Why I Restored a 90-year-old Hand Plane | Sargent 711

All right, today I am super excited. One of the awesome people that I had the pleasure of meeting at WorkbenchCon was Drew Fisher from Fisher Shop. I'm sure you're familiar with this channel. If not, please go check him out. Yeah, just one of the most awesome, genuine dudes I think I've ever met. We were walking around Highland Woodworking in Atlanta and I was just talking about how I wanted to have a nicer hand plane. And these are both the ones that you can buy from Home Depot for like 10-15 bucks. They've gotten the job done, but they're definitely not fun to use. And while we were at Highland Woodworking, I had the chance to use like a Lee Valley hand plane on some pine. And yeah, you can imagine what my next thought was was, holy snot, I need to get me some of these. And so, especially now because I want to keep growing my skills as a woodworker and I feel like that's the next logical step is to go backwards in technology and start to appreciate some of the more traditional methods of woodworking. Walking around the store, I feel Drew tap me on the shoulder and he says, would you be interested in restoring a hand plane? And I kind of thought, no, not really. Like, I don't want to mess with that. I'd rather just buy a new one. And he says, oh, well, I have a really old hand plane. If you're interested in redoing it, then it's yours. And my jaw kind of hit the floor and I felt bad for saying no, I didn't want to restore one. But yeah, sure enough, I got home. Drew asked for my address and he sent it to me. So let's unbox it. This is professional. You don't get this with just your average person. These are like legit packaging bubbles. So this is a Sergeant 7-11 plane. I'm not a huge hand tool nerd or don't really have any sort of expertise when it comes to hand planes. But from what little that I could find online about these is that the 7-11 model is rare, although this is not the rarest of them. There's another one that has like a short little stubby front knob, kind of like a block plane. That one's apparently the rarest. Also, there's a 7-11C that has like a channeled bottom on the bottom of the plane or on the sole of the plane, I guess. This is not that model either. But man, this is a piece of history. And it's certainly not what I was expecting from Drew. I just can't get over how generous that guy is. So please, if you don't know about him, please go check him out. His videos are pretty funny. Just awesome craftsmanship as well. So I don't know. Now I'm a little more intimidated to restore this plane now that I just spent the last 10 or 15 minutes looking up things about it. There's not a whole lot of rust. I mean, they look old. It doesn't look too pitted or rusty in any one area. So hopefully I don't have to let anything soak for too long. From what I was reading, made in the USA, 1920s, 1930s I think is when they stopped making them. So this thing is almost 100 years old. They said mahogany was used for the handles and knobs. I haven't decided if I'm going to refinish the mahogany. There's a decent sized crack in the handle here. I don't know if I'll be able to salvage it. We'll see once I strip the finish off. So I guess the first thing I'll do is I'll just take a couple... well I've already got pictures and video of it so I can see how it goes back together. To be honest with you, I'm pretty intimidated. Okay, there's a little cotter pin in there. I don't really want to take that out because I don't know where I would find another cotter pin that small. I guess we'll see if we can clean it up without getting rid of that. Hey, Jenny Davis. It's Drew Fisher over at Fisher Shop. Hey, just wanted to give you some quick history. In the early 1920s, my grandfather started building an enormous barn down on his farm. Now it took him about three or four years to complete, but once he had done so, he actually ended up building the biggest barn in the county of Ottawa, Ohio. So it's pretty cool. And what's even cooler is that there are no metal fasteners in the barn. Not in the entire thing. There's no nails, there's no screws. The entire thing is held together by mortise and tenon joinery and wooden pegs that hold it in. It's really, really remarkable. So growing up as a kid, I had so much fun playing in that barn with all my cousins, and that's actually me on the tire swing right there. Plus, we had all kinds of family reunions over the years. This barn has really become part of a prominent piece of history in my life as well. So fast forward a whole bunch. In my grandfather's final chapter, he began to distribute all of his woodworking tools to us kids so that we would remember him and be able to carry on his legacy. So I just wanted to share this with you because that hand plane that I gave you, it's not my grandfather's. I just found that on Craigslist. So while this is soaking, I guess I'll talk a little bit about, like, the whole concept of refurbishing used tools. Should you do it if you're trying to run a business? I always preface spending money with the idea of, if you're trying to run a business, don't worry about how much money is going out of your business. Spend all of your time, energy, and focus on bringing money into the business. Don't really be too concerned with how much money you're spending on tools or labor or anything like that. Be aware of it, but don't let that influence your decisions. For example, if there's a crappy joiner on Craigslist that somebody's had for 20 years and it doesn't work and it's a benchtop joiner, but it's only 50 bucks, I wouldn't waste my time with it. It's probably going to need more help than it's going to give