A Hand Plane Should not Cost Seven Thousand Dollars

I think I’ll write about something insignificant today, instead of confronting the sudden confirmation of my predictions of increased violence toward Christians and conservatives. I hope Representative Scalise gets better soon. Expect the violence to spread in the coming months.

I predicted something else, years ago. I said TV and the Internet would eventually be the same thing, along with phones and faxes. My prediction has come true. That doesn’t make me a genius or a prophet. It just means I saw something which was very obvious, while most other people weren’t looking for it.

I am just about done with TV. I record a number of cable shows, but I only watch two things on television (the medium, not the machine): Better Call Saul and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. When I hear about other shows these days, it’s like hearing about the Kardashians. Sometimes t’s a little disgusting (because the values the shows promote are so trashy), and sometimes when other adults recommend shows to me, I feel like toddlers are trying to get me to sit down and watch Finding Nemo.

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a great example of a toddler show. It’s extremely silly; it jumped the shark before it ever aired. The premises of the episodes are laughable, even by TV standards. The characters are as shallow as copier paper and as disposable as dirty diapers. It’s about as mindless as entertainment gets. I enjoy the humor and explosions, though.

Youtube covers my “need” for video entertainment these days. I watch math and physics videos, and I watch videos about tools. Woodworking, machining, fabrication, and so on.

A lot of people are trying to make money on Youtube. It can be done. It’s a bad idea for conservatives and Christians, because we will eventually be excluded from anything resembling social media, and a lot of people will lose their “jobs” overnight, with no legal recourse to recover them. I don’t recommend it to anyone who believes in God, but people are doing it.

Unfortunately, the lure of easy exposure draws folks who really don’t know what they’re doing. That includes me, but I admit I don’t know what I’m doing, so I think I can be excused. People create logos, and they put a little theme music together, and the first thing you know, they have videos and playlists in which they spread misinformation while looking pretty professional.

Over the last few days, I’ve been watching woodworking videos, and I’ve watched a few about hand planes.

The hand plane arena is surprisingly complicated. Hand tools have fallen out of favor among real tradesmen, so big manufacturers aren’t working very hard to make good hand planes. You can’t get a decent plane at Home Depot; they don’t bother stocking them. You have to buy an old plane, or you have to spend a ton on a cork sniffer product like a Veritas or a Lie-Nielsen.

Now I have to explain cork sniffing. It’s a term which is commonly used by musicians, in relation to expensive guitars, amps, tubes, and so on. I apply it more broadly.

Imagine you’re a woman, and a guy takes you on a dinner date. The waiter brings a bottle of wine and opens it. He pours a small amount in the man’s glass, and he offers him the cork. The man smells the cork and says, “Smells good.” Then he drinks the sample and says, “Do you have anything dryer?”, and he makes the waiter take it back.

That’s cork sniffing.

Waiters and sommeliers pour samples and present corks not to see if you like the wine but to allow you to confirm that it’s not ruined. Wine can react with corks, and when it does, it tastes bad. You should taste the wine and look at the cork to see if all is well. If so, you own a bottle of wine. You are not supposed to send the wine back because you don’t like that particular wine.

In broader usage, a cork sniffer is a person who pretends to be incredibly sophisticated and drives people crazy worrying about nuances that probably don’t really exist.

Think of high end audio. There are people who will pay two hundred or even thirty thousand dollars for one pair of cables to connect a record player to an amplifier. They don’t know anything about science or engineering. They claim they can hear things the rest of us can’t, even though most of them are old men who can’t hear anything above middle C on the piano. They will pay for special rocks to put under their stereos. They will even tell you that you can’t wear an electronic watch in the same room with your stereo while you listen. They will believe absolutely anything. They don’t just sniff the cork. They chop it up and freebase it.

I should add that I just learned another reason why sommeliers present corks: in the old days, wines were counterfeited and labels rotted with age, so vintners printed their names on the undersides of corks. People looked at the corks to make sure they weren’t getting ripped off.

I am not a wine person, so I don’t know a whole lot about it.

Woodworking is full of cork sniffers, mostly because hobbyists have taken over. Hobbyists don’t understand the needs of professionals who know what they’re doing. Professionals don’t want $800 hand drills; they want stuff that works. If you go to a shop that produces heirloom-quality furniture, you won’t see cork sniffer tools. You’ll see plywood benches and Chinese machinery. Doesn’t matter to insecure hobbyists. The cork addicts have taken over the forums, and what they say goes. They really push expensive tools.

Cork Sniffer Magazine, Creator Unknown

I’ll bet you can pay $2000 for a hand plane. Let me check.

I must apologize. I was wrong. You can pay $7400 for one hand plane. Specifically, a Karl Holtey A13 Smoothing Plane. If you buy one of these, you are mentally incompetent. There is no refuting it.

Last night, I watched a video by a young man who is promoting himself as a woodworking expert. He compared three planes. The first was an old Stanley #4. The second was a Harbor Freight smoothing plane that costs something like ten bucks. The third was a Veritas plane. Veritas makes very nice tools that are only VERY expensive, not Karl Holtey NASA-Budget-During-the-Cold-War expensive. A Veritas smooth plane costs $232 if you get the special cork sniffer magic alloy blade.

First thing…he doesn’t know Stanley planes. I don’t either, but I know things he doesn’t know. He said his plane was a “Stanley Bedrock.” Stanley Bedrock planes are highly prized collector’s items, and they cost a ton of money. You can’t really use one in your shop, unless you like destroying investments. He had an ordinary Stanley. And he bought the wrong version (I did this,too.) He got one with friction-reducing grooves in the sole. These grooves beat up your wood if you cut at an angle across a corner. They’re probably okay on long planes, but any plane you might want to turn should have a smooth bottom.

Second thing…he claimed the Stanley had a gigantic hidden cost because it took hours to fix. He spent so much time on it, he felt the real cost of the plane was close to that of the Veritas. He stripped the paint. He refinished the wood and the metal. He did a lot of stuff only a cork sniffer would do. You don’t need to paint a plane to make it work.

He should have taken about an hour to flatten the plane’s sole and clean up the blade and so on. He feels his time is worth $15 per hour, so add $15 to the cost of the plane, if you really want to count those beans. Anything beyond that is gilding the lily.

Third thing…he claimed the Harbor Freight plane had a hidden cost of over $300 because he took over 20 hours to fix it. That’s just nuts.

Nearly every plane needs to have the bottom flattened and the blade sharpened. The Harbor Freight plane needed more than that. It had a soft blade which would not take an edge and hold it, and he said (not endorsing his claim) the plane had a fundamental alignment issue that could not be fixed. He drove to a flea market and bought a Stanley blade for the plane. He worked around the alignment defect. That’s not how it’s done.

Here is another guy using a Harbor Freight plane. He paid ten dollars. He spent two hours working on the plane. It works very well. Hmm…what happened?

Here is the answer: the first guy doesn’t know tools. He isn’t ready to teach other people.

I’ll explain what he should have done.

1. Harbor Freight tools need to be exchanged (or modified) a good percentage of the time. People who know tools (people who are qualified to make instruction videos) know this. It’s part of the game. When you buy a Harbor Freight tool, you examine it as soon as you can, and you keep doing exchanges until you get a good one. If possible, you examine it in the store. The video guy should have exchanged his plane when he found out the blade and machining were bad.

2. Knowledgeable people know you can harden steel with a hand torch and oil. He should know this. He should have returned the plane, but barring that, he should have hardened the blade. That would have been a neat tip for other people.

You can get a new plane that costs under $20 to do perfect work. I don’t recommend it, but no one will be able to look at the things you build and tell you what your plane cost. Not even his Holteyness Karl Holtey.

I feel like buying a Harbor Freight plane and turning it into a scrub plane, but I’m afraid that if I get it working, I’ll feel like it’s too good to be a scrub plane, and then I’ll have to get another one. And then I’ll feel like that one is too good to be a scrub plane.

The cork sniffers are a real problem. When a new guy shows up at a forum and asks what kind of plane he should buy, they will say you should get Lie-Nielsen or Veritas if at all possible, but that a Stanley will do “acceptable work.” That’s completely wrong! First of all, a Stanley won’t do work at all; the man does the work, and the tool is just the instrument. It has no skill. Second, a Stanley will do FANTASTIC work. It will work as well as any plane on the planet. Set it up right and develop some skill, and it will beat a Lie-Nielsen in the hands of a cork sniffer who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I admit, I have two Veritas tools. I had given up trying to find a used router plane at a good price, and someone asked me what I wanted for my birthday. Also, I wanted to try their dovetail saw, so I got myself one. They make great stuff that works with little or no fettling. But old tools would work just as well.

I sniffed a little cork there. I will wear the scarlet “C.”

Think about this: the palace at Versailles is full of astounding wooden creations. It’s full of furniture, doors, panels…you name it. This stuff is exquisite. What kind of tools did the builders use? Wooden planes and carbon steel saws. They used foot-powered lathes. They used crap, in other words. If the cork sniffers had been in charge, the Bourbons would not have been able to afford tools. They would have bought a mobile or “manufactured” palace with IKEA furniture.

Marie Antoinette’s Apartment at Versailles: not Built with Cork Sniffer Tools

When I started learning about planes, I found a #4 Stanley in my dad’s garage. A tradesman probably left it at his house by accident. It was junk. It was probably made in the late Seventies, long after Stanley’s salad days. It had plastic handles. It had a big cratered area on the sole because someone had left it in or near water.

For fun, I flattened the sole, fixed the blade and chip breaker, and oiled and loosened the adjustments. When I tried to use it, I was flabbergasted. I have some real vintage Stanleys, and this thing is just as good. It’s a joy to use. It’s annoying, because I wanted to buy a vintage #4.

People told me to turn it into a scrub plane. Why? I have a phenomenal #4 smoothing plane that cost me nothing. It could probably even plane corks.

I still “need” a few more planes. I’m torn between the pleasure of collecting nice vintage planes and the joy of turning garbage planes into top-notch tools. Given the cost of garbage planes, I could do both.

There is a big tool-using movement in America, and it seems like cork sniffers and hipsters are messing it up. People think it’s cool to use tools, and it is, but being seen using tools badly with your hipster beard and sustainable micro-financed socks does not amount to providing quality instruction. If you want to learn about tools on Youtube, find an old white guy (male by birth, not choice) who wears a Dickies shirt and thinks hair gel makes you gay. That’s the guy who knows which brand of chrome oxide to use and how to get a stuck arbor out of your Super Chuck without marring it.

I think I’ll post a few videos featuring people who actually get things done. You might enjoy them.