to go. (BTW, I'm using a clone of the Veritas bench grinder jig that I bought from Peachtree woodworking - not perfect but affordable and FAR better than the rests that come on most bench grinders)

I'm going to kinda glance over a lot of stuff in this entry for the simple reason that there is so much information available online and I don't have anything really unique to add. So, I'm not gonna give a step-by-step on how to hollow grind a bevel. But here's our iron after I did:

See how there is a reflection on the edge in the pic below?

I don't grind all the way to a sharp edge. I don't want to wreck the temper on my iron with the grinder. Especially an iron this short. In practice that means don't let the steel turn blue. The closer you get to a sharp edge, the less material there is to conduct the heat away from the grinder wheel. So, to be safe, I cool the steel often in water while grinding and as soon as sparks roll onto the back of the iron, I'm done.

Now my iron is ready to be worked up. In many cases with vintage planes, you'll receive the iron in the condition I've just gotten to. You normally won't have to cut any material off and often you'll already have a bevel you can work with so you can skip the grinder.

Now that I've removed the pitting and hollow ground my bevel, I find I'll be dealing with another "first time I've seen that" on this plane. I wound up with an iron that's the same length as (or a bit shorter than) the chipbreaker.

I don't know if that will cause me any headaches or not. We'll burn that bridge in a little while ;-)
The next thing I'll do with the iron is to hit both sides with a soft wire brush on the grinder. I'm really just removing the coating left behind by the phosphoric acid. This step isn't necessary but I'm going to end up sanding a bunch of it off anyway and this is less work.

The top of the iron normally sticks up higher than the chipbreaker and is visible so I usually give it some cosmetic attention. After wire brushing, I'll give it a quick polish with some wet/dry paper then hit it with a buffing wheel on the grinder.

If I find the maker's mark is hard to see and I want to enhance it a bit, sometimes I'll cover it and the surrounding area with my layout dye then polish the dye off with some fine sandpaper on a flat substrate. Make sure the dye is dry before polishing and don't use lubricant on the paper.

The next thing I'll do is to take my iron and (sorta) flatten the side that beds on the frog (the bevel side). Remember how in the last entry we took care to make sure the bedding surface on the frog was flat? Well we'll do the same with the iron. I don't spend a lot of time flattening the entire surface but I do make sure that most of it is planar and that there will be good solid contact down near the bottom where the lever cap will hold it down. It only takes a few strokes on my coarse diamond plate to see that we're in good shape. There's a little bit of a hollow at the top but that won't be in contact with the frog anyway.

Disclaimer: I noticed while writing this and going through the pictures, it seems disjointed. For instance, in the pic above, the top side of the iron has been worked on the diamond plate but in the following pics, it still has the iron phosphate coating. I'm not trying to fool anyone and I promise this was all done on the same iron ;-P I just do these things and snap a bunch of pics then go back and try to remember what order I did them in and correlate pics accordingly. So, the way I present this stuff may not exactly match the order I did it in. Don't worry though, in any case where it's important that one thing be done ahead of another, I'll make it clear.

Okay, so far everything is fairly simple. Now let's get down to the real nitty-gritty. Here comes the stuff that really matters. Again, I'll glance over some of the following information because there is so much available online. We're about to begin sharpening. I debated on whether to include this at all because there is soooooo many how-to guides out there on sharpening plane irons. I am also not a sharpening zealot. I don't care how you sharpen your tools. And I don't care if you think I do it wrong. I don't understand people's zeal when it comes to sharpening methods. All I can say is get the basics down, choose whatever medium(s) suits you and your budget and go to it. If you get tools that cut the way you need them to, you're done.

But, since this series is "how I do plane rehabs" I figured I should show this part too. So, here is my basic sharpening setup.

3 diamond plates and a shop-made leather strop. I fit them all into a plywood base for ease of moving around the shop. I use that cheap glass cleaner as lubricant a la Paul Sellers. I also have granite tiles I use wet/dry paper on and some oil stones for certain uses.

So, the first thing we have to do is flatten the back of the iron. Now, IMHO, there are 3 separate "flatnesses" that we require on this face.

