Just a note before I'm off  for a few days,

Be extremely careful with soapy water. Extremely careful! Every time you wet the
grain of the wood you cause a slight swelling which leads to a reduction in edge
definition.  Your maker's stamps won't be as sharp and the clean lines of the
plane will become less so.

Nowdays more woodies are destroyed by cleaning and 'restoring' than by any other
single factor.

Randy Roeder         Repaint houses, not old tools


"Jordan Wolfgang Dr." wrote:

> Gentle Galoots,
>
>  I want to thank you all for many good and valuable comments on the subject.
> Guess I switch from my one step method of cleaning/oiling/waxing to a more
> cautious process of
> - gentle cleaning
> - looking at the result and
> - applying some paste wax if needed
>
>  This leads to another question. Most people seem to clean their planes with
> mineral spirits. Because of the smell and the possible health hazards I
> wanted to avoid this and tried cleaning a plane with just some soapy water,
> with good results. Would this be also an accepted method or should I stay
> away with water from a woodie?
>
>  In order to preserve your valuable comments for posterity or maybe a fellow
> galoot with the same problem I compiled your messages into a webpage:
> http://www.holzwerken.de/plancln.phtml. I hope this is complete as I was
> temporarily switched off digest mode and had to get the missing messages
> from egroups.
>
> Wolfgang
> --
> 'Woodworking with hand tools (in German)': http://www.holzwerken.de
>
> --
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