Cleaning a Stanley No. 5
By Bobby Neal Winters
I am still learning things about myself. I am still learning how to explain myself to the world. Because of the way I am wired up, I have to come at it indirectly.
I’ve been cleaning up my workshop. Cleaning up is something that should be a part of the daily routine, but that is easier said than done. It’s much easier to put it off to the next day, and then to the next. When you take out your tools to work, it’s easy to say, I will be using these tomorrow, so I will just leave them out. You do that a few days in a row, and then for a week, and then you have a mess.
Well, I had let my workshop get into a mess. This wasn’t the first time so I do know how to clean up a mess: make sure the trash can is empty and pick a table (or a corner or a corner of a table) and clean that.
My assembly/finishing table was in a horrible mess so I started on it. I picked a corner and--because the trash was already empty--I started throwing away and putting away. I got that table clean so then I went over to my workbench and threw away and put away until I could see the top of it.
Then I got to another part of the shop that needed attention. I threw away some stuff, but when I moved it I found something that someone had given to me: it was a Stanley No. 5 plane.
An honest-to-God Stanley.
Now, I do have another No. 5 plane, but it's a Spear & Jackson. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a Spear & Jackson. They make some fine products for handtool woodworking, but for planes--I’ve come to understand--Stanley is something of a standard.
This Stanley had been given to me with the idea that I would restore it, but it had got put aside and had gotten something sat on top of it. Now here it was in my hand with a clean workbench just waiting to be used.
This beautiful Stanley plane was absolutely filthy. To be clear, it wasn’t filthy with dirt; it wasn’t filthy like it had been left in a chicken coop; it was filthy with accretions that told a story of it being in a workshop like mine for decades. It was covered with a concretion made up of sawdust, wood dust (which is finer than sawdust), and an alchemical mixture of various finishes.
I got my flathead screwdriver and took the plane down to its component parts. I retrieved my turpentine from the shelf. Some of it I put into a paper cup so that I could soak the screws and other small parts in. I then put some more only a shop rag and a steel scrunchy of the type used to clean cast iron skillets.
Then I got to work with the elbow grease. First I rubbed and scrubbed. Then I scrubbed and rubbed.
After I got the filth off, I discovered what the real problem was: The blade.
The blade is the heart of every plane. The purpose of the rest of the plane is to hold the blade at the correct angle and to allow you to adjust it conveniently. But the blade is the sine qua non. From the Latin, without which there is not. From the Okie, the whole shootin’ match.
I don’t want to tell you how many videos I’ve watched on the subject of sharpening. What is more, I surely don’t want to know. But they have changed me. Once I had cleaned the blade enough to see it, I immediately noticed two things. The first was that the last person who’d tried to sharpen this blade did not know what they were doing. I say this not meaning to insult whoever gave it to me nor any of the relatives from whom it had come. There wasn’t a chain of custody attached. Let’s assume a well-meaning child had tried to sharpen it. The second thing I noticed was there was a big chip out of the edge of the blade.
The good news was the cure to both these problems is more elbow grease, and fortunately I’ve got plenty of that.
I got out my diamond sharpening stones.
That sounds fancier than it actually is. Basically, these are three thin sheets of stainless steel that have had dust from industrial diamonds coated on them in varying densities: 800 grit, 1000 grit, and 1200 grit.
I presented the blade to the first stone and pulled it back and forth until both the poor sharpening and the chip from the edge were gone. And then I did it a while longer. I took it from there to each of the finer stones in turn until I had my final polish. I tested the blade on a piece of paper, and it went through it like butter.
After that, I reassembled all of the clean parts and tuned the plane.
Stanley deserves its reputation.
After I was done, I myself was covered with turpentine and, according to my wife, smelled like a Christmas tree. She brought me a change of pants to my shop before she let me back into the house.
My workshop is not an operating theater, but it’s better than it had been. I’ve got my table and my workbench back in shape to work on, and I’ve got a lovely Stanley No. 5.
It wasn’t a bad day.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.