First, the entire face should be "kinda" flat. The chipbreaker will mate with this face so we need the area at the top and the area behind the cutting edge planar, or at least in parallel planes. Otherwise we may have a hard time getting a proper fit with the chipbreaker. MUCH more on that later… :-/

Second, the area back about ½" from the cutting edge needs to be truly flat and "kinda" polished. That's were our chipbreaker edge will mate and we will want no gaps. Again, more later…

Finally, the 1/8" or so right at the cutting edge needs to be truly flat and well-polished. It forms one side of our cutting edge so we're gonna work it just like we work the bevel.

First, I pull out our old friend, Mr. layout dye. I paint a coat on the bottom area that I want to work flat and part of which I'll want to polish to a fine finish.

Now I work the entire face on my coarse diamond stone about 10 strokes.

And I have this:

I continue to work it on the coarse diamond until I have this:

Now I have the entire face planar enough for my purposes so I'm done with the top part. Note that the dark areas are slurry from the stone in some pitting in the iron. The camera makes it look much worse than it actually is ;-p

Now I still have a long way to go at the bottom though. You can see from the dye remaining that there is a significant hollow there. So now I'm going to turn my iron 90 degrees to the plate and work only the bottom of the face.

I work on the coarse plate until I clean up all of the remaining dye.

Then I work it on the medium diamond plate and then the fine diamond plate. You can see that I stop with the fine when the area right behind the cutting edge is polished. I don't care about polishing the rest of it out any finer than the medium stone.

I'll polish it a little finer later on a leather strop but I'll do that in conjunction with my bevel. So now, let's turn the iron over and work on the other side.

I'm going to use a Veritas (Mk.1) jig to hold my iron while I grind this bevel. Shut up. I don't care if you think I should do it free-handed.

I made the pictured jig for setting blades in this guide. It takes me less than 15 seconds to have the iron in the guide and read to go on the stones.

A few strokes on the coarse stone show me how much grinding I have to do. Not too bad.

I'm not gonna go into great detail here. You probably know how to sharpen an iron. If you don't, do some Googling. You'll find plenty out there. I continue on the coarse stone until all my dye is removed then progress through medium and fine stones. Between each stone, I work the back side on the fine diamond to remove the wire edge. It never sees anything coarser than the fine diamond from this point on. I wind up here after the fine stone:

That'll do. You should be able to shave hair completely in a single stroke with no effort. If not, move back to your last stone and keep working. I move on to my leather strop. It's just a piece of leather glued to some MDF. I use oil and green polishing compound and work the back then the bevel 5-10 strokes at a time until I remove the wire edge.

Yeeeehawwww we're done with the iron. I had intended to do the chipbreaker in this entry as well but, I'm getting a little long-winded so I think I'll do it in a separate one.

In the mean-time though, here are a couple of links that go into more detail on some of the things I just kinda skimmed over:

Derek Perth on flattening blade backs

Don W's blog entry on sharpening plane blades

And, if you want a thorough education on sharpening in general, I highly recommend Ron Hock's well-written The Perfect Edge

Thanks for reading. I feel like this entry was too long to be a quick overview and too short to be a full guide on how to work the iron up. Either way, I've written it now so it is what it is ;-) Hopefully you weren't too bored…

Let me hear your questions and comments! I'll get the chipbreaker written up and posted in a day or two.

Click to expand...

HokieKen said:

Working up the Iron

Alright, let's see if we can wrap this up and have a new user in the plane till by the end of the week. Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving weekend. Mine was nice but no shop time so I'm trying to squeeze this plane in when I can. I found a couple of hours last night to work up the iron and chip breaker. Here's how I did it…

I start with the iron. Prior to this, all we did was rust conversion on the iron. If we recall, we had some pretty gnarly pitting at the business end of this guy:

We can't leave that! What is a cutting edge? Simply put, it's the intersection of 2 planes (surfaces) where the intersection has as small a radius as possible. Pitting will essentially give us localized areas of unacceptable radii if we just hone our edge "around" it. The result would be that no matter how sharp we hone the edge, it won't cut where there are voids.

