What Plane Should I Use Stanley Numbering System

hey y'all I'm James Wright and welcome to my shop today it's time to talk about one of my favorite things the Stanley numbering system now this is kind of a fun thing because here I have the Stanley - through the Stanley eight I don't have the one and I'll be talking about that a little later and I'm not gonna be talking about the numbers that go higher than this so the next thing in line is a nine and then they go on from there I'm not gonna be messing with those today I want to be talking about the standard Stanley numbers what are they used for and what's the difference between a four and a five and a six and where are you supposed to use them do you need them all or what are the specific things that you do need so let's actually dive in and take a look at this okay so we have here the Stanley - through the Stanley eight I don't have a Stanley number one because they're around $1,000 each and they're pretty much a worthless plain there aren't a lot of great uses now there are people out there going to say yes they're great for chamfering well so is a block plane and these you can pick up for five or six bucks so I don't have a Stanley one someday I'll probably pick it up just so I can finish off my collection I'll bids build some sort of housing thing for it to show off this glorious item but for right now we're not gonna talk about the Stanley one and if you want to know about it it's like this long so it's a tiny tiny little plane so between plane two and plane number eight these all have use I've used them all at one point or another and sometimes this is the perfect plane for it and sometimes this is the perfect plane for 50 how do you pick that and a lot of people are gonna tell you this is the plane you have to use for this purpose and this is the plane you have to use for this purpose and for all of that I have to say that it's absolutely worthless you can use any one of these planes for any purpose you can shoot miners with an eight or with a two you can smooth with an eight or with a five a quarter you can joint with a two you can joint with a 6 you can joint with an eight you can do any task you want with any of these planes now the general rule of thumb is the shorter the plane the better it is for smoothing the reason for that is it can go up and down through the grooves of the wood and then the larger the plane the better it is for joining and that's why generally the number four or the number five tend to be the planes you're going to be using the most so the number four and the number five are kind of in the middle of the pack and they can do all the smoothing you need but they can also do the jointing which is what the bigger planes are see this will span across gaps so if you have a valley that you're planing through this will rest on one side and it'll rest on the other side but won't cut in the valley it will only cut on the high points so this will actually join the board and flatten it out once it's flat then you can come back in with your smaller planes and you can smooth it out so the general operation when you're dimensioning boards is number one you bring in your scrub plane now Stanly makes an actual scrub problem which is outside of this number but I normally take a number five and put a big cambered iron on there and I have an entire video showing how to do that this takes off a lot of material very quickly and it makes the surface the wood just an absolute mess but it takes the thickness of the board down very quickly so once you're done with that then you come in with a five or six or maybe a four and you flatten it out you take out all the ridges and the marks left by the scrub plane and you get it fairly smooth and fairly flat then you come in with your big honkin beast and you joint the board perfectly flat and this will get it to a point at which you can put any type of measuring device on no the board is perfectly fat it flat it is twist free and it is ready to go but then every now and then these big planes are going to leave some issues because they're cutting a little bit deeper than what you want to do for your final pass they might leave a little bit of tear out and that's where you come over here into your little planes and you get these small number two number three number four and these will actually ride up through so you can hit one area and just spot clean up that tear out that you had yes it's going to leave the board ever so slightly undulating but not enough that anyone can feel it and so you can do the detail work with one of these and clean them up and do the final smoothing so that's kind of the idea between these you can do all those operations with just a four or just a find you can smooth with this you can drink with this it's not quite as good for smoothing because it's a little bit longer and it's not quite as good for jointing because it's not quite as long as you want for a big board but you can do them and the same thing with the number four it's a little bit better at smoothing than jointing but it can joint and it can smooth you're just going to take a little bit more time if you're gonna be doing the jointing on it so now let's actually go through the numbers and explain this because it gets very confusing here we have a 2 a 2 is short and small it's a little bit thinner you have your number 3 which is a little bit wider and a little bit longer it's actually pretty close in length to the next one the number 4 you see how these are are relatively close your about it what is it a half-inch longer with the 4 but the 4 is a little bit wider than the 3 and so that allows you to clear off a little bit more space then we're gonna skip this one and this one we're gonna jump up to the number 5 the number 5 is a good bit longer than the number 4 it's the exact same width and the number 5 is generally called the jack plane because it's the