Thread: The Veritas Small Plow Plane

Hi Jeremy

The bad news for you is that I did not experience these difficulties (nor has anyone else). So you will now have to purchase the Small Plow. Tough life ain't it!

Alf does a good job and I have no reason ever to doubt her observations, so I will have a close look at her comments.

Regards from Perth

Derek

As promised, a response to concerns raised.

she thinks that Veritas have short-changed the buyer with rods that are too short.

Should the fence rods on the small plow be longer?

No, they do not need to be. The plow is used primarily for narrow rebates and drawer/box grooves. The latter requires a longer rod than the former, and even then it is unusual to require one more than 1/2" from a side edge (or 3/4"/19mm from the fence). There is 40mm available cutting area from the outside of the skate to the inside of the fence, and this represents the available width available without an auxiliary fence. My auxiliary fence is 8mm thick, so adding it in still leaves 32mm available space. This should be plenty for 99% of the time.

the cutters bind in the groove

Not in my experience (and no one else has reported this).

I went back to the workshop and cut a bunch of grooves. Here are some close ups of the last lot...

Big picture ...

Right wall ...

Left wall ...



And another overall ...

Note that I have done a little enhancement to the imagesto get as much detail as possible.

At no time did I experience any binding. Any slight scoring of the inside of the grooves is due to holding the plane slightly off square.

On the subject of holding the plane square, Alf has a nice tip on the website (of a marker she adds to the fence to determine that the plane is vertical). I do not do this. Instead I watch the shaving. Is it cutting evenly. If it is doing so, then the plane is vertical and square.

Regards from Perth

Derek

This thread has been edited at this point as it changed focus from a discussion on Derek Cohen's review of the Veritas Plow Plane into a discussion of the merits of using a blade with a taper, which applies to ALL plow planes, and deserved a thread of its own.

The thread from here should focus on the review, or comments & observations that apply to the Veritas Plow only.