Brace, non ratchet

[mathias]

With your help I received three braces today that I managed to get from ebay.co.uk from one seller so postage was reasonable. 10" Stanley N°66, 8" Stanley 64 and a 5" Flott. All top handles are very tight, the 10" has a little play in the sweep handle and as far as I can judge the chucks are good. In fact they seem to be ready to use so perhaps I will just leave them as they are. Your opinions what to do are most welcome.

I choose to believe the seller who claims they have been in the family and not professional use.

 

[Bm101]

Although as far from an expert as you can get, looks like you had a real result, if the price was good even better. If you look at sellers 'other items' and history, you can soon see who sells tools regularly. I'm a pretty new ebayer but I tend to search 'joblots' then vary the search terms. Sometimes its interesting what it can bring up. Seem to get some interesting finds sometimes. Personally, from the little I know at least, if they work why touch them? They look very nice to me as they are. A little oil on the necessaries. Looks like a good buy.

 

[ED65]

Those look in pretty nice condition so congrats.

In fact they seem to be ready to use so perhaps I will just leave them as they are. Your opinions what to do are most welcome.

Restoration is tempting. I'm sure you've seen some before and after pics of braces and they can look amazing with a full restoration, but once you've done one you'll probably be itching to have the others match so you'd be looking at a load of work. And braces like this are very much in the category of they don't have to be pretty to work perfectly so doing no work to them is a definite possibility.

The metal surfaces look like they could do with having an oily rag wiped over them, or a good waxing, but other than that you could pretty much leave them as-is.

Are you okay with the play in the sweep handle or would you want to try to tighten that up a bit?

 

[mathias]

Are you okay with the play in the sweep handle or would you want to try to tighten that up a bit?

There is a link somewhere in this forum to a place where they talk and refurbish ratchet braces and there they showed how to tighten the sweep handle. That would take out the axial play (1-2mm) if it works but not the radial play (1mm) as far as I can judge from the brace. I'll try to find that page again if only too look at the refurbished shiny braces there

 

[ED65]

Radial play, darn. You can in theory fix that or reduce it at least by injecting some glue and sanding dust into the gap but there's no telling how permanent the fix would be with use. But if your experience matches mine a small amount of play side to side won't bother you so much.

There is a link somewhere in this forum to a place where they talk and refurbish ratchet braces and there they showed how to tighten the sweep handle.

That'll be on Lumberjocks I think, possibly the work of user Brit (this one). Brit's method for tightening down the caps on the sweep handle unfortunately doesn't work on all braces.

But you can insert paired shims instead, like a washer with one side cut out to form a U shape so you can slip them into position. These can be metal if you have the means to do this kind of cutting or you can use pieces of veneer. You push one in from opposite sides with a dab of glue on the inside faces, they stick together to form a single washer.