A popular website has one man's reviews of — or perhaps I should say "feelings about" — many in the line of Stanley's handplanes. The few planes I was most familiar with, I had no serious quibble with their reviews. One, though, saddened me: that of the Stanley 55 Combination Plane. The reviewer began by saying, "Bought it. Used it. Hated it. Sold it." My experience with Stanley advertising's "A planing mill in itself" is diametrically opposite.
My day job was a seven-year marriage to a couple… Wait, wait. Lemme try that again. My day job from the late-1970s well into the 1980s consisted of seven years building an antique shop on skids (so it could be pulled by a dozer up to a couple's new home-site), a garage-shop in which the wife could work on antiques, and two porch remodels blending into a 1940s-1950s home designed and built by a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright. All this for a self-styled "antique picker" (and her husband; but she was the boss), a term I was unfamiliar with. She said she bought the stock of antique dealers going out of business and when she'd amassed enough for a particular market, the couple delivered truckloads to said market. Wickerwork to San Francisco, high-end highboys to Connecticut, and so on.
One winter, the crew and I were shut down due to heavy winter snow and extreme cold (this was at a little over 10,000' in northern New Mexico). What to do, what to do? She lured me into a sideline of antique restoration (a worthwhile story by itself), in the course of which I sometimes needed to reproduce moldings in usually-short lengths. Building custom homes for around 25 years by then had only called for off-the-shelf moldings; I realized I needed to be able to reproduce much older molding patterns.
Option #1 was, of course, to build a room off my shop to hold several hundred or so wooden planes. Option #2 was to get a Stanley #55. Problem with that was that the blades didn't cut those older shapes, but Fine Woodworking magazine, I think it was, ran an article about how to custom-shape a blade out of "scrap steel." #55s were expensive, but I figured one was less-so than "enough" wooden planes.
Then the couple flew the three of us back East, hired a car and we did a long, meandering tour so I could see what she wanted me to reproduce in a ca. 1720 timber frame salt box she'd had her heart set on for years. We traveled around New England for close to a month and one day we whipped off of a highway to check out a very nice sign heralding "Antique Restorations." The young fellow had purchased an old Cape Cod saltbox that had all the "proper period lights (windows)," said my boss, as we drove up to his home/shop, and we easily got sidetracked by an offered guided tour of the premises. At one point my boss asked the fellow where he found the period "lights" (window frames) and he replied that he made them all, plus all of the doors but for two proper period ones he found. I was surprised at this, because we'd done a walk-through of his shop and I saw no power-shaper or -router, and I said so. He said he'd reproduced everything with a Stanley #55. My boss commented, "Gosh, that must've taken forever!" He said no, that he could grab his plane and the requisite blades (I didn't know to ask about the colonial molding patterns), adjust each just right and run all the mullions and muntins, switching blades and running them however many times, for about three windows before someone with an electrickery rig could catch up. He added that he'd enjoyed the whole task. I was sold.
Late in the journey we got to Wiscasset, Maine, and discovered The Anchorage Antiques, in which a fellow had a huge old barn filled with antique hand tools…, including a goodly selection of #55s. I took my time going through them and I picked out the body and attachments of what I long afterwards learned was a Type 1 (1897-1922), a complete later-Type (1925+) set of 55 blades, all in their original labeled boxes, plus a number of simple rectangular "extra" blades for working into special shapes I might need. (It wasn't till I moved here to Idaho that I acquired an original chestnut box for the whole shebang at auction. An early German immigrant had owned three 55s and all got heavy use. That was in 2005 or '06 and I'm still mumphing about not buying the entire collection.)
On returning to New Mexico, my very first case piece restoration needed 21" of very early molding for one end of a "country cabinet maker-made" side-board. Thankfully I'd been saving thicker "church keys" for just such an eventuality and following the directions for shaping a blade, I got it on the first go and didn't need any of my "extras." My second similar job was reproducing about 120' of cornice molding for both gable ends of an early-1800s home. The third such need was for around 100' of reproduction hand-rail on the same house. I didn't charge for making the blades, I just added them to my arsenal.
The reviewer I mentioned at the beginning agreed that the #55 was fine for the occasional short run, but he felt that much longer runs would require too much patience and skill. I flat don't believe in "too much patience and skill." My reputation is in part tied to the motto my former business partner and I cribbed: "The impossible just takes a little longer," and yes, I admit we love challenges. I'd absolutely not do or say anything to dissuade you if you do too. How else do we create a niche reputation? *he grins*
Edit: Oops, I should've added the suggestion for newbies to this plane, get a copy of the (or even an original) instruction manual and read/study it as long as it takes to settle perhaps-initial butterflies in the stomach. The subject matter is nowhere as daunting as, say, quantum physics.
