Hi everyone,

The only two planes I own at the moment are a LN low angle jack plane and a LN adjustable mouth block plane.

I am also currently building my workbench (a roubo in douglas fir). I managed to use the jack plane to plane the faces of the boards well enough to laminate up the top with everything flush. I am now working on flattening the top. It has been quite a learning experience and I have now come to realize why it might be a good idea to own more than one plane, and to that end I am trying to figure what planes to buy.

The jack plane isn't the most convenient to use to flatten such a large surface (the straightedge is becoming my most used tool!) so I was thinking that I would get a LN #7 for jointing. The bevel up also doesn't seem like the best tool to use as a fore plane either, so I was thinking about getting a cheap stanley bailey #5 or #6 to handle this task (since it will just be for rough work I didn't think a LN would be necessary here). I would then use the jack plane I have as a smoothing plane, and for shooting end grain etc. I hope this sounds like a good plan?

So what I want to know is what you guys think would be more useful to me as a fore plane... either a #5 or a #6? I am having a hard time deciding. Oh, and I am not interested in wooden planes at the moment :-).

Thanks so much!