jack of all planes it's the one that can kind of cover all of your bases then we're gonna skip this one and we're going to go up to the number 6 the number 6 gets it wider again and it is even longer than the number 5 and then we're gonna go up to the 7 the 7 is the same width as the 6 but it again is longer and then we're gonna get up to this beastly honkin thing this is the number 8 the number 8 is even wider than the 6 of the 7 it is the widest of the Stanly planes and it is much longer it's 24 inches from tip to toe so this can join a lot of material and can do a lot it has a lot of weight so that its own mass will carry it through a lot of the problems and is a ton of fun but holy cow does it take a lot of pressure to push that much weight through a cut now I skipped a few planes in here and that's because after making the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Stanley came back and they said you know we need a few other planes in between and so they have the four and a half it is a little bit longer than the four but it's also wider than the four and a lot of people really like this one for smoothing because it takes out a wider area but still has a relatively short base and that way you can do a lot of the spot cleaning up to run in between us and then there's the 5 the Jack plane the favorite one the one that everyone has and the one that Stanley sold more of than any other plane and this one they kind of ripped off in to four ways they have the Stanley five-and-a-half which just like the four and a half is a little bit longer than the Stanley five and it's also a little bit wider it happens to be the same width as the Stanley four-and-a-half and so you get that same length you want but covering a bit more in the width and then they said you know what we need something like the five but we want it a little bit between the two so this is the Stanley five and a quarter which gets really confusing because most people think the Stanley five and a quarter should come between the five and five and a half but it doesn't it comes before the five don't ask me why they didn't call it the Stanley four and three quarter but the five and a quarter is much thinner than the five and it's also a lot shorter than the five and so this is almost like the jointing plane but it can still do a little bit of jack work because it's still longer than before so all that being said this is a confusing pile just basically going from the number two to the number eight but if you think about it two three four five six seven those are the main ones the five and a quarter the five and a half and the four and a half four once you don't see that awful and you can just eliminate those and go down to this and have your two three four five six seven and eight so then the question comes down do you need all of these planes no no you don't if you just need one you can get away with just using the four or just using the five if you watch Paul Sellars he uses just the number four almost exclusively it is a very versatile plane and if you have a straight edge to tell you if something is flat or needs to be jointed you can do it all with a number four and a lot of times that's where I kind of lean to as well the number five is generally considered the jack plane it'll be the one that will do everything and that's why a lot of people kind of consider this to be the first one it's also one of the more common planes in most places you can find the number five far more often than you can find any other plane so generally I would say if you have a number four then you're probably going to want to get a six or seven as well because then you would have your number four for smoothing you have your six or seven for jointing and you're good to go with those two planes you can do all your work fairly easily but then you're probably gonna want one in the middle and then you're probably gonna want one that's a little bit wider which the four and a half has a lot of good features for and before you know it you're a plane collector and you have them all so do you need them all no you can get away with one or two or three or four and kind of look at them as by the one main plane that you want by the four or the five and go off from there do you find yourself doing a lot more jointing then get a longer maybe a six maybe a seven maybe the full eight or if you find yourself need to do a lot more detail and smoothing maybe then look at getting a three or a two and I tell you the three is really good for smoothing and getting into this box it is the one I grab most of the time when I want to just detail a little bit of work okay so that is the numbering system two through eight and then the next question a lot of people is going to get what about all those other planes out there where does the low-angle jack fit into it and other things like that the next play in the series is a block plane and then a miter plane and then I think a scraping plane and from there on out the numbers are kind of pointless because Stanley gave them the number the next one as they issued them so the next plane they issued was the number nine and the next plane they issued was the number ten and the next plane they issued was the number eleven and then they came back and they wanted to put one kind of close to it and so they put half marks on it so you have the nine and a half a block plane that's slightly modified so all the other numbers out there aren't particularly in any other order they're just the next plane that Stanley issued and it was given the next number in order so then on top of that not only do you have different sized planes from your two to your number eight and back and forth you also have different ages so originally Stanley made the type one that was the first one that they made and then they made the type two and the type three and the type 4 and on to like 1920 and every one of these