Thread: Stanley #29 Transitional Plane

Ok, I may have a slight problem.....



#2 Jenny.jpeg#2 Jenny 7.jpeg#2 Jenny 8.jpeg#2 Jenny 2.jpeg#2 Jenny 5.jpeg

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....Jenny's twin sister - Judy !!!

All good - you'll get it working nicely eventually, I'm sure. Some of my planes have taken (literally) years to fettle to the point where I'm satisfied with them. I'm referring to planes I've made rather than oldies but even some of those have divulged little "secrets" grudgingly, after much fiddling & faddling. They are hardly secrets to those who really know planes inside out, but knowledge comes in a trickle when we are stumbling along on our own. You'll look back in a few years time and many things will seem so obvious that were pretty obscure at first .....

Cheers,

Originally Posted by KahoyKutter

Ok, I may have a slight problem.....

Ayup!

But it's not too serious a problem.................yet!

Originally Posted by IanW

Mike, I think your "29" should have a 1 in front of it, should it not? The 129 is a transitional fore plane, 20" long with a 2 3/8 blade according to Mr. Leach.

Ian

Your note above was troubling me. It seems there was a distinction between Bailey transitionals and Stanley transitionals. These exerts are from the same 1898 booklet:

Stanley Transitional planes 1898.jpgStanley Bailey 1898.jpg

Planes are not my area, but I had seen reference to the "Liberty Bell" and that is visible in the first Stanley line drawings on the lever cap. They also lack the lateral adjuster of the Bailey planes and the rear handle is not integral within the metal frame. The blade advance mechanism looks different too (Is it a tap the blade adjuster with a lock?). They are a cheaper product.

Stanley Liberty Bell.jpg Stanley Liberty bell close up.jpg Stanley 127 advance mechanism.jpg

Apologies if you know all this already.

Regards
Paul

I think I have a #122, there are no markings on the front. My friend Greg Ricketts re-jappanned it. The ring under the blade is a depth adjuster. I refurbished it and it's in working order. The built-in depth adjuster is very fiddly, it's easier to adjust with a hammer.
transitional plane 2.jpgtransitional plane 1.jpgtransitiona_smoother.jpeg

Those are shavings from a well-set plane. Without being irritating to the beginners here, the reason to not go with the off types isn't inability to get a decent shaving - it's all the little things that make the wooden planes and the all metal stanley planes more productive at really working well.

I had half a dozen or so transitionals, though, because they're interesting. the rarer the function of the plane, the easier it becomes to think maybe they never got popular enough to catch on or that stanley swallowed them like microsoft purchases capabilities and then made the disappear when they found no bigger long term value.

But the idea is still novel "works smoothly like a wooden plane but with the function of the bailey adjuster".

Paul, you've turned up something there! Do you know the dates for each of those catalogue pages? One would assume the lever-actuated depth adjuster & lack of lateral adjuster series preceded the "20" series, but they could just as easily have been made contemporaneously - Stanley did that with a few other lines like compass planes, for e.g.

I'm wondering if the "Stanley" lot were designed before they acquired Bailey's full patents & so couldn't use the Bailey adjuster, or maybe they simply hadn't yet worked out how to incorporate it in the hybrid design?? There was also a bit of coming & going between Leonard & the Stanley works, I read somewhere a long time back they had a couple of falling-outs with threats of law suits & Bailey upping stakes & going back on his own, only to be bought out again by Stanley.

I think we need someone who is intimate with all the messy details of early Stanley history to sort out the conundrum.

Cheers,
Ian

Edit: I just checked "Blood & Gore" & he's showing the "Stanley" models (1xx series) with the lever-actuated depth adjustment and saying they were made the year after the all-metal Bailey types first hit the market, so it would seem Stanley did have access to the wheel/yoke depth adjuster at the time. So my suspicion is they had designed these things some time before they clinched the deal with Bailey & knew they would have a much better depth adjuster...?

Stanley bailey planes started in the 1860s and liberty bell in the 1870s. it's likely that stanley was doing two things:
1) creating a lower price plane to either add to their own sales or take away sales from a competitor going cheap
2) using a different adjuster to avoid paying a royalty/license fee to leonard bailey on the lower priced planes for a while

They're common on the ground here in antique shops - almost a disappointment - you spot a plane across the room, it looks clean and as you get closer, you see i's a liberty bell plane.

