Flattening sole #5 tale of Woe...

[Vivian Ecker]

Hello Everyone,

I'm Needing Help...

I'm a beginner woodworker with some advanced training in futility. I successfully flattened the sole of a new/modern Stanley#4 a few years ago while a student in the Fundamentals of Fine Woodworking class at the North Bennett Street School in Boston. But now I'm on my own and having great difficulty with my used Bailey #5. I have a piece of glass that's about 3/8" thick and flat within about .001" along its 20" length and 8 inch width. It sits on a not truly flat but pretty close piece of board (melamine faced shelf board) on a workbench top that is not truly flat. I affixed Norton "3X" 100 grit sandpaper to the glass with spray adhesive (3M #77) and started lapping the sole. The plane was fully assembled and the blade fully retracted.

Things seemed to be getting better - until they started getting worse. At the end of it all I have a slightly convex sole: the toe and heel are out of flat with the area around the mouth by about .0015". Looking at flatness across the sole: out of flat with a wandering midline lengthwise "hump" by .001-.002" or more. I'm guessing the errors are due to my lapping technique - my grip on the plane, stance, etc. - and maybe also the lack of a truly flat lapping surface.

So now I am not sure where to go from here. I would very much like to get this thing done successfully myself but I am 5'6" tall woman with medium sized hands, not especially strong, and now wonder if I am capable of accurately lapping a plane this large. I also have an old used #7 that needs tuning. I am not going to be able to fettle that one by hand... (right?)

Do you all have any advice or technique suggestions?

I have a Grizzly 9x12 granite surface but this #5 plane is 14 inches long so I can't use that plate - is this correct?

If the conclusion is that I should go to a machinist, does anyone know of a machinist in eastern Massachusetts/Boston area that does a good job with flattening handplane soles and getting the sides exactly square to the sole?

Thanks very much for your help!
Vivian

[Johnny Kleso]

First your dont need the sides square unless your shooting and then only one side needs to be..

The longer the plane the MUCH harder you have to work at flatting..

I have to ask what are you using to check the plane sole?

Also I would put the glass and wood on something really flat as well, like my TS or jointer table..
With a long piece of glass like you have it can bend if on an out of square surface..

A small granite block from ENCO is what I use..
If you join their mailing list on their home page ever month they send a free shipping code for orders over $50 and under 100lbs

Here is this month ad
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On a No5 if your sole is only off .0015 thats about as good as LN says they make thier planes I think..

If not its plenty good enough for planing wood IMHO

.0015 is a 1/2 of hair or 1/2 a sheet of paper


I just checked and the 12x18 is the biggest you can get 85lbs and its $36 so you need to order somthing less light weight to get to $50 the 18x24 is $51 but weights 180lbs

[Wiley Horne]

Hi Vivian,

Please stop lapping. Lapping works so long as the starting surface is concave. But once it's convex, more lapping will tend to make things even more convex.

The next thing I would suggest is verify the current condition of the sole. Your surface plate is 9" x 12". That means it has a 15" diagonal, which is just fine for testing your No. 5 plane. Put the plane on the diagonal of the plate and find out if it rocks--this is to verify convexity.

If it is truly convex, then you will want to know about how much. Feeler gauges would be good if you have them, but a cheap feeler gauge is a piece of ordinary paper--a sticky note is about 4 thou, which may give you some idea.

If the plane is convex, then to true it by hand will require that you identify the high spot on the sole it is rocking on, and then knock that high spot down by rubbing on it with abrasive paper. There are ways to do this, but first do the diagnostic on the granite plate, and we can go from there.

Wiley

[John Dykes]

Welcome to the Creek! You're in the right place for sure...

Guess my first question is... How well does you plane work?

A slightly convex (toe,end - a bit higher) sole is fine! And Lord, .0015 sounds pretty good to me!

You can get carried away with this flattening business, but I think you're probably best served by calling it perfect and moving on.

Take the time you'd use on the sole, and work on the blade and give it a shot!

Thoughts?

- jbd in Denver

[John Keeton]

Vivian, go to your nearest granite countertop fabricator and they will have all shapes and sizes of scraps - usually free or very close to it. I stopped by the one here in town, and there were 30 -40 cutoffs of various sizes and various stones. Others may have differing opinions, but I would think these would be flat enough to get the job done.

