Myths About Hand Planes.

You have to spend $400 each for a good hand plane.

If you are thinking about buying a new bench plane,  spending hundreds of dollars per plane is about your only choice. Apart from the worthless hunks of metal that are made in India and China, that can be found for less than $50.00, the premium models from Lee Valley, Stanley and the like are all that you have to choose from. They are fine tools, but none of them are worth the money asked.

The alternative is to buy a used plane. There are hundreds listed online by eBay sellers, the websites of antique and vintage tool dealers, and more from local flea markets, estate, storage and yard sales. Virtually all of them can be had for a tenth of the price or less of the new planes. And they are every bit as good at doing the job as the premium planes.

True, many old planes need to be reconditioned before they can be put back to work. They might have been stored or neglected in a garage for decades. Even the best of them can have rust spots, nicks, dings or the ubiquitous broken tote. Some will be crusted with rust and pitted. Japanning might be gone. But, unless the base casting is cracked or broken or the frog is missing the lateral adjustment lever and its top, all those planes can be cleaned up and used. Some of them can be shined up until they look new. If you can buy a used plane for a few dollars and return it to a working condition by expending a few dollars and a few hours, why would you spend hundreds of dollars for an equivalent new plane? Other than simply to say that you can afford to waste money, that is?

The only used planes worth buying were made by Stanley.

Stanley was the largest and most enduring maker of iron bench planes. From before the American Civil War until circa 1970, Stanley made millions of planes, most of them based upon the designs and refinements created by Leonard Bailey. The Bailey pattern bench plane became the de facto standard. When Stanley's patents expired, many foundries, large and small, copied the Bailey planes. Some of them were poorly machined or made with inferior materials, but a great number of them were as good as the originals. Sometimes, with some simple variations, the copies were better than the Stanley planes they imitated.

Over the years, Stanley eliminated most of its competitors, either by buying them out or by out-marketing and out-producing them, flooding the market with Stanley planes. Stanley made several grades of planes, and they could sell at any price point and win the battle for market share at any level, simply with the Stanley name.

Sargent and Millers Falls were the two "big" names that lasted the longest as rivals of Stanley. Both companies had sizable shares of the market, although neither was able to challenge Stanley's dominance.  One place where they could fight on an equal footing with the giant was in the secondary or house brand market. There were dozens of hardware companies, ranging in size from Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, and other national  chains, through regional companies such as E.C. Simmons, down to loosely affiliated collectives of stores, all of whom had their own brands of tools, planes among them. Because of their lower prices, Sargent and Millers Falls could offer top-of-the-line planes to those companies at a price that Stanley could not match for its best tools. Thus, at any given date, Sargent or Millers Falls might be making the high-end Craftsman brand plane for Sears. Other times it might be Stanley, using the slightly lower quality designs that Stanley sold under its own "hobbyist" or "home carpenter" brands such as Handyman or Victor. The Bailey fleet of planes, of course, remained its strength. The Baileys were the everyday tools of craftsmen, carpenters and joiners, not only in the United States but around the world.

Like Stanley, Sargent made different grades of planes. The Very Best Made, VBM line was their equivalent of the Bailey. It differed little from the Stanley planes in quality of material or machining. The only functional difference was lack of  the fine adjustment screw of the Baileys. The lateral adjustment lever was folded, sheet steel, rather than the two-piece version used by Stanley, a minor variation. Sargent also catered to the occasional handyman, selling a model called Hercules.

Millers Falls was a rather late entrant into the plane market. Their copies of the Bailey pattern differed from the Stanley aesthetically or cosmetically. Red frogs and a bent-tab lateral adjustment lever were usual visible differences. After a while, Millers Falls added a unique hinged cap iron, that they claimed reduced slippage of the cutting iron and chipbreaker assembly. While interesting, like most improvements to the Bailey model, there was little evidence that the new lever cap  accomplished anything more than could be achieved by proper adjustment of the original plane. Which leads to the next myth.

The Bedrock (or Bed Rock) design was superior to the Bailey.

