starting a collection of hand planes

[Chris Hachet]

First of all, this place is amazing with all the information everyone provided! And I updated my profile to put brooklyn! 

hmmm I think I'm gonna go the route of buying vintage Stanley's. Mainly just the thought of working with vintage tools and only using hand tools seem to go hand in hand. they won't be too expensive and I do have to buy some sort of sharpener and that seems expensive. Since I'm still in school and work on a limited budget. When I run into more money I can venture into lie nelsen and veritas. The wood river still seems like too much if I buy all 3. I'll just practice with the vintages and go from there.
I was reading through the faq page and someone restored their vintage tools with a buffer. I'm I don't have a buffer what else do you guys recommend?

sounds really interesting! Maybe if I have the chance to go upstate I'll visit the showcase but seems a little far fetched.

What years do you recommend for the vintages on the 4,5,7. After I get used to these 3, I'll try to figure out what else I need!

for the Bench I may just use power tools for that or I was thinking of buying the black and decker stand and use that as my temporary bench. For a nyc apartment my place is a pretty good size. The living room will fit a dining table and the work bench. No sofa tho. But never even had one in nyc!

You might want to check out the Moravian workbench built at the wood-wrights school. Google it. It disassembles in less than a minute, has a nifty leg vise, and could serve you for life.

You are smart if you budget for sharpening items. Would rather have a good sharpening system with pre war Stanley planes than expensive planes with no good way to sharpen them.

Chris

[James Ziegler]

For vintage tools, you might try to see if you can go to a MWTCA (mid-west tool collector's association) meet. I attended my first one last summer, and there were lots of good tools available, and pricing was reasonable.

http://www.mwtca.org/tool-meets.html

Unfortunately, none look like they would be terribly easy to get to from Brooklyn.

For a sharpening setup, being in Brooklyn, you have a good source nearby, and the staff there should be knowledgable. You should try to make a trip to Tools For Working Wood, which has a warehouse/showroom in Brooklyn. They make some great tools.

Also, for a starting bench, you might look into the DVD (or download) from Lost Art Press "The Naked Woodworker". He puts together an very usable bench from inexpensive home center materials. And the other DVD in the set talks about buying and fixing up vintange tools. Chris Schwartz modified it into a knock-down design in his blog.

[Bob Jones]

Another vote for the naked woodworker DVD.
LN planes are great. So are tuned up Stanleys. The bevel up planes are popular with consumers, but the bevel down are better

between these two options are stanleys that have been tuned by knowledgeable users. They come up for sale here and other forums regularly. I would highly recommend that option if you can't afford the LN. And if you only buy one from LN, I suggest a 4 or 3 for smoothing. That's the most difficult to tune perfectly. Good luck!

[Mike Cogswell]

I have an embarrassingly large number of planes, the majority vintage, as well as Lie Nielsen, Lee Valley and Woodriver modern planes. LN and LV make top quality products that are a joy to use and both have outstanding quality and customer service. But for someone just starting out, you may want to reconsider and get at least one good quality new plane while you learn and hone your reconditioning skills. The Woodriver 4 is an outstanding bargain at its list price and goes on sale fairly often. I got mine for 30% off. I have both a Woodriver and a LN, and don't hesitate to recommend the Woodriver, especially if you can go to a woodworking show and get one on sale.

If you get a 4 and 7, you will probably wish you had a good block plane instead of a 5. Unless all you are doing is flattening and jointing you'll find many uses for a block plane.

[Kent A Bathurst]

Two cents from an electron burner - - I have hand planes, but they don't rule my life. So - I might have a different perspective.

I'd look at something like this: #3, #4-1/2, and the LA jack mentioned earlier.

To me - there is not a big enough size difference between the 3 and the 4 to make a lot of difference, and the 3 size is very easy to use for a lot of things - kind of a "tweener" size. I seem to grab it all the time. I had the #3 first, and since I liked it so much, that led me to skip the 4 in favor of the 4-1/2.

You really need some kind of block plane - any style is better than none. Ideal for me is a low-angle rabbet block - you can do anything with that sucker.

And - since I don't really get wrapped up too much in the neander things, I did not want to invest my time learning how to restore/fettle. I'm in the LN camp. But I do have a couple LN tools, like the scraper plane.

[John Sanford]

Can a galoot in the NYC area step up and offer the OP an in-person introduction to sharpening and hand planes? Sure, a L-N event would be great, but when is the next one in the area? Finding old planes and bringing them back to life can be great, but without any sense of reference, it can be very frustrating.

[Judson Green]

I used one of these along time ago. Might tide you over till you can build yourself a real woodworking bench. Your local BORG store - black n decker workmate.

1d5a4267-1f19-4515-b3ff-f7f919c1d81f_300.jpg


For a beginner to sharping you might find the Paul Sellers approach to be a good starting point. No power grinders, no jigs, just 3 moderately priced diamond stones. I've the stones from EZE-lap, 3 × 8", model 81.

[Peter Choi]

About to pick up the 4,5,7 on ebay. I'm thinking of using oil stones. I'll check out that shop in brooklyn. And see which oil stones they recommend. And after that a block plane.