So we have to get past the pitting on an iron that's already pretty darned short. But, we work with what we have! So I start by painting the iron with some layout dye and scribing a line across it square to the edge of the iron.

I mark my cutoff line as close to the edge as possible while ensuring I am past the pitting on both sides of the iron.

Then I use a Dremel tool with a cutoff wheel to cut off the unusable portion. Now, I'm not a "safety preacher", you're all big boys and girls, BUT WEAR SAFETY GLASSES when you do this. You only have 2 eyes and these wheels fracture and basically explode often. 'Nuff said…

I lightly score my scribed line with the wheel and repeat 5-6 times until I'm almost through. Then I clamped the waste section in a vise and just snapped it off. The tool steel the iron is made of is very hard and strong but also pretty brittle. I easily snap it cleanly with just my hand.

The next step is on the bench grinder for me. Let me say that if you don't have a grinder, it's not entirely necessary but, it will save you a TON of time when it comes time to hone your bevel. You can hone the bevel from a square edge but you won't catch me doing it.

I start by setting my grinder rest for a 25 degree bevel. There are all kinds of jigs and gauges you can use to do this. Experienced folks may just eyeball it and free-hand it, sometimes without even using the rest. I have all kinds of chisels and plane irons with 25 degree bevels in my shop. I just grab one of them and use it to set my rest. I clamp the iron in my guide and I'm ready to go. (BTW, I'm using a clone of the Veritas bench grinder jig that I bought from Peachtree woodworking - not perfect but affordable and FAR better than the rests that come on most bench grinders)

I'm going to kinda glance over a lot of stuff in this entry for the simple reason that there is so much information available online and I don't have anything really unique to add. So, I'm not gonna give a step-by-step on how to hollow grind a bevel. But here's our iron after I did:

See how there is a reflection on the edge in the pic below?

I don't grind all the way to a sharp edge. I don't want to wreck the temper on my iron with the grinder. Especially an iron this short. In practice that means don't let the steel turn blue. The closer you get to a sharp edge, the less material there is to conduct the heat away from the grinder wheel. So, to be safe, I cool the steel often in water while grinding and as soon as sparks roll onto the back of the iron, I'm done.

Now my iron is ready to be worked up. In many cases with vintage planes, you'll receive the iron in the condition I've just gotten to. You normally won't have to cut any material off and often you'll already have a bevel you can work with so you can skip the grinder.

Now that I've removed the pitting and hollow ground my bevel, I find I'll be dealing with another "first time I've seen that" on this plane. I wound up with an iron that's the same length as (or a bit shorter than) the chipbreaker.

I don't know if that will cause me any headaches or not. We'll burn that bridge in a little while ;-)
The next thing I'll do with the iron is to hit both sides with a soft wire brush on the grinder. I'm really just removing the coating left behind by the phosphoric acid. This step isn't necessary but I'm going to end up sanding a bunch of it off anyway and this is less work.

The top of the iron normally sticks up higher than the chipbreaker and is visible so I usually give it some cosmetic attention. After wire brushing, I'll give it a quick polish with some wet/dry paper then hit it with a buffing wheel on the grinder.

If I find the maker's mark is hard to see and I want to enhance it a bit, sometimes I'll cover it and the surrounding area with my layout dye then polish the dye off with some fine sandpaper on a flat substrate. Make sure the dye is dry before polishing and don't use lubricant on the paper.

The next thing I'll do is to take my iron and (sorta) flatten the side that beds on the frog (the bevel side). Remember how in the last entry we took care to make sure the bedding surface on the frog was flat? Well we'll do the same with the iron. I don't spend a lot of time flattening the entire surface but I do make sure that most of it is planar and that there will be good solid contact down near the bottom where the lever cap will hold it down. It only takes a few strokes on my coarse diamond plate to see that we're in good shape. There's a little bit of a hollow at the top but that won't be in contact with the frog anyway.

