Buying Used Hand Planes- What to LOOK for !

if you're new to woodworking and are looking to buy a used hand plane or just want to build up your collection well we're gonna tell you what to look for before you buy hello folks my name is Chad Stanton and before we get going on today's video I do want to thank wood craft for sponsoring today's episode wood crafts goal is helping you make wood work now I gotta say as a professional furniture maker I use the wood craft wood River number four and a half hand plane now this is a really nice hand plane but it does require an investment of some money to purchase it and if you're just starting off in woodworking you may not want to drop that much money so I would suggest on getting a good used hand plane so as you can see I have a rather large collection of hand planes I have over 200 altogether so I do think I know a little bit on this subject however I'm gonna ask my good friend and mentor Dennis Laney to join us Dennis has over 60 years experience as a furniture maker he also is a hand tool enthusiast so I think he has a little bit of knowledge on this topic now this video is mostly just gonna focus on Stanley metal body hand planes so with that being said let's get into our first discussion on what to look for so Dennis how about you walk us through the first part tell us what it is that you would do in looking at purchasing a hand plane the purpose most guys are looking for Stanley style planes and they can range they can be you know a full cast-iron plane it could be a transitional plane yeah yeah right the theory being that you know these were gonna be somewhat lighter they take a little more abuse they weren't so subject to breakage when we talk about breakage we generally talk about cast-iron planes as you can see this has got a couple of breaks on it here now is that affect this I mean is that something should be concerned about if I'm going to be wanting to buy this hand play no I don't think so I would look and see again for any any fractures and a lot of people think that because this is a metal plane if it drops it will Bend well this is cast iron and it does not Bend very well it'll bend a little bit just like that they're typically cast iron fractures and that's why with this this damage that you have here the cheek of the plane and on the tail of the plane you can see these probably are drops now I've seen some before that they've probably been dropped and they cracked and they put a weld on it would that still be usable if there is a welded or a brazed repair that could indeed change the flatness of the plane - yeah that would be the only time that I would really be concerned about that and the other thing is when you see that there's a welder to repair or a bridge repair you want to look at all the areas especially around the mouth to see if those fracture lines go through haven't been addressed okay okay but again this is a perfectly good user plane so the first thing you want to do is make sure that everything all the different parts are appropriate many times you'll see planes that have been put together in it by a composite of parts and they will kind of fit but if they don't fit exactly because these are all machine to be very precise if they don't fit exactly a you'll have a great deal of difficulty getting the performance you want out of the plane so look at all the parts ie this is a low nob plane this the way this frog sits in here is machined on this very specific way so you want to make sure that everything goes together properly the next thing is to take a look at the iron irons more often than not or only he treated so far up once you get past the area that it's heat treated you can't sharpen it anymore but it's just basically soft metal the other thing you want to do is make sure that everything is a pro again the irons are appropriate there are a lot of aftermarket irons that will actually improve the performance of the plane many times guys will take and be used the wrong iron in a plane before I forget about it this is a corrugated sole and you'll see an awful lot of family planes with corrugated soles I have a lot of them if they're much more common than a flat sole the one thing you want to be careful of when using these you can get a lot of little Nicks and dings in so you want to make sure that those are smooth and you can clean them up with a file well what was the purpose of this the the theory behind this is is that when you're planing especially something that's real dense like a cherry that it relieves friction so it's not a bad idea but the problem is especially on smoothing planes is that if you get a little bit of a clog of chips you get waxed any kind of dirt buildup in these corrugations they'll leave a little mark on your face so for the most part looking at this one as an example you would say it's complete and as a working hand plane not a collecting one this will do the job oh yeah it appears to be that it appears to be fine you're getting pretty close down here in the end you're gonna have to replace that iron over too long but it's certainly workable the other thing is the lever cap you there are some differences in the lever caps from series to series and you want to make sure that you have a lever cap that's appropriate for two reasons number one that if you're looking at it from a collectors point of view you want them to be complete but is sometimes lever caps from one series will not fit another so they won't secure correctly sometimes they're longer from where they anchor the iron and they sit back on the on the hold down screw okay so sometimes they just that they appear to fit but if they don't fit they'll that they can many times perfect the performance of the play like it could chatter and that is that leave marks on and not give you shavings exactly right alright so that's that's a Stanley number five here's a stanley number seven oh what do you think about this one okay well this you've you've got a good fine here for a user I mean this is a it doesn't look that great it's got some it's got some light surface rusting on it and and going back and rusting I don't get real concerned about rust even pitted rust my theory is that there's a little bit of pitting on the sole it's actually going to serve a purpose of relieving friction just like the corrugations do now what about if you got a rust on the iron the bleed is that a concern you know as long as it's not as long as it's not pitted to the point that you can't sharpen you know their home the iron but some surface pitting on it it doesn't that that's a really okay especially for a user what's interesting about this plane as I mentioned to you earlier it's not corrugated I personally when I can find smooth old planes I'll stick with them okay I again many times what will happen to is if you're shooting a chamfer you can get stuck in that the corrugations and so it can make it difficult to use the body of this plane is in very very good condition but just looking at the rest of this the lever cap that look it three rough it is and it appears to be