Hartley Vane

Notes on hand tools and keeping old things working.

Most of what breaks around a house was built to be repaired. Somewhere in the last fifty years that stopped being obvious, and a lot of perfectly good furniture, tools and fittings now get replaced because nobody remembers the half hour it takes to put them right.

These pages are a slow record of that half hour. Mostly hand tools — planes, chisels, braces, the occasional stubborn hinge. Nothing here is restoration in the museum sense. The aim is a tool that works when you pick it up, not one that looks untouched behind glass.

On sharpening

Sharpening gets treated as a craft with secrets, and it mostly is not. Two flat surfaces meeting at a consistent angle will cut. Almost every difficulty people have comes from the back of the blade rather than the bevel — a back that was never flattened will never produce an edge, no matter how carefully the bevel is worked.

The other common trouble is chasing angles too precisely. A degree or two either side makes far less difference than finishing the job properly and stropping afterwards. Consistency beats accuracy here, which is a relief, because consistency can be practised.

On rust

Surface rust on a cast body is cosmetic and comes off with oil and time. Pitting is different: it has removed metal, and no amount of polishing puts that back. The judgement worth making early is whether the pitting sits anywhere that matters. On a plane sole it usually does not. On the bearing faces of a mechanism it usually does, and that is the point to stop and decide whether the thing is worth the work.