Disclaimer: I noticed while writing this and going through the pictures, it seems disjointed. For instance, in the pic above, the top side of the iron has been worked on the diamond plate but in the following pics, it still has the iron phosphate coating. I'm not trying to fool anyone and I promise this was all done on the same iron ;-P I just do these things and snap a bunch of pics then go back and try to remember what order I did them in and correlate pics accordingly. So, the way I present this stuff may not exactly match the order I did it in. Don't worry though, in any case where it's important that one thing be done ahead of another, I'll make it clear.

Okay, so far everything is fairly simple. Now let's get down to the real nitty-gritty. Here comes the stuff that really matters. Again, I'll glance over some of the following information because there is so much available online. We're about to begin sharpening. I debated on whether to include this at all because there is soooooo many how-to guides out there on sharpening plane irons. I am also not a sharpening zealot. I don't care how you sharpen your tools. And I don't care if you think I do it wrong. I don't understand people's zeal when it comes to sharpening methods. All I can say is get the basics down, choose whatever medium(s) suits you and your budget and go to it. If you get tools that cut the way you need them to, you're done.

But, since this series is "how I do plane rehabs" I figured I should show this part too. So, here is my basic sharpening setup.

3 diamond plates and a shop-made leather strop. I fit them all into a plywood base for ease of moving around the shop. I use that cheap glass cleaner as lubricant a la Paul Sellers. I also have granite tiles I use wet/dry paper on and some oil stones for certain uses.

So, the first thing we have to do is flatten the back of the iron. Now, IMHO, there are 3 separate "flatnesses" that we require on this face.

First, the entire face should be "kinda" flat. The chipbreaker will mate with this face so we need the area at the top and the area behind the cutting edge planar, or at least in parallel planes. Otherwise we may have a hard time getting a proper fit with the chipbreaker. MUCH more on that later… :-/

Second, the area back about ½" from the cutting edge needs to be truly flat and "kinda" polished. That's were our chipbreaker edge will mate and we will want no gaps. Again, more later…

Finally, the 1/8" or so right at the cutting edge needs to be truly flat and well-polished. It forms one side of our cutting edge so we're gonna work it just like we work the bevel.

First, I pull out our old friend, Mr. layout dye. I paint a coat on the bottom area that I want to work flat and part of which I'll want to polish to a fine finish.

Now I work the entire face on my coarse diamond stone about 10 strokes.

And I have this:

I continue to work it on the coarse diamond until I have this:

Now I have the entire face planar enough for my purposes so I'm done with the top part. Note that the dark areas are slurry from the stone in some pitting in the iron. The camera makes it look much worse than it actually is ;-p

Now I still have a long way to go at the bottom though. You can see from the dye remaining that there is a significant hollow there. So now I'm going to turn my iron 90 degrees to the plate and work only the bottom of the face.

I work on the coarse plate until I clean up all of the remaining dye.

Then I work it on the medium diamond plate and then the fine diamond plate. You can see that I stop with the fine when the area right behind the cutting edge is polished. I don't care about polishing the rest of it out any finer than the medium stone.

I'll polish it a little finer later on a leather strop but I'll do that in conjunction with my bevel. So now, let's turn the iron over and work on the other side.

I'm going to use a Veritas (Mk.1) jig to hold my iron while I grind this bevel. Shut up. I don't care if you think I should do it free-handed.

I made the pictured jig for setting blades in this guide. It takes me less than 15 seconds to have the iron in the guide and read to go on the stones.

A few strokes on the coarse stone show me how much grinding I have to do. Not too bad.

I'm not gonna go into great detail here. You probably know how to sharpen an iron. If you don't, do some Googling. You'll find plenty out there. I continue on the coarse stone until all my dye is removed then progress through medium and fine stones. Between each stone, I work the back side on the fine diamond to remove the wire edge. It never sees anything coarser than the fine diamond from this point on. I wind up here after the fine stone:

That'll do. You should be able to shave hair completely in a single stroke with no effort. If not, move back to your last stone and keep working. I move on to my leather strop. It's just a piece of leather glued to some MDF. I use oil and green polishing compound and work the back then the bevel 5-10 strokes at a time until I remove the wire edge.

