Paul Womack writes:

>> The usual recommendation with new wooden planes was to remove the
>> irons, set the wedge lightly, plug the mouth with putty, fill the
>> cavity with linseed oil and wait for about a week until the oil has
>> been absorbed. Job's done.
>
> Yes; it is this treatment that I'm addressing. It appears from Spons
> that this was NOT "usual" in 1883, or at least that an alternative
> existed.
>
> And by 1928 Woodworker said that soaking was wrong - so wrong that
> manufacturers would not warrent a tool so treated
>
>
> So the question becomes; "in what period was a full linseed
> soaking usual?"

To answer the last question, I don't recall ever seeing a whole plane
submerged in linseed oil and my earliest recollection of seeing the
mouth puttied up and the throat filled with oil is from about 60 years
ago, the plane being one newly bought by my uncle and left sitting on a
shelf above his father's (my grandfather's)workbench with a stern
injunction to me and my brother not to touch it.

Thereafter I became further acquainted with the practice from
conversations with tradesmen and, in particular, from a piece
recommending it in one of the weekly articles on carpentry and cabinet-
making which appeared in our daily newspaper in the early fifties. I was
a little bit awed to see in print a write-up of the same process which
an uncle of mine had undertaken a few years previously.

It is not thought that the tradesmen of my acquaintance in the late
forties and early fifties ever had the advantage of reading Spons or the
1928 "Woodworker". They read about the politics of the day and the
"Guide to Form" and were quick to criticize the weekly article on
carpentry if they believed it to be in error. A classmate of mine who
left school at 14 and became apprenticed to a carpenter showed me one of
his Technical College books which consisted solely of reprints of all of
the newspaper articles. I doubt if many copies of this tome survive as
it was printed on newsprint and stapled between light cardboard covers
in those days of austerity.

A warranty for a tool? No tools were warranted here until the late
sixties or early seventies except Sidchrome spanners. If the plane split
apart on its first run down a board or the head flew off the hammer the
hardware store proprietor would insist that it was the customer's fault
and avoid drinking in the same pub as his customer for the following six
months. All we had was the Sale of Goods Act, all very fine in its own
way but, in reality, confined in its use to the more plutocratic members
of the commercial community who could afford to engage legal
representation concerning, say, the quality of a shipment of several
hundred tons of wheat to a flour-mill. No "consumer watch-dogs" then.

It is clear from the wooden planes that I have acquired that, although
some still show putty marks just inside the mouth, most were not give
any treatment preliminary to their being put to work and it is just as
clear from some of the metal planes I have bought that their new owners
did not even bother to stone the iron. With so little guidance ever
being on offer to the neophyte handy-man it is little wonder that he
resorted to power tools in a big way when they became plentiful and
comparatively cheap, even before the Chinese saturated the power-tools
market, and were the only things written about in the newly arrived,
generally available woodworking magazines.

The proof, for me, is in the pudding. Every newly acquired wooden plane
gets, at least, its dose of oil poured down its throat. Cracks
significantly larger than the hairline variety disappear within a few
days and the tendency on the outside grain of coffin smoothers to run
out at the midway bulge is subdued. Longer planes, such as jointers, try
planes and jacks, which show signs of having had a bit of merciless
treatment with a hammer at either end, are further treated by having
their ends dunked in linseed oil for a couple of days and are then
permitted to drip out for a day or so, closing up most of the more
fearsome cracks developed by their early mistreatment. The obdurate
cracks in the top are simply puttied up with very moist linseed oil
putty with a bit of turps added to hasten drying. When the plane looks
and feels dry enough, and this seems to depend on the ambient humidity,
I then attend to flattening it sole and, if needs be, patching the
mouth. The patch material is oiled, a bit of mineral turps being mixed
with the oil to foster drying, and left to dry for a few days before it
is cut and fitted but this does not appear to affect the glue job
adversely. I hesitated to treat my European planes having lignum vitae
or suchlike soles in this way for fear that the sole might detach or the
different woods would expand at different rates. Eventually, I
experimented with one of these planes which was something of a wreck and
found that everything proceeded happily enough and, gradually, I
successfully oiled all of them and flattened their soles.

It is probably something to do with the harsh, dry seasons which we
experience here but some old wooden planes manage to digest their throat
full of oil in less than a day. However, I leave things at that and do
not bother re-priming them.

A treated plane certainly whips down the workpiece with much less
friction resistance than its desiccated cousin.

Regards from Brisbane,

John Manners

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