I thought it would be useful to start a thread on this given we're heading into a new season of car boots.
When you buy an old plane, if your goal is a user, then how much work are you realistically looking at and how long should it take?
I think it's usually overstated how much time this should take. How long it can take can be stretched out to days and days of work, but that's usually when doing a full restoration to like-new condition.
If you're new to this, and perhaps if you're not, many demos of clean up and fettling/tuning make it look like more work than it needs to be, with numerous potentially unnecessary steps or individual steps taken too far (I'll go into these more in a later post so this one doesn't run too long). But just getting a plane back into user condition can often be merely a matter of removing light surface rust, sharpening, fettling the cap iron and maybe smoothing out the handles a bit to make them comfortable to hold.
For a user plane as long as you didn't buy a total rust bucket it's likely that you can get 90%+ of old planes up and running in under an hour, and often in less than 20 minutes, if you take the only-what's-necessary route. D_W posted a video recently showing this approach. If you want to make 'er purdy though, well, the time it takes is the time it takes. Removing cracked old finish on the handles, sanding or scraping them smooth and then applying fresh finish, that alone could more than double the time taken up to that point.
Even if you did buy a plane that's literally covered in rust from toe to heel, removing rust might take a while but can be almost entirely a hands-off operation (rust soaks or electrolysis) so little actual effort or time taken away from other work. But if you did want to get the thing up and running fast then it's hard to beat one of those rubber blocks impregnated with abrasive. For the body casting you're looking at under five minutes' work for the sole, both cheeks and the rims. Still under ten for a 7 or an 8.
When you buy an old plane, if your goal is a user, then how much work are you realistically looking at and how long should it take?
I think it's usually overstated how much time this should take. How long it can take can be stretched out to days and days of work, but that's usually when doing a full restoration to like-new condition.
If you're new to this, and perhaps if you're not, many demos of clean up and fettling/tuning make it look like more work than it needs to be, with numerous potentially unnecessary steps or individual steps taken too far (I'll go into these more in a later post so this one doesn't run too long). But just getting a plane back into user condition can often be merely a matter of removing light surface rust, sharpening, fettling the cap iron and maybe smoothing out the handles a bit to make them comfortable to hold.
For a user plane as long as you didn't buy a total rust bucket it's likely that you can get 90%+ of old planes up and running in under an hour, and often in less than 20 minutes, if you take the only-what's-necessary route. D_W posted a video recently showing this approach. If you want to make 'er purdy though, well, the time it takes is the time it takes. Removing cracked old finish on the handles, sanding or scraping them smooth and then applying fresh finish, that alone could more than double the time taken up to that point.
Even if you did buy a plane that's literally covered in rust from toe to heel, removing rust might take a while but can be almost entirely a hands-off operation (rust soaks or electrolysis) so little actual effort or time taken away from other work. But if you did want to get the thing up and running fast then it's hard to beat one of those rubber blocks impregnated with abrasive. For the body casting you're looking at under five minutes' work for the sole, both cheeks and the rims. Still under ten for a 7 or an 8.
