So, one day a year or two ago my wife and I stopped at a consignment shop somewhere in Iowa. It was then that I found a table full of old planes, and picked this old rusty plane up.

It is a 22″ long Miller Falls 22c, an older plane that is suitable for leveling very large/wide boards, such as tabletops, benchtops, or the large surfaces of other furniture.

It was very rusty as you can see from the pictures below.

So I created a quick jig out of clamps to hold it to my workbench so I could clean it up with a brass wire wheel. The brass is softer than steel, but harder than the rust, so it cleans rusty old tools very efficiently. Below are the pictures of the jig, and the cleaning in progress.

As you can see, it cleaned up pretty well. I still haven’t sharpened the blade or refinished the handles, but it is completely usable as is now. I protected the surface with some Johnson paste wax so it wouldn’t re-rust again. It’s a very nice heavy old plane with many years of life left in it still. It would have been a shame if someone had just thrown it away thinking that it wasn’t worth saving.