I received my newsletter from the world’s top carpenter. He was making it known that the routers he used and collected(he must be a collector, he has more the one of each) the Preston 1399 and the much rarer Tyzack are no better than the Stanley 71 or Record 071 and don’t compare to the modern day Veritas equivalent. “Shocker”

The Man likes to use these routers and stated so. He didn’t say “here you have to go out and buy one” He is being blamed for single handedly  causing the hype in price of these routers from £30 – to £300. These are rare planes especially the Tyzack and they are fun to use.

The same point can be made for Norris planes with adjusters. Most of the top carpenters that I’ve heard speaking about the adjuster say there is no great benefit from having it. Yet the value of these planes are hyped as well.

If you want to use or collect vintage tools, choose for yourself there are plenty out there. Most of them are fit for purpose. These tools built an “Empire” and started an “Industrial Revolution”

By choosing yourself, you can’t blame anyone else. I bought 10 plough planes 15 years ago and paid three time more for them than they are worth today, my bad. Nobody else to blame but me.

 

Here I have a low angle infill plane. It looks like a precursor to the Stanley No. 62. It is about 18″ in length and is extremely well made. The sides taper form top to bottom and front to back.

Although nearly all metal, it has small infills before and after the handle. The plane is completely functional and works a treat. This is one of the most unusual planes that I have come across in twenty years of collecting.

Any information on this plane would be appreciated.

I purchased this small infill(beech) with a job lot of planes. The bed was set about 10 degrees to low and it was non functional. Someone had added a couple of bits of packing but it still didn’t do the job.

I’ll take ti to the workshop and set the bed to a standard Spiers setting and I should end up with a dinky little plane.

I saw this advertised on the online shop, Vintage tool, very rare Preston model 1347F bullnose plane, with fence.

Not much argument there, probably is a 1347F, and it does have a depth stop, which is incorrectly described as a fence. We can all get our depth stops and fences mixed up.

So was it incorrectly described, apart from the obvious, well not really it’s just that the two parts didn’t match. The guy didn’t say with a Preston fence, he just said with fence. It was up to the buyer to know they didn’t match.

So what price did it go for, well if it had been match it would probably gone for £150, a good plane with both fence and depth stop goes for £350. This one went for £51.03 which goes to show that most of you know your stuff and have done your homework.

See below for example of matching parts, fortunately the depth stop is marked “PATENT”.

 

I was in the process of dusting down my collection of Mathieson infill planes and a couple of No. 4 types, when I thought, how far they fell. From producing the finest infills ever, to these No. 4 types, trying to keep afloat. The truth is that it happened to all the great makers. Spiers, Norris, Mathieson, Ed Preston and Record here in the UK as well as the top makers in the US.

It’s the nature of the beast, how many of today’s top manufacturing companies will be around in one hundred years, very few I would imagine.  How many will be remembered with such fondness even less.

Old tool collectors never die, they only lose their edge.

Putting this on to the online shop along with a set of 8 blades. It is a fantastic specimen of the Mathieson 5B plough plane. I purchased it 10 years ago when plough planes were all the rage. It was one of about a dozen plough planes I purchased. I think that of all the tools I have added to my collection, my ploughs were the items that have lost the greatest value, selling for about 1/3 of their high.

 

Today I decided to put this plane onto e-bay. I purchased it 10 years ago at Ayr market carboot. It cost £5, at the time and I didn’t realise what a rare plane it was until I got it home and checked the web. When I bought the plane it was complete but I manage to break the lever cap, left hand screw on the adjuster. I have kept hold of it for all these years in the hope that I would come across a replacement, fat chance.

So here it is for sale in the hope it will find a good home.

 

Picked these up at the weekend. The Mathieson saw is as nice as any in my collection.

The Marples M4 plane is going to be the first in a series of Marples planes that I intend to add to my collection. I just have taken a hankering for some Marples tools. I think that is typical of collectors, items take their fancy and so the collection grows.

 

I went on to the online shop and came across this nice little group of planes. At the time, about an hour and a half before the end of the auction it was sitting at £67. I decided to wait for the end of the auction to make my bid, in the meantime I watched the build up to the Canadian Grand Prix. Two minutes to go and I logged in to my account, still £67. My first bid pf £389 was bettered and I swooped again £493 with 4 seconds to go alas on the final second I was beaten with a bid of £503.  Under bidder for a rare plane.

A good friend saw these in a shed and asked the owner what she was going to do with them. She said that they had been in the shed for years and were about to be thrown out. “I know somebody that’ll be glad to have them”. So here they are, another couple of items saved from Mr Rust. The draw knife is scary sharp, even after all these years.