Last time I had straightened my frog fit out and had a fit with the body that I was happy with. Normally my process is to paint the main body next but I was already mixing up my method so I figured what the hell, might as well go ahead and finish the flattening first on this one.

I had already sandblasted the plane before I decided to go back to work on it so don't think I switched planes and didn't tell ya ;-)

I went ahead and cross-hatched the sole again with a Sharpie and put some 80 grit on my granite plate.

I made two full strokes with just the body of the plane to see if disassembly made any significant difference. It didn't.

It's still obvious that the right toe and left heel are gonna make me sweat… So to finish flattening, I fully reassembled the plane with the iron fully retracted but tensioned. I gave my reasoning for lapping an assembled plane in part 10 of my old blog series and I haven't changed my mind about it being the best way to do it. I have however come around to the idea of flattening before painting so that I don't risk damage to my new paint.

Back to one of my least favorite chores… About 10 strokes on the 80 grit shows I'm pretty much where I was before. So, as suspected, fixing the fit of the frog didn't have any effect on the flatness. The body was just twisted for some reason.

A few sheets of paper and a couple hundred strokes and FINALLY I see the light at the end of the tunnel. The sharpie is beginning to fade in the offending sections.

Instead of continuing to remove material, I decide that it'll be flattened more as I work up a few more grits. Just to make myself feel better, I decided to quantify how much lower the lowest points are. Luckily that's simple to do with a depth micrometer.

At the heel, the lowest spot is about .0025" low.

And at the toe, the extreme spot is about .004" low.

In practice, I have no concerns about using this plane exactly like it is. I can't see function being inhibited in the least. For some perspective, I grabbed a couple of things I had handy to show how thick they are. A gum wrapper is about .002".

And a freshly plucked arm hair is about .0017"

So functionally, I'm happy there. I went ahead and repeated the process on 120, 220 and 320 grit paper. After 320, I decided not to go any further. That's plenty slick enough for the sole. I also sanded the cheeks at the same time and was happy with the look of 320. There were some spots on the cheeks that I would have like to see disappear but they were deeper than I wanted to sand out.

Since there are scratches and dings on the cheeks that don't look particularly nice, I use a staple of every machinist's aresenal - Scotchbrite ;-P With a little WD 40 for lube, it will take the uniform sanding marks and whirl them around so they look more random and unintentional. And it won't really abrade the surface to any noticable level. It just changes how light is reflected and helps to obscure minor flaws in a flat surface to some degree.

Removing as much metal as I did from the sole left some exposed dings around the mouth too. Nothing that will cause functional issues but there are some sharp spots so I knock them down with a deburring tool.

I don't remove any significant amount of metal, just dub the edges that are there.

The final thing I did to the body was to scrape some paint splatter that remained in the corrugations on the sole. I forgot to take pics but I just used a pick to scrape all the paint out then folded up a small piece of 320 sandpaper and ran it up and down the corrugations a couple of times to remove the marks left from scraping with the pick.

After all that was done, I sanded some rough cast spots on top of the body just so it will look a little nicer when painted. Then I cleaned the whole thing with Brake Cleaner.

And masked it up for painting.

I don't use brand name blades to cut against the cast iron. They aren't going to last anyway so I use cheapies.

On this go 'round, I picked up a tidbit from Sansoo22 about not masking the top edges of the cheeks and the heel and toe. I've never been completely happy with the crispness of the edges in those spots so I'm going to try his method of scraping the paint off after the fact on this one.

Speaking of tidbits… I know some people keep spare screws to mask the threaded holes before painting. I just roll up liitle pieces of masking tape and stick them in there. Super putty is great for masking threaded holes too but I couldn't find it when I was masking this one :-/

So that's where I'm at for now. I'm hoping to get this thing painted this week some time. I'll be trying a different brand of paint than I normally use but unless there's some significant difference there, I probably won't blog that process. So we'll see what I come up with to write about next time… I know I have a tote repair to do so I'll definitely do a post on that. Otherwise, I don't foresee much that deviates from the basic process I wrote up in the old series.

Thanks for reading!