What can you do with a No. 6 plane?

this is a number six plane and it's kind of the stepchild of the plane family because of its size it's sort of difficult to figure out what this plane is actually intended for for instance it is clearly not a smoothing plan it's way too big for that but it's also much bigger than a jack plane so it can't be one of those either it's a little bit like a jointer but if we compare the two the number six is this big and the jointer is this big so what the hell is this thing for if you've been using stanley style bench planes like this for a long time they might seem old-fashioned or even quaint to you but it's really important to remember that when stanley introduced these in the late 1800s they were actually incredibly modern they were a radical departure from the wooden planes that craftsmen had been using for hundreds maybe thousands of years and the big problem with introducing these planes is that the wooden planes craftsmen already like worked just fine and so it was very difficult to get them to shell out the money for this newfangled contraption that they didn't even want in the first place Stanley had a lot of clever marketing strategies for getting craftsmen to adopt their cast-iron plans their most famous strategy was probably coming out with the transitional plane which combined a cast-iron mechanism and housing with a wooden soul so that craftsmen sort of got the best of both worlds and could be eased into the idea of using a cast-iron plane another thing Stanley did that was really clever was to mimic very closely all of the sizes of planes that craftsmen were already familiar with so for instance the stanley number four or number three are exactly the same size as traditional coffin smoothers and this matching in size continues all the way up the range of planes that craftsmen would have been familiar with so a stanley jointer plane is the exact same size as a wooden jointer plan now this strategy was smart and for the most part at work really well but they ran into trouble in one area this is a traditional wooden for plain spelled fo r e and it's a contraction of the word before because the idea of this plane is that you use it before any of the other plans for preparing your stock generally this plane has a wide mouth and a really heavily cambered iron it's made for fast heavy stock removal prior to using a jointer to flatten things out and a smoothing plane to get a final finish this was a very traditional long standing plane design but let's look at something very interesting if we take our number six and put it next to our floor plane you can see that they're more or less exactly the same size now a lot of people look at the number six and assume that it was made to be a short jointer plane but there's no way that's true all you have to do is look at the stanley catalog and we can see right here Stanley is referring to the number six as a four plane not a jointer and what they were just trying to do was mimic the size of a plane that craftsmen were already familiar with now there's one problem with this idea and it's kind of a big problem here's my wooden four plane and here's my metal floor plan the difference in weight between the two of them is absurd the metal plane probably weighs five times more than the wooden plane maybe more and then on top of that wooden planes are sort of self lubricating this slide very easily whereas metal planes have a lot more friction with the wood and need to be lubricated when you combine these two things together the number six actually makes kind of a lousy for plane now having said this I totally aware that many people use a number six as a four plane and light them so no need to jump all over me in the comments that being said I'm a pretty big guy and I've tried to use a six as a four plane and it wears me out I just don't think it's appropriate for the task especially when there's tons of these planes around they're not very expensive in my experience they work the same and they're a lot easier to use and on top of the six being kind of unwieldy the way it is Stanley had also introduced the number five Jack plane which will do the exact same thing as the number six you can set it up with that cambered iron and mouths and have a number 5 set up that way and it works awesome I love it it's smaller and lighter than the number six and a lot easier to use so if the number five makes the six kind of redundant and even unnecessarily heavy and clunky is there anything we can actually do with the number six of course there is a number six might be significantly shorter than a seven or an eight but it's still plenty long enough to make a decent joiner plan watch not bad so a number six will shoot an edge or flatten a large board about as effectively as a seven or an eight so it makes a good sort of poor-man's jointer but another use you can have for it is to use it as a panel plane and that's exactly what the name would suggest a panel plane is for smoothing and flattening panels of wood usually big panels that have been glued together these planes were most popular in Europe and their most famous incarnation is probably the infill Scottish panel plans made by companies like Norris these are super collectible and hard to get your hands on and they were very desirable even back in the day when they were being made so Stanley never want to let somebody compete with them came out with a very similar model called the five and a half five and a half was supposed to be a direct competitor to scottish infill panel plans and it's the exact same size a lot of modern woodworkers have really popularized the five and a half David Charles worth and Rob Cosman are both well-known influential guys who suggest setting up the five and a half as sort of a monster smoothing plane it's big and keeps surfaces leveled but you can make it take a very fine cut and leave a smooth finish that's ready for polyurethane or shellac or whatever you want to put on it there's a couple problems with these planes though they can be a little bit hard to find and a little bit expensive this is actually the only five-and-a-half I've ever seen in collecting and I bought it and I paid 50 bucks for it and if you know me fifty bucks is a lot of money for me to spend on a plane but you see something really interesting here the five and a half and the six are very very similar in size and since they're constructed totally identically there's no reason you can't take a number six and use it as a panel plan it's like an inch longer so what so if I set my number six up carefully I can take the same sort of really wide thin feathery shavings that I would get with my five and a half and I can use that to get a great surface on a big wide panel of wood so if you're building up your plane collection on a budget you might want to think about picking up a number six you can use it as a jointer plane or a panel plane or both and they're not very expensive I was just on ebay this morning and I saw sixes going for between twenty and forty five dollars depending on condition and that's a great deal especially when you consider what seven eight and five and a half's go for it so depending on what kind of woodwork you do a number six might be exactly what you need not cost you a lot of money before I go I really need to thank my newest patrons the noh8 Hollinger Jim Chow and Gareth Chesley and if you're at all interested in this video and seeing more content like it go over to patreon comm and check out all the benefits and exclusive content that I have just for my patrons and for everybody who's watching this video I really appreciate just having eyeballs on my content so thanks so much for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 80,207

Rating: 4.9540582 out of 5

Keywords: plane, handplane, stanley, stanley no 6, no 6, jointer, jointer plane, panel plane, vintage plane, handtool, tool collector, smoothing, wood, woodshop, restoration, cheap tools, diy, make, maker

Id: 469UWvFCZY4

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2018