I took a piece of junk and with some epoxy resin, sandpaper, Evaporust and a lot of elbow grease put it back in working condition. How do you think it looks? Music: Morning Mandolin by Chris Haugen
With the resin, try adding fine wood dust rather than colorant. We use epoxy all the time on a wooden tall ship to deal with cracks and other repairs. Also, hitting the area with a low heat gun before and during the pour will help get thr resin all the way into the crack.
Love that you were able to get this to a functioning state regardless of the wear and tear that should have doomed it. Will be checking out more of your videos since I just acquired a bunch of wood planes that all need various amounts of work to get functional.
I often buy "toasted" old tools just to see if I can return the function and dignity of the tool. It's fun and cheap! There's no real challenge in very nice old tools. Sometimes, when you really work hard to return them to use, you appreciate them more.
I repaired windows in historic districts where the client got a tax incentive to keep the windows original, lots of dried and decayed wood. I used: Minwax® High Performance Wood Hardener, it is a quick-drying liquid formulated hardener to strengthen, reinforce, and repair decayed or rotting wood. It’s 20$ per pint but is the viscosity of mineral spirits and it’s applied in numerous coats with a brush. This would have worked to re-stabilize the wood back to a workable state as glues and epoxy’s will fill and hold but the tension in the remaining dry wood will just split or tear leaving a different crack close to the repair you just made.
You did pretty well considering what you started with. The body of the plane is firewood. You will be a lot better off just making a new body for the iron. It's a lot of fun.
Late to the party for comments but… Ive used “water-thin” CA glue as a stabilizer with some success. Used in all the cracks before the resin and clamping it helps reduce some of the absorption. And will get further into the cracks. Just a thought. Good save on this old fella 👏
Yours is worse than mine. 👍🏼 I have an Ogontz Tool Co no. 13. It looks like there was a fire at the throat opening, it’s missing a cheek, it has a broken off side of its wedge, and some large cracks enanating from the “fire zone” on its sole. I’m pretty excited about attempting this repair though because I’m restoring a desperate, trash-heap-worthy vintage wood plane rather than messing with a nice but flawed plane that I could potentially make worse. So there’s no pressure. 🙂 My problem is finding Ohio white beech to graft in. It’s agonizing to think about mingling species in an old wood plane. Thank you for your immensely helpful videos; I’ll be relying on them over the next few days.
I agree that you needed to add the resin, but I think the grey pigment was a poor choice. I would have either used the sanding dust as pigment to try and match as closely as possible, or I would have committed to the resin and gone with a bright color so it looked like streaks of opal. I think the grey ended up different enough to look odd, but not different enough to look like an intentional artistic choice.
A fun experiment, and a good result under the circumstances. I seem to recall in Michael Dunbar's excellent book "Antique Woodworking Tools", Mr. Dunbar advocates dropping really dry planes into an oil bath for a couple of minutes, every day for a few weeks if necessary. I've done this on occasion with simple vegetable oil, and it often helps. Whilst those cracks are almost certainly too big to fully close up in this way, it may help the epoxy to grab, without soaking in so much, like you mentioned.
I just found your channel after following a suggestion from James Wright. I have a job lot of moulding planes I’m working my way through restoring, which also included a few coffin smoothers. Several have blown cheeks while the rest of the plane is in pretty good condition. The cracks look old so not convinced I’d be able to clean them out enough to use wood glue and get a decent bond. I was going to go with a thin epoxy until I saw it didn’t hold the cheeks in the video - have you found a better fix since? As others have said, boiled linseed oil (I use 1/3 pure turps, 2/3 BLO) is excellent for reviving the wood after a clean with methylated spirit/denatured alcohol.
Nice project! Since the plane is beyond collector value, why not fill every crack with resin? When I’m trying to get resin into a crack, I take a palm sander, remove the paper, and hold against the object. Vibrates the resin into cracks very well. There are also thin epoxies specifically for crack penetration. Thanks!
You might try boiled linseed oil instead of the oil soap. I dip my old handles in BOL and let them sit for an hour or so..repeat as needed. Them I use paste wax.
Great Work. It now looks like a priceless antique restored by the Smithsonian. Since you asked, I would have filled some of the smaller cracks with clear epoxy and then because the wood was so dry, I would have applied several coats of boiled linseed oil over a couple of weeks, then wax. I have done a couple of old wooden plane restores so your channel is quite interesting.
These wooden planes are pretry amazing, really, the only thing of real importance is a sharp blade and (if aplicable) a precisely fitting chip breaker and a good fit on the wedge. With that the plane will function perfectly fine
just started watching, love everything, thank you for all your effort! dumdum question, and apologies if you covered this previously: Have you ever done the BLO soak to rehydrate older planes, and do you think it could have worked here? I know that re-hydrating after the resin could create internal stresses as the wood expanded, but curious on your thoughts. Thank you again!
After glueing, you could have used a vacuum pot and saturated the entire plane in resin. I’ve also used tiny pins in the cheeks if they looked like a glueing wouldn’t hold. Great job in bringing the plane to usable shape.
That's an interesting idea. I've never tried that before. It's worth experimenting with but it's more work than I want to put into the plane in this video 😭
Titebond 3 and squeeze it back together. You can add a little water to make it thinner and syringe it into the cracks before clamping. I'm not too sure that's the original iron?
Model RR hobbyist will mix wood glue and water(equal parts) and a few drops of dish detergent.. the water will thin the glue and the dish detergent will break down the water to allow the mixture to penetrate more freely and thoroughly