Yeeeehawwww we're done with the iron. I had intended to do the chipbreaker in this entry as well but, I'm getting a little long-winded so I think I'll do it in a separate one.

In the mean-time though, here are a couple of links that go into more detail on some of the things I just kinda skimmed over:

Derek Perth on flattening blade backs

Don W's blog entry on sharpening plane blades

And, if you want a thorough education on sharpening in general, I highly recommend Ron Hock's well-written The Perfect Edge

Thanks for reading. I feel like this entry was too long to be a quick overview and too short to be a full guide on how to work the iron up. Either way, I've written it now so it is what it is ;-) Hopefully you weren't too bored…

Let me hear your questions and comments! I'll get the chipbreaker written up and posted in a day or two.

Click to expand...

1. We want an absolutely air-tight fit between the iron and the leading edge of the chipbreaker.
2. We want ONLY the leading edge of the chipbreaker to make contact with the iron.
3. We want the top of the chipbreaker to be able to control the shavings coming off the wood.

HokieKen said:

Breakin' Chips

Last time we got our iron worked up and ready to go to work. However, the iron can't work on its own. It needs a chipbreaker. What for? Well, in my estimation, 2 things. First, the chip breaker lends structural support to the iron. It basically acts as a spring stiffener to the pretty thin tool steel the iron is made of. The 2nd job of the chipbreaker gives it its name. It breaks the chips, or more appropriately to planing wood, it controls the shavings. It helps to create consistent shavings by guiding the chip off the cutting edge and directing it back into a curl. In a nutshell, the chipbreaker (more properly called the cap iron according to many) forces the wood to fold back on itself "breaking" the continuity of the wood fibers. That is key to a well-performing plane because it aids in the prevention of tearout.

A well tuned chipbreaker is essential to making a bailey-pattern plane perform consistently well IMHO. On clear, straight grained, cooperative woods, it's not that noticable. Get some tight-grained figured wood with changing grain direction though and you're likely to find out quickly if your chipbreaker is shaped and set properly.

I recently was cross-grain planing some White Oak with a jack plane. The plane was clogging every few strokes and the task was terribly frustrating. Eventually I ended up removing the chipbreaker and going through the process I'm about to describe. It turned out that while I had created a good fit between the chipbreaker and the iron when I rehabbed the plane, I hadn't undercut the edge of the 'breaker enough and it was causing me much pain. The difference in plane performance after correcting the problem is night and day.

So what exactly is our objective when we work on the chipbreaker? 3 things:

1. We want an absolutely air-tight fit between the iron and the leading edge of the chipbreaker.
2. We want ONLY the leading edge of the chipbreaker to make contact with the iron.
3. We want the top of the chipbreaker to be able to control the shavings coming off the wood.

The following illustration from an article on WoodCentral shows how we want our chipbreaker set on our iron:

The article linked above is a worthwhile read on how to prepare the chipbreaker and set it on the iron. The following is how I do it.

Enough background, let's get on it!

Here is our chipbreaker. All we have done to it up to this point is rust conversion.

There is significant pitting on both sides of the chipbreaker leading edge. That's not ideal but I believe we can make it work just fine with a little elbow grease.

The first thing I want to do is to make sure the back part (above the "hump" at the leading edge) is relatively flat on both sides. Mostly we don't want burrs or raised areas and we want to make sure it doesn't have a twist in it. If there is some twist, you can most likely straighten it in a vise. You may have to hammer it a bit on an anvil but this steel isn't hardened like the iron and can be "bent to our will". No twist in this one and in the 9 or 10 planes I've rehabbed, I've only had to straighten 1 out.

I start with a fine mill file and file down the burr raised at the threads.

Now I stroke the flat area on both sides on some wet/dry paper. We don't need this to be polished at all, just want to make sure it's decently planar and doesn't have any raised areas.

The bottom side, shown above, is pretty flat to begin with. The top side, shown below, has a bit of a hollow and pretty bad pitted area.

