Thread: Unknown brand name router plane

Looks very utilitarian, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was home made

Originally Posted by elanjacobs

Looks very utilitarian, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was home made

If it was home made they did a pretty good job at casting the iron

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It could be a foundry foreign order. May explain the lack of any brand mark. I had a google but can't see one like it.
Back in the days of the case of beer economy I had a tow bar made at a shipyard.
Regards
John

Originally Posted by orraloon

It could be a foundry foreign order. May explain the lack of any brand mark. I had a google but can't see one like it.
Back in the days of the case of beer economy I had a tow bar made at a shipyard.
Regards
John

You could very well be right or it could have been made as an engineering project by an apprentice engineer who knows but it is heavier than my Stanley 71-1/2, the iron has a slight twist in the bend but I still gave it a whirl after sharpening it and it actually did a pretty good job on the mitre join I routed out to put an inlay in there to hide a gap that was in the join

May have been a kit part from an ironmonger like they used to sell in the English tool catalogs (plane bottoms, etc).

Would be surprised if a pattern maker made it one-off, either.

I also have an unbranded router plane, closed mouth like a 71 1/2. Slightly smaller than my Stanley 71 but with no markings of any kind.
2_routers.jpg
I don't think it's a pattern makers copy because a direct copy (using an original plane in a sand mould) would be smaller but still show any name stamp.

The cutter is wider, the Stanley 71 has a Veritas 1/2 inch blade for comparison. The unbranded blade is approx. 3/4 inch wide.

The cutter in the unbranded plane is not compatible with the Stanley or Veritas, the stem is slightly thicker and with two depth notches.

unbranded_1.jpgunbranded_2.jpg2_depth_notch.jpg
I found the unbranded router plane in a local flea market in Belfast. Of course as with any second-hand tool sold locally the vendor had a tale about how it was probably used in the Harland and Wolff shipyard for the Titanic furnishings. It was cheap so I think the seller didn't believe that any more than I did.

I should've been clearer - there are a lot of cast router planes around made by patternmakers that don't look anything like a stanley for the simple fact that they could make a pattern and get it casted for almost nothing.

when I see a plane like the above, it looks like something a patternmaker might make quickly to fill a need without paying much. The ribs aren't tall, it's made to be pretty easy to cast.

This same thing carries on with more modern makers. i once asked George Wilson about a very lovely brass infill scraper being used in a video. I thought it was neat, because it was very round and it looked like it worked great.

He said he made it in about an hour. I said WHAT? Paraphrasing what he told me in a conversation, it was something like "I just took a piece of brass tube, smashed it into an oval and then sweated a bottom to it".

I said "I'd spend 40 hours making a tool like that because I'd have to dovetail, but wouldn't even consider the curve for something quick", and he said "you need a mill - peoples' problem in making things is that they don't know how to use a mill".

https://youtu.be/zuUqbdTDjcw?t=6m55s
(very briefly used here - in a much better spot in a diffferent part of the video- easier to see and doing something more substantive - but I don't want to spend my whole lunch hour finding it)

The other thing that sticks out to me is that kingshott had a video that I bought years ago - in it, some of the planes that he'd made from patterns (not copies, he made the pattern as his dad was a patternmaker and I believe he was, too) - I sense that in his case, it was cheaper to make a stanley 50/51-ish type setup from patterns and have it casted than it would've been to buy the original plane.

Anyone who has made something will need to think about that - I considered dovetail planes to be the friend of the small shop guy, because you can all of the sudden make a solid plane, but it sounds like it's much cheaper (or was) to cast, and in England and I'm sure other places a the time, you could've gotten bronze or iron casting done locally through a hardware store.

Originally Posted by D.W.

..... - I considered dovetail planes to be the friend of the small shop guy, because you can all of the sudden make a solid plane, but it sounds like it's much cheaper (or was) to cast, and in England and I'm sure other places a the time, you could've gotten bronze or iron casting done locally through a hardware store.....

For the sort of body on the little router the OP has, there aren't a lot of options for the average backyarder to fabricate something like that, but if you happen to work in a foundry (especially if you happen to be one of the pattern-makers!), getting a one-off cast for something you whipped up in your lunch-hour would be a pretty easy thing to do. It looks like a metalworker's solution to a problem a woodworker would have been more likely to solve like this: Front.jpg

Cheers,

Yep, through a current-day lens, that's what we'd probably all make if we had the need. re: the casting, my understanding is that probably when the subject router plane in this thread was made, casting was something you could have done through a local hardware store. Even Kingshott still suggested "just take it to your local iron monger" (a self-made pattern, to have cast). I guess that kind of thing held on longer in England. There are planes like that that were made here in the states, but probably in the 1900s.

I know there is a resurgence of some folks casting bronze as a hobby, but I haven't seen anyone casting iron.

Just 60 years ago or so, my dad had a resident on the farm where he grew up (in one of the spare houses) who did nothing but load and sell shotgun shells. WE all value our time too much these days, I guess!!

Originally Posted by D.W.

.......I know there is a resurgence of some folks casting bronze as a hobby, but I haven't seen anyone casting iron......

I'd say that has a lot to do with the melting point of copper alloys being within the capabilities of a simple forge. Melting & pouring iron is a slightly more serious committmnt!

I'd quite like to have a crack at casting bronze, but it's one of those things that you'd still need to get set up for, and after I'd cast the 2 or 3 things I wanted, I'd have yet more junk to deal with. I very quickly decided that fabricating plane bodies is the more practical approach....

Cheers,

Exactly - interesting how we seem to end up in the same place doing the same thing without conference, isn't it?

I thought casting bronze sounded neat, except the first question after you cast bronze is how will you clean it up with a mill? I pondered that, but I don't really want to go there. I like the hand work even on the metal. Shootenstein, the long shooter, drew up into a banana when I put the cross strap in, but I kind of expected it would. I removed over a hundredth from its thickness in the middle with a vixen, and learned a lot about doing that. Now I'm less afraid of stuff that doesn't start perfectly square or flat.

There's some nuance to doing something like that - a vixen takes pigtails off of steel and is physically involved, and can really damage corners/edges, but it does the job.

If I get back into planes (solidly diverted into guitars, but I think it'll wear off), I'd like to have a die filer, but that's about it.