Refurbished wooden plough plane

This is a plough plane I picked up at a flea market a couple of weeks ago. It was in pretty good shape, just a bit rusty and dirty. And it had a lacquer on it that I didn’t like, and some parts had dried up glue stuck on them. Other than that, it looked good to me. It was made by Nooitgedagt, a former toolmaker in Ijlst, Friesland. I bought the plane in Makkinga, which is about 50km from Ijlst. Nooitgedagt went out of business in 1990.  I find a lot of Nooitgedagt planes on my hunts for tools. Some are from their early days, the late nineteenth century. These are premium tools, but often have been forgotten and left neglected in grandpa’s shed. The newer tools are not great. Not bad either, just plain average if you ask me.  This plough plane looked late nineteenth century to me. I still haven’t found out how to exactly date these. I know they used several brands, stamps and stickers on their tools, and this plough has the oldest brand that I know stamped in it. In the 1920’s or so they started using another one, and stickers.

I cleaned up the plane with a fine file, a diamond stone, sanding paper (some pretty fine stuff, just to take off the lacquer from the wood), a rust eraser and rust dissolver (I think this stuff is mostly phosphoric acid). I started off by taking off any metal parts that could be taken off. The movable metal fence and thumbscrews had to stay in, as did the metal part behind the plane iron (left in the photo below), which runs through the block. What I could take off – the iron, the metal part on the right and four screws – I put in some rust dissolver. This makes derusting easier and I can be less aggressive, leaving more of the original material intact.  You can see the difference between with and without this treatment in the photo at the bottom of this page. The parts that had to stay on were sanded and filed clean an made shiny with my sharpening stones.

I scraped of the glue with a knife (popped right off), gently sanded the wood and rubbed some of my hard wax on it. Then I rubbed that out with some 0000 steel wool. Sharpened the iron, oiled the metal thumbscrews and done! It works like a charm, but above all, I think it’s beautiful.