Thread: Timbecon - Unbranded "Low-angle jack plane"

I know the lure of a bargain and a shiny new plane has a strong attraction.

However, if you're learning, a cheap plane can be more of a deterrent than a blessing. When I started my apprenticeship in 1973 I bought a brand new Stanley No.4 (thought to be a quality plane way back then). It didn't work out of the box and as we mostly used machinery it never got sorted. I left the woodworking side of my trade by 1977 and left the trade altogether in 1980.

I thought I couldn't plane.

About 2008 I bought a new 'Veritas' Low Angle Jack plane. What a revelation! Full width, full length shavings.

I now hardly ever use that plane, preferring the Bailey/Bedrock adjusters to those on a low angle plane. But my suggestion is - unless you have someone who can work though fettling a cheap plane with you, DON'T buy a cheap no-name plane to learn on.

A new premium plane will help you to learn woodworking - or a well set up second hand Stanley or Record plane will be more of a bargain than what you're looking at buying (if you can find one).

Good luck, and Merry Christmas.

Cheers, Vann.

What Vann said...

While we shouldn't condemn a cheap plane just because it's cheap, there are distinct risks in buying an unknown & untried tool simply because the price is attractive. It may well be a perfectly good plane, but it may also need a bit of attention, and since you say you have no experience, you probably won't know where to begin if your new plane doesn't work 'out of the box'. If you are prepared to take the risk, and prepared to put in the time & effort it may take to fettle it, you'll actually learn a lot more about what makes a plane work than you will buying a Lie-Nielsen or Veritas, but if it needs a lot of attention to get it going, you may not yet have enough knowledge, patience or skills to bring it up to a tolerable standard. That can be very frustrating & you may lose interest altogether. I bought an unbranded 62 clone some years ago, & after a bit of attention, it is an excellent performer, but I've been mucking about with planes for 60 years, so I had a vague idea of what I was doing.

IMO, a 62 style plane is not a good "first plane"; they have their place, for sure, but you could get yourself a good used #5 Bailey style plane (Record or Stanley) for less than the unbranded plane. With a sharpish blade and a well-set cap-iron, the #5 will be a more versatile & easier to use workhorse. That is purely opinion, you will get others....
Cheers,

Agree with above posters.

All planes will need some attention at some point, so you'll need to figure out how to sharpen and tune them. The advantage of buying a high end plane ie Veritas/Lie Nielsen is its basically ready to use straight out of the box. As a beginner this can be a blessing and a curse, a blessing as you'll know how a plane is supposed to perform assuming you know some basics ie depth of cut. The curse is you miss the valuable learnings of learning how to troubleshoot a plane. I don't know about you but when i have something i have no idea how to use, i'm exceptionally reluctant to tinker with it for fear of making it worse. This is where buying a cheap/used plane is invaluable, getting an inexpensive plane allows you to learn on without fear of ruining something new and shiny.

If that plane isn't the twin brother of the Luban and from the same factory I'll eat my hat. That said, as suggested by others, a Bailey style 4 or 5 would be a far better, and more versatile, first plane. Next cab off the rank after that would be a block plane.

Hi all and Happy Christmas (well Boxing day now). Is it just me or does spending roughly $500 on a tool seem a little more than dipping your toe in the water? For someone with "limited experience " to commit that much cash to their first handplane purchase seems crazy. K. There is plenty of good advice on YouTube on how to fettle hand planes (where I started) and plenty of knowledgeable and generous and willing people on this forum to help you too. I think (along with the others) that you would be best with a #4 or #5 Stanley. I have learnt so much from restoring these planes (and lots more now desides) that I don't think I will ever need a Veritas or Lie Nielsen.

Pretty much agree with the above posts.

My "go to" plane is a Lie Nielsen low angle jack - with a straight blade it is a smoother, with a slight camber it is a jointer and, when I get a curved blade it will also be a scrubber. It is versatile. But LV and LN LAJs cost close to $500 each.

