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.

Mitt Antoinette Romney.

"I don't care about the very poor/"

"Let them eat -- whatever it is the poor eat."

We have one third of a Grand Prize.

Great is the honor of possessing this most admirable and timekeeping wristwatch machine, which commemorates the Leader of the Turkmen, President of Turkmenistan and Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers, Suparmurat Niyazov, first president of Turkmenistan, 1990-2006.

Not Chairman Mao, but more rare, and just as tacky.

Awarded as one third of the Grand Prize in the Fiddler in the Subway copy editing challenge, which was held sometime during the last century, or so. (You can find it for sale somewhere of other, probably. It's a book, by the way.  By Gene Weingarten.)

Marlowe.

Having mentioned the 1969 movie Marlowe, starring James Garner as Raymond Chandler's knight-errant detective Philip Marlowe, I take this self-generated opportunity to praise it.

James Garner as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe is Sterling Silliphant's adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister. Silliphant was a screenwriter of the classical age of television in the 1950s. Working on through the '60s and 70s, he wrote hundreds of hours of excellent TV, including scripts for The Naked City and Route 66, the latter of which he created. While not of the same class as Paddy Chayefsy or Rod Serling, he won an Academy Award for the screenplay of In the Heat of the Night, starring Rod Steiger and Sydney Poitier as the Bull and Mr. Tibbs.

Sharon Farrell as Orfamay Quest.

Marlowe is remarkable for all the things that made Silliphant's writing so durable and satisfying: It had sinuous often serpentine plotting, a balance of sinewy action and vibrant dialogue, and the characters revealed themselves through their behavior, rather than exposition. Silliphant allowed his characters to remain enigmatic, always giving them more depth through suggestion and  artful reticence than through speeches. It is a fine example of the soft-boiled detective genre. There are plenty of killings, but the soft-boiled detective story is about the pure-hearted detective, who must ravel and sometimes tangle the often crimson-stained interactions of the central characters, serving and preserving his client, while finding the means to extricate himself still clean and with his self-esteem relatively intact in the end.

Gayle Hunnicutt as Mavis Wald.

The actors, most of whom are very familiar, are cast perfectly, and perform with perfect fidelity to their characters. A blonde Sharon Farrell, whose career was cruelly interrupted by a cardiac arrest and brain damage, is a sugar-coated poison pill as Orfamay Quest, Marlowe's initial client. The fact that she is both crazy mean and just plain money mad, but looks harmlessly tight-fisted is the fulcrum of the whole movie, and Farrell plays the woman with just the right intensity of nastiness and feigned simplicity. The patrician Gayle Hunnicutt is Mavis Wald, the woman with the profile of a Praxitelean Athena and a chilly manner to match, who stars in "the top-rated" television sitcom, and is, not coincidentally, being blackmailed. (Imagine Mary Tyler Moore and John Gotti.) Her constant companion and best friend, Dolores, is played by Rita Moreno. Oh, and she's a stripper, a fact that precipitates the movie's climax.

Rita Moreno as Dolores Gonzales.

Carroll O'Connor and Kenneth Tobey as Christie and Fred.

The movie features the first American appearance by Silliphant's friend and karate trainer, Bruce Lee as mob enforcer Winslow Wong. Lee has two brief scenes with Garner that are, at best, tangential to the plot, but both of which are memorable, and foreshadow his career and legend as a kung-fu star. There are some equally memorable moments with Carroll O'Connor and Kenneth Tobey as the police duo, French and Fred, who provide Marlowe with straightlines. Silent film veteran Jackie Coogan is a suitably seedy grifter, who complicates Marlowe's life by getting an icepick in the spine. And William Daniels manages to actually steal scenes from Garner as Crowell, Mavis Wald's fretful agent, whose peptic ulcers seem to be multiplying even as we watch. Lastly, there are two supporting character actors of note, H.M. Wynant, the type of an actor who can fill any role from guest villain to guest hero, here as Sonny Steelgrave, the Johnny Stompanato of the piece; and  Paul Stevens as Lagardie, a Dr. Feelgood of the stars and the mob. (Bonus points to the reader who recalls that the name Sonny Steelgrave is borrowed by Stephen J. Cannell for the character of the slightly insane mob boss in the '80s TV series Wiseguy.)

Bruce Lee as Winslow Wong, mob enforcer.

William Daniels as Crowell, the agent.

