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Under-Appreciated 1950's Stanley Hand Planes - The No. 7 Jointer [1]

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Date: 2025-02-02

In the vintage hand tool world, post-WW2 examples aren’t generally sought after. The quality of hand tools suffered after the war, mostly due to the rise of electric tools like circular saws, jig saws, drills, sanders, and so on. Manufactures devoted more resources to developing better power tools and fewer to traditional manual tools; improving old-style hand tools just wasn’t worth the investment with the future being electric.

But, there are still some excellent post-war hand tools out there, and they’re affordable. This post features the massive 22 inch long Stanley type 19 No. 7 jointer plane, produced from 1948 to 1961.

“Type” refers to the manufacture date ranges of the various design iterations Stanley made between 1867 and 1967. Types 1-9 (1867-1909) are generally well-used and/or collector tools, not ideal as daily users any more. Types 11 through 19 (1910-1961) are good. Avoid type 20’s. After type 20, it’s worse.

Type 19’s don’t get a lot of respect amongst collectors, but they retain all of the features of the pre-war planes — Rosewood handles, black japanned cast iron body, brass hardware, etc. I got this one a couple years ago. The price was good, only something like $125 so I said hey, why the hell not?

Finally today, I decided to devote a few hours to getting it tuned up and ready to work, even though I’ll rarely use it.. First, the cutting iron. It was pretty badly chipped up so I decided to start fresh, beginning with flattening the back side of the iron, as shown below. Getting that back side really flat is important; I spent about 45 minutes on this alone. A little weed and a good playlist at high volume go a long way here..

Flat at last! Time for a beer!

Next, I re-established the 25 degree bevel at the cutting edge. The pic below shows where I stopped — It took forever to do this by hand. More weed, a cold beer, and a lot of patience.. I do have a bench grinder, but one slip at 1750 RPM and you’re screwed. Slow and steady in a honing jig with wet/dry sandpaper on a piece of surplus flat granite floor tile is more comfortable for me.

The initial 25 degree bevel. I didn’t take it all the way to the edge because I’ll be adding a 30 degree secondary bevel there as the cutting edge.

Now it’s time to get the business end sharp. I set my secondary bevel angle to 30 degrees with the handy little gage below. The cutting iron is clamped to a honing guide to keep it at the desired angle and square to the sides of the iron.

After getting the 30 degree edge established, I worked up through finer sanding grits until it had a mirror finish. Some leather stropping to wrap it up and it’s scary sharp.

Ready to cut! Where’s that beer?

At this point, the plane is ready to be put back together. I’m not going the Full Monty on this, trying to make it like new. My aim here it to clean it up, make it presentable, and most importantly, make it work the way it should.

I did do some light filing on these machined surfaces to help the cutting iron sit flat against it.

The rosewood handles are in great shape, but there are some divots in the finish. I’m debating whether or not to scrape it off and re-do them with new shellac. For now, they’ll stay the way they are.

Good wood on this one, but the finish is kind of chipped up.

And here it is, ready to test.

I’ve given it the “eBay finish” — Spray some WD-40 on it and wipe it down.

I haven’t flattened the bottom of the plane because it’s too long for any good flat reference surface I have. But it looked all right with a straightedge up against it. So, onward to testing. I’ve only got some scrap construction lumber to work with, but it works great on this short piece of 2X4. Everything operates smoothly now that it’s clean, tuned up, and lightly oiled where needed. The cutting iron advances and retracts with ease and the side-to-side lateral adjustment, which makes your cut depth deeper or shallower on either side so you can get your shavings uniform thickness across the width of the cut, is tight and crisp.

Nice shavings. There’s that beer! I still need to figure out what to do with those spokeshaves in the background..

So, if you’re looking to get into woodworking with vintage traditional hand tools, these 1950’s Stanley bench planes are a good place to start. You’ll get all of the functionality and most of the quality of pre-war planes for a lower price. Don’t start with a No. 7, though. A smaller No. 3 or No.4 and a mid-size No. 5 will handle most bench plane tasks.

The No. 7 is at right-center in the pic below, next to the taller big daddy No. 8 (which also needs some love). It’s the one with the orange paint around the “Stanley” logo.

I bet I can fit a couple more in there if I re-arrange things.

Another plane in the wall.

Take care, everyone!

ER

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