Rider Planes

[Phil Pascoe]

That's how it is, alright. My bandsaw not only was unusable but it was actually physically impossible to make it work without alteration.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

It does seem fundamentally wrong to me that you buy something and then have to set about making it fit for purpose. When I buy a car I don't expect to have to start by servicing the engine. The other thing that gets me is that you need a reasonable amount of knowledge in order to "fettle" these things ......

You'd laugh yourself silly if I told you how long it took me to realise that my new chainsaw had a chain that:

a) Needs to be kept sharp;
b) Can be sharpened with simple hand tools.

:roll: :wink: :lol:

 

[ED65]

It does seem fundamentally wrong to me that you buy something and then have to set about making it fit for purpose. When I buy a car I don't expect to have to start by servicing the engine.

To a degree this is apples and oranges (although there are some parallels in the car world).

With woodworking tools a few books explain that at a lower price bracket the money the maker isn't charging is because of the work not done, which the buyer then expects to have to do (some or all of) to make the tool work as they need it to. There is actually a long tradition of this with woodworking tools, going back at least to the early 1800s, and at one point it was even thought to be a sort of insult to 'the mechanic' if a tool was supplied ready to go.

The other thing that gets me is that you need a reasonable amount of knowledge in order to "fettle" these things yet the cheaper end of the market requires the most getting and that's the end where the least knowledge is likely to be for most people.

I understand the frustration, many here have been in the same boat (some more recently than others :mrgreen. You could think of a lot of fettling as an extension of sharpening, which overall is much more difficult to do to high level actually.

To put your mind at rest, quite a bit of fettling work is actually pretty simple and easy. Takes effort yes, but it's not actually tricky or difficult. So first-timers can usually achieve good results.

Extensive fettling isn't needed on every lower-end tool anyway, my no. 4 needed very little work done to it. I could have just sharpened the iron and refined the front edge of the cap iron and called it done. I did do a tad more than this but no flattening of the sole (still haven't). All told the plane was taking thin, uniform shavings within half an hour of taking it out of the box.

 

[AJB Temple]

I think this is a choice and that is fine as long as the buyer understands that he either pays more and gets "ready to go" high quality tool or a "needs a lot of fettling" tool that may have potential for high quality (or maybe not). The issue is whether or not you value the time put into fettling and peripherally whether resale value matters. In my non-woodwork day job I can earn far more in the time it takes me to fettle a plane properly, than I will save by buying a cheap tool and spending hours sorting it out. That is why I tend to buy LN or Veritas or Clifton - and because if I screw up my purchase decision, my loss on resale is minimal. I still hunt for bargains though. That makes it a low risk route for me overall: I have such limited time to do actual woodwork, that I don't want to spend it fettling planes. If I was retired, I may well take a different attitude. I also find, from experience, that the higher end tools often use higher end parts (e.g. blades) than cheaper modern tools. By the time you have fettled a modern Stanley or Record, upgraded the blade to a Clifton of something, sharpened and honed it, and adjusted it all perfectly, you have wasted half the weekend and not saved an enormous amount. Horses for courses I guess.

 

[ED65]

a "needs a lot of fettling" tool that may have potential for high quality (or maybe not).

Yes unfortunately there is an element of luck involved when you buy cheap or cheaper.

The issue is whether or not you value the time put into fettling and peripherally whether resale value matters. In my non-woodwork day job I can earn far more in the time it takes me to fettle a plane properly, than I will save by buying a cheap tool and spending hours sorting it out.

That's a fair point, one which others have made before you, but the "hours sorting it out" is somewhat of a red herring as anything so badly out that it needs more than an hour (two?) of work to be a user should really be returned as unfit for use. The last cheap plane I bought new took just about 10 minutes to put into service.

By the time you have fettled a modern Stanley or Record, upgraded the blade to a Clifton of something, sharpened and honed it, and adjusted it all perfectly, you have wasted half the weekend and not saved an enormous amount. Horses for courses I guess.

How long is your weekend?? :mrgreen: Anyway, see previous point.

Also, there is no need to drop in a replacement blade to make a modern plane a viable user. The improvement in performance is nearly entirely about sharpening frequency, not at the steel-meets-wood end (with apologies to people working with the hardest of hardwoods, but they're unlikely to be relevant to this discussion anyway ).

 

[DiscoStu]

Well I popped into Axminster today and did as some of you suggested and bought the Veritas Low Angle block plane. I had a go with it, the Rider and the Lie Nielson and just fell for the Veritas.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk