Frankenplane or Work of Wonder?
The Stanley 4 1/2 Infill Plane
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| Last fall I made a pilgrimage to Tom Witte's place in Mattawan, Michigan. While Tom was ringing up my total after purchasing way too much stuff anyway, I noticed an interesting plane on the display near his cash register. I had heard about infill planes on the list, and I had seen what they could do while at Ron Harper's original Hoosier Galoot Get-Together, and now here was my chance at what looked like a poor man's infill plane. |
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| The plane started out as a Stanley #4 1/2 Smooth plane, which Patrick's Blood and Gore tells us may have been offered by Stanley as competition for the heavier infill planes being produced in England. Tom Witte told me that kits were available for the craftsman to turn his run of the mill 4 1/2 into an infill. It really doesn't look all that difficult to make. Just take a hunk of rosewood, a nice, thick, tapered woodie blade, and your favorite 4 1/2 and get to work. The front knob is replaced with a nicely carved pad, the depth and lateral adjustment pieces are removed from the frog, and an infill is set in place of the tote. | |
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| The tote is secured by the two tapped holes that were present to hold the original tote, and two screws that run in through the cheeks. I haven't tried to remove these screws, or the knob, to definitely type the plane's body. The chip breaker has the 1867 patent date on it, but the frog has a hole where the lateral adjust lever used to be. Perhaps the owner had quite an assortment of old plane parts. The blade is a Robt. Sorby with the kangaroo logo, nice and thick. The thick blade makes for quite a small mouth opening when seated in the plane. I brought this plane with me to Galootapalooza III and was pleased to see how well it performed when compared with the assorted Bedrocks, Infills, and other primo smoothers in attendance. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to contact me. | |
More Discussion
Over the weekend I tried out some suggestions, took some feeler gauge measurements, and generally had some fun. The mouth opening is about 5/16 of an inch. Is this the normal size opening for a Stanley 4 1/2? Anyway, the mouth with the Sorby iron is 0.016 inches, while the mouth with a Stanley iron from my crispy clean 607C is 0.160 inches. The location of the frog is such that the blade is supported by the frog only. I took a measurement to see how far the blade is off the mouth and found that the blade's back is 0.010 inches "in front" of the back of the mouth. Confused yet? Okay, now on to some planin'
I started out with something easy: cherry. Both type blades went "snick snick" without problem. Next I tried some Paddywood ... I mean zebrawood. The Stanley blade had a wee bit of tearout, but nothing major. The Sorby blade had no problem. I moved on to some wenge. Again, no problems with either blade. It wasn't until I turned the wood over that I noticed that I was actually planing against the grain. Cool. Just for grins, I pulled out my 604 smoother and tried it on the wenge. Chitter chatter choke. I'm sure I could have gotten some better results with enough time, but I was satisfied that the punky little 604 was not the tool of choice. I would have tried my 606 fore plane, just to have some added weight, but the pieces of wood I was using were only about 20 inches long and I wasn't able to get a running start. Oh well, so much for tool testing.
My conclusions: The 4 1/2 infill is a cool tool. If I were to make my own (yeah, like I've got that much time on my hands) I'd make the tote a little larger. I switched between leaving my pinkie and index finger out of the hole, but didn't feel real comfortable with either method. I think that the sheer mass of the thing gives an advantage, but the thick blade does help. I believe that the original owner used the Stanley frog because it provided a quick and easy method for holding the blade. Remember, the motto "time is money" was just as true back then as it is today. I do think that a No. 4 size would be a fun project. Any takers?
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