planes then also comes in different types so you can get a stanley number two that's a type 1 thru type 20 and you need a stanley number 4 that's a type 1 thru type 20 and as they went along they added different things this one doesn't have the Frog adjustment knob and the depth adjustment knob is a lot smaller and then later on they added some other items on there they added different logos and some people really liked some things and they don't like other things and so that's why a lot of people collect a particular type of plane and they'll have the entire series with a type 13 or a typed-in or whatever they want to collect and at that point you start realizing that every hand plane is different not only are their Stanley's but then there's Miller fall and all these other ones out there that then fall into the exact same pattern as the Stanley's but they have their own bells and whistles and things that they add to them the big question I get from a lot of people is why isn't the low angle Jack somewhere in this it seems like this should fit in there I mean it's the same length and size as in number five it just has the lower bed angle iron on here and that's because traditionally the joiners and woodworkers would be using all beveled down high angle plants that was the plane that used you didn't have any need for a low angle plane stanley issued the number 62 the low angle plane to basically be a butcher block plane so all that end grain sticking up the low angle plane made great work of cutting through all that grain and then on top of that a lot of people picked it up for doing miter trimming and picture frames and things like that that you can do on a shooting board because you're cutting a lot of in grain but other than those two common uses it really wasn't a useful plane in the shop when you already had all of these but then along came the power tool hybrid people and they started using one of these because the bevel up angle really makes a lot more sense to the power tool mindset because the blade is now in line with the force though it is a bit simpler and easier to work with so a lot of people when they're not going to be using all these planes and not getting used to them this is a lot more fun for that so I don't want to get into too much into why this plane isn't in the system or why you should definitely have a bevel up versus a bevel down plane I have an entire video where I go into one for the other which one is better and in the end really whichever I use this one a lot because I like it actually a little bit better than I do my number 5 for most things but that's probably because my number 5 really isn't that very good it was one of the the cheaper ones one of these days I might get a better number five in which case I might not use this much at all so everyone has a different taste so next time you come to me and say hey I have a stanley number 53 and what do you know about it I'm gonna say I don't really know because I don't know what the stanley number is on it what type of plane is it anything outside of the - - number eight is just a random number out there but in the 1 to 8 you know that generally the smaller the number the smaller the plane except for when you get into the half so or quarters in which case then it gets a little bit confusing Stanley tried to make a system that everyone could follow but in the end it ended up being a little bit more confusing than just having a random item number for everything and I know on top of that I could talk about this topic for a long time so I know there's a lot of other questions out there and people are gonna be wondering what is this what is that how does that fit into this or how does it relate to other companies this is the Stanley numbering system but a lot of people will even have a Miller Falls that is the same length and the same width is this that the Miller Falls gave a different number to but they'll still call it Miller Miller Falls number five that's because it is following the style of the five so if you have another company out there and you call it a number five everyone's gonna know you're talking about this size and shape not particularly talking about that company and that's one of the nice things about the numbering system is that it can make things a little bit easier because you know what you're talking about when someone says it number four you know that they're talking about a plane that's this long and this wide and does pretty much what this family number four will do so if you do have other questions let me know down in the comments below feel free to like share this really does help out the channel also if you'd like to go back and see I have an old video where I talk through this series I mentioned a few things in there that I don't mention here and I mention a few things here which I don't mention there I'll leave a link to that down below and then I have a whole other video on what's the difference between bevel up and bevel down and which one's better I'll leave a link to that video down below because I get a lot of questions from that where people are saying well which one should I get should I get a bevel up or bevel down you can go there and it'll probably answer it for you so I thought about it for a day I hope you like this and until next time have a wonderful day Stanley - three four four and a half five and a quarter five five Wow Stanley didn't know how to count

Channel: Wood By Wright

Views: 28,189

Rating: 4.9593344 out of 5

Keywords: what plane should I use, Stanley numbers, stanley hand tools, Wood By Wright, woodworking, Handtools, Hand tool, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, stanley plane types, hand, smoothing plane, bench plane, handplane, hand tool woodworking, tools, traditional woodworking, how-to, hand planes, plane, wood working

Id: 1QYDC72yAsg

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019