Restoring a Stanley #10 – Part 1

Here is my Stanley #10 which was part of the batch of tool I purchased from a collector early last year (the same one I bought Big Bertha from). He sold it to me as a discounted price due to its poor condition: it was covered in rust, the tote was broken, and the mouth had obviously been chipped and badly refiled. I did not have time to deal with most of the issues when I purchased it but did nuke the rust on the blade, chip breaker, and cap-leaver. I’m apparently bad at before pictures so here is the plane as it looked on Friday:

Most of the Japaning was missing or loose and there was rust all over the plane body. Since I already had the electrolysis gear out for the vise the frog and the body went into the bath for a long soak. 6 hours later I hit them with a brass brush and then back into the bath for several more hours (I’m not sure if my sacrificial iron is getting used up or if it’s because I am using Washing Soda instead of my usual baking soda but the rust removal went much slower this weekend).  After the last soak I used a “between finishes” sanding pad to remove the black residue left on the parts and placed them into a 225 degree oven for 10 minutes, letting them cool inside the oven; this fully dries out the parts in preparation for painting. Once the parts had cooled down there was a fair amount of flash rust that I removed with a wire brush mounted to a Dremmel Multi-tool (I don’t have a bench grinder yet).

For applying the new finish, I followed Rex Mill’s plan using engine paint with the addition of petroleum jelly on the areas where paint is not needed, as recommended by Bob Jones.

Before                                After Flash Rust Removal                                 After Painting

Tonight I will wipe/scrape/sand off the excess paint and access the straightness of the plane mouth.

I also started repairing the broken tote. It’s not a clean break and it had a previous railed repair so I decided to use a compilation of the techniques found on Rex Mill’s site. First I scrapped out as much of the excess glue that I could, and then I drilled a series of small holes in each face of the break (the theory being that this would give more surface area for the epoxy. A quarter inch dowel rapped in tape and coated with petroleum jelly lined up the two parts and I smeared 5 minute epoxy into the holes on each face, squished the two parts together with my fingers, and added a bead of epoxy on the outside to fill the chips/gaps along the break. Once the epoxy was 90% set up I pulled out the dowel and continued to hold the pieces together until the bead was hard to the touch.

I forgot to take a picture of the glued up tote but I will make sure to do so before I sand it down.