Ex-Counsel
Established Member
Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures before I started - probably due to my childlike excitement. However! Today I started working on my first Fore plane restoration. I offered £6 to the seller on ebay and to be honest, I didn't know what to expect. But they accepted and less than a week later my journey began.
Here's a picture from the original sale on ebay.
Before I took it apart, I could see there were a few issues. Firstly, the iron and chip breaker were considerably rusted and one of the abutments has a crack through it, quite a common issue to my understanding.
There are also a couple of cracks in the top but after the initial panic I thought they looked quite stable and not something I needed to worry about.
So I've stripped it all down and given the wood a good clean up using boiled linseed oil and some wire wool after removing all of the loose bits of saw dust and dirt with an old toothbrush. I've then left the BLO to soak in for a few minutes whilst separating the iron and chip breaker, which was surprisingly easy considering the amount of rust surrounding the screw. Once I'd done that, and cleaned up the excess oil, I got to work on removing as much of the rust as I could. I had to do this by hand with some 120 grit sand paper over the sink in my kitchen (thankfully, my good lady had gone to bed by this point and is none the wiser about the mess I made). Although it wasn't as quick as a wire wheel may have been, I was only working on both the iron and chip breaker for around half an hour in total. There's still some work to do, like popping a bit of super glue in the cracked abutment and I also want to clean up the top of the iron to showcase the sorby logo a bit more as well as getting a keen edge on the iron.
I would greatly appreciate any advice or thoughts on what to do next.
Here are a couple more pictures of progress. I'll update once I've had chance to get the ither bits done but it's getting a bit late for that now.
Thanks for reading!
Here's a picture from the original sale on ebay.
Before I took it apart, I could see there were a few issues. Firstly, the iron and chip breaker were considerably rusted and one of the abutments has a crack through it, quite a common issue to my understanding.
There are also a couple of cracks in the top but after the initial panic I thought they looked quite stable and not something I needed to worry about.
So I've stripped it all down and given the wood a good clean up using boiled linseed oil and some wire wool after removing all of the loose bits of saw dust and dirt with an old toothbrush. I've then left the BLO to soak in for a few minutes whilst separating the iron and chip breaker, which was surprisingly easy considering the amount of rust surrounding the screw. Once I'd done that, and cleaned up the excess oil, I got to work on removing as much of the rust as I could. I had to do this by hand with some 120 grit sand paper over the sink in my kitchen (thankfully, my good lady had gone to bed by this point and is none the wiser about the mess I made). Although it wasn't as quick as a wire wheel may have been, I was only working on both the iron and chip breaker for around half an hour in total. There's still some work to do, like popping a bit of super glue in the cracked abutment and I also want to clean up the top of the iron to showcase the sorby logo a bit more as well as getting a keen edge on the iron.
I would greatly appreciate any advice or thoughts on what to do next.
Here are a couple more pictures of progress. I'll update once I've had chance to get the ither bits done but it's getting a bit late for that now.
Thanks for reading!