it appears to possibly be correct it's been painted which would have been not if not done but what's really bad about this is this has been damaged so you'll never get this to seat properly and the way it was damaged is someone assumed that this was going to be a screw that you are screwdriver that you could put down here and adjust this hold downs because that helps keep the tension on the lever captain I right yeah so because once these are set typically you don't have to mess with them exactly but this guy and you should be able to and this one will move with your fingers you should you should really shouldn't need unless it gets dirty you should be never a need to really go in here and use a screwdriver on this okay this is virtually useless at this point this is just pot metal and when they get broken like this again they the problem is they don't hold the iron down as it should and if it if it does have enough meat in the backside to hold the iron down chips get underneath your now your clogs the control arm won't perform well right this is the irons interesting number one the iron itself but the chip breaker appears to be original to the plane but the iron itself is too narrow yeah he's gonna say it looks smaller yeah and interestingly enough the iron was made by Miller's Falls and it says that it's a two and a quarter inch which would be fitting for an old-style five and a half or a miller's falls plane the iron even looks bent if I'm not mistaken yeah there's a there's a bow and Curson there certainly yeah I think you see it on the camera but there certainly as somebody really I'm not really sure how that was meant to perform it looks like what was happening is something must have been not engaging up here and it looks like somebody bent it back gotcha yeah my weight ladder that might explain why the lateral adjuster was was getting on this iron as well these are pretty easy to remove this is just a little friction pin that holds us in place okay and you could bend this back up and straight into action once you have an appropriate iron here and by the way even from a collector's point of view if you can if you could find the parts of the appropriate parts because the body is in such good condition you know and that would be worth reviving and really restoring the the tote the the this this the front screw the hold down screw is out of is missing and it's in good shape except the horn is gone a lot of people would ask well do you really need that horn well believe me the horn helps because it gives you forward thrust on the plane instead of actually air down so once again a handle to replace this not only will help the value of it but it's also gonna help it perform absolutely alright so not too bad of a purchase there as long as you paid no more than 15 dollars for yes now ones of ones if you get something like this I mean this has got plastic on it I mean it obviously this is a newer hand plane it's not old would it be worth well having most most collectors and most hand plane users would look at this and their usual reaction to be but that's just that that's a handyman version you know it was a very inexpensive plane when it was made it was made for incidental use it wasn't made as a daily user but you know I look at that and I tell people you know there's absolutely nothing wrong with this plane you know it doesn't have a rosewood knob or tote but on the other hand this is not broken so many totes are broken but just looking at this plane you know it offers it's made like every other Bailey sail plane it has a lever cap it has a chip breaker and an iron and it also has a frog that has the ability to move four and so just real quick on that I know in another video we're gonna talk about tuning these up but the ability to move that frog forward makes the difference between if you want to remove big shavings to do a lot of removal versus real fine finished smoothie exactly and and we want to talk about this at greater length in the future I think but a lot of people are under the impression after reading a lot of things in magazines and online that somehow the chipbreaker itself controls the fineness of the shaving and that's not true it's the it's the it's the mouth opening itself which controls that and we can get into that a little bit in the future but so this is a perfectly good user plain guarantee in in about 15 minutes we could have this plane being capable of taking off well let's set that guy aside we'll do that for another video yeah so this is probably an ideal plane for someone who's just starting and woodworking maybe he doesn't have a lot of money not sure if they want to do hand tools yeah this is a great one to start I would say so yep I know I noticed you're moving the knob on that so you on any of these you want to make sure all the mechanical memorize ohms are free and and not stuck yeah and these and we can use this you can see that this is that this is the depth control knob right here and there's a little yoke and this is common throughout all of this style plane you want to make sure that that's moot that can be moved sometimes they'll be they'll be frozen all you need is a little bit of penetrating oil to open them up but you want to make sure that that's capable of movement it's very typical if these yolks will be broken so you want to make sure that that's not broken but yeah you want the adjusters to be wreak a so as you can tell Dennis has a wealth of knowledge on the subject matter and that was just a condensed version of the video if you'd like to see the full length video you can click in the description box for a link to that now I'm thinking about breaking the rest of that video up into smaller videos that's easier to watch for time sake and Dennis goes on to talk about transitional hand planes which is half wood in half metal as well as he talks about what to look for in buying just wooden planes so if you would like to see shorter versions of that video I'll go ahead and leave some comments in the comment section below I'm also thinking if you all are enjoying this series I would like to go on and tell you where I buy my hand planes what to look for what to look out for so again if this is a topic that interests you just go ahead and state your comments below and of course as always if you have any questions regarding woodworking in your shop feel free to write me at which happened time at gmail.com because the whole purpose of my show is to make you a better woodworker until next time thanks so much for watching and keep on dancing [Music] you

Channel: Chad Stanton

Views: 4,367

Rating: 4.9111109 out of 5

Keywords: chad stanton, dennis laney, hand planes, handplanes, hand plane, used planes, used hand planes, how to buy a used hand plane, what to look for whan buying used, used tools, looking for used tools, used tools for sale, woodworking plans, buy used tools, used woodworking tools, beginners, tools, beginners tools, stanley planes, stanley hand planes, stanley planes for sale

Id: B3uqmN_HndM

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019