{"id":782,"date":"2020-03-16T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/?p=782"},"modified":"2020-09-08T10:22:10","modified_gmt":"2020-09-08T14:22:10","slug":"week-56-oars-pt-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/2020\/03\/16\/week-56-oars-pt-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 56: Oars, pt. 3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So, yeah, wow, the oars have turned out to be harder than I imagined. Who knew?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew that I could really benefit from using a hand plane or two for shaping at some point, so I trotted out my antique Stanley #4 smoother and block plain (and my not so antique Buck Brothers jack plane) to try my hand yet again at hand planes. I’ve never been successful with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is why they’ve been in storage for so long, and also because they suffered terribly in the flood we had in the basement. Oh, my, was there rust. A lot of rust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I felt terrible about that. Not that I was any good with these tools in the first place, but, at the very least, I should have been a better steward for the antique Stanley planes. Especially the #4 smoother. It’s a type 15, I’ve learned, made between 1931 & 1932. I feel like I should take better care of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, more recently though, I watched Rex Krueger’s awesome video<\/a> on restoring old Stanley bench planes. He showed some awesome results with a bench grinder and a wire wheel. And Dawn had just done the taxes and said I had a few dollars to spend on something for myself. So I bought myself the DeWalt DW756.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it really, really did some good on my #4, getting rid of the heartbreaking rust. I was stunned. But then came trying to sharpen the iron itself. I tried the sandpaper method. I used my oil stones. I used my diamond stones. And I’m still terrible at sharpening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, I thought, maybe it’s sharp enough. Maybe I’m not getting a perfect flat mirror lapping the back of the iron, but maybe it’ll cut okay anyway. I’m not trying to get a shimmery surface on tiger maple or anything. I’m just trying to shape some pine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I tried using the plane on the taper on the loom on the oar where it goes from the 2″ square down to the 1-1\/4″ where it meets the blade. And just a couple of strokes with the plane … and I broke it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I broke my precious antique Stanley #4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I only broke the tote, the wooden rear handle, and not the precious cast iron or anything. It’s not the end of the world. But it’s pretty much the end of my career with hand planes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tried gluing the tote back together with wood glue, but the orientation of the grain makes it pretty much end grain that I’m trying to glue together. It didn’t work. So I used epoxy instead. That made an utterly ugly glue line, but it holds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Tote being glued<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And I instead bought a power hand planer, the Porter Cable PC60THP, which is a malevolent looking beast but works, I suppose. And I used that this weekend to start shaping the oars to their final dimensions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it works really well on the square part of the loom, it works less well on the taper part of the loom, and it works surprisingly poorly on the blade. I really thought it would work super well on the blade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Oar loom shaping with power planer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So I’m back to using the rasp on the blade, which is a good workout. So far I’ve done one side of one blade. A couple more hours of that, though, and I should finish with the oars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Oar blade shaping with rasp<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Oh, and I did get the boat turned right side up, ready for painting the inside yellow. I’ve ordered that paint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Red boat right side up<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, yeah, wow, the oars have turned out to be harder than I imagined. Who knew? I knew that I could really benefit from using a hand plane or two for shaping at some point, so I trotted out my antique Stanley #4 smoother and block plain (and my not so antique Buck Brothers jack … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Week 56: Oars, pt. 3”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-oars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":790,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions\/790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohls.org\/boat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}