I also have several Luban products and think that they are great value for money - 90% of LN/LV quality at half the price. Their blades are very good. But other members have had poorer experiences.

i'm also a relative beginner, so take this for what it's worth, but i would not hesitate to just buy the luban branded one for $299. i would save the discounted, unbranded "engineering samples" for more experienced hands to evaluate

all the luban-branded stuff i have is NICE

for whatever it's worth, most of the youtubers i watch seem to use low-angle planes exclusively as shooting board planes. but they all have an armoire of other planes to choose from for any given task so ??? idk, ymnv (there are a lot of other youtubers who love them, but for whatever reason, i don't watch them)

my first plane was a stanley #4 from bunnings, and as soon as the luban #4's are back in stock i'm getting one of those to replace it, and converting the stanley to permanent scrub duty. cause the manufacturing quality of the bunnings stanley is pretty rubbish, and i absolutely do not have the patience to tune it for precise work when i could just buy something that was manufactured to precise tolerances to begin with

(the impression i have is that the vintage stanleys are much better than the contemporary ones, but i'm not the sort of person to spend years trawling garage sales to find one at a non-collector price. again, ymmv)

tl;dr: just get the luban one instead if the extra hundred won't break the bank

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Hi all and Happy Christmas (well Boxing day now). Is it just me or does spending roughly $500 on a tool seem a little more than dipping your toe in the water? For someone with "limited experience " to commit that much cash to their first handplane purchase seems crazy. K. There is plenty of good advice on YouTube on how to fettle hand planes (where I started) and plenty of knowledgeable and generous and willing people on this forum to help you too. I think (along with the others) that you would be best with a #4 or #5 Stanley. I have learnt so much from restoring these planes (and lots more now desides) that I don't think I will ever need a Veritas or Lie Nielsen.

Fully agree with MA and other's posts.

I just had a look through my pics and it was exactly 2 years ago I picked up these two planes.



A #4 and a #5 for $20 each. That was first time I have held or used a plane. I was interested and used Google and YouTube a lot to find out more on how to restore and tune, etc.



It took a bit, but I found it not too hard to get them to a state to leave really nice surface first on pine and now also some other woods. In the meantime I bought/collected more planes. Some good and some not so good. One of the latter I turned into a scrub plane. But these first two are still my regular user and over time I tuned them better and better.

I don't know how they compare to others, but I would say not to be afraid to buy an older one and restore. There really is tons of good help out there including this forum.

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

I have the Luban 62 version of this plane and while I’m am happy with it’s quality and performance I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner; and if this one has even slightly lesser build quality then you may heading for a lot of frustration. While I don’t believe I’m anywhere near my nadir of competent handplanism I do own (way too) many and have met just about every pitfall and problem you can have with them. You really need to understand exactly how every element of these LA jacks works and how they interact with each other to be able recognise what’s wrong when one minute it’s working great and the next it’s behaving like a dog. I’ll echo the others here when I say you will learn more fettling a vintage Stanley/Record 5.

I bought mine for two reasons; mainly I wanted a low angled jack for use on a shooting board but I also purchased a high angle blade so I could use it as a 60 degree jack on cranky grained timbers. When set up with either blade it meets my expectations BUT getting it set up and adjusted is a bit of a PITA. The Norris style adjuster is very stiff and doesn’t give fine lateral adjustment and the mouth will actually deflect under excess lever cap pressure; I can recognise these as they happen due to experience and compensate for them so I do have a useable plane. Ten years ago it would have been a steep learning curve; twenty years ago when I first thought I had hand planes sorted out I would have probably thrown it away in disgust.

Originally Posted by banana

.....my first plane was a stanley #4 from bunnings, and as soon as the luban #4's are back in stock i'm getting one of those to replace it, and converting the stanley to permanent scrub duty. cause the manufacturing quality of the bunnings stanley is pretty rubbish....

I bought a Stanley #4 for $5 at a boot sale some years ago and was overcharged. The "plane" had a fixed frog, plastic handles and everything needed fettling. The curve in the sole was measured at 0.6mm - about 25 thou - and the blade and chip breaker were of similar refinement. After I spent several hours attempting to flatten the sole I realised that I was simply converting an unusable plane into a crap plane. So I dumped it.

