How to Setup a Combination Plane Stanley 45 and 55

hey y'all I'm James Wright and welcome to the shop today I've got my Stan Lee 45 and 55 out here and all of the other parts and we're gonna moving a little bit of fun going through actually how do you go about setting one of these up so let's dive in and take a look at this fun process so the Stan Lee 45 and 55 the 55 is known as the king of hand planes because it's just well it's so cool has all these extras and it's an amazing thing once you put it up it looks beautiful and there are so many different things you can do with it a lot of people don't like it because it's somewhat complicated and I want to kind of work on that today now I have quite a few videos where I actually talk about the 45 and 55 I have quite a few videos where I talk about the irons and how to sharpen them and I don't have any video about actually how do you go about setting it up for this iron how do you go to setting it up for that iron and today I want to go through that and give you an idea about what you're looking for so that when it comes time to use that weird item you now know how to set it up so today we're actually going to be looking at four different irons and these are the basic types once you've mastered these you can do anything else we're gonna be doing your regular plow plane iron we're also be doing a beading plane iron then we're going to be doing an interesting Cove this is for any of your your really interesting moldings you're gonna be doing and then we're also going to be doing a rounding iron and some of these you can do with a 45 but some of these you can only do with the 55 so let's actually dive into these and take a look what it takes to set them up first we're gonna be starting off with basically a plow plane so it's just a simple straight iron and we're going to want to fit this into place and we're gonna slide it into this slot in here and then let the notch connect in there and we want to push it down into the bed so we're gonna push it down in and then tighten up this wingnut not all the way just a little bit give it some some tension in there next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna eyeball down the skate and I want to make sure that it's only sticking up just a hair shavings with so I'm just having it stick up what a hundreds of an inch if that tiny little bit you don't need much at all and we're adjusting it with this wheel and this wheel will then pull that iron back and forth sliding in once we have it where we want it then we can tighten this wing nut and the iron is locked in place the next thing we need to do is adjust this skate and we're gonna slide this over and you can basically put this skate anywhere you want along that iron I know my push it in just a sixteenth inch or so so there's a little bit of the iron sticking out past the edge of it and then we can lock that down with these two nuts so depending upon the quality of your Stanly 45 or 55 you're going to want to make sure that these two skates are parallel but you can solve that by having the skate inside the iron just a little bit in other words the iron is cutting a wider groove than the skates are sliding in because if the skates aren't parallel and the skates are exactly on the outside of that cutting iron then they're going to jam up in the groove that you're cutting with the iron on my particular one these tend to come loose so I just put a little wrench on here just tweak it there's the hair that's enough to keep them from moving wherever I need them to so next we want to do is adjust the fence where we want to go on here so what I do is I have my board all set up here and normally on the board I'm going to have a mark of how wide I want this groove to be I want it to be between these two marks so then I'm going to set this in place I'm going to put my iron down on that mark and then I'm going to look down through here and I'm going to see either side of this iron make its on the mark and then I can slide the fence up to where I want holding it in place can loosely tighten in these two thumb screws and now I know my fence is exactly where I want it to be again sometimes thumb screws have a tendency to work out so I just give them a little bit of tweak and that will stop them from moving on my stanley 55 I don't do this because I don't have any problem with these loosening up but on my 45 they have a tendency to do that the next thing we want to do is adjust our depth stop and so we can loosen up this screw on top here and then we can use this wheel to adjust the height of it how deep do we want this to be and so we're going to put dam somewhere around there then again lock this down and now we're ready to start cutting and then it's appropriate usually to start at the far end of the board take off an inch or so back up take off of the edge and we're just seeing am i taking a cut all the way along and so that's how you to set up for any of the juveniles whether they're eight inch or inch animate that's how you set this whole thing up for a plow iron now the next thing is what about a beating iron and this has a Cove in the middle we want to take out this is basically set up the exact same way but there's a few things to think about when setting this up so for the rest of the irons I'm gonna be using the 55 and you set it up exactly the same as you do the 45 so anything I tell you in the 55 just understand it's the exact same as the 45 with one exception that's the second skate which looks really weird it's got all these other things on here that really only matters for one iron whenever you have a rounding iron on there so we're going to use this beating iron and it doesn't matter what beating iron you have they all go in the same way whether it's one bead a big bead or having multiple beads in there they all fit into this the same way so just as before we're going to fit this into the slot make sure it fits in the groove hold it tight down against then rotate it over and tighten this up we don't want to lock it down I just want to tighten it up and then with this screw we can push it forward and back it up and then once we set