It's hard to believe, but stanley still makes a #7

[D_W]

I will not condemn the off shore manufacturing, as we are a global economy (I manufacture and ship to China). I will condemn those companies that only copy without improving.

Ditto on that. I think overseas manufacturing improves our standard of living. The evidence points to that. It's the copying that I don't care for.

I think there is a lack of heckling about copying something, or pushing the pitch man in this case to come out with it about whether or not he just robbed the design from...well, Rob.

 

[Jameshow]

Ditto on that. I think overseas manufacturing improves our standard of living. The evidence points to that. It's the copying that I don't care for.

I think there is a lack of heckling about copying something, or pushing the pitch man in this case to come out with it about whether or not he just robbed the design from...well, Rob.

Robs the working class of thier jobs though?!
International Harvester tractors are a Morrisons supermarket, Parkinson machine tools a nursing home.... Dean Smith and grace a pound toyshop supplier......
https://www.poundtoy.com/

 

[D_W]

Robs the working class of thier jobs though?!
International Harvester tractors are a Morrisons supermarket, Parkinson machine tools a nursing home.... Dean Smith and grace a pound toyshop supplier......
https://www.poundtoy.com/

The owner, of course - as far as I know, it's a privately owned company that's gone out of their way to do things for their employees.

Which makes it stink a little more.

The extreme laziness to take something kind of basic - a flat casting with two handles coming off of it, and fail to make a couple of prototypes that don't just completely thieve someone else's casting, that's the turn off part here. My opinion in this case is that someone can spend so much time combing their hair and making test joints and worrying about video quality can't bother to not just rip off designs.

But we've all seen this so much - lifting visually associated designs or copying just to avoid doing the work of actually designing something - that I guess there's a kind of indifference now where there wasn't one 10 years ago.

 

[D_W]

Humorously, my stanley 7 was held aside in customs for some time at DHL this morning. I guess they wanted to make sure my plastic handles weren't Brazilian Faux-wood.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Common sense would tell anyone there isn't a huge financial benefit in rehandling planes, so why the hassle? It's easy to ascertain when manufacturers stopped using rosewood.

 

[D_W]

Common sense would tell anyone there isn't a huge financial benefit in rehandling planes, so why the hassle? It's easy to ascertain when manufacturers stopped using rosewood.

I'm not sure what you're aiming for here.

I actually would like to have a type 20 #7, which has beech handles. I'm fine with those, but this is more of a curiosity adventure. I couldn't say whether or not I'll replace the plastic.

My comment was more about the humorous delays in customs - what I find with DHL is they try desperately to find some import tax that can be assessed so that they can charge a service fee on top of it.

 

[Jarno]

You probably know this, but I think those chinese Stanleys are all metric, so not sure how easy or hard it is to replace anything but a plane iron.

 

[D_W]

You probably know this, but I think those chinese Stanleys are all metric, so not sure how easy or hard it is to replace anything but a plane iron.

I think the only things I'd replace on it would be the iron and the handles, but I'd make those.

If it's defective, I'll just return it to amazon. The cap irons on these are OK. They're a funny shape, but functionally OK.

Of course, it's probably a different gamble with each new year so all of the above could be incorrect.

Listing said it was 9 1/4 pounds, about a pound heavier than a vintage 7. I hope that's wrong, but if it's not....well, I'll just resell it.

Your point is a good one, though. you can't really assume anything. With a prior plane that was still sheffield made, the adjuster pawl was not ever cut down to size. The iron sat on top of it going only halfway down. I did something to adjust it but eventually kept the iron, cap, lever cap and screws out of the plane and threw the casting away. That one was $20, though, and one of those maroon ones with rough casting and maybe thin paint? whatever it was, the casting was rough.

Even assuming the plane will be coarsely made but functional is too much sometimes.

 

[D_W]

said plane is in the city at the moment - arrived in cincinnati late friday night, and "express" apparently means takes three days to go five hours. but I don't have the time right now to do it up, so no big deal.

 

[Jameshow]

You probably know this, but I think those chinese Stanleys are all metric, so not sure how easy or hard it is to replace anything but a plane iron.

Probably made by soba so Indian tbh.

 

[D_W]

Probably made by soba so Indian tbh.

