Musings

Restoring Infill #1 – Pursuing Purdy (& Pass-off for Finito)

 

With performance functionality assured — I’d flattened the sole, made sure all the parts fit together and worked well, and brought the plane iron to sharpness — it was time to turn my attention to making the infill plane pretty.

cIMG_2272

I disassembled the plane again and removed the infills to clean and apply a first coat of varnish.  Since the surface was a little friable and I did not want to grind away the wood to get down to uniformly solid wood for fear it would change the character of the infills I chose instead to coat the cleaned surface with a diluted application of West System epoxy, thinned about 25% with acetone to get the best penetration.

cIMG_2270

While that was happening I was cleaning the metal shell with fine sandpaper and 4F pumice.

cIMG_2273

Reflecting my personal aesthetic preference my plan was to use gun bluing in several applications to turn out as black as possible.

cIMG_2278

As I was doing an in-process reassembly I made a fateful decision that changed the course of the project irretrievably: I gave it away.  The problem was morphological, as my hand was simply too large to fit into the “D” tote with any degree of comfort, and I simply did not like the feel of getting only my pinkie and ring finger comfortably inside the opening.  Instead I packed it up and shipped it off to my brother-in-tools MikeM whose hands are, unlike my meaty Germano-Welsh mutt peasant mitts, are sinuous Mediterranean limbs that fit the opening more perfectly.

cInfill Plane 2

Mike took the project over the finish line and it is now both a showpiece and his introduction to the incurable fascination with infill planes.