it to exactly I want it we're going to push this screw forward so it has a little bit of pressure pushing forward on there I'm gonna eyeball down the skate and make sure that is sticking up just a little bit so that we're getting a little bit of a cut and particularly with these beating irons I want it to be sticking up a little bit higher than I normally would because the thickness of the skate sometimes gets in the way with the thickness of that corner of the iron then with the second skate we're just going to slide it in place and lock it down now if we have 45 that's about all we need to do we want to make sure that the second skate is right there and I want it to be pretty close to flush ever so slightly inside of flush but really really close to it and then we can lock that down if it's a 45 if it's a 55 like this we also have the ability to move this whole skate in and out so I want to make sure that that skate is exactly the right height it needs to be and we can do that by loosening up this knob and this knob and then adjusting it's dead right here just like we would adjust the depth of the iron right here we'll be covering that in a minute when I start talking about rounding irons then once we have that in place we can tighten down this one and this one and that holds this skate in place it doesn't slide to side to side we can grab whatever fence we want and if you put it on the lower hole the fence will stick up above the iron if I put it on the lower hole the fence will actually go underneath the iron and what this can be is you have these two teeth on either side of the beading plane as I can make this fence actually slide over and cover one of those teeth so that the rounded edge of the bead is right on the edge of the cut and I'm going to do that for this and show you how that works so we put that fence where you want it lock down these two knobs and we're ready to work so in this case this skate here is going to be riding on the wood and this skate here is not going to be touching the wood so it's very important that the plane is leveled if I tip it one way or the other we're going to be getting a weird round over there so I want to make sure I keep it nice and level start at the far edge of the plane back up just like that we're getting that round over we want all the way along the edge and because my fence is actually underneath the first skate I don't have that tooth mark running along the far edge of the bead I just have the tooth on the inside of the bead here so I can put this bead right on the edge of the board so so far we've done a plow iron and a beating iron now we're going to start getting these things more interesting now there's a bunch of other cutters that are similar to this and have you know similar characteristics so I'm going to show you how to set up this one but it's basically the exact same thing no matter what other iron you're putting in it just has a couple weird pointers on it the other the other thing you're going to come across is that these two you can do in the Stanly 45 but these you need the Stanley 55 in order to actually make them work right so just as before we're going to put the iron in seat it in place make sure it's pushed all the way down tight into the bed and on this one it's going to be very weird because it's got the rounded edge right by the skate there and so you see that skate has got to go up aways so we're going to push this iron forward until the skate is just touching the outside of the iron there and that is where we want to put this so you can see that this is sticking out a long ways above this skate then once it's in the right place lock this down make sure that our pressure is pushing forward onto the iron and that first skate is ready to go now the Stanley 55 we're going to be sliding this skate in place and with this one now we want to adjust this down because both of these skates are at the same height we need the second skate to come up into this little tooth up here so to get this second skate down we have two nuts here on the side and when I grab an Allen wrench fit in that little hole and then rotate it that way through this hole rotate it that way and turning those out now allows this skate to adjust up and down we can grab this knob here and now we can't adjust this second skate to a different height so now what I'm doing is I'm adjusting this so the second skate is sticking down farther than the first skate and I'm just going to adjust it until I have the right amount poking up here because the difference between the iron sticking out and this skate is what determines how thick your curl is every time then once we get it to the setting we want we can stick this back in here and lock these two nuts back in place doesn't take a whole lot of pressure just a little bit and that will keep them from sliding down in further next we can slide the fence in and put it wherever we want if you want to go underneath or above I'm just going to put right up against the side of the iron here so again we want to make sure that the plane doesn't tilt side to side I'm gonna have my fingers go underneath the skate here and hold up against the board and make sure the fence is locked up against the side and a lot of my force is actually going to be my fingers pushing the fence against here because I want to keep it vertical and then start out here start coming back and just like that you can get some really ornate shapes into the edge of a board with a stanley 55 unfortunately you can't do that with the stanley 45 because you need the two skates to be at different heights so now we're going to use a round now you can get hollows and they work just like a beading plane only bigger but rounds you have to use a stanley 55 you can't use these on a 45 unless you get a specialty sole that is designed to fit it just as before we're gonna fit it down into place let lock in that notch then we're going to hold it down in tighten this screw down a little bit until it's a little bit loose and then we're gonna slide this forward until the skate is just sticking up a little bit now in this case this first escape is pretty much