John and all,
It is my understanding that the linseed oil treatment was something they
did in Great Britain. For some reason it was not as common in America.
If you look at old American planes they are typically lighter in color
because of this.
Mike
John Manners wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
--
Michael E. Siemsen
Green Lake Clock Co.
http://www.greenlakeclock.com/
Mike Siemsen's School of Woodworking
http://schoolofwood.com/
651-257-9166
Have you practiced today?
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