Restoring rusted hand tools

With a bit of love, they can soon earn their keep during your next project. Here are some tips and tricks for restoring old hand tools. This is not meant as a comprehensive tool restoration guide, but more as a means of encouraging you to give tool restoration a try. A broken wooden handle is easier to deal with than you might imagine. If hardware affixes a wood handle to the tool — in the case of a hand saw — remove the hardware.

Knock out the remainder of the handle using a punch. New handles can be purchased at most major tool and hardware stores. For deep seated rust, begin by removing as much rust as possible with a wire brush and then soak in white vinegar. If the tools still have handles, do your best to keep the wood from getting wet.

If the handle is worse for the wear, remove it. When the majority of rust is gone, remove it from the vinegar, dry it, and coat it with a thin layer of mineral oil to prevent flash rust during the cleaning process.

Next, run the metal through a wire wheel bench grinder and then belt sander to remove the deeper pits and smooth the tool. We can carry on sanding and hope to manually remove the pitting which is likely to take hours or we can give in and buy a new blade.

Purchasing a blade is certainly the easier move, but we want to see it through, so we choose to sand on. Using and grit sandpaper, we sand out the pitting in about three hours with occasional refreshment breaks. As long as you can clear about a half-inch from the cutting edge, the rest is relatively inconsequential.

On to honing. Big smiles all around when we find that the extensive sanding we did earlier to treat the pitting has taken care of the flattening as well, saving us from going right back to sanding. We do the permanent marker routine anyway, just to make sure. While some practiced woodworkers may be able to sharpen blades to a chosen angle by eye, there's no shame in using a honing guide to set the angle and hold the blade square.

After a few passes over a coarse grit, we find we'd removed rust from only about one-quarter of the bevel, leaving a lot of corrosion still to be removed. This is going to take some time. There are multiple ways to sharpen blades, and no specific progression of grits that's "correct" for honing, other than the general principle of moving to progressively finer grits to get a good finish.

At times, whatever grits are available in the shop are what we use. With the blade still in the guide, we start honing the primary bevel with a grit diamond stone and progress through to grit water stones. Our blade edge is now satisfactorily sharp and we're good to go. Before reassembling the plane, we apply metal polish to all the large metal parts — mainly for appearance. Then, just as we did at the beginning of the project, we lay out all the parts and inspect them, this time admiring the look and feel of the clean tool components we've restored.

At last, we put the plane back together, applying machine lubricating oil to any moving parts to keep them from rusting and seizing. After taking some moments to admire our rejuvenated plane, we take it for a spin in the shop. After making a few minor depth and lateral adjustments to get the feel just right, we contentedly make shavings, simply for the pleasure of it.

Some people say that old tools are fascinating because they carry stories with them along their journey through time. From their original makers to the craftspeople whose hands have used them to make practical and beautiful things, these old tools evoke memories and echoes of the past. Made in the first half of the previous century, our refurbished plane continues its journey into the future, restored and fit for use by another generation of woodworkers. How rewarding is that?

Yes, take me to Lee Valley Canada Cancel. Restoring an old hand plane Making something old new again can be extremely satisfying — especially if you're lucky enough to find an old hand plane with "good bones" at a garage sale, a flea market or an auction.

Tip To avoid using substantial amounts of rust remover to submerge the bulky plane body in a bath, you can simply wrap the part in a clean cloth that is thoroughly soaked with the chemical.

Also, follow all instructions on the bottle. I use Citrus Strip because it is safer than others. To remove the varnish in the small leaf indentations, I use a tooth pick. This will help remove all trace of the chemical stripper, which is pretty nasty stuff. Depending on how much varnish is still present, sand down the handle. Then continue to higher grits such as up to Old saw handles are generally made of fruit wood and look quite nice.

Use boiled linseed oil for a natural finish. Or you can use Tru Oil or Danish Oil for a darker colored finish. Just wipe the finish on evenly using Shop Towels and let dry for about 24 hours. Make sure you either burn the towels or lay them out to dry. As many finishes can spontaneously combust if they are left crumpled up in a pile. To reassemble the saw, just reverse the steps you took to disassemble it. Take care when inserting the saw nuts. These are square, and have to fit in the hole properly.

Also, do not over-torque the saw nuts. Just get them snug. If they loosen up with use, just re-tighten them. You can now sharpen the saw if you intend to put it to use. Sharpening the saw is quite easy, as you can make your own saw chocks and just use a regular bench top vise. Look, I like using chemicals to remove rust.

It can be a great time saver and even Eco-friendly. Sometimes it is even necessary when the parts are intricate with small cavities, etc. But you should never use vinegar or acid on a hand saw. It will cause an ugly finish, and may cause pitting or dissolve the saw plate entirely. Steel is just a mixture of iron and carbon. And while it should not be possible for vinegar or citric acid to damage the steel chemically, it often happens. Why is this?