This little Marples cabinet is offered for sale from Michael French. Please get in touch with Michael by emailing him with this link if you would like to ask any questions or talk prices.
And a happy new year to my blog readers out there! 2017 will hopefully see me selling some tools from the blog, as 2016 was just too manic to get onto that. I really need to talk to some digital genius in London who has a deep knowledge of WordPress and can implement some sort of e-commerce solution. Having been down this path before and wasted a not-inconsiderable amount of money, I’m looking for some decent ‘bang for my buck’, but please get in touch if you are a whizz-kid with a portfolio I can look at.
Met a lovely old chap today. By the time I’d had a good chat and seen all his wood carvings, and talked about his family and whatever else we could think of, I felt rather obliged to buy some tools off him. It was an unpromising box, and I drove away feeling a little like at least I’d spread some good karma with a a charitable donation. But when I got home and starting adding the majority of the items to my ‘scrapyard’ pile, this little drawknife fell out. What a beauty. I didn’t know Marples made them this small. It was such a lovely well-balanced and well-made tool, I figured karma does work out sometimes.
Some nice boxwood Marples chisels click here to read more. Good price. Please use the Contact form to get in touch, if you’d like to make an order. Now Sold!
I’m forty-five tomorrow. Blimey. I softened the pain and bought myself a birthday present. I’ve been looking for a nice set of carving chisels for a while. When I saw these come up on Gary’s superb OldSchoolTools website, I snapped them up. A beautiful 8-piece Marples set with London Pattern octagonal boxwood handles.
Just a quick post about a Marples ‘X4’ plane I recently found. I couldn’t find a lot on the web about this plane, so hopefully this will show people some of the details of what, to me, seems like a fantastic tool.
The Marples X4 smoothing plane, which went into production in 1954. Production was short-lived, due to the high production costs of the plane’s design.
This view shows the distinctive wavy shape of the lever cap release. When you use the plane on it’s side, on a shooting board for instance, your fingers have a much better hold with this grip. It’s much less awkward than trying to shoot holding a plane with a standard lever cap.
With the blade removed, you can see how Marples was clearly taking a design lead from the finer British infills available. The production on those planes pretty much got unsustainable around this time, so as the quality dropped slightly on those, Marples hoped to capitalise. Unfortunately, this plane suffered the same fate, and was short-lived.
Another thing I love about this plane’s design is the rounded top on the iron. Again, very distinctive.
This is perhaps the most interesting thing about the X4. An adjustable throat! By releasing the front two bolts, you can move a big hunk of metal back and forth, effectively opening and closing the throat, just like smaller block planes. The block is very well made, and mates well with the base.
Here you can see the block fully forward, so the mouth is open to maximum, but it could come right back if need be.
I haven’t even tuned this plane, I just spent a few hours removing sixty years of filth, but already it’s taking feather shavings on the first few passes.
At Hackney Tools, we 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.
