Rebate Refurb

I’ve managed to find some spare minutes this morning so I decided to take a quick look at refurbishing an old wooden shoulder plane which I’ve had laying around but never used. These rebate planes can often be picked up from car boot sales and flea markets for next to nothing so it’s well worth checking out just how quickly you can get one back up and running and put it to use in the workshop.

The first job was to true the faces of the plane so they were flat and parallel. You can see just how must this face has moved over time but a few more passes took away all the aged patina and I was left with a fresh and flat surface.

The next step was to flatten the sole of the shoulder plane and make sure that this was square to the sides.

This shoulder plane has a skewed mouth which is ideal for planing both with and across the grain. To put some life back in to the plane’s iron I spent a good amount of time on the coarsest stone to re-established the bevel. I didn’t have time to go to any great lengths but I got the edge sharp enough to try out for some shavings and then set it in to the plane.

This was a bit of a rushed job but already the shoulder plane is working well to cut a nice clean and square rebate. I’ll come back and do a bit more work on the iron as well as checking that it’s seating nice and flat on the bed of the plane. For now though it’s doing a great job it softwood and I’m happy that this is going to be a very useful and cost effective little joinery plane. I took a look at cleaning up this shoulder plane because our wall cupboard video shows a lot of rebates being cut – I’m making a short follow up video after part one to look at alternative methods for cutting them.

I’ll also take a quick video snippet to add to our Facebook page later on so you can see it in use.