Hello hand plane enthusiasts! I hope your summer is off to a great start. A little over a month ago, I found a lot of spare time to finally get some things done around the house. Some projects were things I was going to get to “some day.” One of those projects was cleaning out the garage and getting rid of stuff, some of which had been out there for a decade or more. Once the clutter was drastically reduced I figured, well, I should do some cosmetic drywall repair, apply a new coat of paint, and put up some PVC trim. Like any house, walls aren’t flat, corners aren’t ninety degrees, and as such, the custom fitting of trim is a given.
There’s a thirty inch wide pass through between the two car stall in my garage and the one car stall. The opening was never trimmed out with casing and was simply rough cut, jagged dry wall. It just needed some external corner molding to cover the rough drywall “end grain.” It looked pretty bad, but was never a priority. After cleaning up the garage, at least trimming the pass through had to be done. Rather than using wood, I went with PVC. In the winter, I get a lot of slush and wet sloppy stuff that drips off the cars in the garage. PVC is affordable and pretty much maintenance free. It’s durable for sure. It actually cuts nicely when using power tools, and as I learned, it can be hand planed too! That pass through I was talking about was a builder after thought. It’s not square anywhere, and the opening is a little wider at the top than it is at the bottom. It’s functional but was poorly executed in terms of cosmetic appeal. Since there’s variation at the top and bottom of the opening, it required me to taper the bottom third of an eighty inch long piece of molding. (If you take a look at the left side vertical molding, you might see that the molding is wider at the top than it is at the bottom.) Even though the PVC cut nicely with my miter saw, I wasn’t sure about planing it. Still, it absolutely had to be tapered to fit the corner properly. Rather than attempt it for the first time with one of my favorite “furniture making” block planes, I thought I’d go with a utility block plane.
Many, many years ago, maybe during the late 1980s, when I started getting interested in hand planes, I received a Sears branded block plane from my father-in-law as a gift. I did my best to sharpen the iron and have used it almost exclusively for planing off dried glue squeeze out on laminations. It’s a useable plane that gets the job done. It was made in England, probably by Stanley, back when Stanley had pushed a lot of its plane production over seas. The plane is the functional equivalent of the Stanley #220, which I believe was also made well into the 1980s. If you go back in the thread to page 49, reply 734, we discussed the #220, including its strengths and limitations. Anyway, this little project, planing PVC in this instance, was exactly what I was talking about back in the Stanley #220 post. Even though I used the Sears version, it proved to be a great tool out in the garage on a very basic DIYer project. As long as the plane is used on work for which it was designed, and one's expectations are reasonable, the results can be good! The last photo depicts the Stanley made Sears block plane (fore ground) and the Stanley #220 (background). Both are perfect tools for general use DIYer applications.
Jim C.
