I was over at my buddie Derrick's place on Friday. He recently built a very large two story garage/shop and he finally has gotten some of his collection moved in. I had never seen any of his stuff before but he has been collecting for over 40 years and is an avid collector of antique and vintage tools, farm implements, etc. He has 100's of hand planes and i was able to see only a very small fraction of what he has. He has so many that he said he was going to set me up with a complete set of Stanley's because he has so many of them......... So we were just browsing around different areas of his shop and he was randomly picking out stuff for me to look at. Then we go into the basement and I see some planes sitting on a shelf. These are planes he has not had a chance to restore yet but they looked different than the regular run of the mill Stanley's. The thing I noticed was that one of them had a square shaped tote and I thought that was unusual. So I pulled out the three planes and he started telling me what they were. The first one was small block plane that he said was a Birmingham. It was pretty dirty but he said it was worth a lot just like the other two. The second one was the square tote model. It was a Spiers plane and he said that it was worth a boat load. The third one I thought was very cool because of it's size. It was very small but the same shape and configuration of a Stanley #4 but smaller. It too was a Stiers and that one too was supposed to be worth a lot of money. I didn't really care about how much they were worth but just thought they were very interesting and cool to hold. The smaller Stiers also had a metal and wooden base which was something I had never seen before. I admittedly don't know much about planes or old tools like he does but I do appreciate their history and the careful craftsmanship that went into making these a very long time ago. I would love to hear what the real hand tool guy's think of these planes as I really don't know anything about them other than what Derrick told me.
Here is the little Birmingham block plane