Thread: What is the right tool?

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Hi Ian. I have been keen on getting a 10 1/2 for a while but I am interested in hearing mkre about why you prefer the 78. Does the smaller body help?

There is no compelling reason, MA, it's just personal preference. The 78 is easy to set up nice & square, its blade is easy to whip out & sharpen, & it's quite a solid little plane. We just got along from day 1. Some tools you like immediately, some take a while to get to know properly, others you just never warm to. Bit like people, eh?

The reason(s) I didn't get on with the 10 1/2 were probably all due to my own failings, I'm not denigrating the plane! I think my expectations were too high to start with. I picked up an old Record 010 1/2 relatively early in my career; it had a hard life at the hands of someone who probably shouldn't have been allowed to keep planes (one side had dings in it & it looked like it had been used as a hammer!). Fortunately, the body was still straight and the sides over the mouth were intact (seen a few of these brazed back together). I cleaned it up, got the cap-iron tidy & close-fitting and put it to work. My idea had been to have a #3-sized smoother with the extra trick up its sleeve of being able to cut up to shoulders.

The plane did a perfectly good job of cleaning up rebates, but I could not get it to work as a fine smoother. If I set the cap-iron fine, shavings always wanted to work under those outside parts where the lever-cap doesn't reach. I decided, rightly or wrongly, that the lever-cap just doesn't put pressure over enough of the cap-iron to hold it really firmly against the blade. I probably should have spent more time on it, but I'd gotten so used to using the 78 by then that it didn't seem worth my while.

Eventually, I got around to making my little "Pseudo badger-plane" Finished a.jpg

It fulfills requirements - it can be set rank to chew off lots of wood, or fine enough to take one thou shavings with ease. A very well-fettled 10 1/2 can probably match it, but it wouldn't have quite the 'solid' feel of the infill, and could never match the warm feeling I get from using tools of my own manufacture...

Cheers,