[Marcus Ward]

How well did the plane work before you started? What was it doing that led you to feel it needed the full treatment?

[Phillip Pattee]

Flat is a relative term. You cannot achieve flatness in excess of your glass and sandpaper. Keep in mind that this is a jack plane, which is generally used for taking off more material before smoothing, and that you are working with wood, which changes shape and dimension with temperature, humidity, etc. It is probably flat enough.

[Johnny Kleso]

Oh,
Its more convex than you can stand you want to hold you plane is a woodworks vise close to the sole and not ovely tight so you dont crack the casting..

Then you need a stick 3/4 x 2-3" x 12"+ and wrap it with sand paper and use it like a draw knife to sand some out of the middle and them back to you flat surface for sanding..

And WELCOME missed that the first time

[Vivian Ecker]

Thank you all for your responses!

Johnny K,
I'm using a Lee Valley-Veritas 24" steel straight edge to check the flatness.
And thank you for the link to Enco. I would love to have a larger surface plate. 12 x 18 is probably the biggest I could accomodate - my shop is quite small but it just might be important enough to find room for it.
Thanks for your suggestion about clamping it and using sandpaper around a stick as a drawknife - I like that idea - and also thanks for your kind welcome!

Hi Wiley,
No more lapping! Although it is hard to resist the urge.
I just did a careful check of the "airspace" between the perimeter of the sole and my granite surface plate using feeler gauges. The gaps at the toe measure between .0015 and almost .003, at the starboard and port sides .001 to .0015, and at the heel the gap is .002 to about .0025. I also checked the sole lengthwise and crosswise with my straight edge and by rubbing the sole on a piece of blue-side-up carbon paper on the surface plate. The areas of the sole that are convex (picked up some blue) ran down the midline of the sole and were the area from just behind the knob to the mouth, just behind the mouth for about an inch, and just behind the handle for about an inch.
Diagnostics completed - looking forward to further instructions! Thanks!

Hi John Dykes,
Thanks for your reply and your warm welcome! You give sage and reasonable advice. Before I started this tuning business it worked fairly well for rough work. But then I decided to give the David Charlesworth plane treatment a try. And look where it's gotten me now.
I was hoping to use this plane for reliable flattening of several 5 foot lengths of Southern Yellow Pine to make a flat workbench top. I bought it well-dimensioned. I have stored this wood in my shop at nice 35-45% relative humidity for months but now it's got quite a bit of wind and cupping.

Hi John Keeton,
Thanks for your advice! I actually have a piece of granite that is nice and large and was destined for a kitchen microwave cart. I dragged it home only to see that it is somewhat dished, not flat. I have been going around in circles for a while. If I lug another 70+ pound granite object into my home I think it's gotta have Grade A or B written on it.

Hi Marcus,
The plane worked OK but I thought it was important for me to get it up to A+ shape in order to get things truly flat. I'm interested in your thoughts. Thanks for your reply!

Hi Philip,
Thanks for your reply. What you said makes good sense. I am just trying to find a way to get control of the tools and thereby the wood. I know about that wood movement thing - seems like wood is still alive after it's dead.

Thanks again to you all!
Vivian

[Marcus Ward]

When I first started with this vintage plane business I, like you, felt it was important to get the planes absolutely frickin flat so they'd work properly. As time went on, and as I gathered more planes, laziness set in and I started using them without fiddling with them any more than cleaning off the accumulated years of mung and sharpening the blade as well as I could. I find that pretty much any of them that have made the trip forward in time 100 years are probably okay and likely got whatever treatment was needed to make them work properly before I was even born. Any that were so effed up as to be unusable probably ended up in the trash, sent back to the manufacturer, or are pristine 'never used' examples we find on ebay from time to time. The point of this long-winded dissertation is that if you've got a plane, it probably is fine. Some of them aren't - I'm sure that for every plane I have in my collection there is a person on here who could post his tale of fettling follies and foibles in which the plane was actually banana shaped before the brave soul spent hours sweating over a lump of granite turning his or her plane into a work of art. However, for every one of those I bet there are a thousand or more that you can use directly out of the box, as it were (priority mail box?). As long as you can use it to the degree required for whatever work you're doing then my best advice is don't fiddle or fettle! Just sharpen and go!

