Sitting here, waiting for plumbers to come by and get the information to bid on a job...time to add to this thread with several topics.
Duplex rabbet planes:We've talked about these before, Jim about the Stanley No. 78 in reply #220 (
http://www.papawswrench.com/vboard/index.php?topic=9443.msg68501#msg68501), and John (of johnsironsanctuary) about the Sargent No. 79 in Craftsman clothing in reply #36 (
http://www.papawswrench.com/vboard/index.php?topic=9443.msg63056#msg63056). But I wanted to bring them up again to offer a couple of ideas.
Here's a picture of mine, a Stanley of England item identical to the U.S.-built plane:
Most of us who gather planes from the wild have noticed that planes often come dotted with white paint, for reasons unknown. Mine apparently belonged to a maintenance worker in a Barbie factory, since mine is dotted with pink paint, not much visible in the picture.
It appears that Stanley originated this design, with Stanley's production starting in 1885, before any of the other major manufacturers (Sargent: 1910; Millers Falls: 1929; Record of England: 1932). It was clearly a carpenter's plane, and equally clearly developed at a time when that carpenter would be carrying the toolbox to the jobsite on his/her shoulder; so it offered both standard and bullnose positions. I find it a much better plane than you would expect: with no chipbreaker and a fairly wide mouth, it should produce more tearout than it does. But it's an awkward bullnose plane, mainly because of its length; when I need to work a closed rabbet, I find a bullnose shoulder plane, about 4" long, far superior. And the bullnose position makes for awkward gripping when you use it without the fence, as is at times appropriate; I find my finger wedging down uncomfortably into the mouth.
John showed his Craftsman-badged, Sargent-made version of this plane (link above). It's a later version of the plane. Much of Sargent's production was very clearly oriented toward people on a budget. The Sargent No. 79 has no adjuster for the cutting iron; Stanley adopted an adjusting lever about the same time Sargent started making their version. The handle on the Sargent is built in a way that would have been much easier to cast than the hollow handle on the Stanley. But Sargent did two very nice things with the early No. 79:
First, it's an absolutely lovely, graceful thing. The swoopy curve was probably intended to strengthen the body, since the mouth is open on one side, but dang, it's sexy!
Incidentally, note the depth stop on the right; this is standard on these rabbet planes, which were designed to be used right handed. The depth stop will encounter the face of the stock being planed when the rabbet is at its correct depth. This location will be important to remember later on/lower down.
Second, they added a little horn to the front of the plane, to make gripping it when working without a fence easier. Some Sargent collectors call it the "rhino horn," for obvious reasons:
This picture also shows the absence of any adjustment mechanism besides your own fingers and skill.
Sargent held onto the lovely floral designs on their planes longer than Stanley, before eventually making less entrancing tools; I'm not sure when that change occurred.
Record produced a clone of Stanley's No. 78, in the No. 078, but they upped the ante in 1959, improving the Woden W78, which had featured a full-length fence with two rods (everyone else had a fence on the front half of the plane, held in place with one rod), and adding adjustment with a knurled nut:
Incidentally, I'm missing the depth stop on this; if anyone has a Record 078/778 depth stop and screw, I'd sure like to talk.
Dado planes:One topic we haven't addressed before is that of dado planes. A dado, for those just catching up to the terminology, is a groove running cross-grain on a piece of stock. Imagine building a bookcase with shelves fixed at a particular height. A dado is one way, probably the best, to locate those shelves. There are numerous hand-powered ways to cut dadoes (saw and chisel, saw and router plane, etc.), but the plane manufacturers didn't want to be left out of the party, so they developed dado planes. I suspect the design is fairly old. I own two wooden dado planes, not pictured here (I forgot them when I was taking the photos). Dado planes are distinct in a couple of ways: the iron is skewed, so that the cutting action presents as a slicing action across the grain; they have cutting spurs on both sides of the body of the plane, since the plane winds up buried in the stock; and the plane is designed to be used against a batten on the right side of the plane, so the depth stop is on the left (as opposed to the rabbet planes discussed above). Stanley and Sargent made dado planes; I don't know who else did. Patrick Leach, in his extensive "Blood and Gore" essay on Stanley planes, describes Stanley's No. 39 plane as very uncomfortable to use, because the depth stop is exactly where you'd place your hand on the front of the plane. Sargent, in developing its dado planes, adopted the rhino horn, as seen earlier on its duplex rabbet plane, so, when I decided my life would be nicer if I owned some dado planes, I decided to get Sargent planes:
Sargent cleverly numbered its dado planes in a way that includes the width of the plane body in eighths. Thus, the No. 32 dado plane is 1/4" (2/8") wide; the No. 33 is 3/8" wide, and so on, up to the No. 38, 1" wide. I own Nos. 32, 33, 34, and 36. I doubt I'll ever need other sizes. Here are two pictures of my No. 36, showing the features I mentioned:
and here's a sample board with a dado, which came out with a surprisingly smooth floor, considering it was cut in tearout-prone pine:
(The spurs on this plane need work; one's locked closed, the other needs sharpening - so I didn't use them. I think the edges of the dado would have been a lot cleaner if they'd been working). And yes, that rhino horn definitely improved the ease of gripping the front of the plane; so I was smart, something that's a rare occurrence.
A bit more on the Stanley 190/192:When I posted my excitement about acquiring a Stanley 190 for $2 this summer, I included a picture with its buddy, a Stanley 192 I acquired some years back. I recently realized something about these two planes, to do with the handle shapes. The Sweetheart era Stanley 192 has a handle with top and bottom horns, like the handle commonly found on a handsaw:
It's smaller than a handsaw handle, and, although it fits my large hands (I wear XL in gloves), it would be tight on hands wider than mine. The pressures on a plane handle differ from those on a handsaw handle, and the bottom horn does not really have a function. Stanley may have been thinking about people with big hands in later iterations of these planes, or they may have just been eliminating non-essential features to save money, but the handle on my later No. 190 is sure not a thing of beauty, as functional as it is:
I hope everyone has as boisterous or quiet a New Year's Eve as they want. We're having dinner with friends, and then music will break out; and we'll declare it midnight when we get tired - after all, it'll be midnight somewhere in the world.