Thread: Demise of the Foreplane

Originally Posted by ian

........ when did the #6 cease to be an industrial mainstay?

my guess is around WW1, possibly earlier. ....

Ian, my suggestion is that it never was. Had 6s been a 'mainstay', then surely there would be a lot more of them floating about today, at least as many as there are old 7s? But the latter are more common at sales & fleamarkets by a factor of 10 to one, in my experience. Alan Peters was the only champion of 6s that I encountered back in the 70s & 80s when I first started reading up on tools & techniques. Perhaps someone from one of the the old-tool groups could comment more accurately on the number of 6s in circulation & correct me if I'm wildly wrong. Maybe scarcity simply means they are so loved they never get sold, but become cherished heirlooms..

NSW Tafe may have been a bit left of centre on this, due to some influential staff member who favoured them, or maybe it was a recommendation that evolved in the machine age. I can envisage a 6 being a useful all-rounder in a shop where machines do almost everything and you only need to take a lick here or there to get acceptable surfaces for joining. I'm not disparaging the 6 by any means; it's not my favourite size, but I know at least two people who find one extremely handy. I also know quite a few who've probably never even seen one in the metal.

It all hinges on how much foreplay you like.

Cheers, (ducking & running for cover...)

Thanks everyone.
The comments have been a great help to me in forming an approach to discussing handplanes with my colleagues at the Men's Shed.
Also very interesting in showing the diverse nature of our very broad craft.
Cheers

Richard

My 2c-worth.

I think that the fore-plane was the cabinetmaker's equivalent to the carpenter's scrub plane.

In Australia, books on carpentry well into the 1960s referred to scrub planes (and the German jack plane which really was a wooden bodied scrub plane) as a standard and essential tool. That is confirmed by the fact that the Carter company made the C10 scrub plane for sale in Australia - it was not just a knock-off of a Stanley or Record plane, as far as I know it was a genuine original design (albeit using technology derived from various sources). To me that indicates that there was real demand in Australia for a coarse plane, at least on job sites. I suspect it was used for hogging out major notches in frames etc in house building situations . Later on chippies used a circ saw to do this (sometimes pushing it laterally to remove more stock) - I saw it done; I don't recommend it, but I saw it done.

By contrast, in a cabinet shop, the fore plane was used to roughly flatten stock before jointing it and smoothing it. I suspect that the jointer was the first machine that such shops added, since it eliminated huge amounts of physical work. To assess when that happened, I would look a the the catalogues for the tool distributors. I suspect that the changeover started in the 1920s but that, in Australia, the Depression and WWII really slowed it down and it only really finished in the mid-1950s.

Originally Posted by IanW

Ian, my suggestion is that it never was. Had 6s been a 'mainstay', then surely there would be a lot more of them floating about today, at least as many as there are old 7s? But the latter are more common at sales & fleamarkets by a factor of 10 to one, in my experience. Alan Peters was the only champion of 6s that I encountered back in the 70s & 80s when I first started reading up on tools & techniques. Perhaps someone from one of the the old-tool groups could comment more accurately on the number of 6s in circulation & correct me if I'm wildly wrong. Maybe scarcity simply means they are so loved they never get sold, but become cherished heirlooms..

I took the question to refer to size rather than particular "metal" versions. I would be completely unsurprised if the most common #6 sized plane was wooden bodied prior to WW2.
I am completely unaware of the planes my grandfather had, but recall my father commenting, with some sadness, 20+ years after granddad passed away that all granddad's planes had been burnt after his death because they were riddled with wood worm. Granddad lived between 1892 and 1982, and would have acquired his planes in the 1920s (before the depression).
under that scenario, relative scarcity equates to worn-out, worm ridden, rather than unpopular.

Hi Richard,

My view on when did the No. 6 cease to be an industrial mainstay is, as soon as there was an affordable and economical alternative such as the thicknesser.

So as others have already said if you can find out when the sales of thicknessers went up you'll be closer to an exact date.

But that did not stop the manufacture and sale of No. 6 planes, and their use by individual wood workers.

Yesterday I looked through my pile of planes and came across an Australian made No. 6 with timber handles
the frog casting shows C468 (this main mean the 4th quarter of 1968). By the mid 70's the handles were the
black plastic.

Regards

Graham.

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There are two variables that would obsolete hand dimensioning:
1) the widespread use of the thickness planer
2) centralization of woodworking to factories (where you could afford things like thickness planers)

In the states, furniture has been made in factories more than anywhere else for at least 125 years. I understand that the lineshaft driven thickness planer - at least the first commercially successful widely made machine - was sold in the 1830s to 1850s (presume it had a lateral rotary head like a blanchard grinder), and a machine with a cylindrical head was patented then. I grew up in an old area in the states (not like plymouth old, but well organized by the late 1700s), and machinery made in places like waynesboro, pa, is commonly seen with dates predating 1900. I've never seen a machine like the first two mentioned above (they had long beds like a metal shaper instead of moving the head), but I've seen plenty of no-guard open machinery from the late 1800s.

The market for mail order millwork was well organized in the states by the 1800s. It can be seen in buildings built around that era, before we went really cheap and stopped putting woodwork in the buildings in general.

Point of all of this, I doubt many 6s got much serious work after 1900 in the state, except for possibly in remote areas and in construction work. As far as their rarity, they may not be common in australia, but they're very common in the US. 5s and 4s were sold in droves to people who wouldn't use planes much (farmers, etc), so more of those remain.

Maybe things lasted longer in Australia and Europe, but the push for mechanization and modernity was swift here. My grandparents had no regard for doing work that machines could do - they did enough of it in their youths such that they didn't think it was particularly nostalgic.