(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . I Buy A Brand New, Made In USA Hand Plane [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-07-16 I love vintage hand tools. I have quite a few, and use many of them. The quality of the older tools is generally better than most of what you’ll get new from a big-box store or wherever, and with a little TLC, a lot of them can be brought back to really good working shape. But, we can get even better hand tools these days. Some manufacturers now produce exceptional quality traditional hand tools, with modern materials, manufacturing processes/tolerances, high levels of craftsmanship and attention to detail. One of them is Lie-Nielsen, operating in Maine since 1981. I’ve been eyeballing these planes for a few years, and finally decided to pull the trigger and get one to see if it was really as good as it’s reputation suggests. I got the base model No. 4 size smoothing plane with a ductile iron body, manganese bronze lever cap and frog (The frog is the angled part that the cutting iron rests upon), with either cherry, maple, hickory, or Maine-grown hornbeam handles. You seem to get what they have on hand as far as the handles go. Other variants have been offered, with bronze bodies and fancier woods, like cocobolo or Bolivian rosewood, but they cost more and were out of stock anyway. BTW, I have no idea what hornbeam is, but apparently it thrives in Maine. I think my handles are cherry. They’re quite nice, tightly secured to the plane body, feel great in the hand, and are rock solid. Cool. I’m used to the older ones that need to be tightened or repaired and/or have the screws shortened because the wood has shrunk over the years. Anyway.. The Lie-Nielsen design is nearly an exact copy of the 1911-1943 Stanley Bed Rock plane, with refinements. Bed Rock was Stanley’s premium line of planes at the time. I do have one vintage Bed Rock, a No. 605 jack plane — one size larger than a No. 4 — that I rescued from oblivion a few years back. But there’s only so much one can do with something that’s been used and abused for decades, then neglected for decades more. Don’t get me wrong, the old fixed-up Bed Rock is a very capable tool and it’s what I grab if I need a jack plane. Heh, even if I did ever happen to possess a mint, unused Bed Rock plane (which I most definitely don’t), it would be worth so much that I would be afraid to use it, so I can’t compare their relative performance completely accurately. I paid $340 for this, plus taxes and shipping. Not exactly cheap, but you’ll pay ~$150-$200 for a nicer original Bed Rock No. 4. Then you’ll have know how to tune it up to get it back into decent working shape. And you never really know what you’re getting with a vintage tool unless you can inspect it in person before you buy. This came almost ready to use right out of the box. With a warranty. The new one alongside it’s design inspiration. It was well-packaged, securely cushioned in a sturdy box. Unlike many new tools nowadays, this wasn’t slathered in some cheap dried out grease and sealed inside a plastic pouch. That shit takes a half hour of Soviet gulag-level labor and a quart of combustible carcinogenic solvents to remove. I’ve been there. Whatever they use to prevent rust, it doesn’t leave a discernable film. It surely costs more than grease and a plastic pouch, but I don’t care. All I had to do was wipe it down with a shop rag. The material keeping the tool from rattling around inside the box was a folded-up piece of cardboard and some crumpled up pages from a recent Maine newspaper. The plane itself was just wrapped in brown paper. No damned styrofoam packing peanuts. They didn’t even use any tape. Newspaper used for packing in 2023 — I love it! In fact, there is no plastic at all in either the tool or the packaging. This is a good thing and more manufacturers should do it as far as I’m concerned. Of course, this box was packed for shipping inside another, larger box that did use plastic tape and some bubble wrap, so there’s that.. It’s been a long day, Maizy! Here it is, taken apart. You can literally feel the quality when you handle the individual parts. No sharp edges, everything perfectly machined, the wood handles are silky smooth, and the sole is absolutely flat. So nice. You can tell these guys don’t cut corners anywhere. Things of beauty. At least to a geek engineer like me.. The first thing to do was address the iron. It was reasonably sharp and made decent enough shavings the way it came, but it could do better. The cutting iron was really flat already, so it didn’t need much attention there. It only took about 15 minutes to put a good micro-bevel on it and it’s scary-sharp now. This iron is about twice as thick as the old Bed Rock irons were, helping to minimize vibration. Plus, it’s made from A2 alloy steel, which holds a good edge but is still easy enough to sharpen. Yay for metallurgy! Good to go. Time for a beer, I think. The chip breaker got some design love, too. The chip breaker deflects/directs the shavings up and away from the cut. It’s attached to the iron with a short screw, as shown below. The Bed Rock chip breaker, like with most planes of the era, is a thin mild steel stamping. The Lie-Nielsen chip breaker is a precision-machined piece of hardened steel, about twice as thick as the Bed Rock’s. This all makes for a very stable, solid, vibration-free setup. The difference in manufacturing and material costs has to be.. significant. Lie-Nielsen iron/chip breaker assembly on the left, Bed Rock on the right. Damn, just look at how precisely the Lie-Nielsen assembly fits together. Besides the iron/chip breaker, there are more refinements. The Lie-Nielsen’s cutting iron depth adjustment wheel has about 1/8 turn of backlash. Backlash is the amount of free spin it takes for the wheel to engage the depth adjuster. Less backlash is better, allowing for easier operation and better control over your depth of cut. My old Bed Rock has more than one whole turn of slop. Some of that is due to age and wear, but not all that much. The depth adjusting wheel on the Lie-Nielsen is also a little larger in diameter, making it easier to turn. Later Bed Rocks and Stanleys (Post-1920 or so) also sport the upsized