My Tranny Problem

I don’t know where the term ‘transitional’ plane comes from, but the type of plane it describes is basically a wooden bodied plane with an adjuster. There’s a wide range of planes that fit this rough description.

I really had a thing for the Stanley versions when I was first starting out at North Bennet, because I was convinced that I would be able to restore them and turn them into better, more functional tools, with fancy new soles that were as long as I wanted. The venerable Stanley #8 tops out at 28” long. But in theory, I could build myself a 3 foot long, wooden bodied jointer plane. I have no idea why I would really need such a long plane, let alone a wooden one, but I still had a lot to learn about using planes at the time. Truth be told, I think I just wanted the satisfaction of having the longest tool in the bench room.

The Stanley and Sargent versions were fairly simple, with the adjuster and frog sitting flatly on top of a beech block. My experiences with them weren’t very enjoyable. More often than not, they clogged. The totes also loosened up pretty regularly, and the adjuster was hard to get to. And in general, they were really only good for rough work. Part of the problem was that while the mouths were pretty wide, the throats were really tight. (See photo) If you get a good look, you'll see that the throat is tightest around where the chip breaker is, so anything that curls off of the iron will fill the space, and clog, and jam the plane. And if you look at the allowed space to get fingers, etc in there, you'll see that it's a losing battle. Too many times I had to pull the lever cap, iron, and everything out to clear a jam.

But I really wanted them to work, and I went to pretty extensive lengths. I bought an aftermarket blade and chip-breaker from Lie-Nielsen, which was special ordered, because they had to mill a second hole in the chip breaker to work with this kind of plane. (They did the mod for free. Times like that I really love Lie-Nielsen.) I patched up the mouth to make it nice and tight, figuring it might help.

When that didn’t work, I chiseled out the patch, chiseled out most of the throat, and installed a new patch, that was thin, and beveled at the mouth, to allow shavings to pass more easily. There was enough room with the chiseled out throat for me to get two fingers in there to clear out the shavings that would inevitably pile up. But no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the damned thing to do precision work. Eventually I decided that if it was really only good for rough work, that I would just go with it, and use it for rough work. I cambered the iron pretty heavily, and it works well as a jack/fore plane. And I decided to stick with iron planes for high quality work from then on.

At one point, I picked up this little smoother, which was built by a company named Gage. The adjuster’s accessible, the iron bed goes all the way down to the sole... and in fact, part of the sole is iron. Basically, there’s an iron box that goes down through the block to the sole of the plane, to allow (I’m assuming, I never really committed to the plane) for more precision style work to be done. But making a new sole meant piercing it to precisely fit the iron box, and then I’d need to flatten the sole to get it to be co-planar with the iron box. That’s not a job for a power jointer, and it would be really tedious work with a hand plane to keep assembling and re-assembling, so that I could safely plane the block down until it was close enough to sand down to finish dimensions, with the iron throat installed... and hope that the wooden sole remained stable. I never got around to tuning it up, and eventually ebayed the thing. I hope it found its way into more interested hands than mine.

More recently, I’ve been playing with a nice wooden bodied A55 try plane from HNT Gordon, which works much more easily, and precisely. Truth be told, this is the plane that makes me understand the appeal. The wooden sole just glides. And the surfaces it leaves behind look almost burnished. Once I replace the split wooden lever cap with a brass version, I have a really good feeling that this will be my new favorite plane.

And no less an authority than Karl Holtey has tried his hand at making a (Really, *gasp* REALLY) nice transitional plane in recent years. So it’s clear that they can work.

A recent discussion on the topic of wooden planes in general  caught my eye, (specifically pertaining to Krenov style planes, but very relevant to the current topic) and it got me thinking about transitional planes again.

It’s really annoyed me. I gave up on this particular kind of masochism years ago. But I was reading a comment from David Charlesworth on the topic of chip breakers in wooden planes, and he pointed out that if the chip breaker was angled too extremely, then the chip would curl directly into the forward part of the throat, and the plane would clog up. Larry Williams pointed out that (for similar reasons) high angle woodies disappeared with the advent of the cap iron. A high angle blade will break the chip on its own, a standard pitch plane with a chip breaker will launch the shaving right into the wall of the throat, instead of out the top, and the plane will clog. This was exactly the kind of behavior I’d tried to cure in the transitional planes I was playing with 7 years ago. And the HNT Gordon plane (55 degree pitch, no chip breaker) clears shavings just fine.

My experience since then has taught me two things: Wedged, hammer-adjusted wooden planes aren’t hard to make or use,  and iron planes aren’t hard to tune up and use. And either will work incredibly well. But their offspring are another matter entirely. Transitional planes as a breed are intriguing, but some designs are better than others, and the Stanley versions seem to suck with a suckiness that I can't begin to describe in a way that doesn't suck. It's no wonder that some folks resort to treating them like witches. (What do we burn, besides witches? MORE WITCHES!!!)

But there are TWO of those misbegotten nightmares in H. O. Studley’s chest. And he clearly knew a thing or two about how to use a tool. So maybe there’s more to these planes than meets the eye? I can't figure out this particular puzzle for myself, and it vexes me. Appeals to a higher power have been made, but answers will not be forthcoming for a while.

I don’t know how to kick the obsession. I'm a geek, and a mechanical problem solver by nature. But I have too much on my plate these days to really feel like chasing this down.