>Got my first plane yesterday, hefty little block plane, Record/stanley clone of indian manufacture from hartville. I can see now that I'll have to build a new bench, or modify my current bench to be more amenable to hand tools. I fiddled with it a little, and eventually was making nice (for a first timer) little thin curly shavings. Nothing to write home about, i'm sure, and this was with the 'as is' sharpening right out of the box. As is, I can see I Need more iron, and will be picking over the flea markets and so forth regularly in the future.
I also picked up a bunch of hand scrapers, which I still need to put a burr on, but they will have to wait for another afternoon. Will be buying a mill file and burnisher.
>Oh I'm going to get more, trust me. Dare I ask which one next? In the meantime it will have to settle for living alongside my spokeshave and spoon plane. I was 'happy' that it had a bit of sharpening at all, as I don't have the wherewithall to sharpen it, yet...
>Track down a copy of each of two books: "Planecraft" (available from Woodcraft, woodcraft.com, for about $10 new) and "The Handplane Book" by Garrett Hack (more expensive, but your friendly local library may well have a copy; available from many sources online if you buy). These two complement each other to give you a good idea of the sorts of planes you'll want to buy.
Also, haunt this forum and read the posts.
I concur with Bugbear's (Paul Womack's) comment about sharpening. Learning how to sharpen and when you've achieved sharp is probably at least 40% of using a plane well.
>Bill, will have to pick those up. In the meantime, I'm trying to stay off of Ebay and away from the plane bidding wars til I know more of what I want and/or need.
I know one thing, I'm staying far far away from those itty bitty ones like that one that sold on ebay for $855!
Gee, and here I was thinking I should go build a new router table like the one in 'Router Magic' hmmmm ;) (great book by the way!)
>Ebay's a sketchy little world. Sometimes you can get great deals... other times it's rambunctious, and people are outbidding each other like crazy, just to win.
I'd recommend you find a decent tool auction and show up first thing in the morning, walk around and gawk at all the tailgating crowd. Look at their prices, and focus on old pre-war (pre-1940s) planes. There are some really good specimens to be found, and for general smoothers, it's hard to beat those. I'f you're looking for any otehr information on tuning, look for the charlesworth books at a store. One of them has a fairly extensive article in it on tuning old bailey style planes, and I can say from experience, that all thigns being equal, a little time and effort can get those old beauties working wonders. I have an old 4C sweetheart that I picked up from a friend for $40 I think. Oh...
Sweetheart... nickname given to old stanley planes with blades stamped with a heart shaped logo with SW inside... very good vintage of planes. They were of a quality that closely approaches the veritas stuff today, I think. Not quite there, but damned close. The castings were solid, and the machining performed was very well done, so that the frog fit snugly in the body, adn slid back and forth like it was on a rail... a very impressive series of planes, and possibly the best blade steel that Stanley ever used. Certainly far superior to the sutff they use now.
Anyway, I picked up that 4 for around $40. I spent another $25 on a new blade from Lie-Nielsen, and tuned up the plane, and the blade. I can't really tell the difference between that plane and my Lie-Nielsen. The LN performs a little differently becuase it's high angle, but both planes perform excellently. But the LN was ~$300 more.
I also won a #3 sweetheart on ebay for $20, plus S/h, and a very old low-knob 4 1/2 for ~65. It normally should have gone for ~100, but ebay was falling off for dealers at the beginning of the summer, and I got lucky. And like I said, ebay can be inflated, compared to the crowds at the auctions.
In the past week, I've picked up a #4 clone (new, in great shape, with nice freshly Tormek'd iron that passes the shaving test) a #7, also freshly tuned, for $35 each, along with a set of turning chisels, Disston-Porter (see turning forum for details), and I even got my little block-plane clone tuned up as well. I also have a type 17 #5 on its way. am I 'done for' or what?
Thanks for the great link, what a resource that is! bookmarked and will be studying for all I'm worth. Now I have to go make a Till for my planes, as well as make a new neander bench. Oh well, I'll just have to suffer for awhile with my old one, though I'm going to have to modify it, add a vise and some dog holes to it. That's ok, winter is coming and now that summer with the kids is about done, I'll have more shop time to play with.
>see my other post on this thread tonight. just picked up a New #4 clone, and a vintage #7, each for about $35, along with some turning chisels. Great new friend set me up, and even sharpened everything on his Tormek while i watched tonight. I'll be sure and check out the used tool scene this fall, we have a semi-permanent flea market nearby which I'll go raid this fall too. Thanks for the tips!
>I seem to remember seeing something about an indian made #4... If it's groz, be wary... those things are hard to get properly tuned.
I think of it this way. Vintage stanleys were, at the time of their manufacture, roughly the cost of 2 weeks pay for a journeyman. That's one of the reasons they feel as solid as they do, and why they perform as well as they do. They were made well, and made to last.
Since then, most new planes now cost roughly the same as one week's lunch for a journeyman, and they're made to be disposable. The steel is inferior. You'll find a lot of hollow spots in the new castings that you didn't find in the old ones. The old frogs used to be flat, and locked in solid. New ones have a bunch of hollows in them, and they have a degree or two of lateral movement before you bolt them down.
The same old stanley planes that were built to last, 80-100 years ago, are largely still around. With minimal attention, most of them will outperform any indian-made plane you can find, easily. With the amount of attention they deserve, and with a new blade, they'll give Lie-Nielsen planes a run for thier money. It's something to think about.
I used to work at a certain woodworking store here in Cambridge. Groz planes are the only thing I've ever sold that made me feel like less of a person for selling them.
>I think they have solved the loneliness issue in my shop. Just received my #5, so now I have a block plane, a #4, a #5 and a #7. add to them my spokeshave, hand scrapers (still need to put a burr on those tho) and they have quite the nice little colony growing in my corner of the shop.
all of the planes arrived in less than one month, sheesh!
>Ned is a kid in the candy store. what are you going to get next? I just picked up a #4 on the charity auction board last night. feal really bad to as no one else bid on it. Went dirt cheap. now I am going to have to put somthing els up to make up for getting it so cheap. What planes are every one needing that I might be able to put over there to help out? Can you beleave that a guy with ~100 planes dosen't own a #4 untill now?
>~ that little symbol ~ means more or less I have no idea how many there are and will not let the wife in the shop to count. she keeps thinking I need to do an inventory but I can't bring myself to doing that. I don't collect I trap dust.