wheel. Stanley Bed Rock No. 605 jack plane and Lie-Nielsen No. 4 smoothing plane. They’ve even improved the lateral adjustment lever. The Bed Rock’s lever is a steel stamping with a thumb tab staked to the end. A proven design that works at a low cost. The Lie-Nielsen’s lever is thicker, appears to be machined, and uses two tiny screws to attach the brass thumb tab, which could have just as well been made from plain steel.. Both levers have a rotating bearing that engages with the iron to shift it side to side, but Stanley later ditched the bearing for a non-rotating piece to cut cost. The attachment pin about which the lever rotates is beefier, too. That’s a common failure point on the vintage planes. Looking at the lateral adjustment lever alone, the manufacturing costs have to be at least five times those of the Bed Rock lever. Damn. All that for a relatively minor component.. Even the drive slots on the little screw heads on the lateral lever are aligned. This may not be intentional, but if it is, that’a a lot of attention to the details. And look at the polish on that tote handle brass screw! The grey metal piece in the photo below is the cutting iron depth adjustment yoke. Turn the wheel clockwise, the yoke moves forward up where it contacts the iron and the iron advances. Counterclockwise retracts it. On the old Bed Rock, there is a lot of side to side and fore/aft free play in the yoke, typical of most Bailey-style planes. The Lie-Nielson’s yoke is more precisely made and fitted to the depth adjustment wheel. Nearly no play at all. More attention to detail. Everywhere I look on this tool, the quality is evident. Check out the nice even chamfer on the side of the frog at top right. That gets rid of any metal burrs and makes for a smooth surface for the hand. So nice. Here’s my go at a brief explanation of how the Bed Rock and Lie-Nielsen systems both work. A selling point for Bed Rock was that if you needed to adjust the frog position fore or aft, you could do it without having to disturb the cutting iron setup. Unlike the regular Stanley-Bailey design where the frog is attached to the bed by two screws that you can only get at by first removing the iron, this design uses two pins in place of those screws, each with a conical hole on one side, near the bottom end. There’s a mark on the head of the pins corresponding to the position of the conical hole. Might be better to just show a couple of pictures: The pins securing the frog to the plane body. Note how the markings point toward the rear. The frog pin and locking screw. The end of the locking screw engages the hole in the pin and draws it down tight. BTW, behold the edges of the iron at upper right. Beautifully finished, just a joy to handle. They could have just omitted that step and let the customer file off the sharp edges. The locking screws come in from behind the pins, and have conical tips that match the indentations in the pins, engage them, and draw them down tight. The photo below shows how they’re set up. The center screw is for adjusting the frog fore/aft. All you do is loosen the pin locking screws, turn the center screw to put the frog where you want it, and re-tighten the locking screws. All without disturbing the cutting iron setup. Clever. Now, check out the way the frog bed on the body is machined. It’s a flat surface that mates up with a similarly machined surface on the underside of the frog. Moreover, see how the machined surface on the body is recessed just a little. The frog slides right in there, and it’s locked into the correct alignment. With most planes, you have to align the frog by eye. Stanley marketed this mating/adjusting system as “bed rock solid” The frog bedding surface and attachment/locking screws. That milling is flawless! Witness the finish on those screws. Nicely done! They could have just left the screw heads first-pass machined as usual, but they went the extra step. By now it’s evident that I really like this tool, and I haven’t even talked about actually using it yet. Yeah, it cost about $350, but it’s worth it to me. Like most of us, I’m all too accustomed to buying new tools for $50-$100 and finding most of them to be pieces of crap that barely work and don’t last more than a few years. This will last for generations, properly cared for. Well, so how is it to use? I set it up and took a few passes on a scrap piece of pine. The plane literally glides through the wood. It’s noticeably heavier than an equivalent older Bed Rock or Stanley. Maybe the extra mass gives it more momentum. In any case, it works like a dream and is just a complete pleasure to use. The shavings you can produce are so thin they’re see-through, and it leaves a buttery-smooth surface behind. This is the finest performing hand plane I’ve ever used. That being said, this is the only brand new plane I’ve ever used. I don’t think any of my other planes are newer than about 75 years old.. But still, I rather doubt a new Bed Rock back in the day was as good as this Lie-Nielsen. If you’re looking for a new, high quality, American-made hand plane at this price point, you can’t go wrong with one of these. Check out that shaving. You could roll a joint with that. Speaking of joints.. My summer garden is flourishing. Here in Michigan, you can grow up to 12 marijuana plants per person at a time. I only planted five this year (Seeds are $20 each!), although technically we could have gone up to 24 plants. I’ve learned a little from last year and they’re doing better this time. By harvest time in October, these should be approaching five to six feet tall. They’ve grown a good 8 to 10 inches just since July 4; they’re now about thigh-high and starting to get nice and bushy. Hope I didn’t put them too close together. We’ll see. The strain is the legendary Durban Poison, an Indica originating out of South Africa. Seems to be doing OK even this far north. I look forward to a bountiful harvest. Weed porn alert! No expensive grow lights for me. Stick ‘em in the ground and water them. Let nature do the rest. That’s about it for now. Stay safe everyone! -ER [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/16/2180654/-I-Buy-A-Brand-New-Made-In-USA-Hand-Plane Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/