I work it on my coarse diamond stone a few strokes just to smooth it out. This isn't necessary, I just like to make it smooth.

I've also dyed the leading edge up on the top. This is where I'll move to next. It doesn't really matter whether you shape the top or bottom of the leading edge first. You're probably going to end up working them more than once anyway ;-p

We want a "knife-edge" in contact with the iron. Objective #1 we stated says we want a tight fit but according to #2 that fit has to occur only at the leading edge. Essentially, we want to hone an edge here. I'm going to start with about a 10 degree bevel on the front.

The exact angle isn't critical and I don't use my Wixey box to hone it. I just wanted to give you an idea of what the angle I'm grinding looks like You can hone it at a shallower angle. I've just never seen any real advantage to it so I basically just want a polished edge with some slope. For now, I'll work it only on my coarse diamond stone just to grind a small bevel back about 1/32-1/16 inch. You can go further if you want but I like to leave as much material as I can. Plus I'm lazy so I like to remove as little as necessary.

I grind enough to make sure there's no pitting in my bevel edge. I'd rather not have any pitting right behind the bevel either but I don't think it's going to be practical to avoid it on this guy. I am going to take it to the belt sander and gently grind the rounded part to smooth it as much as possible though. I'm careful not to hit the bevel I just created on the sanding belt. If I were a smarter fella', I would have gone to the belt sander first…

Now let's turn our attention to the bottom side. First I'm going to grind a flat that's slightly undercut. You can see that I'm going to let the part right behind the rounded section set flat and grind the leading edge just enough to clean it up. I do this part on wet/dry paper because I don't want to grind the area that's resting on the granite down. The intention here is just to clean up where our bevel will be to make sure there isn't any pitting we'll have to grind out.

We should be okay but, I am going to take a half-round file and get rid of that pitting behind the ground flat.

Now onto the diamonds. We're going to hone an edge just like we did with the iron and polish both bevels up through the fine diamond stone. See how all of my plates set above the plywood top the same amount?

That way, I can let the end of the part rest on the plywood and will be grinding a consistent angle across all 3 stones. Both bevels are small so I just work them on the medium then the fine. It only takes a few strokes on each to roll up a wire edge.

Sorry, this picture is kinda crappy. But I think it's sufficient to give you an idea of what our leading edge that contacts the iron looks like.

Below are pics of the top and bottom bevels at this stage. The edge isn't as bad as it looks in the pictures (I didn't remove the burr from the fine stone yet) but it's not great either. The pitting that was present on both sides of the 'breaker has taken its toll. Ideally, I would grind back until I could get a "perfect" edge. However, given the extent of the rust that was on this guy, I'm afraid we would remove too much material. I think this edge is good enough and I don't think it will hurt the plane's performance. If I find out differently after I get it in use, I'll have to re-evaluate.

In order for our chipbreaker to work properly, it needs a "spring" in the fit with the iron. I lay the part flat on my granite plate to make sure that with the ends in contact there is light showing underneath.

Not much is there? Well, it's time for the rubber to meet the road. Let's put this guy on our iron and see what she looks like!

Well, that's just not good at all! Never seen this before. I've had fits that were just barely touching but this one's not touching anywhere at all across the full width. I suspect that while this plane sat rusting away in someone's barn/garage/shed/basement over the years that the oxidation has eaten that leading edge back.

No worries though! We can fix 'er up. We probably should have checked this first and done the following steps prior to grinding our bevels. We're likely to introduce some twist into the part when we bend it so the edge isn't parallel to the back of the piece. Oh well, live and learn…

Like I said earlier, this steel is pretty cooperative. I'm just gonna clamp it in a vise with the rounded portion just below the jaws and pull on it a bit. If my bend is 1/2 way between the threads and the leading edge, it should minimize the effects of any twist we introduce.

We can see the effects of just a little one-handed persuasion:

This actually ended up being too much bend. I was afraid it would be too much stress on the threads so I put it on an anvil and gave it a single whack in the center of the high point with a ball-peen hammer. That made it just right. Sorry but I didn't take any pics of that. I think you can imagine it though ;-)

So now let's test the fit with the iron again shall we?

