Stanley Bailey planes were made in the USA and the UK (I have no idea why both) from 1867 to 1967 and were pretty much a standard bench plane for professional woodworkers. They were of a quality not equaled by most if any hand planes made these days except for the expensive US made Lie Nielsen and British Clifton. Fortunately they were made in such quantity that they are still obtainable without much difficulty. Although good ones can be found most need work to restore to working condition. Many can be seen on YouTube restored to as new condition from being covered all over with a brown crust of rust. It’s not difficult, just a lot of work. I had been looking for a No 4 for a while without success when my nephew found one for me. It wasn’t a wreck but needed some work to restore it to working condition. That’s when I discovered that restoring to “as new” isn’t as easy as watching YouTube, not because of the work required but because some materials are not easily available to us. Most of the videos are American and Americans can buy Japanning material and Shellac but we can’t at least not easily. The black paint we see on Stanley planes isn’t paint its Japanning which is an ancient Japanese finish made with boiled linseed oil, turps (actual turps not turpentine substitute) and asphaltum which is mixed, painted on and oven baked. Not difficult if you can find the ingredients or buy it mixed as Americans can. Shellac was once the most common finish for wood furniture before modern varnishes were invented. Without going into a long explanation of how it differs from varnish, let me just say that it has a softer look that brings out figure and colour of wood in a particular way. I found a source of Shellac flakes in Cape Town but it has to be mixed with denatured alcohol which is nothing more than common meths. Problem solved you might think but only blue meths seems to be obtainable and I didn’t want to risk my woodwork ending up with a blue tint.

Anyhow, the unavailability of Japanning material and the fact that I can only get blue meths stopped my idea of restoring to factory condition. Probably as well because at the age of eighty two time isn’t on my side for wasting unnecessarily. I therefore satisfied myself with restoring it to working order and looking cosmetically respectable. Everything about it was basically OK – all the parts were intact and the only rust was some surface rust on the blade, chip breaker and lever cap. The only other faults were deep scratches on the sole and a badly chipped blade, probably from planing wood that contained nails eg wood floors. I started with smoothing and flattening the sole because that is best done with the plane fully assembled because stripping it first can result in some curvature when it is reassembled. And the cheeks at the same time.

It’s done by rubbing it back and forth on abrasive paper on a flat surface. In a pinch chipboard is flat enough, MDF (Superwood) is better, but the flattest thing on earth except a proper surface plate is plate glass. I have had two small pieces for many years, which my local PG Glass cut for me. Mine are 6mm but I recommend 10 or 19mm if you can get it. My biggest glass is only slightly longer than the plane but still allows a full back and forth stroke. Nonetheless I recommend it be a bit longer. My No 4 plane is 240mm long and my glass plate only slightly longer. However, although it is practical to sand a plane on a piece of glass no longer than the plane I recommend that the glass be 50mm longer than your biggest plane. Although my 6mm glass has worked perfectly well, glass bends so if you have a piece 500mm long it will be less likely to bend if it is thicker. An MDF base board will help but still the thicker glass the better. I wasn’t too concerned about that because my piece of glass is short enough to not likely bend and my bench top is flat enough to provide adequate support. My only concern was how to prevent it from sliding around as I worked. I had in mind a board with fences all round and clamped to the bench. Which would make sense for renovating several planes, but to my surprise taping the glass to the bench with masking tape worked perfectly, and which I have since seen used by an American restorer. The only caveat is that my masking tape was quite narrow so I recommend wider tape especially with thick glass. The wet or dry paper can be taped to the glass or over the glass on to the bench. I found that I could sand the plane for hours without the paper or the glass working loose. In fact it took two hours of sanding to get the desired result. But there is one minor point for which I yet have no answer - American videos show sandpaper in long lengths possibly bought in rolls but I have no idea whether rolls are available in SA. That’s useful for rolling out as long a piece as desired.

Otherwise we must work with small sheets that are too small for anything bigger than a No 4 plane. My best suggestion is to glue two sheets of wet or dry to a sheet of paper, I suggest buying a few sheets of A3 from a local print shop. The bigger planes will span both sheets and won’t tear them up where they join.

