Fixing and Fettling a Wooden Plow / Plough Plane - Part 1

Well, the trip to Death Valley was great, though it was HOT!!  Mid to high 90's most days, about 15° warmer than usual for this time of year.

Notice the temperature at bottom of this gauge in the rental car

On this trip, we also visited Valley of Fire (about an hour east of Vegas), Ash Meadows (just outside Death Valley NP on the south east side) and Red Rocks Canyon (just west of Las Vegas).  All were fantastic.

View of the Badwater area of Death Valley from Dante's View

Badwater is 282 feet below sea level.  Check out the sign about 3/4 the way up the mountain in the following picture.

The arrow points to the sign that reads "SEA LEVEL"

Enough of that, time to get back to woodworking stuff.

A couple years ago I bought an Ohio Tool #96 wooden screw arm plow plane off Craigslist for $45.

At one time owned by H. L. Allen

The plane was in rough condition.  I worked on it at the time and thought I had it in useful condition.  A really great article by Zach Dillinger guided me through some of this, though I did not heed all his advise.

Right side

Left side

Since then it has been on a shelf, mainly because it came with only a single 1/2" iron and I have never needed to plow a 1/2" groove.  I recently picked up a few more irons in sizes that are more useful for the work I do and that gave me the impetus to look into this plane again.

This post will show what I did to fix the plane a couple years ago.  Warning - some parts of this post are not for the squeamish.  Succeeding posts will show the further work I need to do to get it working properly (hopefully).

First is the fence assembly.  The screw arms are attached to the fence with screws from below.

The fence and screw arm assembly

Screws go through bottom of fence and into the screw arm posts

One of the screw arms was broken from its post.

Broken post at bottom of pic

Close-up picture

Fortunately this was a fairly clean break and I was able to glue it.  Polyurethane glue was used - this glue expands and fills gaps as it cures.

The parts clamped up with the glue expanding in the joint

The previous owner had ignored this and let the screw that holds the screw arm post to the fence hold it together.  In fact, he used an extra long screw that went all the way to the top of the screw arm, making a small hole in the top of the post.

Arrow points to hole in top of screw arm post

I shortened the screw a little by cutting it down a few threads and filing a taper on the end.

The second and much larger problem I'm sure most readers noticed already.  On both wooden screws, several threads were damaged or missing where the screw begins from the post.  (See pics of the broken screw arm above.)  I didn't notice this when I bought the plane because the wooden nuts were covering that area and I was not diligent enough to check.  This got me into a long sidebar of trying to make wooden screws to replace this - not a very successful set of experiments.

Front screw

Rear screw

This is the area of threads that really needs to be in decent condition for the grooves that I might do.  For grooves that are 1/4" to 1/2" from the edge of a board, the nut in the above pics would be right in that area.

Some options were

• Make a big fat auxilliary fence that attaches to face of existing fence, bypassing the damaged and missing threads - didn't seem optimal
• Rebuild the threads on the existing screws - no idea how this might be done
• Make new screw arm assemblies - that's the screw-making rabbit hole I mentioned above
• Ditch the screw arms and make a wedge arm - didn't really want to do this
• Cut out the damaged thread area and dowel the screw arm back together

Well, the last option was the winner and it came out remarkably well.  I cut out about 1 3/8" of damaged area from each screw.

Cut out the damaged section and drilled holes for a dowel in mating parts

I did my best to drill the holes in the right location and straight.  In retrospect, I can think of ways to do this more accurately, but it came out pretty good.

Dowel in place, later glued and clamped

They're 1 3/8" shorter, but no one will ever know

Another problem had to do with the depth adjuster lock mechanism.  The lock mechanism is a thumb screw that threads directly into the wooden plane body and the threads were mostly dust.

Depth adjustment assembly

Mortise for the top part of the adjuster - locking thumb screw seen at bottom of  photo

The stripped hole for the locking screw

I drilled the hole out, glued in some wood plugs, re-drilled an appropriately sized hole, and used the thumb screw to thread its way into the hole.

It's not pretty, but works perfectly

Thumb screw in place

There are some other problems with this plane that I'll address in a future post.