Planes #3 Sized

Over on the Sawmill Creek forum is a thread to show your working planes. I've posted most of these images there. While posting I started thinking about having a record of my wood working tools for insurance purposes and where would be a good place to store that record. This blog drew the short straw.

I'll try to keep the boredom level as low as possible but over the next several weeks there will be posts with photographs of my tools starting with my #3 sized working planes.

From left to right: A shop made Krenov style smoother with a Hock O1 iron, a type 13 Stanley with a Hock O1 iron, a V3 Woodriver with a Vertias O1 iron, a post war Stanley with a Hock O1 iron, another Krenov style smoother also with Hock O1 iron, and last a Philly Coffin Smoother with a O1 single iron. Of this group I use the first Krenov and the Woodriver more than the others. The Philly smoother is new and still getting over the shock of moving from the UK to the desert. Once it stops doing stupid wood tricks I expect it will be one of the go to smoothers.

BTW, they are setting on the back side of a Walnut coffee table top that was still being flattened. The front side was almost finished, I used a LN #8 on it and the #8 kicked my butt, I got smart on the back side and dug out the woody, so much better. I do love me some wood stock planes.


After getting most of the high spots down with the woody I used a type 9 Stanley #8 with a Hock O1 iron and chip breaker to finish the job. The LN planes are beautiful and work superbly but damn they are heavy and on something like this slab of table top the weight will turn old arms and backs to jello.  Once the table top was flattened and smoothed the Krenov woody pictured above left was used to relive the bottom edge to give a lighter look to the coffee table. I've no better plane for that type of job because of its light weight and the plane's shape allows using both hands and working in either direction.