When I recently bought an 8 inch jointer through C/L, the seller (a really nice guy), threw in some freebies.
One was a mystery plane (well, to me), that I had no idea about, but was fascinated by because of the "weird-to-me" mounting of the frog. There were two "top-side" (locking???) screws (along with the familiar frog-adjusting screw), that I'd never seen before (I'm mostly a Stanley guy: all I can afford lol).
It wasn't until I cleaned it up (light rust, mostly ...it cleaned up quite nicely tho': see pix) that I saw it had been engraved on both sides and the plane iron with "Zenith" and "M.W.H. Co. Trade Mark" ...it's a pretty spiffy insignia, actually. The only other marks are "409" on "414" on the under-side of the lever cap. It's about a Stanley No. 5 in size (maybe a bit smaller?), but I haven't measured it's dimensions.
I found a few online references that the "M.W.H. Co." part referred to the old Marshall Wells Hardware Company (interesting note: M.W.H. Co. had a major warehouse locally here in Spokane), so that part of the mystery was solved.
But I haven't found much of anything about the plane itself ...if this is a collectible for someone, I don't want to screw with it any further. Otherwise, it goes into "user" rotation (and no, I haven't used it yet: we still aren't totally moved in, so my work-shop is still mostly a plan lol).
Any thoughts, comments, pointers would be appreciated. (I have a ton more pix if you think it would help.) TIA.
01 Plane side view.jpg 02 Lever cap markings.jpg 03 Frog screw.jpg 04 Insignia.jpg 05 Adjustment screw.jpg