Originally Posted by
David Keller NC
Hmm - Well, I maintain that this isn't a situation of "I can't afford it". There's a microscopically small group of people that are interested in woodworking that actually cannot afford a Veritas or a L-N plane, the vast majority just don't want to afford it.
There is a simple calculation that anyone can do that cuts all discussion of this point off at the knees - specifically, if you cannot afford $300 for a L-N or a L-V plane, then you cannot afford any of the materials that are required to make almost any piece of furniture, musical instrument, picture frames, or just about any other woodworking anything. So the basics are - if you really can't afford a L-N, you really can't afford to do woodworking, period. The only exception is some unbelievably basic sort of niche woodworking activities like spoon carving, small toy whittling, and rustic chair building, which require a very, very limited set of tools.
And much of the "I don't want to afford a (LN/LV) plane" is driven by an inappropriate calculation about what a woodworking handtool should cost - a smoothing plane actually should cost about $300, and that's on the low end. Anything much below this price point is not really a smoothing plane - it's a smoothing plane shaped object. And I've learned this the hard way after having (and getting rid of) multiple late-manufacture Record, Stanley, Groz and even Clifton planes.
The only reason that you can acquire a plane that is actually a plane for quite a bit less than a LN/LV is that we've a unique sitatuation in history during our lifetime - the technology change to high-speed automation for most materials that go into a house, and the furniture that adorns most houses, means that there are many hundreds of thousands of fewer people that can use or need a good plane. And since this has been a comparitively recent change - within the last 100 years, there are hundreds of thousands of very high quality hand tools laying around waiting for someone to tune them up and use them. And even then, the new high quality manufacturers' products pretty much blow away the antiques (and I use both).
So a word of finality - to those that continue to insist that it must be possible and even noble to manufacture a very high quality handplane that's a superb user out of the box for far less than a LN or a Veritas, puhleeze stop. You're wasting your money on a fool's errand, and it puts inappropriate pressure on the good manufacturers to cut corners to lower costs - you're going to ruin it for the rest of us!