The Taylor Garage

Along with a batch of 50″ Jet parallet clamps that arrived this week, I also received my latest eBay find – a Stanley #5 Jack Plane:

This one was in pretty good condition – no large patches of rust, both handles are in great condition, no cracks in the base.  However, I was a little disappointed with the quality of the blade. So disappointed that I headed straight for my combination waterstone without taking a picture of the gouges.  Let’s just say it resembled the mid-Atlantic coastline more than it resembled a straight line.  One of the gouges had to be nearly 1/8″ deep.

Rather than go buy a new blade, I decided to give my hands a workout. I felt that keeping the current bevel (~30 degrees) would take forever to rub off enough of the blade to get below the gouges, so I took a more aggressive approach somewhere near 45 degrees. This got me past the rough spots, but left me with another problem: I now have a double beveled edge on my blade.  So after taking an eighth of an inch off the blade already, I got to work the correct angle out to the edge of the blade. A few hundred passes on the stone later and I had a sharp edge I was happy with.  Initially I thought my double angled approach would be easier/quicker, but in retrospect I’m not so sure.  Anyone have an opinion either way?

I haven’t had a chance to make any shavings with it yet, due to the other work I accomplished this weekend. I also still need to check the sole for flatness before putting my newest plane to work. But I’m quite happy with my collection growing on the cheap.

I haven’t spent much time in the garage lately, mostly because I made a huge mistake.  Remember how I had some alignment issues that I thought were purely aesthetic? It turned out to not be so.  When I tried to set the large panel that would serve as the horizontal base of the crib, I found out that it wouldn’t fit, because the panels inside the base weren’t set at the same height as one another.  Given I had already glued everything up, this meant that I had to break it apart, buy some more wood, and start over.

I haven’t had to completely start over, as many of the pieces I cut were unused to this point.  Thankfully, I was able to salvage a couple of the larger parts from the deconstruction to be reused.  Nothing was reuseable in place, but I was able to cut some of the smaller parts from the larger “scrap” pieces I now had.

One advantage to having to do this a second time is I already know how the first couple of steps are supposed to go – which allows me to move a little faster through the assemblies.  Another nicety of this assembly is getting to use my new Jet parallet clamps on the end assemblies:

I’ve now come to realize that you don’t fully understand the lack of clamping pressure you had on a previous assembly until you have the clamping ability you actually need.  Getting any kind of proper clamping was a stretch (pun intended) for the long axis of the crib base.  I have two Craftsman ratcheting band clamps that I was able to fit around the whole base, but just barely.  The straps are so taut that they vibrate like a stringed instrument.  I should take my guitar tuner out there and see what pitch they hit.

Now that I’ve made sure the horizontal base will fit and sit level, I can move onto assembling the crib rails next.