The smoother was made in china - I've long ago tossed the box, but it is china origin. It's possible that the iron itself was still sheffield as these are blanked irons with fairly coarse rotary milling to finish them, so they are being fed through something automatic. It would be difficult to see them costing more than a few dollars each to make, even in sheffield.

The blanking steels made for irons allow for pretty sloppy heat treatment, too - they're relatively fine grained and have enough chromium and vanadium to have good toughness both by composition and by grain pinning for hardening.

Stanley has a large presence in china. I'll know in another day for sure that the jointer is also china - the listing on amazon doesn't disclose like the smoother box and smoother listing do. I looked at the casting to see if they replaced "England" on the casting with "China", and of course, they didn't. it's only a boast when it's favorable. The model number is cast into the bed ("G12-XXX" or something) and that's it.

I put the iron aside as I have made a stack of maybe 50 irons and I like mine a little better. But the iron was by no means unusable and it wasn't soft like the round top 70s stuff.

 

[D_W]

correction - I'll know that today. whee!

 

[D_W]

hencho en mexico according to the box.

 

[D_W]

So, this plane's not that bad. Can't say anything about quality as far as consistency, but this particular plane will probably have about 1 hour of total setup time to deadly flat and sharp.

the fatal flaw, to me - maybe not to someone who doesn't do much with planes- is that it's a bit overweight at right around 9 pounds actual weight (8lb 15.4oz for the particular types).

the iron is some kind of carbon steel, but it lets go of the wire edge strangely easy and I expect when I get some edge wear, maybe it will tell a secret under the microscope? large grain? we'll see. It'll be some time before then.

Casting is hard, heavy and thick. The cap iron is fine, the iron is fine, it's flat, it's reasonably hard, and the surface finish is pretty coarse.

I wonder how much an I.Sorby 7 sells for these days - maybe I'll dump mine as they seem to have gone from "a little more than a stanley" to stupid price levels.

Lateral adjustment and depth adjustment are both smooth and easy.

so, how the iron wears is one thing yet to find out, and i'm curious enough I may have it XRFed to see what the composition is. The other recent new smoother that I bought is just like it. It's a decent iron, but I like how something more common like O1 or 80crv2 wears.

The other will be to hold it for 6 months or a year before dumping it and see if the casting moves and by how much, as I have some trouble believing a plane that must wholesale for about $40 or $50 would be seasoned.

 

[Jameshow]

So, this plane's not that bad. Can't say anything about quality as far as consistency, but this particular plane will probably have about 1 hour of total setup time to deadly flat and sharp.

the fatal flaw, to me - maybe not to someone who doesn't do much with planes- is that it's a bit overweight at right around 9 pounds actual weight (8lb 15.4oz for the particular types).

the iron is some kind of carbon steel, but it lets go of the wire edge strangely easy and I expect when I get some edge wear, maybe it will tell a secret under the microscope? large grain? we'll see. It'll be some time before then.

Casting is hard, heavy and thick. The cap iron is fine, the iron is fine, it's flat, it's reasonably hard, and the surface finish is pretty coarse.

I wonder how much an I.Sorby 7 sells for these days - maybe I'll dump mine as they seem to have gone from "a little more than a stanley" to stupid price levels.

Lateral adjustment and depth adjustment are both smooth and easy.

so, how the iron wears is one thing yet to find out, and i'm curious enough I may have it XRFed to see what the composition is. The other recent new smoother that I bought is just like it. It's a decent iron, but I like how something more common like O1 or 80crv2 wears.

The other will be to hold it for 6 months or a year before dumping it and see if the casting moves and by how much, as I have some trouble believing a plane that must wholesale for about $40 or $50 would be seasoned.

Nice pics??

 

[D_W]

I'll take some tonight

 

[D_W]

It's not exactly shelf jewelry, by the way. Interestingly, some odd things are off on it - like I think the frog the way it's sitting is a little off center, but it's not out of square. No clue if that's something that can be adjusted, but it's also something I don't care about.

This type of plane (bailey) has so few crucial elements vs. what people would lead everyone to believe and I think this plane has all of them covered. They pretty much center around being able to get the frog even with the casting and locked down tight, handles tight, adjuster works freely and the bottom flat.