Sorry for the pic quality but it shows exactly what we want to see - single point contact only at the front edge.

The next process is where you really want to make sure you get it right. It can make a huge difference in how your plane will perform. We said our first objective was to have an air-tight fit with the iron. Well, we don't. I tried and tried to get a decent pic showing the light coming between the 2 pieces but couldn't do it. You want to hold this up at every angle and turn it every way and make sure you don't see ANY light between the two. You'd be surprised at how thin a gap wood shavings will find their way into.

When I tune this fit, I just not where my gaps are and then grind the bottom bevel a bit while putting pressure down on the high spots. Then I check the fit and repeat until the fit is right. In lieu of that though, since it's hard to photograph the gaps, I'm going to use dye and print the fit like we did when we fit the frog to the base.

I lay a thin coat of dye down on the iron and lay the 'breaker straight down on top of it (I don't lay it over from the side like it appears in the picture). Then I press straight down, hard, on the threads like it would be clamped in reality.

Then I pick the chipbreaker straight up. I don't want to roll it or shift it to avoid false dye transfers. The line of dye removed from the iron shows more clearly in pictures where the contact areas are.

What it doesn't show though is that we don't have enough angle on our bottom bevel. If we look at the dye transfer on the chipbreaker edge, we see that the back of our bevel is making contact when pressure is applied.

We don't want that. If we could be confident that the entire bevel was in contact, then it would be ok. However, if the very leading edge gets lifted even slightly, chips will have a path of ingress and will work their way under. Trust me.

So, let's re-grind our bottom bevel. Rather than re-grinding the whole thing, I worked it a few strokes on the fine plate with pressure concentrated on the high spots according to my dye print which meant I pressed down just left of center. That will help my fit at the edge. But I still need to make sure that the leading edge is the only part of the bevel making contact. Rather than regrinding the entire bevel, I hold the part at a much steeper angle and just work off a clearance bevel behind my main bevel.

Now re-check the fit. The pic isn't real clear (sorry) but my clearance bevel was good. Only the sharp edge made contact. I still don't quite have solid contact all the way across though.

I gave it a little more work on the fine diamond. This time I check it after each stroke on the stone to be sure I only remove the dyed areas. Just 3 strokes did it. When checked again, I can see not even a hint of light between the two parts. Like a dummy, I forgot to do a final print to show the fit. Guess you'll have to take my word for it ;-)

After I get a good fit, I give both bevels a few swipes on my leather strop with some green compound to make sure my wire edge is gone. I fit the chipbreaker on the iron like it will be set when I fettle the plane. I set the edge of the chipbreaker back about 1/32" from the cutting edge of the blade. For a smoother, I set it closer - about 1/64" and for a jack or a scrub that will be used for dressing raw stock, I set it around 1/16" or more depending on blade camber. Many set theirs much closer than I do. I just don't see it as necessary in general. I have moved it much closer on occasion though with a smoother on really gnarly grained woods. It does help with tearout. The article I linked near the beginning of this post goes into much greater detail than I will here.

Below, we can see that after working the bottom bevel and tuning the fit, I only have a little bit of the top bevel left on the left side of the 'breaker. A little bit should be enough though, if not, I'll find out when I start using this plane and fix it then.

Et voila! We have finished with our iron and chipbreaker. We have a nice sharp cutter and a tight-fitting 'breaker. In spite of some extensive pitting present on both pieces, I think we'll have a perfectly good functioning cutter when we get right down to it. The pitting in the chipbreaker and the fact that the iron is shorter than than the chipbreaker aren't ideal. But I don't think those issues will cause any problems in the plane's performance. We'll find out in a few days for sure.

We're almost done. ) Next time we'll put our plane all back together and finish up the work on the main body. After that it's just a matter of fettling.

I plan to wrap up in 2 more segments. If I've left out any details you're curious about, let me know in the comments. If there's enough interest, I may add an extra entry to address things that didn't get covered in the main process.

Thanks for checking in! I hope to get one more entry posted this week and wrap this up early next week.

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