Most videos tell you to start with 120 or 150 grit and work through 220 up to 400. Some go further but 400 leaves it so smooth that there’s no point to anything more. Starting with 120 is OK if the sole is not badly rusted or badly scratched but mine was so badly scratched that 120 made little impression. It really needed skimming on a surface grinder but I persevered with wet or dry starting with 60 grit. Even that took two hours of vigorous rubbing to take out half the scratches and half the depth of the deepest ones that remained. At regular intervals I sprayed with marking blue to show the low spots but you don’t need to buy marking blue (I have it for other purposes for which it pays its way) you can simply draw a few lines across the sole with a thick felt tip pen. Eventually I got it perfectly flat but with some scratches remaining but it is flat enough and smooth enough that the scratches won’t affect its performance and it’s not worth several hours of work to remove them completely. I went through 60, 120, 220, 320 and 400 grit, then I cleaned up the sides similarly. 400 Grit won’t leave a mirror finish but it is more than satisfactory, and 320 would have been sufficient.

Most of the black Japanned finish was intact, just duller than the original glossy finish (it is known to dull over time), but it had flaked/chipped off in just enough places to justify repair. My repair was a gamble because only time will tell whether it will hold. Some guys have completely removed the old Japanning. Some have applied new Japanning but most have applied a durable black paint which looks much the same. I taped over the parts not to be painted, roughed up the japanned surfaces and the metal where the japan had flaked off with a small wire brush not unlike a tooth brush, wiped it twice with thinner by way of degreasing, and sprayed two coats of smooth black Dulux Hammerite. I used Hammerite because I have had past success with it directly on to steel without primer. It looks very nice but only time will tell whether it will continue to stick to the old Japanning. If it doesn’t I’ll have to strip off the Japanning and repaint. If that happens I’ll have lost nothing but some time. I should add that it is difficult to see the difference where it is on top of the old japanning or directly on steel.

Most YouTube restorers sandpaper or stone the frog to ensure perfect flatness. An Australian YouTuber who has restored several of these planes says that he no longer does that because he has detected no difference of performance. The blade does however need to sit flat on the frog to avoid flexing in use, so, as the plane is disassembled it makes no sense not to do it. I sanded mine but fortunately it needed only a little sanding. Remember that some surfaces need only be mechanically flat not mirror smooth and usually 80% of the area is enough, so there’s no need to spend hours sanding off all the machine marks.

The only rust was on the exposed parts of the blade and chip breaker and some light pitting on the lever cap. If the rust is too much to remove by hand sanding a more aggressive method is needed. A wire wheel on a bench grinder or drill press is the logical choice but if you haven’t got that a liquid rust remover is the other option. For those who might need to do that, don’t waste money on a commercial product when ordinary household vinegar works better, as one American YouTuber proved. After 48 hours my rusty parts came out of the vinegar with the rust softened so it could be wiped off. After the vinegar I rinsed them with water and put them in sodium bicarb solution to neutralize the acid.

I still had to do a good bit of sanding but a lot less than I would have had to do without the vinegar. I got all the rust off the blade and most of the light pitting off the lever cap but some pitting remains on the chip breaker the removal of which would have needed several hours of work and significant thinning of the steel, for zero practical benefit. Although the rust/pitting was lightest on the lever cap it needed the most sanding - one video said that the lever caps are nickel plated which might explain their resistance to sanding. Although it was a lot of work I got it respectably smooth and bright but I had to go through 60, 120, 220, 320 and 400 grit to get there. Some restorers polish the lever cap mirror bright but I didn’t see the need to take it that far. The red paint around the raised Stanley logo on the lever cap was in poor condition from age and accumulated dirt which wouldn’t clean off. I refreshed it with red paint from a local craft shop. However, I wasn’t confident that the paint would stick without priming first. As the black Hammerite does stick I used it as a primer followed with two coats of the red. I can’t say it’s satisfactory – the Stanley colour is really orange and the red looks dull by comparison. But it’s better than it was. Removing the rust wasn’t too difficult but many Stanley Bailey planes are more rusted than mine and will require more aggressive treatment meaning near impossible without wire brushing or belt sanding after the vinegar treatment.

