My personal experience with a low angle block plane began in 1958. I own three different ones, produced by Stanley. One in particular is a favorite. I’ll tell you about mine, if you first tell me about yours.
This old Windansea guy I know (haha) recently advised me to pick up a Stanley 118, so I did! I softened the leading edge of the plane to avoid gouging foam, and she works great! The thing was new in box and very sharp, so I haven’t sharpened it yet. Smooth ribbons come out on passes.
I have a no-name slightly less low angle block plane as well, which has an adjustment to widen the gap for the blade. That function is pretty handy; I have wondered about some of the other true low angle planes w that function.
Stanley as well, the older maroon paint No.60 1/2. Bought the first one around 1968, when I started working after school, I think it was under $20. And now I prowl yard sales for old ones.I clean them up, lube 'em properly, hit 'em with a coat of Butcher’s wax to keep the iron as it should be while it’s waiting.
The newer black ones seem heavier, awkward, though that may be more in my head than in reality. Have an English Record I’m fond of as well, though by now the old Stanley is what my hand fits.
doc…
The three Stanley low angle planes that I own, are models #118, #60 1/2, and #65. My all time favorite is the model #118, but the model #60 1/2 is a VERY close second! Frequently I will use all three on the same board, at different stages. I also use several different wood bodied Japanese planes. I love those too. Del Cannon turned me on to the Japanese planes, when he mentored me when I shaped for Velzy in 1960. Just to say I had done it, I’ve shaped both a foam surfboard, and a balsa surfboard, from scratch, with just a Japanese plane. Not an exercise for the feint of heart. I think I was 19 or 20 yrs old when I did that. Thank God, for Skil 100’s !
Ah, planes. I do enjoy them. Though some (the wooden Scandinavian jack planes for instance) I just never quite got on with.
There was - and is, still have it - a great big wood bodied joiner plane, the weight of the thing did the work.Joined the edges of a stair landing with it, full for real 2" x 12" cherry.Nothing else would do.
Rabbet planes, pocket and bench sizes, lovely for cleaning up and fine-tuning mortises and tenons, molding ( or moulding) planes, home made or store bought, cast metal or polished wood, scrapers and more and more.
Now, I never knew what a No. 65 was, nor a No. 118, so I looked around a little and came across this:Stanley Planes by the Numbers
Most no longer made, the patterns long gone and the foundries cold. I find myself covetous, wanting to handle them and work with them, see how they handle, see how they cut. See if they’re more efficient than setting up a power tool.
Was offered a retirement gig, curating a tool museum locally part time. I think I will really have to do it, though it’s like letting a junkie have his own poppy field.
doc…
I have two. I have a Stanley #118 but my personal favorite is a Craftsman #3732. My understanding is that the Craftsman was actually made by Stanley. The #3732 has a much nicer blade in it which holds a crazy sharp edge and it has a micro-depth adjustment knob and also the front shoe is adjustable for the gap it creates for the blade and it fits nicer in the hand than the Stanley #118. It is an excellent tool.
A number of years ago I was having a problem with the rear neighbor and in an effort to not make noise with the power planer I shaped an entire board with the #3732. While it was certainly more effort the cuts were extremely accurate and the finished shape was spot on and perhaps even better than the results I get with a power planer.
Both planes are older than I am and were my father’s before they were mine. They are mid-60s or older vintage.
All my planes, but beside the block planes, no real low angle planes. Top shelve shows a part of my japanese kanna, to the right there are Stanley Clones from India, from No. 2 to 7, no No. 6, at the bench next to the jack plane ( No.5), there are my router planes. A combination 45 and the 78 are real Stanleys.
The indian planes need some setting and grinding the irons, but offer a lot of value then.
Love them all…
As I stated above, the #118 is a favorite, for sentimental reasons. If I had only one of the three planes discussed, as the daily working plane, I’d settle on the Stanley #60 1/2. The blade angle on the #60 1/2, is 13 1/2 degrees. Angle on the #118 is 12 degrees. Angle on the #65 is also 12 degrees. Doc was correct about the vertues of the #60 1/2. It is truely a sweety. Doc deserves a THANK YOU, from everyone, for posting the STANLEY PLANES BY THE NUMBERS site. What a great resource. Thanks, Doc.
Hi Bill,
First, thanks for the kind words. Kind, but undeserved, all I did was stumble across that site. The real credit goes to the people who put it together, and I suspect it’s the distillation of the accumulated knowledge over the lifetime of a very knowledgable collector/restorer.
Considering the transient nature of the Interweb , I’m delighted to see the guy has a couple of books out here: so that this won’t evaporate with changes in a server or whatever. Talk about a coffee table book-
And now that I have whetted your appetite: Vintage Machinery . Great resource for the identification, care and feeding of a crazy number and variety of tools. Great collection of manuals and more.
hope that’s of use
doc…
And Bill wrote
Just to say I had done it, I’ve shaped both a foam surfboard, and a balsa surfboard, from scratch, with just a Japanese plane. Not an exercise for the feint of heart. I think I was 19 or 20 yrs old when I did that.
