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As the plane blade is in good shape, and I don’t prefer to leave the bevel with a hollow grind (although not important…merely personal preference), I do the grinding stage for my 25-degree bevels on the belt sander chucked in the Workmate.
I use 60, 80, 100 and 150 grits lubed with WD-40 and lots of water, checking my bevel angle and edge with protractor and square as I go. Cool the blade frequently in water… turn that blade edge 600-degree blue and it has lost its temper and all the blue must be ground away.
Final honing of 25-degree bevel and 30-degree secondary bevel will come later. Next I polish bearing surfaces on frog and plane body using whatever is needed…this Type 16 plane (1933-1941) has decent machined surfaces but many newer models and later Record planes do not.
Here I just use 0000 steel wool, but files and the Dremel Tool with sanding and polishing disks are handy for the rougher ones. The bearing surfaces of frog-body and frog-blade should be dead flat and polished. Use Prussian Blue layout paste to check for uniform bearing, and take down the high spots for a perfectly-flat fit. Also insure the plane’s mouth is square and not chipped… do some light filing if needed… and that the frog mounts dead square with it. As an aside, never buy an old plane without looking at a good photo of the mouth and sole. Pass them by if they are chipped or worn… there are plenty of Type 8-16 pre-war common Stanley models out there dirt-cheap and there’s no reason to buy a bad one. I look for rosewood totes and knobs and corrugated soles when I buy them, but that’s just personal preference… these have all the desirable later adjustment features.
I also check the sole on the ground jointer table using a dash of Prussian Blue layout fluid, the subject of much needless suffering concerning planes. On a short smoother, I like the soles as flat as possible and have honed them on lubed abrasive paper cemented to plate glass. But our plane today is a longer jack used for relatively coarser work. Jacks, Trys and Jointers are too long to flatten to the degree possible with a smoother, and frankly, I don’t understand why folks even try. All I’m looking for on this one is that the sole bearing surfaces at the front of the sole, the area in front of the mouth, and the surface at the rear of the plane are reasonably in the same plane…and they are, so no flattening is required. Much more important to the plane’s function are no wear at the mouth, frog adjustment and chipbreaker fit. And re-machining the plane sides dead square in anything other than a badly-warped shoulder, rabbet or coachmaker’s plane is, in my opinion, a needless endeavor.
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