I spent so long looking for a good, unadulterated, original one of these, that in the end I bought one from a dealer. The Stanley #112 is a scraper plane, basically a mixture of the Stanley #12 and a Stanley No.4 smoother. It’s used to scrape a fine finish over stock and has no other uses. And of course, there are new models out there, and obviously Lie Nielsen has a pretty much exact copy for sale. However, if you know me, you’ll know I always prefer to go ‘old-skool’, so I wanted to find an original Stanley.
The performance of the plane very much rests on setting and adjusting the angle of the blade. Not getting it right will produce a teeth-grinding chatter, akin to the kid drawing his fingernails across a blackboard. Correctly setting a ‘burr’ on the cutting edge is also very important. This is known as ‘burnishing the blade’. You’ll need a hard steel rod (or proper burnishing tool) and a vise. Basically, you’re trying to create a small sharp hook all the way along the bottom of the blade. This sharp hook is the fine edge that scrapes the stock, when held at the correct angle in the plane.
When it comes to fine-tuning the blade, some people will swear by the original Stanley blades, which are markedly thinner that some new production replacements out there today. However, the excellent Hock Tools, who make a new, thicker blade, have a good write up on their site about how to create that all-important burr.