Which leads me to make an immodest and maybe unpopular suggestion for those starting out.
I’ve seen a lot of questions asked ti the tune of " where can I get a starting power plane?" or “What sort of planer should I start with?”
Likewise what great big power sanders for the newbie and similar.
And my suggestion is this: for somebody starting out or for somebody just making a board or two a year, you don’t want power You want hand tools and hand sanding. Admittedly, hand tools sharpened to a fare-thee-well, sandpaper in good shape, but you want to be doing things with your own paws.
Why?
To begin with, skill. A beginner going from doing the odd ding repair to making a board, let’s say. With sharp tools the job will take about the same time, though maybe more effort. But errors will be smaller and you can more easily recover from them… A power tool, well, mistakes get ugly.
Next, efficiency… Doing something by hand is more effort, true. Which inclines you towards effficiency, not wasting that effort, thinking about what you’re doing every time you push that plane.
And then there’s ability. You use a hand tool, you’re not thinking about tripping over the cord or the cloud of dust you’re making. The tool is simply in your hands, you’re thinking about the sharp edge, where it is and what it’s doing. Immediately. You think about the contours and how heavy a cut or how hard you’re sanding.
And there’s the eventual path to mastering the process. Every power tool is the descendant of a hand tool. Every one. If you understand the process with the hand tool you’re all the closer to understanding what it will be like with a power tool.
Should you ever go there. Really good hand tools are addictive. The way they fit the hand, the sounds of the blade cutting. How the sound alone can tell you if it needs a touch of the sharpening stone. Properly kept, properly used, properly sharp, they are surprisingly quick and efficient. If you’re not chewing out a dozen boards a day, sanding a room full of hotcoats, you may want to ask yourself if you want to go the power tool route.
Or just enjoy the process.
hope that’s of use
doc…
As is typical, I will disagree.
Stanley products made in the past 40 years are junk. Rough castings, wimpy blades and sloppy adjustments… Their stuff made way back when ( Bill’s Planes) is much better and worth looking for but most people know that and price accordingly.
I have worked almost exclusively in wood for 40 years and the two planes I reach for the most are the low angle block plane and low angle jack plane from Lee Valley/Veritas. I’ve been using both for over 30 years and am still on the original blades.
Yes they cost a bit more, but they are superior to anything Stanley ever made. In every way.
Heavier castings, better adjustments, tighter clearances and thicker blades of better steel.
Use them right out of the box.
For me, the extra money is worth the quality.
My 2¢
My name is Surfifty and I have a block plane problem. Although I haven’t shaped a board in a long time I’m addicted to block planes. My favorites are :
Stanley 60 1/2 with. Hock blade, Stanley 61. Very low angle, Stanley knuckle
Lie-Nielsen 9 1/2, 102
Kuntz small block and squirrel tail
Please don’t get me started on spoke shaves.
YOU SURE GOT THAT RIGHT ! I’m afraid you are beyond redemption! (but I did hit the like button) Be strong.
(Chuckling) I dunno if I’d call that a problem More like a real good start. They made that wide a variety for good reasons and those reasons still exist… And then there’s the way they fit the hand…and some don’t…and the sound they make when they are sharp and cutting right, like an indrawn breath.
Good tools, that are the product of a long evolution, there’s just something about them… Planes, saws, chisels, a really good mallet is a delight. A broadaxe, a bow, a rifle that lines up just so…
Me…don’t get me going on adzes.
doc… or double-barreled shotguns…
You should have seen the collection before I down-sized. I kept some doubles and sold the triples.
My great grandfather was a boat builder on a tiny island between Finland and Sweden. About 20 years back my father went there and his uncle gave him one of the block planes that belonged to my great grandfather and possibly my great great gf. The plane is made out of a hardwood and the steel has Sweedish writing on it and a date from the 1880s. The next time I stop at my parent’s house I’ll grab a picture.
I got this jack plane as a gift from McDing when we first met, was going to restore it but decided to leave as-is. Maybe 1950’s or earlier (like us). There’s an ancient piece of wood stuck in the blade.
Hi Doc, I’m delighted to hear you say this, because I’ve been thinking of tackling my first board that exact same way. So nope, 'not an immodest or unpopular suggestion, at least as far as I’m concerned.
Yep, 'agree with all of the above; when doing my ding repairs the thought went through my mind about just how risky it would be if I was trying to do things with a power tool; they take stuff off much faster and are much harder to control the speed of, so if a mistake was made, it’d be a lot bigger and harder to fix than the mistakes I was making using just hand tools. And when doing a whole board that way as a first time? No thanks; slow and easy baby steps for me please.
A little while ago I dug out one of my grandad’s old hand planes to trim the bottom of a door that was jamming whenever the humidity levels swelled the wood up. All I needed to take off was 1mm.
