gloat alert...
Paul M. in San Diego
>I just received the set of 3 new Veritas spokeshaves from Lee Valley for my birthday. These are wonderful shaves. I was out in the shop within an hour of receipt honing and trying them out on various scraps lying around the shop.
These come with plastic shims to close up the mouth if desired. I don't know why I would ever want to do that. The mouths are already very tight. Much more so than any older shaves I've seen around.
A while back, I got to use the Boggs concave shave that Veritas used to market. I loved that shave and wanted one badly. I inquired with Rob whether he still had any of these around, but there were no older spares lying around. He sent me to Brian Boggs, but he was already in the works with LN with his own shaves there and didn't have any of his old ones available.
That was over a year ago. Boggs has his extremely expensive shaves over at LN, and now Rob has filled the price gap with his own wonderful shaves. I think the older Boggs Veritas shave had a tighter concave radius, but not by much. I've used the Clifton radiused shave, and really hated that one. The radius was much too large, and the blade rattled horribly in use. The mouth was also huge!
And to top off this gloat with yet another.... I created a "wish list" set of html links so that my wife could look at items I'm interested in and surprise me with her choice. This puts a little more fun into the process than the former "what do you want" query. She wound up also getting me the Veritas Beader and a Henry Taylor carving chisel I had my eye on. What a keeper!