you value. I'd much rather go buy the full, like, brand new version and know that it's going to work correctly than trying to hassle with it and find spare parts and, oh, this is broken. And I didn't even know that that was not normal. Like, a lot of times you'll buy a used tool and you won't even know that something on it is broken until eventually, like five to 10 years later, you buy a new version and you realize, oh, you mean that was not how it's supposed to be on the other one? And then you've wasted all that energy on a used tool that's not working properly. Now, the flip side of that is when you find something that's just an absolutely amazing steal. Something that I've seen on YouTube before, I can't for the life of me remember who it is. And I even tried to look it up. I couldn't find it. There's someone made a video on YouTube I watched a couple of years ago where they said that they have a Craigslist filter set up to send them an email anytime somebody posts a listing with the word grandfather in it or granddad. And they said that they found a ton of used woodworking tools and lumber and all sorts of things because unfortunately someone's granddad passes away and then they post on Craigslist, hey, granddad's shop found this. Granddad had a whole bunch of wood. Granddad had all these tools. I don't know what to do with them. Like, you'd be amazed at how much you could find by just setting up a little filter like that on Craigslist and then it sends you an email. That way you're not wasting two or three hours poring over Craigslist ads every week, but you still get the highlights of, you know, some of the stuff that you want. If you did a filter search like that for tools or for like planer or jointer or any of the bigger tools that you might want to buy in the future, that would be a really easy passive way to get notified about those things on Craigslist without wasting two to five hours a week looking over Craigslist ads. This is a brand new saw, a brand new tool that I didn't really need very bad at the time. I have wanted one for years. I made do with a short bed, six inch wide, three knife jointer for a long time and I probably still could have because I haven't used this much yet. I watch Craigslist all the time and have never gotten anything from it until now. Now in this particular case, there was a guy here about 90 miles away who was getting ready to retire and he decided he wanted to do woodworking in his retirement. So he ordered this saw off Amazon and the next day he decided I'd rather have the 12 inch version. So he called him up and tried to cancel the order. Well it was already on a truck on the way to him and they told him that it would cost him something like 25 percent restocking fee and he would have to pay the full return freight for it too. So he already had this thing listed on Craigslist before it even showed up at his house in a crate and he decided rather than trying just losing that money giving it back, he was going to lose that money selling it to somebody else and that somebody else happened to be me. I saw that listing and went I don't need it right now but that's too good of a deal to pass up. So new in the crate eight inch helical blade joiner, Powermatic of all things, and it cost me a thousand dollars less than new for a brand new one. And because I've been sitting on some money waiting for something like this I could just pull the trigger and get it. So I guess that's my best advice to you when that one rare occasion comes up where something like this happens, you can jump on it. I think that's about all I have to say. Let me pitch it over to Bruce. So my perspective of restoring old used tools versus buying new ones, for me it's a really case-by-case basis. So that miter saw you see right back there I bought new but I always try to find a deal. It had a stand that comes with it and I didn't need the stand because I was going to build my own. So what I did was I sold the stand and put that toward the cost of the saw and knocked off almost $200 for it. So in that case there was no need to really go get a used saw because I got used saw prices. But I'm not above buying a used saw. I recently got a used circular saw and I went with this family of saw because I already have drills that have a bunch of batteries for it. So that's another one of my considerations is that worked well for me because I didn't have to go out and buy a bunch of batteries or that kind of thing. Some other things like my jointer, I bought that new because a lot of the used ones that you would restore while they're great, I wanted the technology of having the helical head with the spiral cutter head on it. So I went with a newer jointer so that I could go ahead and get that spiral cutter head. It's just a technology that I liked that yes you can swap it out in an older machine but I didn't want to have to do that. Then with tools like my drum sander right here, I consider it a pretty technical tool. It's not just a few mechanical things so there's more that can go wrong with it. It has a very dialed in and specific way that the drum works and that kind of thing. So I actually purchased this one new. It has greatly improved my workflow in a lot of things. I make a lot of cutting boards and so this thing has been a huge help. So one of the final things that I take into consideration is the price spread between a new tool and a used tool. So if you can get an excellent used tool for a hundred bucks but you can buy the new one for 130 or 150. Depending on the tool, I might just spring for the new one. It's going to have a little bit of a warranty and it also just depends on your budget. But when you can get