Wood River planes mn65 steel blades

[ian maybury]

Must say that while i've no axe to grind (beyond that it'd be terrible if cost cutting and our inability to resist a cheap deal was to drive good quality product off the market as happened before) that it'd be nice to see more posts setting out actual user experience with mid range and similar planes, and with the MN65 (which from the metallurgy seems like it should be able to deliver a pretty decent edge?) and the other steels used in them.

The nominal specification/labelling is one thing, but the achievement of consistency of quality seems likely to be the real challenge/acid test of a maker and a fairly complex matter in the case of something like a plane.

Stuff like accuracy of composition/recipe of the steels, control of the casting, forging, rolling etc processes by which the parts are formed, stress relieving, accuracy of heat treatment, precision of machining, heat input during machining and sharpening etc etc all have the potential to make or break a given example of a product.

Chances are that when it comes to producing a mid range product to a high standard of quality that it may be that much of the cost and many of issues lie in some of the above - which presumably have fairly major implications for the choice of the suppliers, manufacturing processes, skills and systems used. Corner cutting could mean quite a degree of variation in quality between examples of a given make and model - the sort of thing that has tended to be a feature of low cost machine and tool imports.

On the commercial side of the equation. Given that competition of this sort is a fact of life the likes of Lee Valley and Lie Nielsen (the high end plane makers) will be very aware that they need to take care. In that while there presumably will always be a market for premium kit, it's important that the functional ability and quality of the product remains sufficient to differentiate it from the mid range stuff in the eyes of a sufficiently large segment to generate the income needed to support what they do.

If in order to chase volume they were to drop to relatively lower prices they could find themselves threatened by the emerging mid range guys. In that it could compromise their ability to maintain the required quality/product differentiation. It'd get messy too if the mid range guys turned out to be able to make the required quality off a lower cost base, or that the premium guys couldn't maintain a recognised advantage in performance/quality to justify their pricing.

The strength of the brands would help initially, but would eventually leak away .....

ian