A Little Tension

I have an old Stanley 110 block plane which used to belong to my father. I can remember him buying it in the early 1970s. With house moves and things over the years parts of it got lost. Importantly the blade and tension wheel went missing. The blade was fairly easy to replace but the the tension wheel was another matter.

I have tried to order the part from Stanley but never had any luck. In fact ordering spare parts for tools can be a cause of tension as they often do not follow up on orders. In the interim I managed to make a tension wheel from a large flat washer and a quarter twenty bolt secured with a couple of square nuts. The old adage of temporary becoming permanent comes into focus. This has in fact served me well for quite a number of years. However I always wanted to replace the temporary repair with a real one.

As is often the case you get a bee in your bonnet, so I decided to see if I could order a tension wheel online. It came as quite a shock that I would have to pay over $50 Australian dollars for the part from the US. Luckily I am a member of the Australian woodworking forums which has an active buy and sell section. There is a guy who regularly sells s lot of planes so I sent him a direct message asking where I might buy the part. He very generously offered to send me the part for postage only.

The Stanley No 110 and the tension wheel are now happily working together. In the end my quest to secure a replacement tension wheel had an answer in Australia.