Fettling a Jointer Plane

My shop contains few working power tools. I'm not really a Neanderthal, but the shop has developed accidentally with an emphasis toward hand tools. This is partly because of my penchant for getting things used or free, and partly just bad luck.

For example, I would love to have a working jointer, but the little bench top model I bought for a "bargain" was setup incorrectly by its previous owner, and so far I've been unable to release the blades to adjust them properly (the man must have been a beast, because those screws are not budging, even after multiple WD-40 and Kroil applications). There's no point in trying to joint with blades that are set out of square.

I believe learning a task with hand tools teaches me more about power tools than learning it with power tools teaches me about hand tools. This may or may not prove useful some day, but I've been betting that it will. Hand tools also fettle more quickly than power tools (are power tools fettled?). My band saw, for example has much larger parts and labor requirements before it works to a fine standard than a any bench plane will.

So when it came time to glue up the bench tops for my bench project and I had a choice between driving the three hour round trip to my friend's house to use his power jointer or spending the time fettling my jointer plane and doing it by hand, you can guess which one I chose.

The plane had promise, but it needed some help.

My sole aim was to have both sides of the mouth in the same plane. Right, well even if the puns are unintended, I wanted to make sure the front and back of the mouth would contact any board I'm flattening. To ensure that, I made reference marks in front of and behind the mouth using a Sharpie and started flattening the plane on my "reference" surface.

The reference surface is a cutoff piece of marble that I got free at from a local granite counter manufacturer. It works well as a flattening surface and is heavy enough to hold a length of Klingspor Gold Cloth Roll under the ends using just gravity as an adhesive. The Klingspor sand paper is fairly expensive, especially at this width, but it is so worth the cost. It can be torn to an appropriate length using just a straight edge, it has a good tooth, and you can vacuum it clean and keep using it for quite a while.

With the plane assembled—no blade of course—I planed the surface flat on the sand paper. Here it is: flat enough, with just a hint of the mark left at the front of the mouth (all of that is in a scratch pattern that would take ages to sand flat, so I called it "flat enough").


The blade had apparently been sharpened and polished by its previous owner on a grinder with a felt wheel. Even though it looked good with a finely polished surface, it wasn't good. I had to flatten, square, joint, and resharpen the blade to get it going right.

I'm not going to comment on how this was done, except to say that I don't have a grinder (remember my lack of power tools?) so almost all of this was done on the Gold sandpaper. Ages ago I had purchased a sharpening jig from Lee Valley, and this made it easier to redefine the bevel at the correct angle. I also acquired a really thin metal ruler last year, which made polishing the back of the blade much easier than it might have been: I used the David Charlesworth trick of laying the ruler on one side of the oil stone to hold the back of the blade at a consistent angle and focus the polishing on the end of the blade. It was the first time I had done this, and it worked wonderfully. I'll cheerfully do it again when flattening plane blades, which don't get used as reference surfaces.

After honing on the oil stone, I hoped for the best. And fine, frothy shavings emerged. Success. I was ready to start jointing.