Cannell's name brings us to the other point of note: The movie is all but an early pilot for The Rockford Files. It almost certainly was the inspiration. Garner's Marlowe, both in manner and wisecracks, is the prototype of Jim Rockford. He's persistent, or stubborn as the situation warrants, rather than aggressive, as likely to match a punch with a witty jab as with a counterpunch; and even some of his best quips from the movie will make their way into the show.. He breakfasts on Oreo cookies. The major differences between Marlowe and Rockford can be attributed to inflation: Philip works for one hundred dollars a day plus expenses, while Jim gets two hundred, and Marlowe's drab office in the famous Bradbury Building is far more upscale than Rockford's Malibu trailer. Rita Moreno became a recurring guest star in the series and in the later Rockford movies, as the proverbial hooker with the heart of gold. Daniels, Wynant, Tobey and Stevens all had guest roles on Rockford.

Talk Like Gene Weingarten Day.

Everyone buy a helium balloon on October 2 to participate in what I hereby designate Talk Like Gene Weingarten Day.

The Un-American Woodshop.

That title is both inaccurate and unfair. There is something definitely American in the wholehearted embrace of whizbang technology in Scott Phillips' The American Woodshop. And there is nothing at all unpatriotic about the show or its host. They are both Red-White-and-Blue through and through. But, man, both the show and the host annoy me until the cows come home driving a tricked-out Caddy SUV.

Some of it is born of envy, I happily admit. The man's workshop probably cost three or four times more than my house to build. The woodworking machinery alone probably is worth more than my house right now. There is nothing un-American about envy, either. But what really turns me green is the waste.

I have a rum gut, so it doesn't take much to get me queasy. The way this guy runs through wood is truly American. He takes some beautiful salvaged wood, wood that is a century or more from the tree, and turns it into pure crap. And he just tosses away enough wood to make any other woodworker cry.

On one show he took a 6X6 walnut beam, saved from a demolished 19th Century barn -- (so the real dimensions were almost at the nominal),  and planed it down to four-by. Then what did he do? He chopped it into foot-long lengths, and shaved off the outer half-inch of each block to make the sides and ends for some walnut drawers! And threw away the rest. He couldn't make eight sides from one block? No, of course not. That would be both economical and sensible. That's pretty bad, isn't it? Don't get your bowel strangulated. There's worse. How did he make the drawers? Dovetails perhaps? Box joints? Nope. Super Glue.

Speaking of dovetails. The gauge of a workman's skill is his dovetails. That's one of the maxims of woodworking. They print it on T-shirts. So, it's practically a tenet. You know that Scott Phillips is about to sin against it with all his might whenever he recites it religiously. Craftsmen make dovetails with a saw and chisels. Some do it by eye, others do the layout with a bevel and square. I'm no master carpenter. My dovetails always have irregularities, and sometime even a gap that needs to be filled with a sliver of wood. But they are honest, hand-made, workmanlike dovetails. Scott Phillips does them with a thousand dollar jig and a power router. The only skill involved in making his dovetails is in locking down the wood in the jig.

Give me Roy Underhill any day. He might be a fundamentalist, but his work is authentic, in every sense.

The Postal Service and Me.

June 25, 2010.

Inside the mail box, atop the familiar glossy invitation from a local car dealer to "Scratch and Win," there is an unusual piece of paper. It is slightly off-white and printed with green lettering. It is a form. At the top are two drawings of mail boxes, such as you might see lining the streets of any suburban or rural road. One is forlorn and rather decrepit. The other is spruce and chipper. They might be pictures of the same box, one drawn in some happier time, when life seemed full of hope and promise, the other, after years of toil and weather, in it's old age, filled with despair and dark thoughts of death. The legend asks, "Which one looks like your mail box?"

The implication, of course, is clear.

The form is designed to register complaints about the state of one's mailbox, with two columns of check boxes, each box accompanied by a curt description of some possible potential grievance. "Your box is not an approved box." "The door needs attention." "Box must be located so carrier can serve it without leaving vehicle." "Your box is not waterproof." "Your box should be raised (blank) inches." CHECK.

The check mark is further annotated, in an impressive cursive script, at the bottom of the form. "20. Other faults.  'Box must be 42 " from road to bottom of box.'"

First thing to do, obviously is look at box. It's old. The house it serves was built in the 1960s, and is located in a rural subdivision in North Central Florida. Cattle and horses are still being raised nearby. The roads are kept paved by the homeowners association. There are five houses on a street about one half mile long. Two of the other houses are contemporaries of this one, while the other two are products of the early stages of the recent housing boom/bust. Beyond this house, the electric power line extends one more pole and then ends abruptly at vacant lots that run to the end of the street. It is, as I say, rural.

One of the things I noticed shortly after buying the house 15 and a half years ago was the number scratched into the dull aluminum of the mail box. It is a date, 1972.

