Hand Plane Blog

Veritas bevel-up bench planes have awarded for the best new tool in 2005 by Popular Woorking magazine.


If you use bench planes, your core set should include three tools: a jack, jointer and smoothing plane.Used together, these three tools flatten and smooth surfaces, and perform many other workshop tasks.This year, Veritas introduced two tools – a jointer plane ($225) and a smoothing plane ($185) – at complete a set of these three essential planes.Together, they are an excellent value, are easy for beginning planers to set up and, most importantly,perform brilliantly. What’s unique about these tools is they have the bevel of the iron facing up, like a block plane, and they all use the same 21⁄4"-wide iron.This bevel-up feature makes the tools easy to set up(there’s no chipbreaker to mess with) and having the three same-size irons (with different pitches or shapes) allows you to swap blades around for tricky grain or to put off a sharpening session. All three tools have an adjustable sliding mouth plate to close up the throat and a n i n ge n io u s stop system to keep you from damaging the c u t t i n g e d g e with the mouth plate.The jointer plane also allows you to screw on a 90° fence for truing edges of boards, another nice feature for beginning planers. These three tools are ideal for anyone wishing to explore hand planes.You’ll get started on the right foot, you’ll fi nd the tools versatile for different styles of woodworking and you’ll never outgrow them. To buy them go their website.
Lee Valley