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| I am certainly no expert on hand planes and this
plane in particular seems to prove that. I bought this plane with the idea that I could
use it to remove the saw marks on stock left from my tablesaw. It seemed (in theory) like
this would be actually easier than firing up the jointer and (in theory) better since a
hand plane would leave a better edge. This Veritas plane is a very nicely made simple bronze body with a blade that is held such that it makes a skew cut across the wood. The body is made so that it is held against one face of the stock at 90 degrees to the adjacent face. |
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| The plane itself is very simple, a small cap holds
the blade in place and a lever underneath the blade adjusts it for depth. There is no real
lateral adjustment (this is the case with many planes though). The blade was sharp on mine
when I received it, the body has it's 90 degree faces milled at 90 degrees according to my
square. Basically the plane was ready to go right out of the box but I did buff the edge
sharper before using it. The cutting action of the blade is quite good, the skewed cut makes for a very nice surface. The problems I have had is that I could not get a perfect 90 degree edge. Without going into all the details, I tried several different methods to determine the root cause and here are my theories: With the edge held up (in a vise) I get a noticeably more angled cut than if the stock is held flat with the cut edge to the side. For quite some time I thought the poor performance was due entirely to my technique. While that could be part of the problem I don't think it is all of it. I finally proved this to my own satisfaction by clamping a piece to form a 90 degree edge to my Record low angle block plane. With this setup I was able to make a 90 degree edge every time, in effect it performed much better in this regard than the Veritas did. If very many passes are taken to try and get the edge right, I start to get a curved board. This probably is be due to my technique but one should probably not expect such a small plane to maintain a straight edge after several passes; there is a reason after all they make jointer planes with long soles. I can't help feeling that my problems are due to my technique and not the tool. It is possible but I can achieve much better results with the Record setup mentioned without much effort. As such I can't recommend the Veritas plane. I still think the idea of using a dedicated plane to clean up an edge is a good one. Since I now have the Record plane that would go mostly unused (it's function having been replaced by the Veritas low angle block plane) I think I will convert it to this task.
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