Sharpening the blade (for some reason it’s called “the iron” in the business) was a new challenge for me. I sharpen my wood chisels but my biggest chisel is only 25mm wide and a 50mm wide blade is something else. They rarely need grinding, usually only stoning, but this one had chips out of the cutting edge so deep that honing without first grinding wasn’t sufficient. It’s difficult to present accurately to a bench grinder freehand. The idea of grinding accurately by hand is as silly as those who claim that they can sharpen twist drills by hand. I can do that myself but not nearly as accurately as a jig, and grinding a plane blade by hand strikes me as unnecessarily chancy as sharpening drill bits by hand. A simple adjustable wooden table fixed next to a bench grinder is easy to make and works perfectly, like a disc sander. But I had already built a steel track in front of my bench grinder for the purpose of guiding tool sharpening jigs so I made a simple jig to work with that. It presents the blade to the side of the grinding wheel in such a way that both the angle of grind (25 degrees) and the squareness of the cutting edge can be accurately set. The cutting edge doesn’t have to be perfectly square because the plane itself allows some adjustment, provided it is understood that the plane allows only a small amount of adjustment so it is desirable to grind the cutting edge at least nearly square, I’d say no more than one degree out of square. The cutting edge was so badly chipped that it took two hours of grinding.
The standard recommendation is that half a mm to one mm width at the cutting edge be stoned at 30 degrees. As I don’t have a stone big enough and have had good results on other work with wet or dry, I decided to see what 1200 grit would do, that being the finest I could get locally. I was encouraged by Guy Lautard’s report in one of his books that 2000 grit will polish steel to a mirror finish in which you can shave, and Paul Sellers said that when he was a young man the modern very fine grit stones weren’t available but a 450 grit stone gave good results. I therefore figured that I had nothing to lose by trying and it turned out that 1200 wet or dry proved adequate - my blade easily passes the test of slicing through a sheet of paper held loosely by hand, and takes nice shavings off pine. How well it will perform with hardwood remains to be seen, and I might, having gone this far and in view of the unavailability of 1500 and 2000 wet or dry, fork out for a fine stone.

Stoning or rubbing on wet or dry is usually done with a little jig, many of which can be seen on YouTube. They are metal with nice little clamps and a single wheel probably on a ball bearing, and some DIYs recommend making them with ball bearing wheels. I made up something similar from a piece of scrap wood and two scrap steel discs which had been templates for filing accurate circles served as wheels. It looks unbelievably crude even to me, but worked so well that I won’t need to replace it with something better. I’ll tidy it up a bit, a coat of varnish and knurl the wheels. I’ll gladly send drawings and photos of both my jigs to anyone who wants them.

The wood handles (properly called tote and knob) were in decent condition, just too many coats of varnish not too carefully applied at various times in the plane’s life. The handles were traditionally Brazilian rose wood but I suspect that those made after WW2 (mine is a Type 19 made between 1948 and 1960) are some other hardwood probably stained beech. As I couldn’t refinish them with the traditional Shellac and the colour was dark brown as most of them are, I settled for something simpler. YouTuber Dave Corinth restores old ones and makes new ones for customers. Where he has used a light wood like maple he stains it darker, varnishes with conventional varnish and finishes by rubbing with steel wool and a coat of Johnson’s furniture wax. Looks nice, a soft sheen. So I rubbed the existing varnish with steel wool and applied wax. I couldn’t find Johnson wax so I bought Cobra wax which seems to work well enough. After all, I thought, furniture waxes are all similar. My woodwork doesn’t look quite as nice as Dave Corinth’s but it’s better than it was and looks pretty decent.

The last job was the three brass items ie the blade adjusting knob and the tote and knob screws. The two screws weren’t badly beaten up as they often are, needed only a few needle file strokes to clean up the slots and a little polishing with steel wool on my drill press. It would have been no bother to polish them mirror bright with Brasso but the finish left by the steel wool looks perfectly OK and this is a working plane not an exhibition piece. The very fine knurling on the adjusting knob was worn with use so I restored it with my newly restored dividing head and a slitting saw on my ML7 lathe. Exactly how I did that and the tooling I had to make to accomplish it is a long and somewhat complicated story best told with the story of the dividing head restoration.

I don’t claim this to be an “as new” restoration. It isn’t. It’s a restoration to good working condition. Appearance wise, it looks like you’d expect a well used but properly cared for tool to look. All things considered it has turned out pretty well and I have a nice working plane. As I’ve already said restoring them if is time consuming if you have to do it all by hand, but not at all difficult so I recommend it to anyone who needs a good plane. These old Stanley Bailey planes and the copies made by Record are better than the most expensive modern ones and well worth restoring.