Here's a tip though for your now boat-bottomed plane: Use a mill file and push it across the sole to fix the high spots. Use your straightedge often, you can even try to flex the file slightly into the plane so that you're sure you're taking material out of the middle. If you've never seen a machinist use a file that way, don't think of it as filing long-stroke. Lay the file perpendicular across the sole of the plane and push it fore and aft on the sole with your thumbs on the file over the center. It'll remove very small amounts of material very precisely. Draw filing with finesse, as it were. Once you've got it flat, lightly sand to remove file marks and never fettle unless absolutely necessary!

[Wiley Horne]

Hello Vivian,

Wow, those are great diagnostics! Are you sure you haven't been at this for some time? Very impressive.

What to do.....read what John Kleso and Marcus Ward said. You want to cut down (draw file) the portions of the center line that are showing carbon blue. Then repeat the diagnostic, then cut some more. You can do this with either a file or with sand paper.

The question will then arise--when to quit? If it were my plane, I wouldn't want to take 3 thou of metal off the entire sole, in order to get it dead flat from toe to heel. That is machine work. I think I would concentrate on the more interior portions, say from the knob to the tote. You want to work from the inside out anyway, given the diagnostics that you have.

You will need to cut the centerline down to at least flat before resuming lapping, because otherwise the sole will reconvex, and you will wind up right back where you are now. I suggest you not think about lapping as your final flattening step. Instead think about the draw-filing (with file or sandpaper) as the final flattening step, and any additional lapping you do will just be cosmetic--indeed, you could skip it.

As I say, I would concentrate on taking the left-right rocking out of the sole, and getting it flat from knob to tote, then see how you like using the plane. The left-right rocking will give an erratic shaving, so it really does need to come out.

Are you sure you haven't done this before??

Wiley

[George Beck]

Many years ago, I ran across a Record 08 jointer plane in a hardware store. Knowing this plane had been discontinued at the time and the fact that it was $30 prompted me to buy it. I noticed when I got home that the sole was convex. After Lapping it on a piece of glass for hours I was about to decide in using it as a new door stop. Here is the unconventional method I used; First make sure your lapping surface is really, really flat. I went to a local granite top dealer and bought a "cut off" piece of granite, about 40 in X 4 in. x 3/4" I mounted this on a piece of mdf and clamped the beast to the work bench. I marked with a sharpie the front and back of the mouth, the toe, the heel and a thin line down the sides(these are the critical areas. I lapped the plane with 80 grit sandpaper attached with 3M 77. I noticed the ink remained on the front and heel of the plane. I then came up with this unconventional method. I used an extra corse DMT diamond stone (also great for flatting corse water stones) and "scrubbed" diagonally across the center and mouth of the plane using water as a lubricant. I then returned to the lapping table and noticed the ink still remained on the front and rear but I was moving closer. I used files and a green stone (extra corse about 60 grit) to Scub away high areas and returned to the lapping table. BTW the plane sole looked terrible and I was convinced I had ruined it. I change the sandpaper to fresh sanding belt and noticed I was starting to remove the sharpie lines. Much like sharping, once the corse terrible looking lines are even I proceeded through 360 grit and achieved a very flat, very large plane. The whole process took days and many sanding belts and I doubt I would ever repeat the process but in summary.1) Get a truly flat reference surface (plate glass, old jointer table, granite) for lapping. 2)Knock off the high spots any way you can. 3)Mark the important parts of the plane for matching. 4) Save your money and buy a truly flat plane.
Welcome to the creek. You are now doomed.
George

[Ron Petley]

It might be a moot point to mention that when lapping you should move the plane in a figure eight motion.
Cheers Ron.

[Zahid Naqvi]

have you ever entertained the thought of a wooden jointer. They are much easier to flatten, and if you are not comfortable with the adjustment mechanism of a wooden plane you can get a transitional plane which has the usual Stanley mechanism for depth adjustment. There are several listed on eBay.
Welcome to the creek

[michael osadchuk]

....thanks for the discussion, particularly on how to use a file to reduce the high spots on a convex sole and and the caution not to lap (to remove the file scratches) until the sole is flat.....

...I've read several cautions against lapping plane soles to a remove a convex shape but this the first time I've read on how to safely remove it (not that I'm tempted to do the work to achieve a perfect plane sole, btw)


thanks

michael