Paddy Roxburgh":30x471yo said:
Custard, I've read before about the no.7 being the only bench plane in the Barnsley tradition. I find this hard to imagine as I mostly use a 4 and a block and find the 7 really unwieldy. On an instrument making course I went on they got me to flatten violin plates with a seven and I found it hard to handle, I usually only use a long plane (a wooden one) for truing edges.
Have you carried this over into your work or do you now use a variety of bench planes?
Paddy
I don't like having too many tools or machines. It takes time to get any tool working just right and to learn how to get the best out of it, plus tools take up space and need looking after, so I try to have just enough to do the job but no more.
I did just use an 07 for quite a while, and like anything you get used to it, although I always used a few different irons in it that had been prepared differently. Incidentally you can always fasten the 07 upside down in a vice and run small stuff over it. But I now use three bench planes.
A Record 05 with two irons, one quite strongly cambered and one very strongly cambered. Both irons are Ray Iles D2 steel. D2 may not take the keenest edge but it's very tough and can take quite a beating, which is what's needed because this plane just gets used for truing the edges of plywood or MDF, truing the edges of UF glued laminations, or cleaning up boards that have been laying on a gritty floor before running them over the expensive knives in the thickness/planer!
A Lie Nielsen 07 with three frogs (45, 50, and 55 degrees) plus a selection of A2 irons with different cambers and one with a moderate camber and a 20 degree back bevel. I true every board by hand before edge jointing and this is the plane I use. For thinner boards I use a stronger camber, for thicker boards a less aggressive camber. For book matching wild grain boards I use a higher pitch. But all this variation (and it really does make a difference) is available from one single plane.
A Veritas bevel up jack plane with three irons ground at different angles in PMV II steel plus a toothed iron in O2 steel for scotch glue veneering. This plane has a Lie Nielsen "Hot Dog" permanently attached and is the plane I use for shooting and as a general purpose plane. I used the Lie Nielsen version of this plane for quite a time in the same capacity but I couldn't make it hold the lateral adjustment when the iron was extended or retracted. The Veritas tote isn't great and at some point I'll get around to making a replacement, I see Veritas have technical drawings for the tote on their website so they've made it a relatively easy fix. I like their PMV II steel. It's a bit of a digression but I'm selling more and more live edge, slab top pieces. The slabs generally need flattening by hand as they're often too wide for my machines, so I get quite a bit of practise with hand planes and I can see how PMV II is holding a good quality edge that bit longer. Incidentally, one of the main issues I see with hobbyist woodworkers is that they don't sharpen their tools nearly enough. On a tough hardwood I'll hone after ten to fifteen minutes constant use, and I'm glad of the break! Then I'll re-grind every seven or eight honings (always being careful not to remove the edge so the camber and shape is preserved), so some days I might be grinding the same iron three or four times and honing twenty or thirty times! The bevel up planes have a lot to offer, but their biggest shortcoming in my view is that cambering is much more difficult. Not impossible, just more complicated and difficult to achieve consistency, which is why they haven't replaced the 07 or 05 in my tool box. On the plus side they're great for shooting (easy to grip firmly and squarely), and fast to swap irons around.
I also use the Veritas low angle block plane, again with multiple PMV II irons, it's bigger than most block planes and I have a wooden front knob on it, so it sometimes get used as a kind of small smoothing plane.
If I made more very large case furniture I might feel the need for a large carriage maker's/rebate plane like the Lie Nielsen 610 or 10 1/4. This would be useful for drawer fitting. But as most of the drawers I make are only average size I get by with a Lie Nielsen 507, a 1 1/4" shoulder plane, or 80 grit abrasive paper glued to a trued up block.
Incidentally, I'm not spoiling for an argument about plane choices. If someone's tools works for them in the woods they use and for the things they make, then that's pretty much the end of the matter as far as I'm concerned! Somewhere I'll have the Barnsley recommended hand tool list, If anyone's interested I could dig it out; it's not particularly long!
