Vise details

Tonight I snuck out into the shop and worked on my leg vise.  First I trimmed off the top of the vise to make it level with the bench top.

Then I needed to detail the top front.  I watch Mark do this part on his vise and he used a grinder.  I don’t have a grinder, so I resorted to my hand plane.

I drew a pencil line on both face and planed the edge away staying between the lines.  Obviously, I made sure to plane from both sides so I didn’t blow out the end grain. This is how it turned out.

Final Jointer plane pics and test run

So after some sanding on the bottom and sides to do a little flattening and rust removal, I worked on the frog.  Once I flattened the areas on the frog, I put sticky sandpaper on the newly flatten surfaces and flattened the mating surface on the plane base.

Here are a couple of shots of the whole plane after I worked on it.  I started at 100 grit, went down several grits down and did a final polish with some 600 wet dry I had laying around.

Then I did my first test run.   I got crumpled shavings and a lot of chatter on the first pass.

So I pulled out the blade and chip breaker to see if I could see light between them and sure enough, I still had some light peeking through.  I took the chip breaker, clamped it up in my honeing guide and made some more passes over the sand paper.

This time I got nice ribbon shavings and a lot less chatter.  I might need to work with the chip beaker some more to get all the chatter out .. we’ll see on I get my workbench back in operation.

I added a shot of the honing guide set to 35 degrees.  I used this to get an even edge to mate with the blade.

Here’s a good summary video if you don’t want to buy a dvd (thanks Tico Vogt!):

How To Tune-Up A Hand Plane

PS.  please feel free to make suggestions.  After all, that’s what all this blogging is about, right?

The Jointer Plane

Today, I went down to Puget Sound Coatings and, for an extremely reasonable price, they bead blasted a jointer plane that was given to me recently (thanks Mike!).  I masted all the surfaces that needed to stay flat with Gorilla Tape and they popped it into their cabinet.  These guys were incredibly gracious and I  thanked  them profusely.   This is how it looked … nake-id!

Then  I took it out to the paint booth (the card board box I got out the the Auto Parts shop recycle bin) and put on some gloss engine black.

This is how it looks now.  I’ll be flattening sides and bottom and will sharpen up the blade to see how she runs.  I’ll be turning this into my dedicated jointer so it many not need a replacement blade.

Oh .. and I squeezed in a little work on the work bench too.  More on that tomorrow.