A productive Saturday morning

There is nothing better than a Saturday morning in the shop.  Another work week in the rear view and the promise of working for yourself, relaxing, and hopefully being productive.  But let's face it, any day in the shop is far superior to the best work day.

On my way home from work on Friday, I stopped at the hardware store and picked up the nuts, bolts, and washers to mount my grinder.  Again, I could have been smarter and actually measured prior to the stop, but I guessed the size bolts I would need.  Fortunately, I got the size I thought I would need and 1/2" longer.  The longer bolts worked, and I took that as a good sign of things to come.  At the last minute, I decided to change the orientation of the grinder on the table, so I re-drilled the holes and tightened it down.

Grinder in it's original position.  I ended up turning it 90 degrees to face to the right.

The grinder had become a major focus as I needed to camber a jack plane blade for quicker stock removal.  With the grinder ready to go, I started on the blade.  The first step was laying out a template.

The template laid out on the spine of a manila file folder.  I went with an 8 inch radius so that I will be able to hog off serious material.

The next step was marking the radius on on the plane blade.  I didn't have any layout fluid on hand, so I made due with some white spray paint.  I then traced the radius with a scratch awl.  The paint made it much easier to see my line.

 

The template on the blade, radius marked.

Ready to grind.

This was my first attempt at grinding plane blades (I've been fortunate to find vintage planes without heavily nicked blades), so needless to say, I had spent a lot of time thinking about the procedure.  Once I got my nerve up (and realized that I could always order replacements), I filled my mind with pure thoughts and got started.  In most cases, we worry for nothing.  That was certainly true for me in this instance.  The process went very smoothly.  So smoothly in fact, I went ahead and reground a smoothing plane blade and my jointer plane blade.  As it turns out, that was a fantastic idea.  I got the plane with the blade razor sharp, and my trusting self had put it to work.  The edge however was far from straight.  I realized it while planing down the legs for the bedside table.  It created a lot more work as far as checking progress and carefully evening out the stock removal.  My afternoon work would prove the effort worthwhile.

Smoothing plane and jack plane blades reground.  Time to hone.

As with many things in life, I managed to get carried away with the maintenance work.  I ended up completely disassembling the jointer plane and nearly so, with the jack.  I hadn't done more than a very cursory cleaning since I had gotten them, but flush with my success at the grinder, I decided now was the time.  Besides, I had all day in the shop.  I'm still getting used to blogging, so I totally neglected to get a really good before photo and didn't take an after.  I do have a decent photo showing the two planes that I will share tomorrow, and I will get a good after photo tonight.  I will say though, that neither will ever be perfect as both are approaching 100 years old and have definitely seen some hard use.  That said, there was a major improvement in both, aesthetically and functionally.

I'm looking forward to sharing more tomorrow, and maybe even some actual woodwork.  I hope you'll visit again then.  For now, I'm off to work.