I would speculate without measuring that while this plane is coarsely ground, it's not more than about 2 thousandths hollow in its length. Which is something I don't like, but probably is the norm as I see the castings slightly hollow more often than the other way around. I have my guesses as to why that is (heavy pass grinding, the toe and heel will always be least rigid).

 

[D_W]

Ultimately, this plane doesn't have the stability at the bottom of the frog due to a gap between the frog and casting. The only way it would be stable enough would be to add a thicker iron.

This isn't exclusive to modern planes, but this one has less of a gap than some of the poorly thought out older designs (union planes come to mind, if I recall, and some stanley frog designs have a big gap - I think....I just don't keep the old ones that I don't like).

so, I guess I could cover some of the stability issues by making a custom iron for the plane that's about 1/8th thick.

Casting unbelievably hard, too. I think I may have said that already...if I didn't.

Best fix for the lower part of this plane would actually be to set the frog just behind the casting, carefully file the sloppy bottom of the casting in place and then apply metal-filled epoxy to the small gap between the frog and the casting.

I'll show this in a video. It's deceptive because the gap is small, but it's enough to cause instability with a thin iron and this is what you get:



Notice the edge - that is an iron that planed maybe a couple of hundred feet at most in cherry and maple. I can feel the instability in the plane, but I have a lot of experience in feeling when an iron is vibrating and it's instability vs. just flimsy feeling. In this case, the iron is moving a little bit in the cut, and the result is that even in something innocent that i planed iwth another plane fine - figured hard maple - the reverberation of the iron beats up the edge, dings it and forms a small burr out of the various nicks. This is toxic - an iron that could last much longer transmits the message to the user that it can't last, but without obviously failing immediatley.

When the burr from these little several thousandths defects gets organized (as in, too many of them work in combination along the edge), the plane rather abruptly stops cutting.

Here is a plane iron of my own make used in a type 20 stanley that has support all the way down. This is at twice the magnification so defects would appear twice as large. Notice that they're absent. This plane didn't plane the same wood, but did plane beech and cherry and planed about 800 or 1000 feet to get to this point.



While I think I make the best irons in the world .....there's no way that the iron is the differentiator in this case, and the way I'll have to prove it I guess is to throw the new iron in a T20 plane, plane the same things and see what happens.

So, it's a swing and an "almost". It would be an OK plane if stanley could've managed not to make the "Frog better with better machining on the feet" and face, but rather the critical last 1/4th inch at the bottom of the plane, the cost cutting is terminal.

I will probably make a 1/8th 80CRV2 iron for this plane to make up for the poor support at the bottom of the frog and confirm that it holds up well before dumping it sometime next year (also after confirming that the flatness that I filed into the casting remains there).

 

[D_W]

long story short, don't buy it. Unless you're OK with filing the bottom of the frog and filling the gap with with some kind of filled glue or silver solder or something.

It's been interesting to gradually figure out what the invisible problem was as it seemed like there was something odd with the steel. Rather, it's what the plane quietly does to it, and I think it's not bad enough test cutting with the plane or using in softwoods for stanley to address it.

 

[D_W]

Since I said I'd leave pictures - I filed the bottom casting ledge on this plane - below the frog. Stanley doesn't intend you use this ledge, but it just barely is tall enough to touch the back of a thin iron's bevel. From yesterday to today, this was the factor that finally made the plane stable.

It's so sloppily made and roughly cast that until I started marking and bedding the iron (something you should never have to do on a stanley style plane), I wasn't aware that any part of it could contact above the bevel, I thought looking at the bottom of the casting that it could only contact the bevel.

That's a chancey thing because the bevel changes location with the plane cut depth.

So this plane planes fine now and with stability using a part of the plane that wasn't intended to bed the iron, it now doesn't damage the iron like above and the plane just works like you'd expect.

Except, it still has a huge mouth, the cap iron is still kind of crude and will let shavings through too easily without adjustment of the leading edge, the adjuster is difficult to judge - when it is actually moving the iron and when it isn't. I think I may crosshatch the back of the iron just to make it resist adjustment so that I can feel it, but that won't help with lateral - it's also obscure feeling. AS in, you can use the adjust, but it's hard to tell when it changes from slop to moving the iron. That may be because it's pushing the iron on the frog a little before it rotates laterally.

Whatever the case, it's a no go for buying it.