Stanley 60 1/2 block plane

[NickM]

I bought one of these on eBay a while back.

Unfortunately someone has filed the throat. It's now enormous (the photo below shows it at it's narrowest!). A bad buy, lesson learnt.

Anyway, I had cast it aside but rediscovered it and thought it might be worth posting on here to see if anyone had a spare body lying around which I could buy off them to get this in proper working order. Please let me know if you do!

 

[Bod]

Have you tried using it?
It looks as if the back of the mouth has been altered.

Bod

 

[NickM]

Bod,

No, I haven't tried it. I should do that and will give it a go.

Taking the blade out and comparing it with an online picture, it looks as though the front part of the frog has been removed (I think there should be a "lip" just to the rear of the throat which the blade sits on). I wonder if someone filed that away to make it even more low angle?

 

[AndyT]

Here's mine. It's a fairly early model I think, about a century old.

There's no 'lip' just a flat ramp.

Mouth opening, measured without the blade, is 4mm max, 1.5mm min.

 

[JohnPW]

Maybe the rear of the mouth got chipped and someone filed it straight across. Although the cutting edge to the front of the mouth gap wouldn't change unless the bedding angle changed as well. It just means there's more unsupported blade at the edge.

I can't tell from the photo if the bed (bit with numbers) has been ground down, if it has then that would actually increased the blade angle.

 

[NickM]

John, you're right; I got it the wrong way around - the "work" that has been done would of course increase the angle.

This picture shows the lip, or shorter ramp, that I referred to and which seems to have disappeared on mine.

 

[AndyT]

Well, Stanley does it again. I was trying to show how it should look but seem to have found another way they avoided 0.00001 cents worth of milling work on the later models!

 

[NickM]

Well, Stanley does it again. I was trying to show how it should look but seem to have found another way they avoided 0.00001 cents worth of milling work on the later models!

That was my reaction too when I saw yours!

 

[JohnPW]

The later version of the 60 1/2 (with lateral adjuster) seems to have a bigger bed than that narrow strip but my particular example has the bed ground wonky, off square, and needs the blade to sharpen on a skew.