Plane restoration #3 – Disassembly

Well, here we are all disassembled and ready to go. This is the plan of attack:

1. Put the plane body and frog  in a bath of white spirit to de-grease and loosen all the crud that has accumulated over the years.
2. Remove any rust and loose paint and mask up for a respray. Two or three coats of rust preventing paint and we should be good to go.
3. De rust and de-grease all of the steel components – screws, washers, iron, cap-iron etc.
4. Polish up the brass components – depth adjusting nut, handle nuts – as well as the lever-cap.
5. Strip the handles of the old paint, scrape and sand to bare wood if possible, and refinish.
6. Lap the mating edge of the cap iron, and sharpen and hone the iron.
7. Lubricate and reassemble.

It looks as though there is not a lot of rust to contend with. I think the problem areas are going to be the handles and the iron. The paint on the handles will take a lot of stripping and the iron is in pretty poor shape. We’ll see…