New Stanley No. 62 WIP

[583nuc]

ALL,

OK, I'm cheap (because I couldn't pass-up $85.00 for a Stanley No. 62 Sweethaert POS), slightly masochistic, and enjoy a challenge. At any rate I brought my new plane home and have actually made good progress making it work. I got so invovled in the mechanics of the job that I forgot to take pictures of the whole process, which I will remedy at first opportunity. We have all heard of the various ailments that this plane has, but as it turns out, non of them are insumountable. Basic details follow:

(1.) The sole of the plane had a 0.003" hollow right behind the mouth, which truly is not a big deal. I also found that the adjustable mouth plate was about 0.005" high at the mouth. About 15 minutes on the sole, working from 150 grit up to 400 grit flattened the sole fine. Before I flattened the sole, I addressed the adjustable mouth issue by lightly filing the milled surfaces of the plane body and the adjustable mouth plate with a 8" single cut file to get rid of the maching nibs and wire-edges then polishing them slightly with "medium" and "fine" diamond hone sticks. I also cleaned up some "wire-edges" left over from the frog milling process on the mouth of the plane.

(2.) The Blade: this is a hefty chunk of A2 steel. (Mine had a couple of fine nicks on the cutting edge for some reason.) Flattening the back took about 10 minutes, this time starting with 180 grit working up to P2400 for a fine polish. As the blade is ground at 25 degrees, I lapped the cutting edge in at 27 degrees, which took about another ten minutes.

(3.) The Tote: mine is a ugly light Cherry or Maple. It was also loose, even after tightening down the tote screw. I found that the counter-bore in the handle was marginally to deep for the nut to clamp the handle. I drilled a No.8 brass washer out to fit over the 3/16 screw rod and installed it under the tote nut: problem solved.

(4.) The Frog: I would never let something looking like this leave our machine shop. Again, I spent not much time with a fine 8" single cut file making sure that there weren't any nibs or wire-edges jutting out of the mill tracks then used the "medium" and "fine" diamond hone sticks to dress everything up.

(4.) The adjustable mouth plate: AH, here is where I ran into my biggest problem. One of the common gripes about this plane is that the mouth doesn't (can't) close down very far. My inital measurement of the mouth opening was about 0.100", way to big. At first I thought that it was due to the mouth plate adjuster cam hitting the side of the plane, but even after removing a little metal from the brass cam at it's interference point, the mouth plate would come to a hard stop before the cam reached the end of it's travel. What I found was that the rabbet for the mouth plate was incompletely machined and on the left side of the plane body there was a 0.200" long protrusion that prevented the mouth plate from moving it's full travel. HUMMMM. I have a small assortment of diamond burrs for my Dremel tool that I picked up at a local big box store for about $15.00, just waiting to be used for something like this. Using one of the smaller rod shaped burrs, I ground out the rest of the rabbet. TAKE CARE NOT TO GRIND INTO THE PLANE"S MOUTH!! It took about that long to grind out the offending material and VIOLA! the mouth plate went all the way back to the plane's mouth! If you are really anal, like me, you can touch up the paint job with some flat black paint where you slipped while grinding the metal out.

(5.) OK, I'm feeling pretty good about resolving the adjustable mouth problem, so it's on to the back-lash issue with the Norris-type adjuster. I had about 2 - 2 1/2 turns of slop on the adjuster. Althought the threads on the adjuster screw are not top-notch, I couldn't account for that much slop. There are TWO issues here, both deal with the size of the holes that the adjuster nuts fit into. The hole in the plane's blade was 0.125" in diameter and the little adjuster nut nub was 0.116", the bore in the plane body for the big adjuster nut was about 0.007" bigger than the nub on the big nut. Although this doesn't seem like much, it's enough to cause all the slop in the adjuster. I used a small piece of 0.004" brass shim stock to wrap around the little nut nub and some 0.003 shim for the big nut nub. (Shim stock like this is available at auto machine shops, Hobby Lobby, Mc Master_Carr, etc.) I just cut it the correct width with SWMBOs kitchen sissors, wrapped it around a like-sized drill bit to shape it and stuck in the appropriate holes. Now I have less that 1/2 turn of slop in the adjuster.

(6.) The other thing that I stumbled upon was when I went to clean the burrs off of the blade cap: it was ground in such a way that it was off-square about 1/8" from side-to-side. This is probably not an issue with a bevel-up blade, but it didn't look "right". At any rate, I filed the front of the blade cap square. Take care how much you remove if you do this: Shortening one end of a fulcrum means the other end has to increase it's travel to apply the same amount of pressure and there are only so many threads on the screw on the back end of the blade clamp

(6.) I still have an issue with the mouth adjusting cam plate vs. bolt size in the front tote handle, but I'm not worried about it right now.

So, that's what I accomplished in a short evening in the shop. I can peel off 0.002" full width shavings from quarter-sawn White Oak and hard Maple. I have spent much longer and been more aggravated while restoring an old Stanley and as I said before, I enjoy the challange. I hoe that this helps somebody.

[jhl.verona]

Thank you for that - must be the longest first post I've ever seen on this forum! Excellent description, I think I managed to follow nearly all of it, though a few photos would be nice.

One point: the brass shims (sounds like thick foil wrap to me) are forced into the nut threads to reduce the thread diameter, right? I imagine that the brass will wear fairly quickly, so you'll have to repeat the process when the play comes back?

Welcome to the forum, BTW.

John

[583nuc]

Thanks John.

The brass shims are wrapped around the small portion(s) of the barrel nuts that seat in (1.) the hole in the plane blade and (2.) the bore in the plane body in the case of the larger barrel nut. Another source of shim material, although not as durable, would be aluminum from a disposable pie tin or the like.