Plane, scraper, sandpaper???

Re: I think all of you are wrong, and I...

Andrew F in Australia

>Hi Mark,

For what it's worth, I wouldn't touch the throat - Terry Gordon sets each plane up as he makes them to work fine. A wide throat causes more problems than it fixes, and if you go to far it's a bit hard to glue filings back in.

0.028mm = 1 thou, perhaps a touch too small.

Sure you don't want to check it out with a sharp blade or try out the planes I have here? I'm about 1 - 1.5 hours away and on holidays at the moment? Just repeating the offer - shoot me an email if you're interested.

Cheers,

Andrew

Re: I think all of you are wrong, and I...

Mark Harrison -- in Sydney, Australia

>Andrew,

Thanks again for the offer. If you are no more than an hour to an hour and a half away in Sydney, then you must be no more 30 km away from me :-) I've been on holiday though the party's over on Monday :-(

Yesterday, I had a little more time and some more samples to work with. I can also report that I was off by one decimal point on the mouth opening of the plane. That should have read as 0.28 mm. Still tiny and the clogging is still annoying but I wont be doing anything about it without further consultation with Terry.

I re-checked the plane and its sharpness and I wasn't satisfied so I re-sharpened it. Not sure what happened there! Anyway, the results were more positive than my first attempt. I'm still getting some tear out if I am not careful. Still mostly hopeless on the curly grained sample I have. I've taken to scraping that and then sanding. Scraping still leaves a rough finish so the sanding is necessary.

Took three samples and sanded to 320, 400 and 600 using a ROS. I then applied Organoil and while the three samples look the same, they certainly feel different. The plan at the moment is to sand to 600 or 800, apply Organoil and wet sand, then to spray or pad Shellac. I'm leaning towards spraying at the moment. Shellac is fairly risk free and fairly easy to remove if I completely botch it.

Regards,

Mark