Eclipse Hand Plane??

Re: Eclipse Hand Plane??  *LINK*

paul womack

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http://eclipse.brclients.co.uk/History/

Eclipse Hand Plane - long and digressive

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA, gettin' soggy

>I have an Eclipse (actually assembled from two corpses, one with a broken toe and one with a frog on which the screw for the lever cap was blown out) that is a "4-1/4"* size - that is, about the length of a 4, but with a 1-3/4 inch iron. Some comments, which may be completely irrelevant for your model:

1. The frog seating on mine is less than stellar - the "machining ledge" up where the screws fasten it down is the only place the frog actually rests, and it's designed so that the frog rests on a painted surface. I can get a 0.008" feeler gauge under the base, and probably a thicker one if I could figure out how to fit a feeler gauge into the space. Someone either here or on Badger Pond described filling the gap with epoxy to reduce otherwise irreducible chatter (my memory says "someone" is either Cooper Suter or Stephen Thomas, but then my memory is an inveterate liar and gets by on charm alone). I would use a filled epoxy, like JB Weld, if I were going to do this; would fill the entire space after cleaning things up; would install the frog forward and then push it back into good bedding; and would realize I was making a fixed-frog, probably carpentry, plane, not something I'd be using for planing birdseye maple.

2. The iron adjusting lever is of the pressed-sheet-steel persuasion, also known as a piece of dogmeat.

3. I have an impression that they're not famous for their irons, either.

All that said, I originally bought the blown-out-hole frog because the lever cap was a nice heavy one, as I needed a good cap for the Stanley 5-1/4 I found, capless and ironless, at a garage sale for $2; and the handle, though not physically pretty, is well-shaped. I keep dithering between making it into a carpentry plane, saving my Wards Master No. 4 for good work; and donating it to Greenwood. Instead, since it's not a high priority, it sits patiently - well, I assume it's patient; quietly, anyhow.

*For the benefit of folks new to hand tools, this is a reference to Stanley's bench plane numbering system. 1,2,3,4, etc. refer to the mainline bench planes, which grow progressively longer as the number goes up. Nos. 1-3 have progressively wider irons, finishing out at 1-3/4" in the No. 3; Nos. 4-5 use 2" wide irons; Nos. 6-7 use 2-3/8" irons (except in some early sizes); and the majestic No. 8 uses a 2-5/8" iron. No. X-1/2, which you find, as far as I know, only in the No. 4 and 5 sizes, refers to a plane that is more or less the length of the main number, but uses 2-3/8" irons. Stanley, always eager to confound future plane collectors, also made a No. 5-1/4, which is roughly the length of the No. 5, but uses a 1-3/4" iron. How they resisted the temptation to make a 4-1/4, 3-1/4 using a No. 2 iron, etc., I will never know, so I'm not referring to a real plane size up there.