...(the impression i have is that the vintage stanleys are much better than the contemporary ones.....

World War 2 seems to be the dividing line. A very experienced friend gives the following advice on Stanleys:

• If made before WW2 it is probably very good or excellent,
• If it made after WW2 there is a good chance that it is crap,
• If it has a plastic handle then be even more suspicious.

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

• If made before WW2 it is probably very good or excellent,
• If it made after WW2 there is a good chance that it is crap,
• If it has a plastic handle then be even more suspicious.

Graeme, I think that's a very useful guide for any newbie. I bought an Australian-made #4 in about 1980, plastic handles & all, and it suffered much the same fate as yours. I think I could probably make it work reasonably well, now, but I had neither the knowledge or skills to be able to do that at the time. I reckon almost any plane-like object could be pursuaded to make decent shavings if you have the gear & are prepared to spend the time on it, but the effort involved may be ridiculous.

There are always exceptions to any rule. I bought the #4 because I had an Australian-made #5 (circa 1966), which had been a very good performer out of the box and is still doing a good job (actually, it did have wooden handles, iirc, so it possibly does fit your guide). However, I have seen quite a few pre-WW2 planes that were abused or damaged to the point they would probably be difficult to impossible to get working well.

But if an old plane looks in reasonable nick, even a raw beginner has a fair chance of persuading it to work to a reasonable standard, and as others have already said, the lessons learned will be invaluable....

Cheers,

Finding cheap stanleys and making them work is a sub-sub-hobby in its own right. Usually included as a chapter in the sub-hobby of sharpening.

That no name jack at Timbecon looks thicker than the Luban, I'm concerned it might weigh too much.
The finish also looks about to peel in those photos. I wouldn't order it online, I'd like to hold it first.

Wow - Great participation and plenty of good advice. Thanks all for sharing your thoughts.

Let's say that I have already put in the bin the idea of buying the expensive brand-new unbranded #5 plane I linked in my first post (yes... $199 for something I don't even know how to use is expensive in my view )

I'll do a step back: I already have a Record #4, which - in my newbie opinion - seems in decent conditions. Bought it second hand a few months ago (together with some other tools), but I have used it only a few times 'just for fun'. In the meanwhile my baby was born and have also been super-busy at my job, so never had the time to do something with the plane. The few projects I have done in the last months never required the use of a hand plane.

So, I have suddenly realized that maybe I should first learn how to use the plane that I ALREADY HAVE, before buying another one (I think I have the "tool sickness"... that thing that makes you buy whatever tool you find attractive, even if you don't really know if you will ever use it ... I am sure it is pretty common here on the forum!).

Let's start again with a new question: how can I learn to use my #4 (including sharpening, tuning, understand the issues, etc)? Any project you want to suggest I could copy from Youtube? Or there is a friendly member here on the forum who wishes to share his knowledge and a couple of hours with me ? (I can repay the favour in beers...)

Originally Posted by Cklett

Fully agree with MA and other's posts.

I just had a look through my pics and it was exactly 2 years ago I picked up these two planes.



A #4 and a #5 for $20 each. That was first time I have held or used a plane. I was interested and used Google and YouTube a lot to find out more on how to restore and tune, etc.



It took a bit, but I found it not too hard to get them to a state to leave really nice surface first on pine and now also some other woods. In the meantime I bought/collected more planes. Some good and some not so good. One of the latter I turned into a scrub plane. But these first two are still my regular user and over time I tuned them better and better.

I don't know how they compare to others, but I would say not to be afraid to buy an older one and restore. There really is tons of good help out there including this forum.

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

You did a GREAT WORK! Thanks for the pics. Well done, and really inspiring!
However, as somebody else said, restoring the tools is a sub-hobby within the main woodworking hobby. Unfortunately, in this moment of my life I have barely the time to spend a couple of weekend hours in the garage.
At this stage, I would be just happy to learn how to use a hand plane and build something easy with it.