#4 Plane And The Stay - Set Cap Iron

With the sole nicely flattened it’s time to tune up the other elements of the plane. First up is some rust removal from the chip breaker/cap iron. This #4 Record came with a Stay Set cap iron which was a nice surprise, more on that later.

As can be seen in the photo the chip breaker is in quite a bad way with heavy rust. It was the ideal chance to trial a product I purchased a while back for this very task. The aim of using this product was to save on a bit on time and elbow grease. It seemed to good to be true. All I needed to do was to remove any loose rust with a wire brush, then apply a coating of the rust remover approximately 2mm thick, working it into the rust with a paintbrush and let it do its thing for half and hour. As the rust was so heavy I did this for a 3 hour period.

The rust remover was nice to use. No strong smell and although gloves were worn when it did come into contact with the skin there was no unpleasant burning sensations! Having said that I was not initially impressed with the progress. In my mind I had assumed a foamy residue of rust lifting off, not so. I did keep applying and brushing on a little more every 30 minuets and after the 3 hours I was about to throw the rest of the rust remover away. Thankfully just before I did so I washed off the solution as per the instruction and I was amazed at how most of the rust just came away. OK so there is still a bit of rust but that chip breaker was in a really bad way.

To give it a final clean up I rubbed it down with some 240 grit and hey presto a presentable chip breaker.

As I mentioned this #4 had a Record “Stay Set” chip breaker. The chief advantage of the “Stay Set” is that it does not create the same bending forces on the blade that a regular chip breaker does. The photos below illustrate my point. The advantage of this is that a nice flat blade has a maximum contact area on the frog, therefore reducing or as Record claimed at the time eliminating chatter. Record dropped the Stay Set concept long ago, but the two piece chip breaker is still going strong thanks to Clifton Planes who fit the two piece chip breaker to all their premium bench planes.

Next up is a final tune up of the chip breaker and a blade sharpen.