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Planes Stanley

Meet the Baileys (Part 2)

Some shots and words about the Stanley Bailey No.7 Jointer plane. A mention of the beauty of repairs, and a stab at typing the manufacturing date.

Revel in the beauty that is the Stanley No.7 Jointer plane.

Stanley Bailey No.7
Stanley Bailey No.7

Stanley Bailey No.7
The blade that’s in this plane isn’t the original, although it’s a Stanley blade. I’ll switch it out when I get round to finding an original.

 

Stanley Bailey No.7
Coquettish ‘look at my bottom’ shot, shows small adjustment nut, and that steel lower bolt, that allows the whole frog to move forward and backward.

 

Stanley Bailey No.7
3rd-gen Bailey frog receiver, as seen on my other No.4 smoother. You can’t moan about these, they’re solid.

[notice]Tool Nerd Alert! The following information is reserved for people who, like me, probably should get out and socialise a bit more.[/notice]
I believe this plane is a Type 11. It has rosewood handle, and the front knob is a ‘low’ version. Manufacture date is therefore 1910-1918, and the blade should carry a pretty wacky ‘V’ ‘Stanley, New Britain, Conn, USA’ logo. It has a small brass depth adjuster nut and it has the ‘APR-19-10’ patent date added behind the other dates on the plane casting, behind the frog. Please let me know if I’ve got this wrong. You learn by your mistakes!

Stanley Bailey No.7
I could, and at some point will, write a long post about repairs. One of the things that attracted me to this plane, was the beautifully repaired handle. To me, a nicely done repair is as interesting as a makers mark. As with a lot of these finds, you can’t help but wonder who did this and exactly how he went about it. What a lovely job.

 

Stanley Bailey No.7
Someone wanted to make sure this didn’t get nicked!

 

Stanley Bailey No.7
As previously mentioned, this isn’t he original blade, and a close up shows it’s a bit crappy. However, this shot is just to show how a chipbreaker exaggerates the angle of the cut shaving, once the blade is slicing the wood. The chip breaker lifts the shaving a little more, making it break out.

Jointer planes like this one, are used to true an edge, so that successive pieces butt up against one another very closely, or they’re used to get the face of a piece of wood very flat. At 22″ long, it’s one of Stanley’s biggest planes, being only secondary to the No.8, which is 24″. Jointers are long planes because the ‘sole’ of the plane is less likely to follow the ups and downs of the wood, but will instead remove the high and lows, ready for planing with a smaller-sized plane.

I think these planes are just beautiful, and for not much money, you can snag one on an online auction site, and have a killer tool working in no time. If the one you find is rough, rusty and looks like crap, this is the sort of thing you need to do.

So there it is. The second of my Bailey family.

I buy old, good quality woodworking tools. If you have any tools you would like to sell, please get in touch using the contact form on the home page.

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