Choosing & Buying a Combination Plane for Woodworking

last group of planes we're going to talk about our combination planes or universal planes [Music] Stanly designed this plane a pair of planes of 45 and the 55 to be what they call the universal plan it should replace essentially all other planes in the shop and do all the different duties of plane hat and for that reason they provided these planes with a variety of cutters and you can see for example here are the basic cutters for a stanley 45 included beating tongue and groove sash a slitter plow plane and data plane irons and a moving Phillips to iron in addition they also made a set of special cutters here and I think that included weeds and beads and molding shapes the stanley 55 had as many as about a hundred different kinds of cutters for the plane Roy Underhill not too long ago this spring has written an article about comparing the functionality of the 45 for the 55 with each of the planes it was meant to replace a dado tongue-in-groove of a piece of molding plane of beading plane and so on and so forth the reality is what's really the case is these planes work well to do these individual tasks but translating back and forth is a little bit cumbersome and reality is using a dedicated plane is a lot quickly just pick it up I I use maybe two beads in my work a couple different moldings one tongue-and-groove that covers everything that might be in this plane here so there are advantages and disadvantages to having these intervals of planes however they're they're quite popular and they I would say they represent the very peak of ingenuity about hand tool design and for that reason are a very attractive plane to oh and I have both 45 and 55 plus special cutters and I'm very happy to have them but do I use them very often no I do not I would say 90% of the time I use a stanley 45 is too ploud groove a quarter-inch wide groove quarter inch in from the edge and 3/8 inch down that's it so it's great as a plow plane a couple other companies made plow planes craftsmen Ward I think Miller made plow planes and so we have different different examples here they're all basically based on the same concept here when you look at these this plane here and you look at the various features there are some things that you definitely want to look for to make sure that they're there first of all you should have a fence and that's this part right here it's got a wooden surface on it so the fence can be moved in or out this particular plane came with different arms for the fence so you could have the cutter way far into a board or right up at the very edge you might want it far in if you're cutting a dado for example so a fence it had a pair of skates and you want both skates the skates provide support for the iron you remember on the tongue and groove and the plow planes the skates actually had a groove in the back that rested on the on the groove on the iron here so they made it together here there are no grooves but the iron does rest right on the skates and so there's a right and left skate here depending on how wide the iron is you can be using so you want that your noise also this skate has cut knickers on them so if you're cutting dedos or cross-grain work that's very important to have these knickers and there's one on this side on this skate and if you could look over here you would see over here there's knickers here as well and you see this the typical three part nikkor right here so it's not in use right now the four spaces for the unused nikkor and then you have three options for using that over the lifetime the tool so skates and knickers so that's important here's the adjustment mechanism for the iron you see it's a screw adjust you release it by releasing this screw and then you can advance or retract the iron and the irons have little slots let me just take one out here and you can take a look at this the irons have little slots at the very front top edge here which catch into a pin right here so that allows the iron to be pulled forward and backwards like that and then you can lock that back down just go ahead and put this in here so we need a adjustment mechanism for the iron the skates the fence depth stop so here's depth stop release right here and then adjustment right there and that's always good there's another depth stop in the back that's quite useful to keep the plane on this on the same level a few out there so there are a lot of a lot of things to look for on these planes that can be a little bit confusing and overwhelming when you first look at one of these we're gonna try and break this down and use this plane to cut maybe three or four simple types of joints so you can see how the plane to be set up for different operations we'll do that just a little bit later and I think that will give you a good idea of the range of functionality that this Universal plane had so we'll look forward to that this is Joshua Farnsworth if you're interested in woodworking with a mix of hand tools and power tools visit my website at wood and shop comm where you can find a bunch of free woodworking lessons workshop towards of amazing woodworkers and our very popular tool buying guides you can ask questions and share your projects with thousands of woodworkers on my forums enjoy

Channel: Wood and Shop

Views: 19,489

Rating: 4.9541283 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, traditional woodworking, roy underhill, woodwright's shop, chris schwarz, lie-nielsen, hand planes, hand saws, chisels, workshop, stanley, stanley tools, combination planes, universal planes

Id: pWe9LpD2v1M

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2020