Hi all. This is my first thread, so please forgive my long and rambling tale of woe. I'd just like to hear thoughts on whether I should try to make this plane work, buy another used but sound one from a more reputable source, or drop the $$$$ on what I really want, a Veritas plane that'll work right out of the box, which would let me focus my plane rehab efforts on the more trouble-free #3 plane I'm tuning up.
Anyhow, ignoring all the advice to buy old planes from the better tool websites, I bought a 9 1/2 Stanley block plane on eBay for about $25. I've sharpened the iron and honed the cap, but have yet to flatten the sole, which is concave both in front of and behind the mouth.
Before I got around to that, I realized that the lateral adjustment lever, which flopped around on the screw and hardly moved the iron at all, was the wrong one, so after poking around I picked up the right one for $9. The disc on the new lever fits perfectly in the iron's slot, but because this one also flops around, it doesn't move the iron well.
Finally I found this on Patrick Leach's Blood and Gore: "The lateral adjustment lever pivots on the lever cap screw, onto which the lever cap engages. In fact, the lever screws onto the lever cap screw, which is itself screwed into a boss in the main casting."
Sure enough, the adjustment lever's screw hole is threaded, but the plane's cap screw is too small to engage its threads, which means the screw doesn't hold the lever at the right angle to keep the disc in the iron's slot. Besides, the screw is very loose in the boss. I stopped by Ace Hardware's Aisle of Fasteners to find one that would fit, but even the smart guy who worked there couldn't find a screw, either metric or standard, that would work; we did find a size which engaged perfectly with the threads on the adjustment lever, but it turns out that the lever's threads are coarser than the ones in the boss, so the right screw for the lever doesn't fit into the boss. And the boss's threads are extremely shiny, looking like they'd just been cut. (Hopefully the pictures below help you see what I mean.) That makes me think that someone recently tapped the inside of the boss to match some other screw--which we don't have. And that means that buying a new screw (or matching screw and lever cap) won't solve the problem.
I don't even know if it's possible to re-tap the boss's threads in the right size, but my guess is that the new threads were to replace original threads that had been stripped, and that there's not enough metal to restore the original thread size.
Thoughts? Admonishments? Guffaws?
No. 9 1:2 Lever and screw threads.jpgNo. 9 1:2 boss threads.jpg