I’m currently working on building a small end table, but more on that later. Today I’m going to talk about a couple of new tools in my equipment shed (no tool chest yet).
The first is what I’m going to call an “old” new tool. It is a beautiful little Veritas Plow Plane my wife got me for a Christmas gift because I had dog-eared that page of the Lee Valley tool catalog. I’m embarrassed to say it but it wasn’t this past Christmas, but the one before. That’s right, I’ve had this plow plane for more than a year without taking it from its box. I can hardly believe that I let a tool sit for this long unused but I did because one thing led to another. At the time I was building my workbench, then I broke my knee, then I was finishing up my workbench, then… well, you get the idea.
This plane has an adjustable fence for setting offset of the groove and an adjustable foot to control the groove depth. The wife was good enough to get the model that comes with 5 irons of differing widths even though I suspect the standard 1/4″ one will receive the most use.
To test its performance (or rather my ability to use it) I set the plane up to cut a 1/4″ groove, 1/4″ deep, offset 1/4″ from the edge.
As mentioned, I’m building a small table and need to cut grooves on the back side of each rail for the buttons that hold the top in place. In the past I would’ve cut several biscuit slots in the rails but since we aren’t doing that sort of noisy work anymore I decided on full-length grooves. My “old” new plow plane makes short work of this task. This is such a nice tool I can’t wait to come up with more projects that need grooves.
My second tool is a “new” new Stanley 12-978 Rabbet Plane I bought on Amazon. I had my eye on the Veritas Skew Rabbet Plane, even had the page dog-eared, but didn’t get it. I felt I should have something other than a Shoulder plane to make rabbets so I ordered up this Stanley model which costs about a third of the Veritas one.
It, too, comes with an adjustable fence and depth foot, just like the plow plane though not nearly as nice and refined. It also has a “nicker” to score the wood and prevent tear-out when making cross-grain cuts. This is listed as a “Bullnose” rabbet plane and one can certainly re-position the iron to the front but I don’t see myself doing that.
I don’t actually have need for rabbets on my small table so I tested the plane by cutting a rabbet on the edge of scrap. It seemed to work okay but I bet it’s not nearly as smooth as the Veritas would have been. I found that shavings tend to jam inside the plane because there is nothing to push them out on their own. I dug in with a finger to pull shavings out after each pass. I’ll continue to keep the catalog page dog-eared and try to not be naughty, you never know what Santa might bring next year.
- Carl
