Originally Posted by
Robert Hazelwood
Fairly soon I should be able to see if this comparison holds true for me; I recently acquired my first premium plane, a LN #4. I have a couple of other premium specialty planes, but my bench planes have all been vintage Stanley so far- #4, #5-1/2, and a #7. I've spent a lot of time getting these in shape (mostly trial-and-error and messing around, since these were my first real planes) and I've got them working pretty sweetly. I can confirm what others have said about the chipbreaker enabling these planes to work difficult grain; honestly, I don't even think about grain direction much when planing anymore- except for the 5-1/2, where blade camber prevents the chipbreaker from getting very close to the edge. These planes work very well for what I might call functional planing- getting a board to dimension, squaring an edge up, removing pencil/tool marks, etc. But I still have some slight troubles with my Stanley 4 in taking very fine, full-width shavings for finishing a surface. And, at random times it leaves inexplicable plane tracks, despite my having rounded and cambered the iron, and even rounding the corners of the chipbreaker. On occasion I will resort to smoothing with the #7 as it just seems to work better despite having no camber and sharp corners- I can't really explain it.
So I bought the LN #4 specifically to use for these very fine smoothing cuts. (Which, presumably, cured the problem? Interesting...) I figure the Stanley will still see a lot of use, just left to a slightly coarser setting. This should reduce the amount of fiddling with setups, and reduce the amount of sharpening for each blade. I still need to do the final prep work on the LN's blade, and then I guess I'll see if there's anything magical about the premium plane, or if setting for very fine shavings is just fiddly business in general...