Re: Help me to understand....
Clay C in Miami
>Bill,
I had/have exactly the same thought ... I initially figured I could pick up a 40 pretty cheap (I mean, the number of folks who still square stock by hand, plus the collectors, shouldn't add up to a tenth of all those old 40s rusting quietly away in basements, right?)
But, it became apparent that a 40 was gonna be pricier than I expected, so my next thought was to find either a beater #3 or an old 'horn' type German/Scandinavian scrub, or convert any fairly narrow horn-type plane to a scrub. But again, either they were too pricey, or seemed too wide, or had awfully thin irons.
I could make my own (I've made a few Krenov-type planes, with amazing [to me] results), but it seems that a scrub needs some kind of handle, whether tote or horn. To use for long periods, and push hard, my more-or-less block-shaped homemade planes aren't gonna be very comfortable. I considered adding a tote to a homemade plane, but I've not tried that yet, and finally decided that, by the time I make the plane, make/find and install the handle, find/buy a reasonably thick and narrow iron and get the bevel shaped, I might be better off buying one.
And somehow, even to me, a LN scrub seems ... I dunno ... excessive. Like buying a fancy, precision-machined ivory-inlaid pry bar or some such. It's rough work with rank mouth, I felt like my LN money could be better spent elsewhere. I had ultimately decided to keep hunting for a reasonably-priced old horn-type scrub.
But, when I heard that LV was coming out with a new one, and knowing of their happy tendency to rethink and often improve some old designs, for fair $, that seemed all-around like a good solution. As Rob says these will be priced about the same as their shaves, that sounds like a winner for my needs.
Incidentally, I was in a shop last summer which had a dining-size table whose surface looked to be straight off a scrub. The short-radius tracks looked like they'd perhaps been burnished a bit, and then finished. I will tell you, no one who came into that shop (a very high-end tourist trade) could keep their hands off the thing. Wives calling their husbands over, everyone who walked in loved it, all without having any notion what it was - it was obvious that the appeal was primarily that it was very obviously hand-made. I had my own doubts about practicality (looked like stemmed wine glasses might be awfully unstable on it) but I couldn't argue with the popular appeal.
So, that's how I came to be eagerly anticipating the Veritas scrub - but I agree with you that at first blush it seems odd.
Clay