up into some of the larger tools that you can get a lot more tool for the money, that's when I'm more likely to consider a used tool. All right, it was super cool that those guys could help us out with this video. Please go check out all their channels. The three of those guys together do a podcast called the We Built a Thing Podcast. They talk about all sorts of topics from just random woodworking maker stuff to, you know, trying to raise their families and deal with all the chaos that that brings. So it's a really cool podcast if you're just looking for something to listen to. It's easy to consume while you're driving and stuff. Definitely take a look at them. Link will be in the description and also please take a look at their channels. They didn't have to help us out. Really good friends that we made at WorkbenchCon. So yeah, I hope you got something out of each one of their perspectives. It's just really interesting to hear how everybody thinks a little bit differently about it but everybody pretty much has the same sort of ideas around buying new tools versus used tools. But in a business environment, I think it's extra important that you don't focus on all of the numbers and everything. Focus on bringing jobs in. So if you know that a tool is going to help you build a bigger job that's going to cost more money, that's going to give you a better profit margin, I say spring for it. But I really do take to heart a lot of the things that our friends just told you about. So yeah, there's definitely some really good tips in there for anybody to use. All right, so it's been a couple days since you last saw whatever clips you just saw about me taking this thing apart and letting it soak. Everything cleaned up really nicely. It still needs some polishing and some fine work. And I started thinking, I don't want this plane to look brand new. If you've ever restored a car or something like that, there's a difference between restoring it and completely overhauling it. And what I want to do with this plane is not to completely overhaul it and make it look brand new off the shelf. I just want to give it life again. I want to get it back to working order and hopefully it still works pretty well because, I mean, honestly, the only plane I have is that Home Depot one. So I'm not really going to notice a huge difference in quality. If I made it brand new right off the shelf, I don't think I'd notice the difference. And plus, I kind of like seeing the history behind a piece. So I don't necessarily want it to be completely redone. I just want it to be given new life. I got a new set of sharpening stones. I didn't get super expensive ones because I've never used sharpening stones before. There's a link to this, an affiliate link in the description if you want to get the exact same ones I did. If that's what you're interested in, this is what I got. It goes, the stones go from 400 to 1,000, 3,000, and 8,000. They're really soft, way softer than I was anticipating. So they're going to deteriorate faster. Like I said, they weren't that expensive, relatively speaking. I'm just going to try to keep them flat, keep sharpening, and do all the right things. My only sharpening experience comes from watching Rob Cosman videos. So all I'm going to do is try to recreate the things that work for him. I figure he's been doing this long enough at a high enough level that if I can come close to his methods and his procedures, I'll probably be okay. So again, I'm not super interested in like the best way to sharpen. I just want things to get a lot sharper than I'm used to them being. So there's that. Link in the description if you want to help us out. All right, now it's time for the main event, the iron. I will zoom in again, this old Tony style. I will show you. Focus. Focus. There we go. I hope the light's not too blinding, but I've got a couple different bevels here. I hope you can see that. There's a couple of different bevels here. There's what looks like the secondary bevel that was ground in, not evenly at all. It looks like there's about half of what's left of the primary bevel. So I'm going to try to give this thing a new primary bevel. I don't have a bench grinder or anything, so I'm just going to take it really slow on this 400 grit, see if I can't get that primary bevel to register, and then just hopefully to just remove enough material to knock this secondary bevel back quite a bit so that I can establish a new secondary bevel that's consistent all the way across. Because at least from how Rob Cosman does his plane irons, this looks to be the opposite pattern of what you would expect on the corners of a plane iron. He holds each corner for a couple of extra seconds. This seems to have only wallered out in the middle, while the edges are a little bit thinner, I've got a project where I'm going to need to use it, and I'm just kind of running out of time. So I'm going to put it back together. I'm not going to finish the handles. I may do that at a later date. I just need to get this thing back together because I need to actually start using it. So it's sharp. It's clean. I think it's refreshed, especially with the plane iron. That was what I was really worried about. So now that I've got a new set of bevels on it and it's sharpened nicely, I'm going to put it back together, test it out, and then we'll get started on the next project. All right, shooting for one take on this one. Don't want that phone to wreck my thigh line. All right, take two. I think that's about all I have to say. Take it away, other people. Let me pitch it over to Bruce. Your turn, Drew. That ought to cover about everything, right? All right, well, I'm done being awkward.