worthless when doing it around because it's so far out onto the edge it doesn't contact the wood until the very end of the work the important thing is the next skate we're going to be putting in so once we have this skate so it's just barely underneath the cutting iron back here we're going to tighten this down and then we're going to put the second skate into place and just as before we're going to extend this skate down until it's in the right place now what we're looking for is we want this second skate to be right in the middle of the iron because this is what all the wood is riding on it's just this one skate because we want this skate to be a little bit underneath the cutting edge so there's only a hair sticking out here and this is very important here because this skate is far more important with this cutter than any other cutter out there once that is set up in place then we can lock down the skate so it's not moving down any farther and then lock it down side to side and we're ready to start working with this one just make sure everything is nice and tight we don't want anything coming loose don't over tighten things because over tightening just leads to tools breaking down just like that we can put the fence on and as before with this what I can do is set the plane where I want on the board left to right whether it's marked or not then we can slide the fence on and I can bring the fence up to where I want setting the iron in the right place lock the fence in place and now we can go to town and this one is very very hard to keep vertical especially in this case I'm taking off too heavy of a cut I really need to back that skate off because if it's taking too heavy a cut that means the skate is too far up so I'm going to loosen this up a little bit I'm gonna push this skate and just like an eighth of a turn not much at all just a tiny tiny little bit there you have it now you can get these beautiful coves with a stanley 55 you just can't get that with a stanley 45 because that skate doesn't adjust now there are a bunch of other things you can get with it you'll often see these slitting cutters and these actually come on to the back here and they'll slide into this screw and if you have really really thin material you can use this to cut it so if I'm working with veneer sometimes I'll take you take all the hardware out of here you put your fence in you put the slitting cutter down in there and that will just slice a line a certain distance away from the fence so just like a marking gauge except for this knife is designed to actually slice the veneer you have to be very very careful with it only works in very certain circumstances because a lot of times it'll catch the grain and the grain will start to wander so you need very thin wood you need straight grained wood and there's very few situations where this really works it's just every now and then you come across those so I've actually never used my slitting cutter on the stanley 55 you'll often find one of these and this is actually another depth adjustment that you can put on this side so if you're leaning off of the wood and this depth adjustment skate can't reach it you can put one on this side you can also use this in the case of being a third skate so if you need one two and a third skate you can use this I've actually never come across a process where I've needed to use this but for those of you who do yeah great just loosen this nut it slides in here and then you can adjust it up and down to whatever depth you in there another thing that often used to come with the 45 is this cam and I don't actually have one but it's slide onto the rod and what that allow you to do is if you move the fence out too far away from the iron it becomes very difficult to keep this vertical you can put the cam all the way up here against your fence and that will keep it held up so that the fence doesn't want to fall down the work but you have to constantly be adjusting that cam so that as we as you go deeper it's also adjusting the depth of your rods deeper and deeper I don't have one of those because I've never used it and it hasn't come with any of the 45s or 55 so I've gotten so there you have it now I didn't go into every plain iron in the box because there are a lot of plain irons there but once you can do these four you'll be able to do any of the other ones just understand that the first point of the iron to touch the wood needs to have a skate behind it so that the iron doesn't dive into the wood whatever comes down farthest on the iron you need to have a skate down there to support the whole plane above it so I hope this makes some sense I know there's lots more questions out there and there's lots of other features that came with different planes over the years if you have specific questions about a particular feature or something like that go ahead and send me a message I'd be glad to answer those these are really fun planes to mess around with I know some people don't like them because they're really complicated they take a lot of time to set up and get going but once you have them set up they can be a lot of fun so I hope this answered a few questions if not let me know and if you do have any other questions concerns ideas let me know in the comments down below also if you did like the video please hit like comment share subscribe ring the bell and click the all notifications when you ring the bell because if you click the Bell and you don't click all notifications you'll be missing a lot of the videos I put out so thank you for watching and until next time have a wonderful day so when eight inches of snow falls outside on your driveway and you're shoveling it away that's one of the times you really wish you had a plow plane which is the very reason why it's called a combination plane does woodworking and snow removal

Channel: Wood By Wright How 2

Views: 7,638

Rating: 4.982379 out of 5

Keywords: Wood By Wright, wood By Wright 2, Hand tools, Handtools, Woodworking, Combination plane, how to setup a, stanley 45, stanley 55, plow plane, how to use

Id: _x93L1_zaDo

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 30 2020