For some reason I've stopped receiving notifications for this thread ever since I blocked a certain someone. I'm not talking about notifications of his posts (I kinda expected that), but I'm not notified whenever anyone else posts either.


Ian, my guess is they intended to offer three model lines to appeal to customers with different budgets pretty much the same way car companies do today. Liberty = entry level; Bailey transitional = mid-level; all metal Baileys = top of the range.

Raffo, I really like the aesthetics of the Liberty planes but have shied away from them because I surmised that the depth adjustment would be cumbersome. Thank you for reminding me that I can use a hammer. I'd been considering the Liberty Jack but it would seem the the blade doesn't have a PM-V11 equivalent. I may still yet purely for the fun of restoring and/or customising it and not necessarily to use. Cheers.

Originally Posted by IanW

Paul, you've turned up something there! Do you know the dates for each of those catalogue pages? One would assume the lever-actuated depth adjuster & lack of lateral adjuster series preceded the "20" series, but they could just as easily have been made contemporaneously - Stanley did that with a few other lines like compass planes, for e.g.


Cheers,
Ian

Ian

The planes were from an 1898 pamphlet.

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

Ian - The planes were from an 1898 pamphlet....

Thanks Paul. That was nearly 30 years after the first "transitional" hit the stores. I realised from other posts that the two lines were contemporaneous, not an evolutionary development, as you have confirmed. As has been noted on many occasions, Stanley strove very hard to fill every possible niche!

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

Thanks Paul. That was nearly 30 years after the first "transitional" hit the stores. I realised from other posts that the two lines were contemporaneous, not an evolutionary development, as you have confirmed. As has been noted on many occasions, Stanley strove very hard to fill every possible niche!

Cheers,

Ian

Market saturation: Stiffles the opposition!

There were four pamphlets similar to the the 1898 version I posted including 1900 with the latest being 1902. One was undated. Also the prices fluctuated during this period. For example the prices of the No.26 varied between $1.50 and $2.25 and for a No.34, $2.35 to $ 3.50. Inflation was alive and well in those day too.

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

Ian

Market saturation: Stiffles the opposition!

There were four pamphlets similar to the the 1898 version I posted including 1900 with the latest being 1902. One was undated. Also the prices fluctuated during this period. For example the prices of the No.26 varied between $1.50 and $2.25 and for a No.34, $2.35 to $ 3.50. Inflation was alive and well in those day too.

Regards
Paul

reminds me (saturation) of a grocery store chain here. the store is market dominant, I think over priced (finally resolved a little by a few international chains that can't be bullied taking up real estate, but they are not full grocers).

About 25 years ago, a drug store chain realized they could set up stores near some of the grocery stores, have a pharmacy and then sell dry food goods in their stores (about 1/4th the size of the grocery store) for much less than the market dominant grocer did.

the grocer either bought the chain or bought the properties and then bought the chain of drug stores, but in the end, they owned the whole lot, those stores existed for about 5 years as an "alternative" to the same owner, and then they were quietly shut sending a message to anyone else who wanted to try.

...

A few years later, a discount grocer opened up a few stores in the area. Same local (large, privately owned, but local) group rented space in the same shopping centers as the discount chain and set up a discount store that did something identical to torpedo the value of those stores. when they left the market, the local grocery chain announced that they changed their mind and that their bargain grocer group of stores wasn't a good business and they folded, too.

Stanley has other bits mixed in there, but they may also exist at the grocery level - such as making a lower cost plane, doing battle with L. Bailey about the license cost of the adjuster when the planes became more popular than expected, and creating other lines of planes to stifle L. Bailey. In this case, the design was just too good (bailey's plane) and nothing else could topple it, even at a lower cost.

Lower cost alternative planes all seemed to have some kind of deficiency, either in a gap between frog and casting leaving unsupported iron, lower quality irons, or whatever else.

The "transitional" planes - which were made by other manufacturers, too, not just Stanley - weren't the only designs to attempt to combine the virtues of wood and cast iron in a plane. There's also the Gage planes: Stanley Gage Planes – History and Type Study | Virginia Toolworks. I recently acquired one of those (with the intent to sell it on), and it's an interesting design.

Interestingly, the Gage plane lives again, kind of, in the Veritas Inset Plane from Lee Valley: Veritas Inset Plane - Lee Valley Tools