Tom Mullally
Furnituremaker - - - June 23, 2002 Oakland, CA You can make almost anything with a plane if you’re patient enough. In that vein I’ve chosen three of the most significant hand planes that I own. The first one is a Stanley #4, the first plane I ever bought. It was required for the North Bennett Street Industrial School furniture making program. It’s a basic simple plane. You can plane wood square and flat and you can even plane end grain if you get it sharp enough. The next one is the prettiest plane I ever bought and I do have a story about that. It’s a Stanley #113 compass plane. You use it to plane either concave or convex curves. I bought a reproduction of this plane from Woodcraft Supply in the late 70’s, a Kunz, made in Germany for $135.00 and it was basically a piece of junk. It hung on the wall of my shop for five years and one day Bill Bierman walked in and said “I’ve got a good one of those.” I ended up trading him the Kunz reproduction and paying him the $35. he said he paid at the flea market for the #113 and I got this beauty. The other one is a Stanley #55 and it’s supposed to be the ultimate Stanley plane. It’s known as a Multi Plane. It’s made for planing long grain grooves, a phillester, cross grain grooves, -a dado, edge cuts, a rebate, and moldings. It’s the very complicated and almost impossible to use. In case:
< > |