I’m not doing a great job of taking in progress pictures but I made some progress this weekend. As I have mentioned before, simple tasks seem to grow as related tasks pile up.
Last weekend my DrawSharp arrived from BenchCrafted and when I attempted to assemble it, I discovered that the wear plate was missing and BenchCrafted immediately sent me a replacement. On Friday I finally assembled it and realized i needed to grind my drawknife. So out came my grinder but the handles required me to hold the knife at an angle to the stone so I used by early used high grit stone which ended up with a bevel at the outer edge.
Since I had the grinder out I pulled out ever bench plane that needed a new edge and ended up grinding the blades for me #4 and #7, both of which had chips. I also pulled out my #5 1/2 which has been sitting waiting for some TLC (some of the parts went through electrolysis when I first squired it). While I had it out I refinished the rear tote, swapped out the front tote, removed some rust, and oiled everything. I had planned to re-paint it since it was missing almost all of its jappaning but oil wil work.
Then I decided to flatten the bottom of my #4 on some sand paper followed by diamond plate and water stone.
Now I was finally able sharpen my draw knife which I used to remove a lot of the material from the bottom relief. This was followed by a scrub plane, my spindle sander, and a chisel to flatten it up.
The bridle joint took me forever and I’m still not happy with it. I remembered to smooth the sides of the legs before marking out the joint.
It still needs some adjusting but I’m hoping to get one side together this week.