So, for 38 years, the box has stood by the side of the road, faithfully discharging its Postmaster Approved duties, through hurricanes and hundred degree temperatures in the summer and freezing temperatures and gale-force winds in the winter. It has been there almost since the establishment of the U.S. Postal Service in 1970. Richard Nixon was president, running one of the most corrupt administrations in American history. Every month back then about 1,000 U.S. service men were being killed in Vietnam. Ah, good times.

Now, the box is an outlaw. OK, it's thirty-four inches from the road surface to the bottom of the box. So what? It's been there 38 years. Nobody has complained about it in the last 15 years. Why now?

July 1.

My weekly trip into town. 18 miles round trip. Everything I need to do for the week, that cannot be done at home -- grocery shopping, banking, prescription filling, gassing up the car, everything, has to be done that one day. It's that way every week. One day a week, for two hours. I decide to add something to the usual to-do list: Visit the Post Office and ask about The Notice.

The first clerk I speak to throws up her hands and says, laughing, "You aren't going to talk to me about that!" The two other clerks also laugh. She does take The Notice. After reading, she gives it her best shot, basically repeating what is on the page. She then tells me that the Postmaster is not here, but I can speak to the Supervisor, if I want. I want. She goes away into the back of the building and, in a minute of so, the Supervisor walks to the counter.

He reads The Notice. He explains, using pretty much the same wording as The Notice. I  inform him that the box has been there 38 years. "Why is it so important now to raise the box?" He explains that the Postmaster has been trying for three years to get boxes in the area up to Standard. He has sent out notices. The Supervisor has driven around and sent out notices. I object that I have received no such notice prior to The Notice. The Supervisor says that the previous notices were given to the Carriers. Perhaps, he suggests, the Carriers, for their own reasons, did not deliver them. This time the Postmaster has personally put The Notice in my box. I suggest that the fact that the box has worked just fine for THIRTY EIGHT YEARS indicates that there is no need to change it now. I further suggest  it is not exactly good public relations, when the Postal Service is running a 6.7 billion dollar annual deficit, to waster time and money antagonizing customers. The Supervisor demurs, but says that the Postmaster, his boss, makes the final decision. He, the Supervisor, cannot reverse the Postmaster. He gives me the telephone number and the name of the Postmaster. I should call that afternoon. I observe that it sounds unlikely that the Postmaster will change his mind. The Supervisor offers that, on occasion, the Postmaster has been known to reverse himself. I wish the Supervisor a Happy Independence Day.

That afternoon, I call the Post Office, hoping to speak to the Postmaster. "This line is busy," the voice of Ma Bell informs me. I try again later. "This line is busy," Ma Bell repeats. I give up.

July 7.

The Federal holiday is over. I am, like the country, a year older. Sheer coincidence, but I am feeling not happy. The Notice has been a magnet for my eyes and thoughts. I have been stewing. I decide that, failing to meet the Postmaster in person, and being unable to reach him by telephone, the Devil's instrument, I shall write a letter. I write a letter. It is brief. I enclose photographic evidence of the date on the box. I argue that the simple fact of long usage is sufficient to demonstrate that the box is serving its purpose adequately. I make the deficit point. I am courteous but firm. I mail the letter.

July 9.

Deadline day. Nothing.

July 10.

D-Day plus one. Nothing.

July 12-16.

Nothing. I begin to notice Nothing.

July 17.

I put a letter in the box. At the end of the day, it is still there. Perhaps I missed the Carrier. She sometimes arrives early.

July 19.

I put the letter in the box. Early. At 3:00 p.m. it is still there.

I call the Post Office. Surprisingly,  I get through. I ask for the Postmaster.

We go over the familiar ground again. By now, I am a bit annoyed. I point out that there are others, perhaps hundreds, of mailboxes on the route, many of them much lower than my own. The Postmaster suggests that the owners of those boxes will be noticing that they, too, are not receiving their mail. I suggest that this is highly irresponsible, as there are people who depend upon the U.S. Mail for their pensions, their medications, who pay their utility and mortgage bills through the postal service. Is the Postmaster willing to put the incomes, homes and even the lives of those people at risk? Apparently, so. It is not his fault. When I reach the end of my arguments, the Postmaster is unmoved. I play what I believe to be my trump card.

Why did he not reply to my letter of protest before discontinuing mail service?

"You didn't include your telephone number. I couldn't reach you."

I burst out laughing.

The Postmaster could not reach me without my phone number.

I had to apologize for my outburst, but I was still laughing when I hung up.

The Man had won again.