Holy cow. Loved it. Smooth, precise, able to adjust it to a really fine cut so that it’d take several passes to take the wood down in total to that 1mm amount (i.e. made it much easier to take off the amount I wanted while taking off as little as possible beyond that).
Only downside was when I got to a knot in the wood it’d jam there. Could have been the blade was a bit dull or just the edge had corroded over time (wouldn’t be surprised if it hadn’t been used since before I was born). Didn’t have the tools with me at the time to sharpen it. A bit of extra oomph could bust you through the knot, but doing that made me wonder if it was damaging the edge of the blade a bit. After doing a bit of experimenting I found a better way was to keep pressure in the direction you were going and wiggling the plane left a bit and then right a bit to slowly work your way through the knot.
Any tips on how I could better be doing this?
A while back I needed to widen and deepen a hole in a post to take the sliding bolt in a gate that (for the same reasons; humidity swelling the wood) was moving around a bit and the bolt was now too high to hit the hole. Tried using the electric drill but didn’t have a drillbit with a diameter big enough for the width I needed, and using what I had trying to take stuff off the side of the hole, the point of the drillbit kept wanting to wander back into the center of the hole, plus I wasn’t happy with the side-pressure I was having to apply to the drillbit to try and keep it on course; wondered if it was bending it and maybe risking it snapping. Couldn’t have been good for it in any regard. And even if I managed to get it to work it wasn’t long enough to get the hole down to the depth I was after.
So I dug out one of my grandad’s old narrow chisels and sharpened it up.
Again. Holy cow. Worked a dream. Easy as pie to widen the hole to what I wanted and in the shape I wanted, and (even more importantly in this case), the depth I wanted. Smooth. Precise. Accurate as. Loved it. Even sharpening it was fun.
So I’m really starting to come around to appreciating the value of hand tools. In the right context (which for the average person who doesn’t need the to be punching out the volume of work per time spent that a tradesman does), over all the different types of jobs you tackle, a hand tool is often a better tool for the job compared to a power tool.
So it’s a bit annoying watching the ad’s on TV by the tool companies for the last few years where they’re pushing a wall full of power tools (all powered by a single battery). Why? Just because it’s a power tool doesn’t make it necessarily better; case in point the “leaf-blower”. Just give me a big rake. Just as fast, way easier to control the leaves you’re raking. Don’t get me going on them. Proof positive that Einstein was right when he said “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”.
Think I might go dig out the my grandad’s old Bit and Brace drill, give it some attention, and have a play with that to see how it compares with the electric drill; much easier to take it slow and see what the drillbit is doing with something like that.
And I’m definitely going to go for a dive into one of my grandad’s old tool boxes that I saw a few planers in; didn’t pay too much attention to them at the time, but I think I saw what might have been a jointer plane in there, probably a jack plane or two, and (fingers crossed) maybe a block plane or two?
What’s more, if there is such a thing as an afterlife, I reckon my grandad’s would be stoked to see me picking up their old tools and putting them to good use, because, like I said earlier, I suspect at least some of them hadn’t been used since before I was born.
Really glad to hear my thoughts of tackling my first board with just basic hand tools are shared by at least one other person who has a lot more experience in it than me.
So cheers Doc!
But the question I really wanted to ask is this, (and it goes back to Bill’s original post that he kicked this thread off with); does it HAVE to be a low-angle Block Plane?
Can it be a Jack Plane?
Or are the higher angle’s of the blade on a Jack Plane too much to be shaping a surfboard blank with, without causing gouging or tearing of the foam? Or the fact that it’s edge bevel is down instead of up like on a block plane?
Because (as far as I know right now) all I’ve got to play with are Jack Planes.
And does the foam you’re working with make much of a difference? I.e. PU is very different to the beads you get in EPS foam.
And how about the density of that foam? Is a finer foam bead easier or harder to cut with a hand plane blade?
The plan for my first board is for it to be in EPS. Deck and bottom rockers and outline already hot-wire cut by someone else.
Originally the plan was to do the rough shaping with large grit sandpaper (e.g. 60 or 80) over a wooden block, then fine tuned to finish with finer grits.
But after using the Jack Plane to trim the bottom of that door, it really got me wondering if I could do the rough shaping with that instead of the 60 grit on a block?
Tips anyone?
I’ve got some scraps of EPS foam in medium to semi-heavy density to test this idea with and get a feel for how this compares with sandpaper on a block; just have to give the blade of my Jack Plane a sharpen first, and I’ve got a little research to do on that to make sure I do the job right the first time around and don’t mess the blade/edge up.
But if that doesn’t work, PU’s still an option, or won’t it work with either of them (mind you, I’m 99% sure it’ll work at least with PU; I think I remember seeing a picture in a book on shaping from the 70’s with a half-shaped surfboard blank with Jack Plane sitting on it; the inference being the Jack Plane was being used to shape it)?
Cheers all!