In the 1890s, Stanley, after listening to its users, decided that "chatter" was a problem that needed to be addressed by its plane designers. Chatter is the vibration of the cutting iron as it moves across and cuts into the surface of the wood.  It shows up as ripples or ridges in the planed surface. It can be felt and heard during the planing, It is the result of the resistance of the wood to the motion of cutting edge. On other words, it is created by the laws of physics. You cannot escape physics.

Every successful design of Nature or of human invention loses something in order to gain a particular advantage. Bailey had designed a plane with an adjustable frog and more closed mouth, to allow for finer shavings. The more closed mouth had required a thinner cutting iron. The thinner iron increased the chatter, especially at slow planing speeds, as on small work pieces, the pieces on which a smoothing plane would most likely be used. Increasing the iron thickness would require opening the mouth, which would decrease the effectiveness to some degree of a smoothing plane.

The Bed Rock design was based on the theory that the thickness of the iron could effectively be increased without actually making the iron itself thicker, but by making the iron and the frog more integral, more of a unit. In theory, by increasing the contact area between the frog and base casting and between the iron and the frog, the tendency to chatter would be reduced, even with a thin iron, thereby preserving the closed mouth. Thus, the best of both worlds would be achieved. In theory.

The problem is that there is no evidence that in practice there is any appreciable difference in the reduction of chatter. Chatter can be reduced in the stander Bailey design by several adjustments, either in the plane on in the way that the plane is used. Skewing the plane to the direction of planing will measurably reduce chatter, not to mention rear out. Using a heavier plane will also reduce chatter, as the increased mass will tend to keep the plane moving over the wood. Increasing the speed of the plane will also decrease chatter.  Merely making lighter cuts will solve he problem, too. In the end, the effect of the change in plane design is negligible, at least in comparison to every other variable.

Stanley itself made the case for the Bed Rock's superiority weaker by it's modifications to the Bailey. The single best innovation of the early Bed Rocks was the introduction of the FIne Adjustment Screw to the rear of the frog. While the fine adjustment was nice, the mere presence of the screw was more useful. It allowed the disassembly of the plane for cleaning, and the reassembly without loss of the exact frog position. Thus, a plane that had been adjusted to the workman's preference could be returned to that precise setting without fuss. When Stanley came to improve the Bailey, the Fine Frog Adjustment screw as added. But, did Stanley also make changes to the frog to make the seating of the irons and the frog more integral? No. In fact, over time, Stanley reduced the amount of surface area of the frog that was in contact with the irons, finally settling on the "indented" frog surface in the Type 16. And the mating of the frog to the base casting was in like manner made less integral. If the theory behind the so-called superior design of the Bed Rock was sound, why did Stanley take the opposite approach in the improvements to the Bailey? The Bed Rock was a clever design, and the second version was even more clever, allowing the movement of the frog without removal of the irons, but it did not make the planed surface any smoother. It improved convenience, but nothing else.

Everything must be made or adjusted within tolerances of thousandths of an inch.

This is one of the more demonstrably ridiculous ideas about planes. Oh, sure, if you are building a house, the finicky planers will allow, you don't need to have perfection in a plane. You can do well enough with good enough. But not if you are building fine furniture. Oh, no. Then everything must be perfect, or as nearly perfect as science and technology can produce. That is nonsense. For thousands of years, when measuring was crude and tools were made only as fine as the crudity of the times allowed, people produced fine furniture. Even when machined tools became the norm, nobody demanded perfection. Now, however, you will read solemn exhortations to the user to take the machinist square and the micrometer to the plane to get it a thousandth of an inch better, or to set the mouth of the smoothing plane finer than the width of a human hair. Rubbish. Planes are flat enough and square enough as found, barring some violent accident. Even the pitted sole is of no concern, as long as there are no burrs to mar the wood. Just enough sanding to remove a jagged edge or sharp protrusion is all that is needed. If you want to waste time doing all the unnecessary work to satisfy the hyper-censorious high priests of planing, go right ahead. But it is still a waste of time and effort. The end result on the wood will not be better or noticeable. Wood, after all, will not stay in that planed condition for long.