Im just going to build my bench. My friends going to get me into a woodshop at pratt and I'll rip and joint them there.

[Robert Hazelwood]

My $0.02:

I agree with the general consensus that for basic stock dimensioning you'd want a smoother (3 or 4), a jack/fore (5, 5-1/2, or 6), and a jointer/try (7 or 8).

I would get the smoother first. It can be used for more than smoothing, and you can basically do everything with it if you needed. It's normally the most-used size of plane. Overall, I don't think it matters much whether you go new or vintage; as long as you buy decent quality they all work about as well. But I do think there is a case for buying at least one new, premium plane (Veritas or Lie-Nielsen, basically) when you're starting out. This is because you can get it up and running quickly, and then you can see how a properly setup plane works. If you have problems using the premium plane, then you know it's something you've done- usually your sharpening, or the way you're approaching the wood. You'll know the issue isn't with an out of flat sole, a flexing blade, or what have you. I haven't found that those are actually serious problems for vintage planes, but when I was starting out and getting a bad cut, I wasn't sure. It's always tempting to blame the tool.

Once you have some experience eliminating the initial problems, you can translate that to a vintage plane. I did this backwards. I started out with vintage planes, and fussed around for a while. They normally worked well, but occasionally I'd have issues with chatter, tearout, etc. I eventually learned to deal with these by getting a bit better at sharpening, learning to take a thinner shaving (I would always get impatient and increase the depth of cut, but there is only so much you can plane off without it being a struggle), waxing the sole (a huge improvement), setting the chipbreaker correctly, and generally improving my technique (modulating pressure at the start and end of cut, skewing the plane, etc.). Note that these are issues you would still have with the finest plane ever made, but at the time I was tempted to fiddle with the tools. Basically my learning curve was a little longer than it might have been. Although I did learn a lot of useful things.

I only got my LN #4 after using the vintage ones for a year or so. I wanted to have at least one, and wanted to see how much better (if at all) it would be compared to my vintage planes. Honestly, after refining my approach and technique, there is not really much difference in use. I use the Bailey 4 and the LN 4 interchangeable, grabbing whichever one is sharper at the moment. Subjectively, the LN feels more solid, but I also like the Bailey's lightness.

So, I might recommend getting a premium #4 or #3, and get the other two vintage. A smoother is where the higher manufacturing precision would pay off the most, in theory, and it will be used more than the others. It would even get used if you decided dimensioning by hand was for the birds and you did everything by machine- smoothing out planer marks with a plane is way better than sanding. And you could always sell it for a good price if it came to that.

That said, there's nothing wrong with going all vintage if you have a bit of aptitude and willingness to fix things (none of mine required much work at all really). I just think it's a good idea to have a known "good" tool to use as a reference.

Anyways, best of luck. -Robert

[Jeffrey Martel]

About to pick up the 4,5,7 on ebay. I'm thinking of using oil stones. I'll check out that shop in brooklyn. And see which oil stones they recommend. And after that a block plane.

Im just going to build my bench. My friends going to get me into a woodshop at pratt and I'll rip and joint them there.

For what it's worth, for now I've been sharpening with just sandpaper and a granite tile. It works quite well so far, but you do have to go out and buy new sandpaper every so often. I use grits up to 2000, and then have green honing compound on a leather strop to finish up with.

[Winton Applegate]

Buy one good plane rather than a few wannabes or could have beens.
If I could have one plane, that would do an entire project, this is what I would reach for. Or you could get a quality #4 but I can do much more with the former, faster, with less fooling around and I don't have to dig around for the screws on the frog of the #4 to convert it from rough planing to finish planing.
Forget the #7s . . . I have two of those and can easily get by with out either. See the photo of the stack of planes. I could do without all of those if I had to
but
I wouldn't WANT to do without the Varitas bevel up smoother. I could do with a narrower one in place of this wide one, easily, but one or the other is a must for me.

Also a must is a good, long(ish) straight edge which I need anyway even with the long planes.
Do not underestimate that Varitas plane. I bought everything else first, piles of planes, then I bought the Varitas. Brilliant performer and highly versatile.

As far as a collection the next plane I would get would be the scrub plane that is on top of the heap of planes in the photo. You may not even need that from the sound of the prepared lumber you mentioned. The scrub it a must for taking rougher planks down to flatten them or dimension them.
The next plane I would recommend would be a router plane or other specialty plane maybe a shoulder plane or rabbet plane.

[Jamie Cowan]

4,5 and 7 are a good start. Buy an old Stanley (WWII or earlier) on ebay, probably a #4. It will need work. That is good. You will learn more by making an old but good plane into a workable user than you by buying any new plane. A Lie-Nielsen is ready to use out of the box, but you don't really learn anything, The first time you need to sharpen that blade, or adjust the cut depth, you'll wish you knew more about planes in general. A good, old plane is a great learning experience. Sure, the blade is kind of thin on old planes compared to the new stuff, but you learn a lot in making them into users.