Comparison Between Stanley 45 and Stanley 55

heyo I'm James right welcome to my shop today I've got something a little special I've had a lot of people asking about the Stanley 45 and the Stanley 55 they're both really amazing planes they have a lot of bells and whistles and screws and slides and knobs and twiddles and this that and the other thing but other than looking really cool on your shelf are they actually useful in a shop and the answer is yes but the stanley 45 is a little simpler and the stanley 55 is a little more complicated and what are some of the differences between them what can they do and what can't they do so come along and let's take a look at it so let's start with the stanley number 45 this was the the first major combination plane that Stanley came out with there's also a stanley 46 i think it is and a few other little odds and ends of stanley 50 but the 45 is by far the most common you can generally get this one on ebay for about $45 in the united states shipping included you can find them at different places around usually around 40 to 50 dollars it's a going place a going price for one that needs a little work but it's still in usable condition then you can get a full set of iron's for it basically this is designed to replace a lot of your old wooden planes so in this case we have a bunch of straight cutters all the way from 1/8 inch up to one inch and then we have beads from 1/8 inch to I believe this one's a half-inch and then we have a sash iron and this will actually make window sash which is kind of a really cool feature for this iron so we'll get into that here man you can also get a lot of other cutters and any of the cutters for the stanley 55 will fit the 45 at least the newer model 45s any of the 45s that have this little notch you can see in the blade so some of the uses for the Stanley 45 number one a grooving plane you can make a groove with any one of these cuts from 1/8 inch up to 1 inch and make it in any depth you basically want up to the depth of the ski at some point it starts running into the hardware which is 3/4 of an inch so that's most every groove you're going to want to make is within 3/4 of an inch you can also do beading and because you can slide the fence away from the rail you can actually put beads in up to eight inches away from your cut into the board and that is extremely useful for doing bead board you can also cut tongue and groove with a tonguing iron and this is actually one that's designed to fit with I believe this one yeah that one right there and so you can cut groove with this and a tongue with that another use for the Stanley 45 is you can put in a slitting cutter and it can actually become a slitting plane and basically what that does is it will cut thin stock material but it will do it without leaving a kerf so you can theoretically put those pieces back together or if you need to actually make a cut without a kerf this is sometimes useful I've seen it used in a few box items I honestly never used a cutter for the.45 but if you need it it's there so along with grooves you can also do dedos if you look very closely here there's actually a slit ER or a nikkor that you can rotate and put in the ski so that it will actually just barely stick out and it will Nick the fibers ahead of the iron that will allow you to cut cross grain without tearing out as you go along and there's actually a nikkor on both sides though this one is a little harder to see I don't know if you can see in there so the stanley 45 basically has three main parts and you can put them together in different configurations it has the Maine skate which the handle is attached to it has a secondary skate which can slide on google that on and that can provide a secondary support to the iron now the fence on the 45 has two different holes it has a lower hole and a higher hole if you put it in the lower hole this allows you to slide the fence right up to the iron so you could cut a rabbit and this would then slide right along the edge of the wood and the iron would cut all the way to the all the way to the side but you can also slide it into the higher hole and this then allows you to go past the iron and you can then cut a thinner rabbit with a larger iron so rather than using a smaller iron you can use the larger iron to cut immediately up to the fence rather than pushing this up against the iron so that's about it for the 45 there's a few other bits and bobs and things you can put onto it and I can really go into it a lot deeper but for right now I'm just going to be showing a lot of the differences between the 45 and the 55 but the 55 has several other features number one the most obvious is that it has a second fence it doesn't have this front nob and I I rarely use that front nob I end up finding myself grabbing it somewhere else and so I really like being able to grab the fence it allows you a much better control over its twisting and turning but the other neat thing about the fence is that these can actually rotate and they can slide to 45 degrees and this allows you to then run up the corner of a beam so you can actually put this on a beam and put a bead running down the beam or you could use it as the second big feature that the 55 has that the 45 does not have is that the second skate can actually adjust up and down so I can loosen this knob and this knob and then I can actually adjust that skate to slide up and down the iron now any time you're using a straight iron that's really not a problem because you want the skate to be at the same height at one side as the other but anytime you start getting into really heavily mold moulded moulding planes then you want to have a skate over here but if the skates over here it's actually sticking up higher than the blade and if you don't have a skate over here then this will want the twist on you and that might cause issues so when this skate can slide up and down you can actually adjust the skate to be perfectly set this way you can set it or than the other so that there is always a skate in contact with the with the wood so that you actually do have some kind of a soul it's not a complete soul but a partial soul the other item that sets the 55 apart is that it comes with a few other bits normally number one the shorter rods some of the later 45 also come with the shorter rods and then this tool which actually will bolt in here and become a secondary depth stop there are also some other uses into it and this can actually be a fairly useful tool I honestly have never used it and I would love to hear from someone else who has and how often they do but other than that that's what it is but the one big thing that set the stanley 55 apart from the stanley 45 is the number of irons so the stanley 45 came with one box worth of irons and the stanley 55 was said to be able to replace 55 different planes and so you can have 55 different irons in here that will all be able to go into the stanley 55 everything from moulding irons to hollows and rounds to curve outs to windows to sashes to tongue and groove to beads of all kinds of sizes it really just has an immense amount of capabilities yes it takes a little bit of time to setup and it takes a bit of time to work through but it is a fairly straightforward plane so there's some of the major differences between the stanley 45 and the 55 and i'm going to be using them quite a bit in the shop especially the next couple weeks or so so I'm thinking about doing a little more detailed video sometime on the 45 and possibly in the 55 so you may see those around me if they are uploaded yet if not then keep an eye out for them if there's something particular you'd like me to do or show you something with them I'd love to love to do that just feel free to let me know in the comments below I'm also thinking when I do a detailed video on them and also going to be doing some of the the cutting and showing you what these shapes actually look like but that's about it so if you have a comment please let me know in the questions below if you just like to say hey I always like to talk to you if you liked the video please hit the like button or subscribe and until next time have a wonderful day

Channel: Wood By Wright

Views: 31,031

Rating: 4.946981 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, Handtools, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, Stanley 45, Stanley 55, cutters, irons, Combination plane, planes

Id: 5_85S1681q0

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2016