I joined SMC recently and this is my first post in the Neanderthal Haven forum. My wife was in Denver over Thanksgiving and her uncle hearing that I was into woodworking gave her to give to me a Stanley 54. It belonged to his father-in-law who was stationed at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th 1941. After the war he built movie sets for one of the Hollywood movie studios. Anyway, my wife's uncle also sent along a note with the history part which I thought was really cool. He also gave me an un-marked rabbeting plane and a Yankee drill.

It is kind of funny - this summer I was working out of town and decided to hone my hand-working skills. I built Mike Peckovitch's tool chest using only hand tools (I did take a skill saw for cutting lumber to rough length). I had to plough a lot of grooves and dadoes and ending up using my router plane. The router plane worked fine but this plane would have been super handy.

The 54 came with 4 blades (unfortunately not 1/4" but I am not complaining).

I am getting ready to sharpen the lot of them. It looks like the bedding angle is 45 degrees, and the blades were sharpened at a 35 degree angle.

My question - for ploughing grooves in hardwood wouldn't 25-30 degrees make more sense?

Thanks in advance for input.

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Kris