Well, a mere 6 months after starting this series, I'm finally ready to wrap it up…

So let's dive right in! When last I left off, I had finished repairing the tote. So now it was time to finish the tote and knob. The tote had been sanded back so the original film finish was removed before I did the horn repair. I just sanded it up through some higher grits stopping at 400. The knob still had the film finish so I sanded it back. I still do knobs the same basic way I detailed in this old blog post except I have found that I prefer to work on it on my lathe rather than on the drill press. Better speed control and it's just more comfortable.

I have also found that using a flanged tee-nut instead of hex nuts lets me chuck up right against the flat and have the knob closer to the chuck and therefore less runout making it easier to sand.

So I sanded it up through the same grits to 400 like the tote. In contrast to how I've always finished the knobs and totes on my planes, I was seduced by the shiny side via Sansoo22's finished pieces ;-) Until now, all of my planes have just had the wood oiled and waxed as shown in the blog post I linked earlier. However I decided to go a different route on these. Sansoo uses a poly and finish wax schedule. But I wanted something with a little less gloss but also something that enhanced the wood on this plane.

So after a little research, I decided to give it a go with a modified French Polishing schedule. I am very happy with how the finish ended up on these so I'm going to give the details below. Note that the below details how it was applied to the tote specifically. The schedule was the same for the knob but I applied the shellac on the lathe running at slow speed rather than rubbing it on.

At least that's how I think I remember doing it… I kinda winged it. Here's a good write up on the French Polishing method in much better detail. Derive your own recipe from there

I will say that this finishing schedule wasn't labor intensive but it was time intensive. It took me about 3 weeks with all of the coats and curing time. Is it worth it? I dunno. I'll probably do it again but I'm still tempted to try Sansoo's method with poly and see how it compares in looks and feel. I love the look and feel of the shellac but I also question how well it will stand the test of time.

Here are some in-process shots during the finishing stage.

Enough about the wood! Moving on to the lever cap… After making the wood glossy and the brass and steel all shiny, the lever cap just wasn't going to do in its current condition:

So, I wire brushed it and polished it up:

But in the process, I lost the paint in the recess. So, I masked it up and shot some of the red paint I used for the frog on it covering the recess and the raised letters:

Then I masked it back up to prevent marring the polished surface and used some micro-mesh sanding sticks to remove the paint from the raised letters.

And done:

And that pretty much sums it up

I did work up the iron and chipbreaker but my method is unchanged from how I did it in this blog post so I won't rehash it here.

So we went from the before:

To the after:

So she's pretty but is she useful?

Well, not at first :-( I was getting this:

I initially thought my chipbreaker wasn't doing its job properly and I needed to go back to work on it. But then when I removed the blade/chipbreaker the clog fell out. It wasn't stuck on the chipbreaker but instead the mouth was too tight. Then I remembered that I put the frog on way back after painting so I wouldn't misplace it but hadn't actually set the position. It was set a bit too far forward. So, I moved it back so the blade bed was flush with the ramp at the back of the mouth and put the cutter assembly back in. After a few swipes and a couple of taps on the lateral lever, voila

Full width shavings in short order. No, those aren't the gossamer thin shavings you usually see when somebody is showing off their plane. But this big boy is no smoother and he don't eat salad! I set it for about a .008" cut which is about how I like my jointers set. They aren't scrubbing anything so they don't need a real big bite. But I don't want to take 100 passes before I get a face fully flattened either so it needs to take a big enough bite to do that efficiently. And it'll get followed up with a smoother to do the final surfacing so a little tearout or edge tracks can be dealt with.

So there we are. This series ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated but at least I got my annual series done before Thanksgiving! My intention was to supplement my original series on rehabbing planes so hopefully these entries are helpful with some things that weren't covered previously. Thanks for reading and comments and questions are always welcome. And I constantly learn new and better ways to do parts of of plane rehabs so by all means, if you have suggestions on how I can do something better or easier, let me know!