Hi all
I’m interested if there any old time mechanical fitters out there who have flattened bearing slides etc using a scraper and whether this is a better method once learnt than flattening the bottom of a plane by lapping it on wet and dry. It seems to offer better speed, and possibly a better finish.
I’ve had a go at scraping a plane flat myself, it was pretty successful, I think much quicker than lapping. However it’s quite easy to take too much off, so some advice on technique would be great.
Anyone else got some thoughts on this?
Brian (Aberdeenshire)
Replies
Here ya go...Paul Womack (aka BugBear, or simply BB) has a page on scraping soles of planes.
http://www.geocities.com/plybench/flatten.html
Take care, Mike
The reason people scrape surfaces are because they can't move them to a lapping plate, they're just too big, or the damage is localized.
The way they flattened smaller movable surfaces in Little House on the Prairie days was to use three different surfaces with abrasive slurry. (rock tumbling abrasives on ebay or a craft store.) Use water. Oil is a pain. Just hit them good with a hair dryer when you're finished and spray the whole thing down with WD-40.
Lap 1 against 2; 2 against 3; then 3 against 1 over and over. Each defect or high point is negated by the other surface and like this you can get each surface flat, straight, and true to millionths of an inchs. This is how they make the surfaces that they use as "references."
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