Right handed left handed plane?

[AndyT]

Here's a puzzle.

This is a common pattern of dado or housing plane. Made/sold by Gleave, of Oldham Street, Manchester.

The cutting part is on the user's right hand side, with the depth stop on the left. This makes it easy to use when pressed up against a temporary batten, to plane a housing across the grain. Just like Philly shows on his blog. Common and useful. Note that the skewed blade has its leading corner on the right hand side, so the plane tends to pull in to the batten, nice and tight. Just like an ordinary rebate plane.

There are also left handed versions, which I believe are less common, but not exactly rare. This is one, made by A Mathieson of Glasgow:

This is a mirror image of the first plane, so could be used with a batten on the outside, out of the way of the depth stop. Again, the skewed blade has the leading corner towards the batten, so would tend to pull in nicely alongside it. I'm a bit puzzled why these were offered - I can't think of any other tool that was made in left and right hand versions where grain direction was not the reason - but that's not tonight's question.

Here's the real oddity:

It's the left-handed variant again, but this plane has the blade skewed the other way!

It is a proper commercially made plane - Scottish, as so many of these are, marked R Livingstone & Co, 235 Argyle St (which is in Glasgow) with a rather fine device of a snake swallowing its tail, surrounding some floridly unreadble initials:

and this is the other side of it, showing that it's not some user-made copy:

So, what is the reasoning here? How would this have been used so that the skew was helpful instead of a nuisance? Has anyone else got one like it? Over to you!

 

[toolsntat]

Mmmm Andy , not noticed the variants before, but next time I poke around in that department I will have a closer look :wink:

Andy

 

[Jacob]

You put your guide batten on the other side, i.e. same side as the depth stop. It'd have to stand high enough to touch the plane body above. Or even start it off without the depth stop in place.
A lot of woodworkers were specialised and would be makng the same things often. This plane could have been set up for just one particular but often repeated job.

 

[matthewwh]

Just clutching at straws here but does the skew direction influence which side the shavings emerge from? I can see a benefit in having them come out on the opposite side to the fence for obvious reasons. As far as the wood is concerned the direction of the skew makes no geometric difference so it must be something that either makes the plane easier to use or easier to manufacture.

 

[Schtoo]

Using up a RH blade instead of getting another LH made? Proper LH blades too expensive? User request?

I'd lean toward a RH blade being used for inventory/cost/time reasons myself.

Something along the lines of the buyer needing a new plane, plane maker tells buyer we have no LH blades, can a LH plane with a RH plane do the job? Buyer says "ok" and the result is what you've got there.

I'd doubt it was intentional, just a victim of circumstance.

Stu.

 

[AndyT]

Thanks guys. A few more thoughts:

I can't quite buy the stock control problem, when companies like Mathieson were supplying so many hundreds of options and sizes. They'd have ground some more irons - and in any case, the angle of the bed and the shape of the hole are reversed too.

On all the planes, the shaving emerges on the side away from the leading corner of the blade, and the snail-shell curved hole is wider on that side.

On the plane that I'm puzzling about, you can use a guide batten to run under the depth stop, but it has to be thin; 3/8" at the very most, which means it has to be quite wide, so as not to flex and to give you something to fix through. However, once a cut is established, it will continue down nicely, staying in the housing / dado / trench.

Working on the bench, using the left handed versions with a guide to the left was very awkward. In fact, I could do a better job if I pushed the plane with my left hand and guided it with the right. (I'm right handed and not at all ambidextrous.)

I'd be really surprised if these were made in a left handed version for the convenience of left handed users - I can't think of single example of another woodworking tool where left-handers were accommodated like that. So I think the reason must be to do with the way they were used.

I think a lot of their use would not have been at the bench. Ellis's book on joinery shows how to fit high-class skirting boards by cutting a tongue on the bottom to fit into a groove on the floor. Much of the time, that groove would have been across the grain, so a plane like this would have been used. So, (I imagine) with a normal r-h model, you'd tack a narrow batten to the floor and go round the room anti-clockwise, pushing the clear side of the plane against it, away from your body. (The batten could even be a wide board on its edge, tacked to the fixing grounds, so long as you could keep your hands away from it. ) But I'm struggling to visualise how you'd need to have a left-handed (or clockwise-working) variant. You'd have to chisel into the corners anyway so it wouldn't help there.

And why you'd need your left-handed variant to be further varied by having a right handed blade is still beyond me.

Anyone got any more ideas, or examples?

 

[toolsntat]

Just going to check em out but the floor/skirt ones were I think called raglet planes.....

Very intriguing :wink:

Andy

Yep was another name for the dado....

Salaman says they were used for floors first but I would have thought they must have used them at similar times for each job :wink: Drawn backwards to start scribe 8)

Andy